Not his real name, but there’s real fun to be had learning how JoseMonkey geolocates videos on his wildly popular TikTok channel. Hear the tools, techniques and process he uses to pinpoint even the trickiest videos, the wildest things he’s seen and how this supersleuth got into the GEOINT game.
Episode Notes
Key takeaways
- Geolocation for fun!
- GEOINT for privacy awareness
- How geolocation as entertainment inspires creative sleuthing
About JoseMonkey
Josemonkey is a social media personality, an online privacy and safety advocate, and an amateur OSINT researcher. While he has no formal training or professional experience in intelligence or research, he has been an avid geolocation hobbyist for more than ten years.
On TikTok, Josemonkey makes videos where he pinpoints the location where user-submitted photos and videos were recorded. These videos have been seen by millions of people around the world.
You can find links to all of Josemonkey’s social media accounts on his website, where you can also see a map of all the locations he has found for his fans so far.
References from the show
JoseMonkey
I have kind of a unique scenario with what I’m doing. Because while many of your listeners may be doing this professionally and they’re trying to find places as efficiently as possible because it’s important because they’re reporting on a story, or maybe there are even higher stakes. Right. I’m doing it as a hobby, but also for entertainment. So I really have to consider that in all the videos I do because the most efficient way to find a place.
Jeff Phillips
Welcome to Needlestack, the podcast for professional online research. I’m Jeff Phillips, your host.
Aubrey Byron
And I’m Aubrey Byron, producer on Needlestack and your co host for Today. Today, we’re taking a little bit of a divergence from our normal conversations in this series with professional geentors geointers in the field. And instead, we’re going to talk to someone who does geolocation as a hobby.
Jeff Phillips
That’s right. So we’re joined today by the man behind a popular GEOINT TikTok channel who goes by Jose Monkey. Now, while that’s not his real name, he has requested to keep his identity private. So that’s what we’ll be calling him today, jose Monkey. Welcome to the show.
JoseMonkey
Thank you for having me, guys. I really appreciate it. I’m excited to be on.
Jeff Phillips
All right, so for anyone who isn’t familiar with your channel, can you start off by telling us what it is you do?
JoseMonkey
Absolutely. So what I do is I will take a video that someone has asked me to try to geolocate, and then I will look at the video, find the clues in the video, use various different techniques to see if I can figure out where it was recorded. And then if I’m able to find it, I make a video about it, explaining exactly how I found it. And it’s really important to me that I do that for people who have asked me to do it. It’s kind of a big point that I make in my videos. My whole tagline is, hi, I’m Jose Monkey, and I find people who ask to be found.
Jeff Phillips
I did see that as the tagline, and I think you even sell T shirts that have I was found on them, which is awesome.
JoseMonkey
Yes. I just launched a store recently. I was surprised that anybody might be interested in purchasing merchandise that has my likeness or my name on it, but it seems like there’s at least some people who might be into that.
Jeff Phillips
And that one thing you mentioned on there sorry, Aubrey, is you do explain how you don’t just say where are they? You actually go through and see what you identify in the video, which is really cool.
JoseMonkey
Yeah, it’s important to me because, one, I want it to be educational for people, but also I’m an explainer. I like to explain things. So that is really part of the appeal for me is to be able to not only find it, but then carefully explain to people how I found it. And I think that that’s what people enjoy about it. I know that there are some creators who do kind of similar things sometimes that go for a bit of a wow factor and they don’t tell you how they found it. And that can be really kind of amazing to see people do that. They’re just like, people’s minds are blown. They’re like, wow, how did they figure that out? And so that’s not really my thing. I like to explain how I found things. So it means a longer video, but it seems like some people enjoy that.
Aubrey Byron
And you said you don’t come from a professional background in this, so how did you find yourself in this space? Both sort of on the Geolocation side, but also making content on TikTok?
JoseMonkey
Yeah, so I’d say that I got started doing Geolocation type things really probably years ago. It’s longer ago than I realized. It’s funny, I actually just realized the other day that I have been playing Geoguesser. I don’t know if you guys familiar with that game. I assume you are. The whole idea is they drop you somewhere in the world and show you the Google Street view and you try to figure out where you are. My time hop just told me that I posted ten years ago that I had spent like 2 hours straight playing Geoguesser, and that I had dreams about being on a random street in Europe somewhere. So I’ve been doing Geolocation type things for at least a decade as a hobby.
Aubrey Byron
I actually didn’t realize that Geoguesserer was ten years old. Actually.
JoseMonkey
Yeah, apparently it must have been shortly after they had launched it because I think that’s gone pretty far back. In fact, I seem to recall that they may have posted something a few months back about their ten year anniversary, so that would line up. I played a lot of Geoguesser, but even before that, I think I was always interested in trying to if I ever saw a video or a photo that didn’t obviously identify where it was taken, I always would kind of wonder, could I figure out where that was? Are there enough clues, is there enough information in the photo or the video to figure it out? And after the first few times I tried, I realized that, you know what, sometimes you can figure it out. And that was really satisfying for me. So I was kind of hooked after the first few times that I found that I was able to do it. And fortunately, I was able to find others on Twitter who were doing similar things. And sometimes people would post challenges, you know, to geolocate a photo, and sometimes it’d be like challenges where there’d be prizes and things like that for different challenges that they had.
JoseMonkey
But I was mostly doing it because I enjoyed it. But it was nice that there were other people who were doing a similar thing because that gave me kind of a way to do this thing that otherwise people don’t really ask you to do unless you have a good reason to.
Jeff Phillips
So you didn’t have formal training in geospatial intelligence, any formal? No, it came up as a hobby.
JoseMonkey
It’s purely been a hobby for me. It’s funny because people will ask me a lot of questions about that. I get comments all the time. People frequently like to say, oh man, he’s CIA, he’s FBI. And it’s sort of a funny running gag that I never confirm or deny that in in the comments ever. I just let people keep guessing. But but yeah, that’s it is a thing that I think people wonder about. But I’m sure that there are people who are much more serious about the type of thing that I do that might even think that some of the things that I do in my videos are quaint by comparison. But I think that what I’m doing is probably a bit more accessible to average folks who aren’t necessarily doing this professionally.
Aubrey Byron
Hey, maybe CIA should be using TikTok for recruiting, who knows?
JoseMonkey
True.
Jeff Phillips
Well, I think this podcast does focus on the ocent world in general, and we’ve been focusing here recently on GEOINT. And what’s been interesting is the audience ranges from professionals that might be doing this at a federal level to two hobbyists or a lot of reporters that are having to do what we now people are starting to understand the term ocent, but they’re out there doing investigations to validate things. So it runs the gamut. And so I’m curious, you’ve kind of taught yourself as you went. Can you talk a little bit about the kind of techniques that you’re using for finding the location in the videos that people send to you, the ones I’ve watched, it’s not that simple in what you’re noticing and I don’t know what you’re doing in the background, tools you’re using, et cetera.
JoseMonkey
Yeah. So one of the things I do try to impress upon my viewers is that I will always explain exactly how I found a place in every video that I do. And that’s important to me because I really want to be transparent about how I’m doing it. So it can be kind of funny because sometimes I have people who have theories about how I really found the place and they want to comment about it and say like, oh, I think you really did this, or you used metadata off of the video or something. But I always explain what I did and sometimes it can be really straightforward and it might just be looking for details in the video that I can Google or that I can find on other publicly accessible websites where I can search things. It really depends what’s in the video. Right? So a lot of times I’m just using tools that everybody uses, like Google, Google Maps, sometimes using reverse image searching when that is kind of the most direct way to find a place, especially if it’s like a highly photographed place that I know will be something I can find pictures of online.
JoseMonkey
But sometimes they use very specialized websites and databases to search for things. For example, sometimes I’m trying to figure out if I see an airplane in a video and I can see the tail number. I’ll use various different websites where you can look up that sort of thing to figure out, well, where was that plane? It really depends on what the video calls for. I’ve only more recently gotten interested in learning about some other tools that I’m sure some folks in your audience would be familiar with. Things like the Overpass API for searching, like the OpenStreetMap database, doing data mining on that and I am pretty fascinated with that right now. But the thing that’s interesting to me is I have kind of a unique scenario with what I’m doing because while many of your listeners may be doing this professionally and they’re trying to find places as efficiently as possible because it’s important because they’re reporting on a story, or maybe there are even higher stakes, right? I’m doing it as a hobby, but also for entertainment. So I really have to consider that in all the videos I do because the most efficient way to find a place isn’t necessarily the way that’s going to be interesting to my viewers.
JoseMonkey
In fact, I know that if I use reverse image search too much to match a place, I will get people in the comments saying, well, you didn’t really find it. The Google lens found it, which is fair. Sometimes it isn’t me, it’s the tool. Although I would say that reverse image searching is not the silver bullet that some people think it is. Sometimes it’s really helpful, but other times it can be a bit of an art, even getting a good result from reverse image search tools. But yeah, I had to really consider that because like I said, I started learning about some of these data mining tools for OpenStreetMap and I actually tried it recently and I was able to find a location that I was having trouble finding otherwise. But when I thought about how I might explain that because I tell people I’m very transparent, I tell them exactly how I found it, I was like, well, what are you going to explain? You’re going to explain that you plugged some stuff into a query language and got some answers. And I don’t know if that’s the most interesting thing. So I may limit how much I use tools like that, even though it’s probably a really good tool for people who need to find things and maybe need to find them with urgency.
Jeff Phillips
I have watched a number of the videos and I’m looking forward to watching more. But I’m understanding what you’re saying, meaning that there is an entertainment factor to them and it’s not about maybe a sense of urgency or efficiency there and hearing what simply even what you’ve noticed in a video that could tip someone off. When I’m watching the same video and don’t see some of the things is entertaining. Yes. I don’t even know how to say it. It’s entertaining to see what you notice in a video that can then be plugged in somewhere to help you give you clues.
JoseMonkey
Yeah, I’d say that I watch videos differently than your average person, and it can be a bit of a curse sometimes because honestly, it’s a little bit hard to turn it off. I’m so used to looking at a video and trying to figure out where it is. Sometimes I’ll just be scrolling on TikTok and I’ll see a video that’s outside somewhere and my immediate reaction is, this is a video someone has tagged me in and I should start looking for the details. And I’m like, no, wait a minute. You’re just watching a video. Just enjoy it. I’m always looking at the details, and that’s part of what people miss about the videos that they post, that they don’t realize that they’re focused on the subject of their video more often than not, whether it’s a car, a person, a dog, whatever they’re recording a video of. And they don’t think about all the details that are in the background. But for someone who is motivated to look for those details, they’re paying attention to all of those things. One of the things that you’ll notice in my videos is I’m often not talking at all about whatever the main subject of the video is.
JoseMonkey
And sometimes people will post things in the comments and say, like, you’re not going to even mention whatever the point of the video was. Right. There’s probably something humorous happening in the video, or maybe it was like a car wreck or something, and they’re like, you’re not even going to talk about that? And I’m like, well, that’s not what I was looking at. That’s not how I found it. So, yeah, you definitely look at videos differently. And I think people definitely some folks are starting to pick up on the approaches. And I do have a lot of my followers who like to kind of play along. They’ll pause the video and try to figure it out before I reveal it. So that can be fun for people. Right.
Jeff Phillips
Which seems to make sense. There’s tools like AI out there. I think I saw some people comment, would AI take your job? And maybe AI could do things, but that’s not the job or the point of the channel at the end of the day.
JoseMonkey
Yeah, and I do think about that. There was something I saw on Twitter recently about how some tools really are starting to be used for geolocation. Things like chat, GPT. You can really put in bits and pieces of information and it can help you. It’s not to the point yet where you can just drop in a photo or a video and have it just tell you exactly where it is. But at least right now, who knows in 18 months from now? But at least right now, if you can describe things in the video, you still have to do a lot of the work of finding the details. But if you can get enough of the details to plug into these tools, some of them are getting really good at being able to get you candidate locations at least. And I find it interesting, although I do, I do worry that like, I don’t know, in in two years from now is, is anybody you know who has access to something like Chat GPT going to do exactly what I’m doing and nobody will think it’s interesting anymore? Some people accuse me of doing that already.
JoseMonkey
I think there still will be a place for people who do this because they’re interested in doing it and enjoy doing it, even if there might be simpler, faster ways to do it, because it’s kind of like a puzzle, right? And that’s the thing that’s satisfying for me. And it’s one of the reasons that I don’t really use people’s profiles very often. A lot of times people will ask well, I say they ask. They usually accuse more than they ask. They’ll say, you didn’t find it that way. What you did is you clicked on that person’s profile and it says that they’re in Texas in their profile. Or you just look through their other videos and it’s obvious that it’s wherever it is. And it’s true that you can find it that way. But honestly, the reason I don’t do it is because it’d be really boring. Like my videos wouldn’t be interesting and it wouldn’t be fun for me because I hate to say it, but people’s videos are really easy to figure out. If you allow yourself to dig into their profiles and maybe even look at their other social media profiles when you can find them, it changes the game entirely.
JoseMonkey
And honestly, it’s a little bit frightening how easy it is.
Aubrey Byron
Yeah, actually, on that note, I’m curious, how do you select your videos? Is it for the challenge or maybe just something visually pleasing or whatever strikes you that day?
JoseMonkey
Yeah, well, I usually have a lot to choose from. It’s an extremely long list that I’m working from right now of people who’ve tagged me. So usually what I try to do, I have a whole process for trying to decide which video to do next. And one of the things I do is I really try to prioritize people that tagged me like a long time ago and I haven’t gotten to their video yet. But I do skip around a bit in my list. I don’t just process it sequentially and I try to keep things interesting so I won’t do too many videos in a row that are like kind of the same thing. I definitely will try to use videos that are interesting. If there’s something in it that’s like very different than videos I’ve done before or requires a technique that I haven’t used in the past or recently, then I’ll usually try to mix those in. So sometimes I have a dozen or more videos that I’ve actually found already that are just sitting in a queue waiting for me to make a video about them. But I want to do it when the time is right and I don’t want to be ten videos in a row where it’s like a pickup truck driving down the road and I saw a billboard for something.
JoseMonkey
It’s like, okay, it’s the same content over and over, right? I get a lot of videos like that, by the way. So yeah, I try to mix it up.
Jeff Phillips
Can you maybe talk about any particular super interesting videos that you’ve been sent and more from the puzzle piece, any of them that jump out to mind that you’re like that our listeners would be interested in how you ended up being able to locate where the people were?
JoseMonkey
Yeah, sure. So kind of early on when my videos started taking off, someone sent me a video and I think they were really thinking they were going to stump me with this video. And it’s a Skydiving video. The person is jumping out of an airplane and basically they’re holding their GoPro or whatever they have and they are in the airplane and they jump out. And then you get a few seconds of them as they descend toward the Earth. And you could very briefly in the video see the tail number of the plane. And because I was able to see that, I was able to go look it up on one of these sites. I think I use Flight Aware to go find where that plane may have been. And actually it turned out that this was a plane that was owned by a company in Pennsylvania that does Skydiving types of things. So they tend to fly out of the same airport all the time. And what I was able to do was confirm that because in the video you could see the ground briefly and some features were visible. You could see like an interstate and a lake, I believe was in the video and I think it was Hazelton, hazelton Township, Pennsylvania.
JoseMonkey
And I was able to look at that and compare it to Google Earth type views. Actually, once I knew that stuff, it was kind of easy to find at that point. And so that was great. I was so excited for that one because I knew this person was like, I’m going to stump this guy for sure right away. So that was pretty satisfying.
Aubrey Byron
We talked a little bit about this kind of ethical side of things and that you find people who want to be found. And you mentioned that privacy and sort of media awareness is important to you. Can you talk about that piece of it?
JoseMonkey
Absolutely. It was really important to me when I started doing this that I was doing something that people were going to be comfortable with me doing, because even doing it the way that I’m doing now, there’s a bit of a creepy factor to it that some people get really kind of weirded out by. One of the most common comments I get is, wow, this is amazing, but also terrifying. So I knew I’d be dealing with that, but I really wanted to make sure that I wasn’t in a position where anyone would be objecting to the content. And so I, from the start knew that I would only do this for people who were asking me to do it. I kind of set some ground rules early on. I won’t locate anyone who’s under 18, and I try hard to verify that. Usually it’s pretty obvious if someone tags you and then you look at their profile and it’s all like, I don’t know, Roblox and Fortnite videos. And you can be pretty sure, even if they haven’t told you that they’re under 18, that they might be under 18. So I tell people, don’t tag me in a video if you’re under 18.
JoseMonkey
I tell people not to tag me in other people’s videos because people will. They’ll just tag me in a video they find, because I don’t think it’s malicious. But sometimes people see a video and they’re like, I got to know where this is. Let’s see if Jose Monkey will tell us where it is. But I tell people I’m not going to find it unless the original poster asks me to do so. And the thing that I got a bit concerned about and that some people started asking about is, well, what if somebody just takes a video that they found somewhere else, they stole somebody else’s video and they post it as their own and then they send it to me. What do you do then? And people were really concerned, what if there’s some kind of domestic violence situation or something that would be concerning where I shouldn’t do it? And I did my best for a long time to try to watch for anything that seemed suspicious about any videos. And if I was at all concerned about it, I would just not do it. But I recently made a change to how I do my videos that I think was definitely an improvement and I hope solves the problem.
JoseMonkey
But what I did was I noticed that some people who were sending me videos started doing a new thing that they hadn’t done before, which is they would record a video and they’d come on camera and say, where am I, Jose Monkey? Which was a little bit jarring the first couple of times it happened. These are people talking to me in the videos. But when they did that, it occurred to me that this is a really great way to be sure that the person in the video is asking me to do this. And it occurred to me that not everybody would want to be on camera. So I told them, if you want, just hold up a sign in your video that says the thing. Don’t put it in text on the video, because anybody could add that, but as long as it’s in the video. So that was like my new rule to say, that’s what you have to do if you want me to find a video. Now, granted, I have a whole bunch of people on the list already who I told them, like, look, if you’re on the list, you’re on the list.
JoseMonkey
But going forward, this is the new rule. And I think a lot of people were really appreciative of that. I got a lot of positive comments. People were like, you know, I’ve worried about exactly that. I’m really glad you’re taking this step. So I felt like that was a good thing, and I’m glad I was able to make that change.
Aubrey Byron
We talked about the importance of Google, but can you touch on any maybe lesser known tools that you’ve used that could be good for our audience to hear about?
JoseMonkey
Sure. One that I used just recently, which I actually was not aware of, and I learned about from another creator, is a tool called Find a Grave. And what you can do on that website is type in partial information that you would find on a tombstone. Things like people’s names. I think you can even put in like, dates and things like that. And it will bring up results for cemeteries all over the place. And the funny thing was, I learned about it on the same day that someone submitted a video to me where they were walking around the cemetery. And when I first got the video, I was like, I have no idea how I’m going to find this, because there really wasn’t a lot of other information in the video. I could just see some stuff off in the distance. But then later that day, I learned about this. I actually learned about it on Khan’s channel. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with her channel on TikTok. She finds people’s birthdays using their social media profiles. She’s doing really good work over there. And she posted a video where one of the steps that she had taken to find somebody was that they had posted a video of a tombstone or they were in a graveyard somewhere.
JoseMonkey
And I was like, oh, my goodness, this is exactly what I need to find this video that I just received. And that’s what I did. And I was able to find a couple of tombstones in that that I could see clearly. And I plugged it in. I was able to locate where they were. It was in West Virginia. It was actually my first video in West Virginia. So that was fun.
Aubrey Byron
Awesome.
Jeff Phillips
Wow. Did not know that that tool existed.
JoseMonkey
I know. Apparently a lot of people know about it, and I did not. So I felt like I was sort of late to the game because a bunch of people commented saying, like, I love find a grave. It’s so cool. I was like.
Jeff Phillips
Well, I just want to encourage everyone as we come to the end here, to check out Jose Monkey. Whether it’s on Twitter, your channel on Twitter or your YouTube channel. The videos are very interesting, especially for if I talk to friends or show people what you’re able to find out of those videos that are not doing this on a regular basis, either as an investigator for Osin or as a hobbyist such as you. It is truly amazing how you’re able to locate people. So we really appreciate your time today, sir.
JoseMonkey
Yeah, thank you. It was fun talking to you guys. As I said, I love to explain things, so I’m happy to talk about this as long as anybody will let me.
Jeff Phillips
Well, hopefully we’ll have you back one day. I do want to say thank you to you, Sir, Jose Monkey, for joining us today, everyone. If you’ve liked what you heard, you can view transcripts and other episode info on our website, authentic8.com/needlestack. That’s authentic with the number eight needlestack. And be sure to let us know your thoughts on Twitter at needlestackpod and to like and subscribe wherever you’re listening today. We’ll be back next week with more on GEOINT. We’ll see you then.
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