Transcript of #2473 - Bill Thompson

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

What's up, Bill?

How you doing, Jeff?

Good to see you, brother.

Good to see you.

This is—this might be one of the coolest things anybody's ever given me. So you gave me this knife. Explain all this.

All right, so, I mean, there's a larger explanatory reason behind this. My brother and I grew up—my father died when I was 5—my brother and I grew up doing, um, these things called rendezvous. Have you ever heard of them?

Um, in what way? What is a rendezvous?

So, there you go. So, what a rendezvous is, is it's not—you know, you go to those, like, uh, what do I—I don't even know what they're called, but people do, like, reenactments.

Oh, okay. Like civil war reenactments?

It's not like that. So, that's the closest thing approximation to probably what it is. You get invited to them, or these days they're easier to get to, but my stepfather, my—the guy my mother remarried, brought us to them. All you do is camp, but you're only allowed to camp, and no one comes to the camp, or sometimes they might have people at the end, but while you're in the camp, everything in the camp has to be 1840 or prior. So there can be no modern appurtenances, nothing like a, you know, refrigerator, nothing like that.

1840? Why that year?

The end of the fur trapping. The end of—like, that was considered, like, Jeremiah Johnson time, like, peak fur trapping.

Oh.

So there's people, you know, they dress like either, you know, revolutionary, like American revolutionaries, or they dress like mountain men, or they dress like Indians.

How'd you guys dress?

Mountain men. So, uh, while we're there, you learn all kinds of stuff while you're reenacting. Like, I learned how to brain tan hides. I learned how to traditionally art—do traditional archery, stuff like that. So anyway, this knife was a knife I had actually started working on with my brother a while ago. I do more of, like, the brain tanning, tomahawk thing.

And when you say brain tanning, you talk about using brains to tan animal hides, right?

Yes, yes.

Using animal brains?

Yes.

What—what does brains do? What does brains work?

It softens the leather in a natural way. And what's cool about it is, every animal, no matter what animal you kill, has the exact amount of brain needed in order to tan the hide.

Oh, really?

So you don't need any additional—like, people use egg yolks or mayonnaise or something like that. All you do is you take the brain out of the cavity, you grind it up, you mix it into some water, and then after you've—after you've cleaned the leather and you've scraped it clean, you stretch it. I usually use, like, a dull shovel. You stretch it over the dull shovel, and then you soak it in the brain water mixture, and then you just keep repeating that pattern, and the leather gets a, like, a really nice soft, um, uh, feel to it.

What is it about the brain? Is it the fat?

It breaks down the leather. Uh, I'm not sure if it's the fat or—I haven't gotten that deep into it, but it breaks down the leather and just makes it feel really soft, really nice. So anyway, this knife here, I started—I killed that bear, so the jaw is made out of two, um, bear jaws, or out of one bear jaw split in half. So, um, that was a bear I killed in Canada in 2017. It was my biggest black, um, black bear. And, uh, so we split the jaw, put that together. Um, it's Irish linen threading.

Hmm.

And then, um, the sides are horse and turkey hair hanging off of it.

And these are bear teeth?

And those are bear teeth, yep.

Wow.

From the same bear. So when I was thinking about what I was—because I wanted to give you something for inviting me on, because it's still a shock to me that you did it. Even though we've been talking for so long, I just never imagined a scenario where you'd want to have me on here, so.

Well, you're an interesting dude.

I thought, what could I give this guy that, you know, money or people or whatever couldn't get you? And so I thought, this is the right thing to do. So it went from a me project to a you project, and, uh, my brother Aaron, uh, helped me out with it tremendously.

So how'd you find this knife from the 1860s?

Well, he found it. My brother is, um, even more esoteric and odd than I am, believe it or not. And, uh, he collects this kind of stuff. Um, they—I mean, the guy who dated it said 1860 to 1890. They—is what they figured.

Oh.

And, uh, and you can tell by the way that, like, around the hilt and the way that it's—the pitting on it and stuff like that, and the way that it was made, that it fits that era. I mean, it could have been somebody redid it in 1900, but it's definitely that old. Like, the type of steel and the way that it was worked and the way that it is around the hilt around the bottom there.

Wow.

And, um, so it's at least, you know, 130, 140, but most likely 160, 170.

It actually fits my hand perfect.

Yeah, so that's also something my brother and I talked about, about how long it was going to be, and we—I mean, we made some educated guesses and put it all together. So, yeah, I mean, like I said, not something you can just go pick up somewhere or something that will, you know, hopefully mean something. Not saying it's pra-pratical, like, it's not something you'd be gutting an elk out with, but, um.

Well, if we get attacked by zombies in the studio, it's a good thing to have on the desk.

Yeah, I mean, if you're going to make a last stand, you know, that's a pretty good—that's a pretty good knife to make your last stand with.

It's a good way to go out.

Yeah, exactly.

That's awesome, man.

Yeah, so the rendezvous, um, uh, we did those from when I was.

How long do they last?

Uh, they vary from a week, and then some go up to three weeks.

And what do you do for food while you're out there?

Um, so inside of your lodge—so there's two types of rendezvous. In—at most rendezvous inside of your lodge, you can have a cooler, as long as it doesn't leave the lodge. So I have, like, a 20-foot teepee that I take to these things. And, uh, inside of my teepee, you can have a cooler.

Oh.

And some modern appurtenances.

Did they have any kind of coolers in the 1800s?

I mean, they had ice boxes and, like, steel ice boxes and that type of thing, but nothing like we have today. Um, you know, stuff was getting, um, dug out, buried in the ground, or put into the ground, like, cool areas of the ground.

Mm-hmm.

Or digouts. And they dried everything. So pemmican would have been the, you know, everyday thing to eat. That's just dried.

So did you bring your own food, or did you have to hunt for food?

Well, so you bring your own food, but there are other rendezvous that are kind of invite-only, and I don't even think a lot of people who do rendezvous knew about these, but there's ones that I think they're called—I think I might be speaking out of school. Somebody might send me an email after this, but I'm going to talk about it anyway, because I never got read the riot act. They're called juried—I think they called them juried southerns, and I've only been to one of those. And that's where everything in the camp has to be pre-1840. You meet down in the parking lot, you put everything on the back of a mule, and you—when I did mine, it was up in the—I think it was the bighorns.

Oh.

You know, uh, teaches history at Berkeley or something like that, or other places. And they just really enjoy living like this. And at those ones, if they're in season, you can hunt whatever's in season. You're hunting with traditional archery, and it's really good for kids. Like, the internet wasn't a problem as much when I was a kid. I was certainly into computers. I have been since I was a child. But you could just detach. Everyone's running around crazy, sitting around the campfire at night, people are singing with the, you know, songs and the guitar. You're learning how to do things like this, you're learning how to brain tan, you're learning how to live traditionally.

Community.

Community. People take it very seriously. There's—there's more advertising surrounding it now than there used to be, because numbers are kind of dwindling. But, uh, I did my last one last year with my brother. So if you go on my Instagram, there's a picture of my brother, my son, and I doing, I think, our second rendezvous together, and we're just dressed like, you know. I've actually got an awesome war shirt. I can show you the picture. I've got an awesome war shirt that a friend of mine, uh, went to war with. He was half Native American. His grandfather was, um, Ojibwe or something, Chippewa, something like that.

How much do you enjoy a shower after you get out of here?

I mean, I—as long as you, um, keep, you know, they have showers in camp. They've got a showering area where it's just, like, pallets. That's the inside of my lodge. Um, so there's a cooler at this one. This is not a juried rendezvous. Um, and, uh, so you can shower while you're—some of them, they call them hooters. They'll be, like, a latrine and a shower area in camp. But also, like, some of them, I don't—I don't do it at all.

And so there's no reenactment. Like, there's not, like, civilians walking around and.

It's not like Renaissance faire.

Yeah, exactly. It's just more like, I want to act like it's 1840 for a couple of weeks and not look at my phone one time and not worry about the news. It's amazing after a week here, you really forget about the world, and you're like, don't even know you're supposed to be stressed out about things. You're just out there doing your thing for a couple of weeks.

And you just cook over open fire.

Yep. Everything gets done traditionally that way, yep.

And did you bring your own meat in every single.

Yeah, you bring your own meat and stuff in the cooler. Um, and then, uh, there's also cooking classes where they teach you, like, all the recipes to do with, like, a Dutch oven, like an old cast-iron oven. And, uh, they do gambling at nights. So you'll walk into, like, a huge—they call marquise, but it's like a huge 100-foot square lodge. There'll be three gambling tables in there, girls in, like, the low-cut shirts and dealing cards and smoking cigars and just having an amazing time. And there are pe—you go by camp names while you're in there. Nobody uses their real name. Well, some people use their real name.

What was your camp name?

This is embarrassing.

It should be.

Yeah, so, uh, I got my camp name—I got christened with my camp name in the bighorns when I was 14 or 13, and it was Talksalot.

Talksalot.

Yeah, and Sioux was pronounced Iyahota. And, uh.

Just because you talk a lot, or did.

When I was a kid, I talked a lot. Actually, as an adult, I don't talk that much, unless I know you. Um, but as a kid, I would never shut up. I had really bad ADHD. They kind of diagnosed me with having some low-level version of Asperger's. And, uh, I was a rap scallion in class, just never showed up, never listened, never did anything. And, uh.

Those are the people that are the most fun.

Well, I—they didn't enjoy me in high school or in grade school.

I probably would have been your friend.

But, uh, yeah, they called me Iyahota, uh, and, you know, we got christened, and, uh, it was a—you know, it's a—one of the things we're kind of missing in culture today or something that I'm trying to reinvigorate, especially with my son and with other, you know, young men that I run into, is kind of like coming-of-age rights.

Yeah.

Something to say, "You're a man, and I'm going to start treating you like a man from this moment forward." Like, you know, what does that—there should be structure to that. You know, we're tribal, and, um, it's important to me, so, uh.

I think that is really something that's missing from society. I think that it—I used to think it was silly when I was young, and then as I got older, I realized, well, I went through that. I became a black belt, and I started fighting.

Yes. And you had a group of men telling you, "You're at this level. We're going to treat you like that."

Yeah.

And if you fall from grace, we're going to remind you right away.

Yeah.

And, uh, we just don't do that with young men, and we have a society now where young men act like young men until they're 45 or 50 or 60.

And sometimes never stop.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, um, you know, women—nature imposes itself on women. They become fertile.

Mm-hmm.

They're able to have babies, and, uh, and, uh, they got to seek security or find a husband or a really good job that will supplement whatever a husband would provide. And they got to start acting like a woman, whereas men can sit in a basement, you know, and it becomes very dangerous.

Especially men that never have children.

Yeah, and.

And they're perpetual children.

Yeah, and if you don't impose nature on yourself by undergoing those types of rights and understanding what it means to become a man, nature will impose itself on you by either, A, you're never going to have children, and therefore you're dead forever, or, B, it will kill you because you're fat and in your mom's basement, you get diabetes, and a foot chopped off, and you're 35, and, you know. We just don't tell men. We don't have a—the military did it for me. I had really put off, uh, responsibility or, uh, seeking meaning or any of those things until I was in the military.

I think there's a reason why most ancient cultures and a lot of ancient religions have these rites of passages where you are, like, now officially, officially a man.

Yeah.

Officially, you know, you're responsible. You are—you have to think of yourself as a different thing now. Whereas if you leave it up to your own decision, men sort of dwindle into this perpetual state of childhood.

Yep. And it's not about you anymore. It's about other people.

Right.

Like, that for me, having children, I've got four kids, um, really, you know, the military was kind of the first inkling of responsibility, but then having children and realizing this isn't about me at all.

Right.

And I need to be willing to break my back for these people who depend on me. Um, it's the second.

There's this weird primal feeling that you're responsible for these, like, very vulnerable little people that you love more than life itself. It just changes everything. It just kicks you into gear. But for some people, it doesn't. You know, some people that are so stuck in that perpetual childhood thing, they just wind up deciding it's too much of a drag, and they get divorced.

Yeah.

You know, and then they fuck up the kids.

Yeah. God, we have so many rabbit holes we could go down on this.

Yeah.

But I mean, it was, um, you know, growing up in the '80s and the early '90s, it was really like a divorce culture.

Mm-hmm.

And I obviously understand that if you're in a bad relationship or an abusive relationship or, you know, there's certainly a threshold where marriage should dissolve.

Sure.

No question. But I kind of feel like the central thrust of a lot of culture at that time was about, like, divorce or not getting married or, you know, discovering yourself and that type of thing, which in some ways is good. There's goodness there. But when it becomes a central thrust or a central narrative and divorce becomes very easy or it's happening everywhere, it's super.

It's normalized.

And it's normalized. It's super destructive. Children are the ones who suffer the most on it, and I think the data is clear on that.

Mm-hmm.

Um, when you look at, you know, single-parent homes or no-parent homes or being raised, you know, without an authority.

Or an abusive step person.

Or an abusive step—and that is, you know, when you look up the stats on that, like remarriage and having a new family, like, that becomes the single most likely vector of abuse in a young child's life.

Mm-hmm.

Is that new person, right? Because now they're raising someone else's kid or whatever. Um.

I mean, it's a—that's in every old movie, the evil stepmother.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

Or evil stepfather. But in the old movies, it's always the stepmother that abuses the girl.

Yes. And, and, and so, you know, I kind of, uh, I kind of resented that part of that time that culture was, um, I shouldn't say when I was a child, I should say as I got older, because I was in a single mom home, and, uh, the guy that my mother remarried right after my father died was abusive. And, um, you know, he really got hard on my younger brother, and, you know, my mother moved us out almost immediately. But, uh, when I reexamined that time, it really was, uh, you know, I don't know how to describe it, but, you know, there are no rules when it comes to relationships and family, and every family is special in particular in its own way, and they all need to be venerated.

That's kind of what humans do, right?

Yeah.

We always overcorrect.

Yeah, we do.

Yeah. We go in one direction until we realize it's destructive, and then we overcorrect until we realize that's destructive.

And I would say that's the—and not—this isn't a political thing. This is just the reality of it. That's mostly what makes me conservative in nature, is I agree systems need to change, but they need to change slowly and pragmatically. So we—because, you know, any social, um, any social scientist worth their salt will know a social experiment almost never has the outcome that we thought it was going to have. In other words, we thought doing something to society would form society this way, but it almost has the inverse, the anti-pattern, like we talked about before, and almost ends up propagating itself.

Yeah.

Kind of, you know, federalism. Let's do little changes here. Let's let California be crazy for a while and see how that works out for them. But let's not nationalize the craziness. Let's learn from what they learn there, and there'll be goodness. You know, hot baristas, they make great coffee, and it's cool art. And let's take those parts, but how about the rampant homeless? Let's find out what caused that and solve for that. And, you know, that was kind of the founder's intent with federalism. They're really federalist-minded, state-minded. And there's, you know, even for that being 250 years ago, there's a profound amount of profundity in that.

Yeah. I think in this country, one of the primary problems that people have is a profound lack of respect for discipline and how important discipline is for your life.

Yeah.

And discipline is associated with conservatism. And because of that, like, a lot of people think that I'm—I don't think I'm anything. I think I have politically or ideologically, I have a lot of everything in me. I don't think I identify with one side or another. But if one thing that I agree with conservative people on, conservative people lend more towards the importance of discipline. Hard work, discipline, don't complain, get things done, deal with the hand that you've been dealt with, and just sort it out and get to work.

Yeah.

Don't cry, don't look for other people to save you. They're not going to. And this is not something that's celebrated in society. It's thought of as a cruelty, that if you say that you need discipline, that you're not treating these people that are victims of circumstance with the proper respect or with the proper empathy. And I think a certain amount of empathy is probably not so good for you at a certain point in time. There comes a point in time where you're letting people wallow in their bullshit and just make excuses for why they're not getting anything done.

Yeah. And that suicidal empathy becomes a way for the person who's imposing it on someone else to feel good about themselves.

Mm-hmm.

Which makes it even trickier and even more insidious because they're feeling good from the weaponization of other people's, um, lot in life.

Mm-hmm.

And, and the thing about that is none of the rules that you're going to impose, especially as a legislator or as somebody in a think tank, you'll never feel the repercussions of them. You'll never have to actually deal with it day to day. You're just imposing it on someone else and saying, "I better understand the structure of reality and the fabric of the world, and you can't help but be this way. It's the system that's done this to you. So let me give you pittance that I'm going to take from someone else."

Mm-hmm.

And, and that makes me benevolent. I get to feel good about that.

That's a giant part of government, for sure. That's a giant part of what's the problem with, like, liberal governments. Liberal governments should—they should get paid based on whether or not the city does better or worse financially than when they were in office. If their policies lead to, uh, greater domestic production of goods and services and, you know, GDP does better and everything does better, then you should get paid more. If more real estate sales, more people are making more money, medium income raises, less homeless people, you should get paid more.

Right.

You're doing a shitty job.

Yeah.

And if you did that, I think they would impose laws that made it safer and healthier and made it for, you know, better for society.

Yeah. And then they would just inevitably change the ways that we track and measure those things and pay themselves more.

Well, they shouldn't have the opportunity to do that. Then you need some sort of an oversight that's completely cynical.

I'm being cynical.

You're right, though. You're right to be cynical because that's what they do about everything. Someone was explaining to me yesterday that one of the problems with, um, cleaning up fraud is that fraud is responsible for a giant percentage of GDP. And if you have hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud in this country and you eliminated that, you actually lower GDP because you actually lower the amount of money that's in circulation.

That's interesting. I've never thought about that before.

He was explaining to me, and I was like, "Oh my God, that is crazy that a giant percentage of our GDP is fraud." And if that was somehow or another eliminated, I mean, like, one of the things that they do when they raise jobs, like, they increase GDP. We've added, you know, 200,000 jobs to the market. Well, what are those jobs? Like, what are those jobs? Are these government jobs? Because the government is a giant percentage of our GDP. Government jobs.

Oh, it's way bigger than it should be.

Yeah. Way bigger. And those jobs, a lot of them are bullshit and waste. A lot of them.

Yeah.

You know? And that was some of the stuff that was uncovered during Doge.

Yeah.

You know, the limited amount of access that Doge had to it. Just the beginning of it, where you got to see the curtain pulled back and get to see exposure of so many of these fraudulent, supposedly charitable organizations that were really just money laundering. They were really just funneling money into these people's hands. Like, like the homeless thing in California.

Oh my goodness.

It's a bonkers situation where they've spent $24 billion. They cannot track it. They've tried to audit it. The government has vetoed these audits, and they have no idea where that $24 billion went, and yet homelessness went up.

Yeah.

But you've got a giant machine that is this homeless establishment, this homeless industrial complex.

Yes. Yes.

That is being funneled money into that, and that actually aids the GDP, which is kind of crazy.

Yeah. I mean, it was one of the things my last three years in the military, um, I was advising a colonel and a two-star general, and they were in charge of all of the, uh, offensive cyber development, ethical hacking offensive cyber development. I was their technical advisor. And one of the things that I kind of learned about government at that point was, um, these systems have their own incentive, and the incentive is not the output of their purported mission. The incentive is the growing of the organization and the execution of budget.

Isn't that crazy?

He would go to the Pentagon, and they'd be like, "Well, you didn't execute $300 million of OCO, of overseas contingent operations funds here." And they would dress him down for an hour.

And what people don't understand is if you don't spend that money, your budget for the next year will be lower.

Yes.

Because there's no need to have a higher budget.

Instead of tying it to mission to say.

Right.

"Did you achieve your mission objectives?"

Right.

We started the year agreeing from the president's framework, the NIPIF, the National Intelligence Priority Framework. We wanted to achieve these effects. What you would want to hear is, "We achieved them and we saved 25%."

Right.

But instead it's, "We achieved them, but we didn't execute all of this money. Well, you're fired." And I literally have seen that happen. I've literally seen that happen. And that kind of.

What a sick society.

Yeah. And that kind of shifted my thinking in that, um, these systems have their own incentive to exist and to grow because those guys that were holding that general officer or that O-6s, that colonel's feet to the fire, they also have an incentive to because they were part of that trickle down.

Mm-hmm.

And they've got bureaucracy that surrounds them. And if they didn't execute it, that means they didn't execute it, and that means they have to go to whomever. This was during the Biden administration. I believe Hegseth, for everything we could say, has actually tightened this up quite a bit, and he's kind of rehauled the way development works, especially on the offensive cyber side. But they have bureaucracies, and the incentive of the bureaucracy is to make sure that we grow. And that's it. And then you think about that for a minute, and you're like, "Well, it's no longer a question why we have $30 trillion of debt."

39.

39 trillion. And then what, like 150 trillion of unfunded liability. In other words, we've promised people money for the next 30 years, and it's debt that, you know, I don't see how we'll ever escape that debt. Um, and it's the thing about it is, is, and I don't want to be pigeonholed because I'm actually quite liberal when it comes to my politics are like yours in that I'm kind of a man without a home.

Yeah.

But they also change at different levels of analysis. I'm very liberal with my family, and I'm very, like, communist. I protect them. I give them everything they need. I'm trying to give them structure. And even in my community, I'll help someone out out of pocket or do something for them that's a strain on my time or might hurt something else because there are really no solutions. There's just trade-offs.

That's supportive for the community, though.

Yeah.

That's how people are supposed to do charity.

And I'm also very non-judgmental in someone how they care. I don't care what they do in their house. I don't care if it's a Roman orgy on the weekends. Like, be a predictable, productive person Monday through Friday and go do your Roman orgy on the weekend. I don't care. I won't judge you. Like, I don't I really have enough crap in my own life.

As long as someone's not getting hurt.

Yeah. As long as no one's getting hurt. Consenting adults.

Right. Yeah.

Like, I have enough problems, and I screw up enough, and people have there's a laundry list of things that people could say about me, how I've screwed up in my life. But then as I graduate and get higher and higher, more conservatism takes place. Um, and that's a result of just, you know, having an engineering mindset when I'm looking at life and understanding that it's just not Republican or Democrat or leftist or rightist or liberal or classically liberal. All of these monikers don't work for me because they break down at some level of analysis.

Right.

And.

I think that's the problem. I think the problem is these ideologies that people subscribe to, where you have a predetermined pattern of thinking that you're supposed to adopt.

Yes.

You're supposed to adopt these opinions. And some of them just don't fit. And that's how people get pigeon that's like on people on the left. They get pigeonholed into weird stuff that you can't really justify, like trans women in sports. Like, what the fuck are you doing?

Yeah.

You know, like, we're, you know, we're being inclusive. Like, no, you're not.

We're loving the borders of Ukraine while hating our own border.

Yeah. Fucking bonkers. Yeah. It's there's so many crazy things. There's so many crazy things that people just adopt that don't make any sense. And, you know, when you subscribe to an ideology, the problem is if, like, if you define yourself as this person, I am this, I am a hardcore right-wing blah, blah, whatever it is, you immediately close the door to all the very productive and interesting things that the other side thinks.

Yeah. And you're also making yourself into a tool of propaganda.

Mm-hmm.

Because if I if someone if I meet someone and they just say, "I'm this."

Right.

It's like, well, I could reasonably predict everything that's going to come out of your mouth.

Yeah.

That's not entertaining. I don't want to have a conversation with that person.

Right.

I can't seek to learn from them because I could just pick up the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf.

Right.

And have a pretty good understanding of who I'm dealing with, and therefore a conversation is not relevant.

That's it.

It's not needed.

A lot of people are afraid of social ostracization, too. So they're afraid of straying outside of the narrative, whatever side they're supposed to be on. And, you know, some groups are really good at making you feel like dogshit if you don't agree entirely with even things that don't even make any sense.

Yes.

And so that's why people go along with stuff that's illogical, like open borders or whatever it is.

Yeah.

They go along with things that's not in their best interest because they're scared. They're scared of being ostracized. They're scared of being cast out of the kingdom. There's you know, they're scared of being excommunicated.

Yeah. I dealt with a lot of people first when I retired from the military, and then more recently, um, leading up to the last election where, you know, I was entertaining the deal of doing some work for government, um, believe it or not. And because I'm as we talk more, you'll figure out I'm pretty anti-institutions. I'm really, uh, against those types of things. But I really felt if you would have asked me three years ago how I felt about the Trump election and all of that stuff, I was very excited because he was saying a lot of things that I wanted someone to say.

Oh, really?

I think so. I can't remember. But there's an old one that I used to watch with my grandpa.

God, there's too many movies.

Yeah. And, uh, there's this pattern where you wouldn't invite these guys to a dinner party. You wouldn't want them in church on Sunday. But when a system is so corrupt and so horrible, you have to rely on these types of people to come in and be a check to the system. But then also, you don't want them to stick around when the system is reset. So there's a scene in the movie where he says, uh, you know, "Man, these seven guys are talking." And they said, "Man, these people must have really wanted us. Like, it's crazy. They must be happy we're here." And I think it's Gary Cooper or someone or one of these guys says, looks at him and says, "They're going to be even happier when we leave."

Right.

Is he trying to hit on is he trying to sleep with Cyclops' wife? Yes. Uh, did he chop a guy's head off and throw it at a car? Yes. But we're about to go face Galactus, and we're going to need him. And so we have to put up with all of this other stuff because we understand that when the system is corrupt at every level, you need someone who's outside of the system to come in and set the system right. It's a western, uh, um, pattern as well. Other people who fit this would be like Patton, right? Married his cousin, Slop Soldiers who.

Did he really?

Oh, yeah.

Married his cousin?

Yeah. I think it's his third cousin. Uh.

How many cousins removed does it become okay?

I don't know. Is it third, fourth?

If there's blood.

If you never met them?

I'm Icelandic, so I really can't say anything. Right? They literally have apps in Iceland. Like, my grandparents and my great-grandparents are all from Iceland. My they settled in Manitoba, Gimli Manitoba, which is this Icelandic community. And they literally have apps in Iceland to make sure you're not dating your cousin. So, you know.

Is it such a small community?

Less than a million people.

Right.

All in one island.

Right.

You know, it's so you're trying to prevent that stuff. But anyway, um, Patton, yeah. Uh, Slop Soldiers who had tuberculosis. One of them probably had shell shock. It got in the newspaper. They wanted his head. And thankfully, the generals were like, "No, he's the guy that we need for the moment." Right? He had the ivory pistols, and he dressed like not like a general. He didn't talk like a general. He wasn't like a, um, Eisenhower where he had the veneer of a general. But we knew he was the only guy we could have at the Battle of the Bulge. Like, the Germans talked about him like he was already a mythic legend in his own in his lifetime.

Yeah. He was sleeping with some girl that was writing his book or something along those lines.

That's it?

Uh, well, I'm not saying that's.

He was married.

Yeah. I'm not saying that's the end of him.

Right.

All I'm saying is that history will remember the pattern as ending unfavorably.

Mm-hmm.

You know what I'm saying? And so when I examined Trump, I said, "Yeah, I don't like what he says. I wouldn't want him around my daughters. I don't want wouldn't want him at a dinner party." Um, but he seems to be saying these things like he's going to reset this system. You know, I think it was Chappelle was on your show or another show or someone like that where he talked about Hillary saying, uh, you know, something about the tax loopholes or whatever. And he just hit right back at her and said, "Well, you're the people who are funding your campaign take advantage of those same loopholes. And if they're there, I'm going to take advantage of them.

What were the problems?

Oh, my goodness. Um, books that general officers were being told to read and that I, as an advisor, were being told to read. Books like White Rage, like Understanding Why You Are a Problem. Uh, you as a white man are a problem in the modern-day military because, um, this whole thing's built on systemic racism. You have inbuilt implicit bias that you can't escape even if you wanted to or you recognized it.

It was woke politics.

Yeah, it was woke politics. And it was, um, and it was, uh, you know, I would sit there and say, you know, all of the friends, all of the people that I know who've died during this war, not all of them, but 80% of them, and the numbers bear this out when you look at them, they're all white guys from the middle of the country who were on their farms or, you know, not all of them, 80% of them. I think the numbers bear out about 80% of them were these guys from the Midwest or these places where they didn't really have a lot going. And they went off to fight a war that we probably shouldn't have been fighting in the first place, especially in Iraq.

Katangi Brown Jackson.

Yeah. They were talking about how it's historic because she's black. And Biden had said he's going to hire a black woman to do this job.

Mm-hmm.

If I had worked my whole life to do something, but now I'm only being elevated to this next position because of my gender and the color of my skin, I would turn that job down so fast because that's not what I want to be known for. These are immutable characteristics that I'm not in control of. I wasn't I didn't choose to be born white or with blue eyes. I didn't choose to be born in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere without a dad at five. I didn't choose any of those things. I don't see how I benefit from these things at the individual level. And, you know, the individual level of analysis for me is really the only way to evaluate someone for their pluses and their minuses.

Of course.

It's just a great way to control people because you pit people against each other that way. And it's just an awesome way that they can stay in control and make everybody walk on eggshells and think that, you know, they victimized people in order to get to their position, and they have to be shameful of who they are that they had no control over.

It also gives people an easy rubric to judge other people.

Yeah. Because nothing's easy, really. And it gives some, like, white guy bad.

Mm-hmm.

You know, black guy good. Chinese guy, as long as he's not applying to the college I want to get into, he's good.

Right.

Um, and, and it gives people want easy answers, really, at the end of the day. They want to be told the easy rubric to navigate life because, really, none of it's easy. And it requires discipline, like you said before, um, and thought. And, and, and so it was that stuff in the military. I remember getting told in an equal opportunity briefing we were getting, um, it doesn't matter what you meant when you said what you were saying. It only matters what the person felt when you said it.

They said that in a military briefing?

It was a military equal opportunity briefing. So and the example they gave was if a woman walks into the like, we worked with a lot of civilians at this, um, at this, uh, military organization where we're developing these, um, uh, offensive cyber capabilities. A lot of civilians in there. And, uh, so if, you know, woman X walks in today and she's got a dress on, and the thought in your head is, "I'd like to get my wife that dress or something like it or find out where she bought it." And you just say, "That's a nice dress. Anyway, here's the TPS reports." If she heard something sexual or didn't like the connotation or whatever, there's going to be an investigation.

But it was weaponized.

But it was weaponized, and it was carried out in a way where it's only about how people feel and not what a reasonable person's standard would be in a particular situation. And from the time I joined the military, until that time, we had been at war. My entire time in the military, we were at war. Um, I deployed throughout my career. And I wouldn't say that I was a war horse. I was not a long tabber. I was not a cool guy kicking in doors. It was my job with the as the guy with, you know, tape over his glasses to point out the door for someone else and say, "Bad guy's in there." Um, so I was not, you know, a super badass in that regard.

Yeah, of course.

And but then someone would overhear that joke or something, and now you're looking down the barrel of a 15-6, which is a military investigation. And all of these things that could permanently impact your life in a way and give you a scarlet letter to where you could never be employed again or do anything ever again because you were simply trying to relieve some pressure or you were trying to find out where to buy your wife the next dress.

Mm-hmm.

And I know guys who suffered under that. Sword. Like, I wouldn't name them, but I know guys who, you know, their career met a terminal end because of a dumb joke or something. It's like you can't be expected to go out and shoot people in the face and then be sensitive to someone's feelings an hour later.

Right.

It's just it doesn't it does not work. Now, should you talk to that guy and say, "Hey, you know, you made woman X feel so-and-so, be more cognizant of that whenever you're around her in the future"?

Well, you should also have a rational discussion with the woman.

Yes.

And what did he ask you?

Yeah.

He said, "Where did you get that dress? It's very lovely. I'd like to get one for my wife." Why were you upset at that? Like, does this is this rational? Like, how you can't be in an office if you're that sensitive. Like, it's one thing if the guy said, "I'd like to get you out of that dress."

Well, okay, now.

Okay, now we're.

Now you're in a different world.

100%. 100%.

Right.

Yeah.

But if someone says, "You look great," you know, "Have you lost weight? You look fantastic." That's the that's a compliment.

Yes.

And if someone gets upset, "I felt sexually objectified. I felt harassed." Like, okay, he just said you look great.

Yeah.

That's it.

Healthy.

It's not, "You look great. I'd like to get you naked."

Right.

Now we've crossed the Rubicon, right?

Yes.

Now we're into.

For sure. For sure.

Right. But just, "You look great," or, "I like your dress," that's like, if you said that to a man, like, "Hey, great suit."

Yeah.

And he's like, "I need to file a complaint."

You've trimmed up.

Yeah, right.

You need to file a complaint.

Yeah, you've trimmed up, Joe. You're looking good.

Looking great, Bill. Like, oh my God, I'm being harassed. I need to, like, complain.

That would have worked during the Biden administration.

That is fucking crazy.

That would have worked.

That's so crazy.

And the other thing that they were doing in this briefing, which is where I kind of, you know, the last couple of years of my military career, I got in trouble a couple of times, or I should say called down. I was a senior I was a CW4. I was one rank from the top. I was advising two-star generals, colonels, um, on very important matters. I wasn't high. I wasn't high in the in the dominance hierarchy, but I was adjacent to people who were as an advisor. And, um, uh, the, the amount of in this briefing in particular, um, they had gotten into, uh, you know, it's bad that there are so many white people.

Just being rational.

Yeah, just trying to be rational and say that there's, there's more difference in groups than there is between groups and that the similarities and the way that things stack up, you recruit from a pool of volunteers and candidates. If I'm recruiting from a pool of volunteers and candidates who are 80% male and white, I have to expect that the selected individuals are going to be male and white. The majority of people who join the military, I don't control this. I'm just as an engineer, I'm looking at statistics.

Also, if you want a highly functional, productive group, it's got to be based on meritocracy.

Yeah, for sure.

Period.

For sure.

It has to be. Anything other than that is literally a threat to national security.

Yeah, you're, you're, you're denigrating lethality.

Yeah.

The role of the army is to deter war through exuding superior military fighting and technology. And when deterrence fails to win, that's it. Those are the those are the two things that we need to do with our military. It needs to look like the guy in the playground who you would not muck about with. And if you were to muck with him, he will beat you senseless. That's it. Now, whether or not we should be using that all the time or how we use it, that's a separate question. But the entity itself needs to comport itself in this way. Otherwise, you are endangering this, this truly special experiment, which at least in its beginnings valued the individual.

Well, it's also you can't judge people from the past based on the standards of the present.

For sure.

Because culture changes. People understand things better. We have a more a much greater recognition of what was wrong with things 100 years ago, 200 years ago. And I'm sure in the future, we're going to look back on today with the same lens. There's it just always works that way.

Did you know Joe had a gas-powered car?

Exactly. That kind of stuff. Yeah.

Did you know that?

You consumed more, you flew more.

Yeah.

You ate more meat. You did whatever you did.

Yeah.

You were a problem.

He was a problem.

Yeah.

And, and now why would we ever like, I'm voting to get rid of the Joe Rogan experience from the National Archives because he drove a gas car.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like, someone, you know, stores your stuff for.

Right.

Profundity's sake for the future to hear about this. You know, I, I, I've always loved your podcast, Joe, and it was because you're a genuinely curious person, and I'm not kissing your ass right now. You're a genuinely curious person that was saying things that were not in the current zeitgeist at the time, and you refused to apologize for it. And it, it, it led, you know, led to a lot of great things, but it led to the an updating of the system. And you did it with dialogue, with the dialogos, with, you know, two people trying to learn things about each other.

Yeah.

Because if I can't express a bad idea, I have to act it out. And if I act out the bad idea, it could kill me.

And the celebration of good ideas.

And the celebration of good ideas.

Yeah.

And, uh, it's just really there's just been such a weird inversion in politics where the free hippie-loving liberals of yesteryear are now the ones telling you what words you can use. There are no borders, all of these crazy things. Um, and I always say to people I said it to Andy some fun my last podcast with him. I'm like a 1996 Bill Clinton Democrat. If you go watch his State of the Union.

Right. Oh, yeah.

And he talks about lowering debt, getting out of debt, actually, working with Newt Gingrich to get out of debt, um, securing the borders.

Yeah.

Making work and education freely accessible.

Yeah.

Um, I'm voting for that guy.

I know. Isn't it crazy that I mean, that's why the problem of labels doesn't work, ideological labels, because if you go back far enough and look at Clinton, for example, he's one of the best ones, and by the way, did balance the budget.

Yeah, he did.

He actually did.

We had a surplus when he left the office.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Did a fucking amazing job. So he got his dick sucked.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Who didn't? Back then, that's the other thing. Judging people by the standards of the past, you know, JFK doesn't look so good in the Me Too movement, you know?

Right. Exactly.

You know, I mean, he would have got canceled.

Yeah.

It's like you, you have to recognize that those this ideological bubble that we find ourselves in, left versus right, Bill Clinton does not fit in that. Bill Clinton is securely on the right in, in terms of, you know, 1996 standards applied to today.

He would never want to hear that.

No, he would never want to hear that because he's kind of shifted with the zeitgeist because that's what you kind of have to do if you want to stay in your party and be protected by your party.

Yes.

You know, but he was essentially he had a lot of the I mean, we've talked about this before. We've played clips of, uh, Hillary Clinton from 2008, and she's more MAGA than MAGA.

I know.

You know, her, her take on the border was, like, hardcore.

Yeah.

Was hardcore. If you've been convicted of a crime, get out. You know, if you stay here, pay a stiff penalty, and you have to get in line, and you have to learn English, nobody cheers.

Yeah.

Like, that is a hardcore right-wing 2026 perspective.

Obama did it too in 2012.

Yes, absolutely. And Obama deported more people than Trump did.

Yes, exactly.

And, and it's just I'm not saying like, my thought is I'm always updating I'm always updating my systems. I'm always getting told things. I always have a pre-prescribed way of looking at the world that I'll have a good conversation with someone, and I'll update my system. But generally, my principles are in place. And when you watch these people who get into their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, and their core foundational principles are changing, it really should give you cause for concern.

Mm-hmm.

Because, like, you were saying this at this time, and now you're saying this at that time. It's like, generally, my rubric that I don't think will change about myself is I'm fervently for the individual, and I'm fervently for truth. And, and that we can that the that the world you should measure it and look at not what your intentions are, but what the outcomes are. And, and then evaluate the system and how it scales based on those outcomes. Those are that's principally if you I try to live that standard up to myself. I fall short of that standard all the time, but I try to.

It's part of being a human.

I try to live by that standard. And I feel like that will always be me even into my 90s. Like.

Unless something goes horribly wrong, right?

Right, right. And, and I've pretty much been here since, you know, the past seven or eight years or so. Like, even into my 30s, I wasn't quite sure who I was, um, as a human. And, uh, but I'm, I'm pretty, you know, steadfast in that. And the amount of opportunities and the amount of goodness in my life and my children and, and my home and the things I've been able to do have really been born out of that last seven years of the truth's going to be the top of the of the decision matrix for me, the top of the hierarchy for me.

Yeah.

But, uh, um.

Well, I don't think if you don't hate the government, I think you're not paying attention.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean.

When you were working in cyber defense, like what, what.

Cyber offense.

Cyber offense.

Yeah.

What was the, the primary function? Like, what did you do?

Um, so in the beginning, it, it, it I have no short answers, and I apologize. In the beginning.

I don't like short answers.

Yeah, I just I always feel like I'm.

I like a good long answer.

Yeah.

Don't worry about that.

Okay. When I joined the military, I was in Signals Intelligence, um, and essentially learning the ins and outs of radars, how radars work, what they do, um, how they function.

Did you guys ever see any weird shit, like UFO shit?

I, I, I wish I had. I really do.

I wish you had too.

Yeah, I really do. Um, I was more in the Signals Intelligence side of the house, um, focusing first on electronic signals or emanations from radars, mapping them so that, you know, if we were going to go do the ground invasion and there was going to be some air support going in first and blowing shit up, we would tell them, "Hey, there's a manpackable SA-7 here. There's a SA-10 here. There's this here, there's there." And then telling these pilots so they didn't get shot out of the sky.

Mm-hmm.

Um, quickly, when the war kicked off, that became irrelevant because there was no, you know, surface-to-air missiles, surface-to-surface missiles in Iraq. We had knocked them all out in the first few weeks. So then it shifted to communications intelligence. So I kind of retrained on communications intelligence, and that was at that time off of cell phones, off of, uh, push-to-talk radios, repeaters, um, long-haul networks, terrestrial networks, extraterrestrial networks. And what I mean by that is satellites in the sky. Um, and doing analysis on those to try to inform the, the, the what we call the common operating picture of the battlefield for a combatant commander.

Yeah.

Get into all of that? And that was that that was the, um.

How did you get into it? What was what, what did what was, like, what was the operational aspect of it? Like, how did you actually what did you do?

Going so, you know, there's, there's I'll stick to terms that are more, um, generally understood by the public, but learning how to do things like war driving, um, collecting on networks, Wi-Fi, you know, endpoints, um, cell phones, uh, understanding the ins and outs of them, understanding how to do forensic analysis of them. So after there was an operation and a bunch of guerrillas had been sent in to kill a bad guy, um, we could derive maximum intelligence value from the hand from the handset to plan other operations.

Was he?

I mean, yeah. You know, your job's to remain.

Anonymous?

Anonymous, and you're walking into a casino, and there's Goldfinger calling you by your first and last name. It's not a great look. Um, you know, generally, you don't want to be sleeping with your sources or, uh.

Right.

Um, you know, using your real name or whatever. So human intelligence. And then my focus for the last 10 years was how does Signals Intelligence, computer network operations, um, become a force multiplier for people conducting overt and clandestine operations, um, throughout the theater. At that time, uh, my, you know, my deployments and my time was spent in Iraq, Afghanistan, um, Africa, Northern Africa. And then the a lot of people don't know it, but we were in active combat operations in the southern Philippines as well for, uh, a fair amount of time.

When was this?

In the southern Philippines. My first deployment to the southern, um, southern Philippines was, uh, 2007.

Who were we doing operations against?

So, um, there were terrorist elements down there that were traveling back and forth from Pakistan and Afghanistan. And there was a terrorist organization down there called the Abu Sayyaf Group. And, uh, there were other ones as well. Jamaat Islamiyah, I think, was the name of the other one. And, uh, they were conducting their own terrorist anti-Christian operations in the southern part of the Philippines. In the in the southern part of the Philippines. I don't can I say it? Can I say the word?

What do you mean?

Jamie, can you pull up a map of the Philippines? Can you pull it up?

Oh, say that? Say that term?

I want to yeah, pull it up, Jamie.

I've been listening to it forever. Uh, so there's what's called the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, which is the southern part from, like, a place called Zamboanga down to Hulu or Holo Island. Um, and there's a it's a funny joke because if you zoom into Zamboanga, which is.

God, look how many islands there are.

I know. It's go down to the south there. See Zambo go down right there. Right, right. Zoom right there on that island. Now move to sorry. Now move to the southwest. See that penis?

Mm-hmm.

At the tip of that penis is called Zamboanga.

Mm-hmm.

All of our combat operations now if you zoom out a little bit more and, and pan more south and zoom out just a little bit more so the joke hits. All that sperm south of the tip of the, uh, the Zamboanga city, this there are terrorist operations in here now. If you go to that main island called Sulu, there's Holo Island. That's where I was on this tiny island out in the middle of nowhere. And on that, there's a mountain.

That that's all the Philippines?

Well, no. I mean, this is all the Philippines down here. Yeah.

Wow.

So this is called there's a mountain in there. I think it was called Mount Tumatoc or something like that on the near on the eastern part of the island called Luke. It's called Luke. Yeah. So there's mountains. There's a mountainous region there. There are a bunch of terrorists up there. They were killing people in the area, conducting bombings. They were getting trained. Um, in fact, there was a guy, and I believe I'm going to get his name wrong, perhaps, but I believe his name was either Insan Haplan or oh, it's Jamar Patek. Jamar Patek. He was actually arrested outside of Osama bin Laden's compound the day after he was killed.

Zoom back out. I want to see the Philippines one more time, like all the islands. When you zoom all the way out, it's so nuts how many islands there are.

Yeah. So up north.

So big.

Up north in Manila is mostly the Christian, um, population. And as you get down south, it's the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.

Mm-hmm.

And that is all of where these terrorist operations were happening. Um, and I believe that mostly pulled out of there. There might be still some people in Zamboanga. I'm not sure anymore because it's been five years, four years since I retired. But, um, yeah, we were doing counterinsurgency operations down there, and guys died down there, and there were combat operations. And, uh, I was out there, um, I was in a tactical military intelligence battalion, and I was attached to the 1st Special Forces Group. And we were down there a couple of times, and, uh, a lot of people don't even know about it, so.

Yeah, I never heard about it.

Yeah. So, uh, anyway, um.

I'm just I'm sorry.

No, no.

It's a sidebar, but I'm so stunned at how many islands are in the Philippines and how spread out it is.

Yeah, it's, it's insane. And the, the, the thing about it is, is I'd go to all of these little outposts in these out islands. We were always debriefing these guys. And I'm going to get these terms wrong, so I'm sure there'll be people in the comments, but I think they were called bongarays or something like that, but they were like these mayors of each one of these little islands. And there would be terrorists in and around those areas, and we'd try to make friends with these guys so they'd give us some information. Um, and every one of those places was absolutely beautiful. Like, you'd go there and be like, "Man, Hilton could turn this into something in a short order."

Right.

You know, when you're out of these places, beautiful beach, beautiful lush jungles, the best swimming water.

Nicest people too.

Oh, Filipinos.

Filipino people are some of my favorite people, man. Like, you want to talk the guys that we worked with out there, they're, uh, scout I think they're called scout sniper scout rangers. And they were a special I think they were like their special forces. We'd go to the range with these guys and show them stuff. And they're the most, um, ride-or-die type of guys you'll ever meet in your life. Like, you know, so-and-so said this about you last week, and I could kill him. It's like, no, dude, it's cool. It's like, don't worry about it. Like.

Fun fact, there's some of the best pool players on earth too.

Oh, really?

Some of the greatest pool players of all time came out of the Philippines.

They're just great people. I mean, I just the people down there were fantastic. And it was awful because those guys would be bombing churches, Christian churches and stuff like that. And, uh, they're doing counter operate like I said, counter, um, um, intelligence operations out there, doing intelligence operations collection to inform that battle picture. But those guys had direct links with Osama bin Laden and other people.

Wow.

Um.

I had no idea.

Yeah. Right after we like I said, I think it was I think if you look it up, I think his name is, um, Patek, P-A-T-E-C P-A-T-E-K. And he was arrested outside of Osama bin Laden's compound, and we had been chasing him in the Philippines.

Wow.

Because we thought he was still down there. Um, there was another guy that we I believe we killed him. His name was Albedo Parade. Um, but yeah, my job was not I always say this on podcasts because the veteran community is wild right now. They love to cut each other down right now. There's something weird going on where.

Yeah, I prefer it.

Like, obviously lying. Yeah. Call the people out. I prefer to call people out face to face. Um, but, uh, I always make sure people know I was not a cool guy. Like, sometimes I got to dress like one. You know, for a few years, I didn't wear any uniforms, and I got to grow my beard out and act like a cool guy. But I was really a nerd for cool guys. I've literally got pictures of myself down in the in the Holo or in Afghanistan or anywhere else and tape around my glasses and, you know, Pez dispenser and my radio and collection equipment looking like a true blue American nerd.

That's crazy that you're so smart, but you were a horrible student.

I wouldn't yeah, I wouldn't I would call myself curious before I'd call myself smart. But, um, uh, you know, my mother you know, I don't know if we remember you would remember this, but maybe other people my age, you know, you'd get these scholastic book order forms that you'd bring home from school, and you could order books.

Mm-hmm.

There'd always be on the back page, there'd always be like little cool stuff. Like, you could get like, you know, a pair of gloves or a hat or something. Anyway, one time there was a, um, a coil radio that you could order where with an earpiece, and you put this coil radio together and with an earpiece, no battery. It was just the electromagnetic radiation would, would, would, um, activate the coil, and the coil would you could listen to radio chatter.

Really? With no battery?

Yeah, yeah. Just tiny little, little radio.

How did it what was the power?

The electromagnetic radiation. And you would just kind of like a record, a, a like, you know, how you coil.

Uh-huh.

You hit a record. Electromagnetic radiation would hit the coil, and the coil would feed up to an amplifier or up to an earpiece. And the earpiece, you could hear chatter, and you could tune it.

Did the earpiece have a battery?

Nothing I don't think anything had a battery on it. Yeah, I think it was just a.

Wow.

I could be mistaken, but I don't believe there was.

Powered by electromagnetic radiation.

Yeah. I mean, you can look it up, Jamie, if you want. Sorry to say that again, but.

Tighten that thing down. That thing's driving me crazy.

Yeah, sorry.

This thing.

Oh, like here or here?

Right here. Look at my finger.

It's right here.

Yeah. I've been meaning to do that, like literally when everybody uses this fucking thing. It's wobbling around, ready to fall off.

Yeah, but if you look up coil, coil radio with small earpiece, I could be wrong. I don't remember there being a battery on it.

Electromagnetic radiation powered it. That's bananas.

Yeah. So kind of like a same thing with, like, you know, not the same wattage, but a microwave, right? Um, sends power through the air.

Right, but it uses.

Or DC.

But it uses power in order to send it.

Yeah. Yeah, but I could be wrong, but, um, at any rate, that was the first time I got a radio, and I was hearing things, and I'd put it together, and I'm listening to things and.

Like what kind of things?

Uh, HF radio, VHF radio, people talking, that type of stuff. And, um, it was just and then I found out how to get an antenna to make the antenna larger and started ordering auxiliary pieces for it. And then what really changed me was my mother let me get a my mother and I would clean houses. She was a waitress, but we also would go around and clean houses. And there was a lawyer that we worked for. His name was Phil Culp, and, um, he had an old 286SX IBM. And, uh, it was just sitting in his basement.

GUI meaning graphic user interface.

Graphic user interface. Yeah. Yeah, sorry.

That's okay.

And, um, so that kind of started me on that. And that for me, like I said, um, I had all kinds of problems with attention deficit disorder and not being able to pay attention. That was the only time.

But you could pay attention to that.

I could I would go for.

Yeah.

I don't believe in ADHD.

I might be wrong.

No.

I think it's a superpower.

I mean, it certainly I remember I would spend two days working on a problem and not sleeping.

That's what I'm saying. I think it's a superpower. I think it just keeps you from being interested in things you're not interested in.

Yeah. I have a theory on that too that I can get into after, but, um, that started me down that road. But in school, I couldn't pay attention.

Me neither.

There was this teacher. I always tell this story. It's a great teacher. She's still around. Um, her name is, uh, Connie Trenbeth, and she was my English teacher or literature teacher or something like that. She might not even remember the story, but here I am telling it on your podcast. I remember it. Um, she kept me after class once, and she goes, "You know, I knew your dad, Bill, and, uh, you know, your, your uncles were all smart and your my grand my great uncle has an engineering wing of a school named after him out in western North Dakota." And she goes, "All these guys were thinkers, and your dad did all this great stuff and built all this stuff."

Yeah.

No one can talk.

Sounds like me.

You're trying to dominate every conversation. But when you know, I you had written one paper on something that interested you, and I don't remember what it was. And she's like, "That was a wonderful paper."

Yeah.

She's like, "If you could just do that every time." And, uh, I was not hearing it. Like, I remember the conversation because I actually remember her. I think she said waste of life. I think she actually said that. Like, you're wasting like, you're obviously my RP my CPU clocks high. I'm always thinking even when I'm not thinking. And even as we're sitting here talking, I'm thinking about other things or stuff I want to do when I get back to my computer or stuff I want to do for my business. And, um, and so I joined the military, and the absurdity of life is this.

Yeah.

Yeah. I was like, "Yeah." And so they walked me into this back place, and, you know, nothing super crazy, and briefed me up on the job. And I went back out, and I said, "Yeah, this is actually the job for me." So the absurdity of life is me forgetting my driver's license when I was 16. I was 16 when I signed up. Um, maybe 17. No, I was turning 17 that December. When I signed up for the military, um, I can connect with a string to forgetting my driver's license to being here with you today.

You can you can sign up when you're 16.

I think I was turning 17.

You could sign up when I didn't even know you could sign up when you're 17.

Yeah. I had signed my delayed entry program thing, um, and I left a little bit before my 18th birthday, so I just graduated from high school. But, um, yeah, you can sign up when you're 16, I believe, as long as your parents sign the waiver. My mother signed the waiver. She was happy to get me out of the trailer. Um, so, uh, yeah, I was 17, almost 18 when I left.

You can get your radio out of that.

Yeah, right there. So that's all the pieces.

Wow. They call it a crystal radio now.

Yeah. I was going to say crystal controlled.

What? That's a radio?

There it is. That's actually the exact thing. That looks almost that is almost exactly what it looked like.

Slinky made it?

Well, they bought the brand they just the Slinky brand now bought this toy.

Yeah.

But there's a bunch of these all over the internet. Yeah.

Wow. Make your own working radio without that or is?

Yeah. And it uses a I was going to say crystal controlled radio because it uses a crystal diode on it.

See?

Would you say Tesla coil, Jamie?

Actually, it's a Tesla coil.

Oh.

This guy's explaining it. So this thing has a kind of cool too. Let me find this thing. Uh, a rocket radio they called, which is a like further development, this thing. It attached to a phone.

Oh.

So you plug that onto a phone cable. There's a picture of it somewhere on here, but, um, it explains like you're picking up there you go.

Wow.

No power.

Wow. No battery or current needed, hence no operating expense and long life.

Yeah, this is almost.

Clips it onto a phone. What year was this?

Man, this is old.

Yeah.

So it also shows here. This is like you're picking up power from a radio tower.

Yeah.

Wow.

The more powerful the signal this is clearly like what they're paying for with the FCC. The more powerful your radio tower, the longer and more people you can reach.

Crazy that has no battery.

And that's also why some radio signals come in very well on your radio and some don't, and they sound like dog shit.

Yeah.

They got weak power.

Yeah. And then the frequency modulation, like amplitude modulation isn't as efficient as frequency modulation when it comes to for the vocorder to produce sound. Amplitude modulation travels farther, but it doesn't have the, um, the amount of information. It's not modulated with the the carrier wave can't be modulated with as much information as you need. Whereas frequency modulation is much quicker, megahertz, and you can amplitude and add more, um, um, sound or more information, which is why it sounds better. So FM sounds better, but it doesn't travel as far.

Right.

AM sounds worse.

Right.

I always when I was training people in the military on this, I would use the analogy of if a party is happening next door, you can hear the bass music.

Mm-hmm.

But you can't hear the treble. You can hear the bass music because that frequency travels farther because it's lower in the frequency band.

Oh.

But you can hear the treble because or you can't hear the treble, I'm sorry, because it's higher frequency and there's more modulation. And so it disperses quicker, and you can't hear it as well. And it's the same thing with like VLF comms coming off of like a submarine can travel underwater for very long ways, but you can't put as much information in them as you could if you were doing, you know, VHF or UHF comms where there's lots of modulation.

Mm-hmm.

So it's the dispersal. And, you know, a lot of my, you know, mid part of my career was explaining this stuff to, you know, military guys who were trying to understand like here's how a cell phone works, and this is how frequency works, and this is how we send information and just kind of demystifying, you know, how, you know, a GSM network works essentially.

One of the things that I wanted to ask you about that is when new technology is emerging, how, how do you how do you stay ahead of the ability to extract information from this technology, hack into networks before people understand the capability?

You really can't.

You really can't?

And that's the beauty of the free market is that the innovation to perform the function that you want someone to pay for will always move faster than your ability to exploit the technology.

Then how do you explain things like Pegasus?

Well, I mean, something like Pegasus well, first off.

Explain Pegasus to people that don't know.

It was a persistent implant on cell phones for people. Um.

Initially, it was you had to click it. It was a click worm.

Initially, it was click a click, and then it became a non-click exploit. So in other words, you had to interact with something on the phone in order to initialize and install the implant. And then after and but the reason why it was so good is because it wasn't stored in the, um it wasn't stored in the usual areas that you would want a persistent implant or where you would have a persistent implant. For instance, uh, you know, you might want to put it in the application layer of an app or something like that where there's a binary that can run and execute commands or functions.

Well, that's why they banned Huawei devices in the airport.

Oh, yeah. ZTE.

Yeah. Well, Huawei had a phone that I was really interested in back in the day. They had a Porsche design had partnered with Huawei and made this insane Android phone with like the best camera, the best battery. It was like really high level. And I was like going to buy it. And then all of a sudden, they banned all the Huawei phones. And I was like, "What's going on?" And then, you know, I had heard some people say, "Oh, they're just trying to stop competition. It's like American companies are trying to stop it." And then I I went into it deeper, and I said, "No, it seems like there's third-party input on some of their routers and some of their, um, some of their network devices."

Yeah.

That they had engineered in order to be able to access them by third party.

Yeah.

And this because of whatever, lack of understanding, lack of, uh, knowledge of how these things are constructed, the people that purchased them didn't weren't weren't aware of them. And these things had gotten into place. And they had gotten into place in universities. They got into place in military establishments. They were using them in cell phone towers that people had, you know, inadvertently bought from China.

Yep. And, and that's really I mean, I can tell you firsthand from having done some of the forensic exploitation on this stuff. Another large part of my career I didn't talk about was just on mobile forensics and media forensics, which is essentially you think of like CSI Miami or CSI whatever the city was. There's a crime. Someone was killed. You have forensics that are doing forensics on like blood and fingerprints and blood splatter and all that stuff. There's a whole another part of that same forensics branch that focuses on media forensics. What was deleted off this phone at one point?

What was going on with the Huawei phones? Like, what were they doing with them?

I mean, they were they were they were either some of them were coming out implanted. In other words, there was access built in for a foreign actor. And then other in other terms, other places with routers, with the ZTE stuff, there were just things that you would patch or that you would fix as a company who was trying to protect the consumer and create a product that would people use would use, and they weren't doing it. So they were creating persistent back doors either by actively placing code on there that would allow, you know, root access or they were leaving things open, especially in Africa.

On a consumer level, what were they doing with those phones? Like if they had imported them to the United States, if they didn't have that ban, what would have been the issue?

Uh, getting access to, you know, any number of people that the Chinese really want access to everybody. But you could start at the topical level of just saying, you know, getting Joe Rogan to use a ZTE would be that would be my wet dream as a guy who used to do this work back in the day because you're talking to the president or you're talking to this guy or that guy. And I can build out a a network of understanding who you're in contact with, who you're talking to, what's being talked about, but then also finding out, you know, this person's phone number and now doing a deep dive on there.

Wow. And so as far as today's technology, I see you you use an Android phone.

Mm-hmm.

Like is there a phone that is more secure or a platform that is more secure?

It all depends. Like I I always take this from Thomas Sowell. There are no answers. There are only trade-offs. So there's there's like the way to answer that question would be is like who are you? What are you trying to do with your life? What are you talking about on your phone? What are you doing on your phone? You know, most of these phones, if you're just an average everyday citizen who's just going about your job, um, you know, the phones today are pretty secure, especially versus a few years ago. Um, if you're a reporter, now the nexus is do you trust the government and do you trust Apple?

What is lockdown mode?

There I don't know if that's exactly what it was called or not because I've never really used Apple just for my own personal reasons.

What personal reasons?

I don't trust Apple.

How so?

Uh, they are more interested in monetizing people's data than they are providing them capability. So every time you take a photo, every time you upload a document, every time you talk to it, every time it asks you about your, you know, you you'll get these questions where it says, uh, if your password's lost, you can back up your password in these ways. Tell us where you were born. Tell us your mom's maiden's name.

Mm-hmm.

Tell us your mom's this, your mom's that.

Lockdown mode is extreme optional protection. It would only be used if you believe you may be personally targeted by a highly sophisticated cyber attack.

Very well.

Most people are never targeted by attacks of this nature. When iPhone is in lockdown mode, it will not function as it typically does. Apps, websites, and features will be strictly limited for security, and some experiences will be completely unavailable.

Yeah. So when I was advising guys back in the day on going out and doing like a high-risk source meet.

Mm-hmm.

So you're going to go meet, you know, a spy for another country, and you're a military guy, and you're debriefing someone or doing something, I was always telling them to use lockdown mode. I knew that it did those things. I didn't know if that was the term or if I'd thought that.

So can you still send iMessages?

You can still text and call.

Text and call. That's it.

Yeah. But there's other things that you can't do. And so when you're.

Well, like Meta just recently announced they're no longer encrypting your DMs.

Why would they do that?

Well, they said it's for protection or whatever to make sure that people aren't doing bad things. I don't know what see what their, um, explanation for it was.

What was it? Sorry, I'm worried about this reporter.

I'm sorry.

I missed the word.

Meta.

Yeah, Meta. Gotcha.

Meta recently announced that they're no longer encrypting your DMs on Instagram. And a lot of people are up in arms, and they're stopping using any DMs on Instagram and any of that stuff. And the idea is that other people can read your stuff now. Now, whether it's Meta can read your stuff or who.

That's what I mean.

Yeah.

And I said, "Why don't you trust Apple?" It's the same reason I don't trust Meta. They're not interested.

Here, the dangers behind Meta killing end-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs. Meta blamed users for not opting into the privacy protecting feature. Experts fear the move could be the first major domino to fall for end-to-end encryption tech worldwide.

That's a horrible narrative.

Mm. Yeah. It seems squirrely. Um, so, oh, you've read your last free article.

Oh my God.

Give me money, motherfucker.

But but what Apple and Meta want to do is like they're trying to build these new neural networks. They're trying to, you know, humans and we can get into this too later if you want. Humans are the only thing, in my opinion, and and I'm happy to have you disagree with me, and I'd love to have this conversation. In my opinion, we're the only ones that are.

After May 8, 2026, announce plans to discontinue support for end-to-end encryption for chats on Instagram. If you have chats that are impacted by this change, you will see instructions on how you can download any media or messages you may want to keep. Social media giant said in a help document, if you're on an older version of Instagram, you may also need to update the app before you can download your affected chats. When reached for comment, this is what Meta had to say. Very few people are opting for end-to-end encrypted messages and DMs. So, we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months. Anyone who wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp.

WhatsApp. Yeah. I mean, they're all squirrely. Um, and that's the problem. And so you asked me why I don't trust them. It's because they want to they want to you so humans, in my opinion, and some animals are the only things that are that have the ability to project consciousness. And projecting consciousness is how you train a neural network. And it's how you train all of these large networks that would a lot of my time also in the military spent in ar I was doing artificial intelligence in 2012, 2011. Like before it was even a catch term, we were using artificial intelligence to map dynamic networks and to do other things, more pragmatic uses of it than how it's being used today with large language models or convolutional neural networks.

What if you're paying for Google Drive?

I don't know about their terms of service now. That is one of the best things that I use with large language models is any product I download, I have the, um, the neural network examine the terms of service. And then you can pretty much understand like here's how here's my focus. Here's the 40-page terms of services document when you click that link that you got.

Mm-hmm.

What are they able to do with my data? So that's how I sign up for apps. And that's one of the great uses of a large language model, in my opinion.

Mm-hmm.

Is to quickly understand what how these things are being used. And that's why I say with Apple, with Meta, with all of these large information, you are more the product than the product's the product. And that is because they're trying to build the most powerful, capable, um, artificial intelligences, which I think's a misnomer. And again, we can get into it later, but they're trying to build these hy hyper-competent artificial intelligences. And you need train you need two things for that, really, is training data and you need compute. And that's why you start seeing them coming out with like Meta's building its own nuclear engineering facility or something nuclear facility or something like that.

Yeah. This is a good example, right? Pokémon Go players built a 30 billion photo map. That's how training robots deliver your pizza.

There you go. Um, so you you know, they view and they can say they don't. And maybe if someone from there catches this podcast, which they well could, they might put out a statement that's saying that that's not what they're doing. But I'm telling you as a person who has done media forensics, who has done computer network operations, and who has trained artificial intelligence models, that is precisely what they are doing. That is there's no.

And what is the difference between using Apple and using Android?

Well, Android will do the same things, and Google will do the same things. It's just that I can root my phone or I can install a custom operating system like Graphene or something like that, which I'm not doing right now. I I had to make a sacrifice when I started my car my company Spartan Forge. And the sacrifice was I had to be the face of this product. And so I never had a social media until I started the company. And I didn't upload things to the cloud until I started this company. And it became just like I have to sell a product. I have to, you know, s and I'm actually selling a product, not people's data or people's photos.

Mm-hmm.

I have to sell this product. I have to let people people often don't know who is the company or who is the organizing principal and what do they care about in the company. And I just made that trade and said, "I'm going to have to become a public person and start putting things out there." And, uh, so, you know, when I started the company, we started our first Instagram, and I started my my marketing team started my first Instagram. And, uh, I had to start uploading things and talking about how I felt about things because, um, I wanted people to know that this company was not going to be like the other companies that are out there.

So the reason why you use Android over Apple is the ability to root it and install things like Graphene.

Yeah. Custom OSs and, uh, all those.

But yet you don't use it.

Uh, not now, but what I still can use and what I still do use is Android also publishes their their their framework in an open-source fashion where you can exit you can look at the And it's called AOSP, Android Open Source Project. So the basis of Android, the the nuts think of it as the nuts and bolts. I'll try not to talk in too technical terms here. But the basic framework, think about it like a car. The frame and the engine makeup is published so you can look at how things work on the inside. Apple goes the opposite way, and they don't publish any of that, and you can't see any of that stuff.

Is that option available for the average consumer that's not that learned in computers?

Well, the great part about large language models now is if you wanted to dump your own phone today, you could follow along with a large language model and do it. Your own Android.

And how would you do that?

Um, well, there's you would have to buy some expensive there there is something you'd either have to pay a firm to do it or you could download things like, uh, uh, Cellebrite. You could get a Cellebrite. Uh, or there's other things called Forensic Toolkit, other things like that that allow you to examine your phone at a deeper level in order to do it.

And is this an app forensic?

They're they're products.

Products.

They're products.

So it's a physical product that you dump your phone into?

Yeah. And there's software.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and there's connecting and all that type of stuff. Tools I used throughout my military, um, career. Um, Cellebrite is one of them, but they're Israeli-owned. Um, I've got nothing against Israel. I've just got everything against foreign actors. It's just if they're not an American company, that automatically kicks them down a level for me. So, um, anyway, there's there's all kinds of Android just makes it much easier to examine your phone or to understand if you've got something going on that's funky than it is on Apple.

So for the average person, like for me, like if I got.

You're not the average person.

Well, let's pretend I am. If I got an Android phone and I wanted to examine my phone, what would I what would be the process?

Uh, you would download some of the software that I talked about. You would jack your phone into it. You would open your phone, and then it would start carving, um, the binary of your ph the the the everything in your phone. It would start you could create a one-to-one emulation of your phone if you wanted to. And then you would be able to get under the hood and examine the apps. You'd be able to examine the binary. You what's the executable code? You'd be able to look at all of those things and then determine because Android open source project is published, you could do a one-for-one and say, "Well, you know, at the kernel level, there's this weird code that's not in the Android build.

So I could take that information. I could put it into Perplexity, and Perplexity would lay out what's going on with it?

Ostensibly, it would be able to, yes. Unless it was some type of weird code. I don't know if I haven't used Perplexity, so I don't know if they have something like ChatGPT's Codex, but, um.

I just sort of just tried just to be like, "Can you help me examine my Android phone? Is doing looking for any malicious actors?"

Yes. I can walk you through structured non-destructive check for malware or other shady activity on your Android phone. A first, what are you noticing? Four, tools, commands. Quickly check for common warning signs. Sudden big battery drain. You're not using the phone. Unusual data usage, particularly in the background. Apps you don't remember installing or icons briefly appearing and then disappearing. Lots of pops pop-ups, redirects in browser, or new default search launcher. Strange calls, SMS messages you didn't send yourself. If any of those ring a bell, we'll focus on them in later steps.

Yeah. It's just asking you like, "Why are you going to do it?"

So this is just something that you could do with an Android phone that you just can't do without.

You can't do it. Yeah. Apple's not open.

What other reasons you don't trust Apple?

Well, could I ask can I do one thing before we remember that question 'cause I don't want to forget it? Could I give you a prompt?

Sure.

Um, 'cause I want to answer your first question that we've already gone past. Uh, if you can you bring Perplexity back up, please?

You want to go in addition to that or start a new one?

No, this is fine. Um, just say, uh, "My friend helped me carve an EO1 file. EO Echo Oscar EO1 file." And he says that there is code in there that doesn't comport with the rest of the Android system.

Comport?

Yeah. P O R T.

With?

The rest of the system. Could I dump that code here and could you tell me what it means? I'm sure the answer is yes, but I just didn't want to answer it 'cause I've never done it.

Could you tell me? Could you tell me, Jimmy?

Could you tell me what it means? Yeah.

I would figure that out probably, though.

Get the U out. Get the U. Tell me U.

Could I have some of your coffee, please?

Yeah, absolutely. It's for you. Okay. Let's see what it says. Yes. You can paste suspicious code here, and I can help explain what it me what it appears to do line by line and whether anything looks malicious. Before you paste, a few important notes. Remove or redact anything that looks like private data, usernames, passwords, keys, tokens, IPs, email addresses, phone number. Perplexity's our sponsor.

I love that. I 'cause you'd never get that from ChatGPT. It'd want all that information.

Perplexity's the shit.

Um, and so you're not sharing personal or case-sensitive information.

Wonderful, Perplexity.

If it's very long, send in chunks and tell me chunk 1-3, chunk 2-3, etc., so we can help keep track. I can do static analysis here, read and reason about the code, but I cannot actually execute it in a sandbox.

Right.

So this is more like a careful forensic read-through than a full dynamic malware analysis. Go ahead and paste the code snippet your friend flagged as not fitting with the rest of the system and tell me in a sentence or two where in the EO1 it came from. Example, app folder, system partition, random file path.

Yep. Exactly.

So yeah, I I thought that would be the answer. I've just never done it. And so you can do a forensic examination of an Apple, by the way. I I I'm sorry if I misspoke there, but you can't do it to the level that you can with because the Android open source project publishes all of the code.

Mm-hmm.

I can get an understanding of the very inner working. So if something's being done for for instance, at the kernel, or you could think about as like the lowest level of the phone, something that wouldn't normally, uh, get caught in a forensic um, examination, I wouldn't be able to do that with Apple.

Right.

So and the nation-state actors are doing th are doing things at very low levels in the code framework for that exact reason because most people who aren't very deep into forensics, um, would miss that. It would be like the fingerprint under the couch cushion or something like that.

And what is the difference between what what someone can do with an Android phone with the standard Android operating system versus Graphene?

Uh, so that gets into, you know, if you wanted to war drive or sample, um, Wi-Fi networks in an area or if you wanted to run a, um, barrage, um, attack on a Wi-Fi, um, endpoint, you could work that in there to do things with the phone that you couldn't otherwise do with a standard app um, with a standard Android operating kit.

But as far as on a consumer level, like what protections do you have by running Graphene that you don't have by running Android?

Um, you're you're much more in control of the ecosystem. Um, you're you're you have a firmer understanding. And again, you could use a large language model to do this to understand exactly what's being run on the phone. Um, you control the background services that can be run on the phone. So if you're getting hot miced or if your camera's taking pictures of you when you're not looking or it's listening to you for advertising content, stuff like that, you you would be in control of all of that in a way that you're not in control of on a native Android app.

In control like how so would it alert you that this is happening?

Or or just the functionality wouldn't be there for it to take place.

Right. Because the functionality is it's only designed for the standard Android operating system.

Yep. Yep. And I haven't installed Graphene in a while, so a lot of this all of this updates and I could be saying things that are incorrect. My data I stopped doing this about three years ago.

Well, I know that there was uh, I forget what country it was, but they were focusing on people who use Google Pixel phones, for example.

Yeah. 'Cause that's.

'Cause that's one of the phones that are more commonly rooted.

Yeah. It's easy to do.

Mm.

And you could do it with a large language model. You could sit there and be walked through on how to do it, which is a great, you know, part of that.

Is it complicated? Like for a person like me that's not that astute?

Uh, no. It's not something I would do with a phone that you care about the first few times.

Right.

'Cause you're going to jack things up. You have to, you know, get the boot loader and, uh, essentially the starting you know, the starting mechanisms of the phone that launches all of the other things. You have to get down to a level and unlock that so that you can, um.

Is that available for all Android phones?

No. Not all Android phones. Lots of them lock it down, so you can't do that.

Is that available for Samsung phones?

Uh, no. Not this one. You can't so the question has to become can you lock unlock the boot loader? And that is the starting think of it as the starting engine of the rest of the phones.

Why is that only available on Google Pixel phones?

I'm not sure why they do it that way. I haven't looked into that. It was just Pixels and the older Samsungs, um, made it avail older Galaxy S7s, S10s.

Mm-hmm.

You could do more than you can with like you know, I've got the Galaxy Fold here, and you can do almost none of that on here.

That is fucking sweet, though.

Yeah. I love this phone. But, um, like I said, I went away from doing all that, A, 'cause it was work, B, because I'm not working in national security anymore, and I'm not you know, I haven't written an exploit in years. Um, I I don't do this type of work anymore, and I need to sell a product. And, uh, it just you know, working with other employees like that run my Instagram or, you know, assistant going through my email and all those other types of things, it just it wasn't pragmatic anymore for me to keep doing that, and I had to give up that part of myself.

So SparkForge, your app, work, run on Graphene?

Yeah. Well, it could. Yeah. It would. We you have to side load the app, but again, a large language model could walk you through doing that. So, um, we haven't gotten to that level of.

Does it make sense here that this says it's easier because Google makes it easier?

Yeah. They I he was just asking me why they make it easier, and I don't know that answer.

That's I mean, so the process is officially supported in the Android settings under developer options, allowing users to toggle OEM locking. Simple fast boot method. Pixels use standard fast boot commands, uh, that work consistently across all models to unlock the boot loader accessibility.

Yeah. That's what I was talking about. So, um, yeah, I don't know why they do it. It might be people can well, well, the Android open source project exists, so it would stand to reason that you would want a way for someone 'cause what you want is people interacting with that code and red teaming it and making the code better and then offering, you know, bug bounties, uh, so that you can tell Android like, "Hey, you've got a critical flaw in your system architecture here," and then they'll pay you 20 grand for that.

Right.

Um, I've got friends who do that. So, um.

You and I talked about, uh, Eric Prince's phone.

Yes.

That which is so the the narrative is that that is an unhackable phone.

Yeah. It's just by virtue and look, Eric's a wonderful guy, and, uh, uh, he's the principles that he used for for the first instantiation of that phone are the correct principles, which is we need to get if you want if you're security focused at all, you should get away from these big, large conglomerates because none of your data is private. That's a correct principle. An incorrect principle, and I'm going to get shit about this, but I told you in the beginning I care about the truth, and I do care about the truth, is that when you're using a PKI, um, subsystem that relies on Microsoft, then you're not in control of the PKI certificate signing, and Microsoft could cause a bunch of problems, and they were using that.

Yeah. It didn't make sense to me, which is why you and I talked about it.

Yeah. We talked about it quite a bit. Um, I have like I said, great guide and lots of great things for the country. And, uh, uh, it's just if they had just said something along the lines of it's hackable as any phone is hackable because by virtue of you having to interact with it, it's hackable. It just just like if I install if I came up with an app that had a you know, look at the TikTok terms of service on the first TikTok.

Oh, it's bonkers.

With those terms of services, I will own your phone. And I'm not saying you can install TikTok on his phone, but what I'm saying is by virtue that you have to interact with the phone and see what you're doing and type passwords and you've got those kinds of terms of service, I could easily put a keylogger in that. And now I know your signal password or your signal PIN or or, you know, I get you you know, you're going to China, so I stop you in secondary. And while you're in secondary, I've got a CCTV on you and you unlock your phone. Now I know how to unlock your phone. Now I'm going to lock you up in secondary, uh, at at customs in China or in Canada, and, uh, I'm going to separate you from your phone, and I've seen you unlock it.

So me, like what would you recommend I use?

I mean, I wouldn't want to I mean, okay, I'll I'll tell you generally what I would say because you might ask me that question one day because we go back and forth about a lot of tech. Um, I know specifically what I would recommend for you to do, and I'd even tell you to hire someone else to do it, not me, um, because that just that checks and balances is what I would want. But, um, for you, I would say you should take something like a um, a Raspberry Pi, and you should run WireGuard on your phone, and you should route all of your internet traffic through something like a home terminal at your house through a Raspberry Pi using something like WireGuard, um, which is a a VPN that I use that's very good.

Mm. Yeah. It's, uh, very concerning 'cause it seems like these things keep getting stronger and more capable.

Yes.

Like the Pegasus 2 being a non-click exploit.

Yes.

So all they have to do essentially is just know your number.

Yep. And that's you know, uh, you just make yourself a difficult target would be my best recommendation. When you're going to answer questions about password reset, don't answer them honestly. Write down in a physical journal or something how you answered those questions. Don't answer them honestly. Um, you know, all of these things we think are added for layers of protection. For instance, you used to get that popup on your phone where it said, you know, there'd be like blocks of pictures, and it would say, "Click all of the pictures."

Right.

With a uh.

With a traffic light in it.

I was just going to say that. A traffic light in it.

Yeah.

Part of that might be for security. The other part of it is they're using the information of what you're clicking to train neural networks.

Right.

You're a product at that point.

Right.

You think you're getting security out of it, but you're a product at that point because you're helping to educate a neural network on what traffic lights look like.

Yeah.

And how they can look and all those different instantiations of traffic lights. So and and again, like we have to separate causality and intention and outcomes in that the companies might do this because they want to create the greatest AI ever. But when you're issuing someone a 40-page terms of service document on everything they can do with your thing that you paid $2,000 for, it's just, you know, we need more ethical people. At least what Eric Prince was trying to do was right, which was we need to off-ramp from some of these big things because the way that this government is going, I'm very worried about the rights of the individual now, um, and going forward because we have an uneducated class of people for all of the reasons in the world.

In case they need it.

In case at some point we needed to, you know, come up with a narrative or get rid of somebody who's inconvenient or whatever else that just flies in the face of individual American rights and American autonomy and, uh, is really in my mind, um, the anti-pattern to freedom. It's just really, really bad. I mean, I'll give you one that people always crap on me whenever I talk to them about it, but there's two that really bother me. One of them being like the 17th Amendment. Do you know the 17th Amendment of the Constitution?

I don't.

So the 17th so when the founders when you read the Federals papers and the Federals papers, I really love reading the Federals papers. I love reading how they informed the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, um, the Declaration even. Um, John Jay, James Madison wrote these documents explaining the framework and the 17th Amendment, essentially how the Senate, the Senate, right, the 50 people there that are supposed to be representing us was originally constructed was a state would have legislatures and the state legislatures and the governor would appoint the senator.

Mm.

Because if I can repeat back to those people all the ideas that they want to hear, I'm going to win that vote. And I don't have to represent those people out in the rest of the state in anything.

Right.

So they created a redundant House of Representatives. But another reason why it happened was they wanted popular vote because there is no amount of money that you could stick into a legislature out in the western part of North Dakota. You you can't bribe these people. But the DNC and RNC now can say, "Look, these two senators are running. We like this guy. So we're going to this guy will do whatever we tell him to do." And it's it has nothing to do with the state or representing the state's rights or the rest of those legislative districts. We're going to pick this senator and he's getting $300 million for his election bid. And this other guy who's, you know, a slower moving constitutional conservative who might be a free, you know, market absolutist and a classical liberal, he's not being funded.

Right.

You would get the popular vote out of the likely voting people and now the rest of the country is not. And that would be another you hear all these people saying we need a popular vote. We can't have the electoral college. We can't have all of these things. Everything needs to be pure pure democracy allows 51% to rule 49%.

Right.

And that was another thing the founders were working fervently to get away from. And that's why we had an electoral college. And it and it's actually quite beautiful when you actually read about it and examine it. It's why we had the state senate and state legislatures and it's why we had the house. You had all levels of the things of government that the founders cared about being represented in this body politic. And it was a beautiful thing. And I could go on for 15 more things about that. I won't do it for the sake of your listeners because I'm I doubt this is what they wanted to do. But similar things happened with the uh Supreme Court and Marbury v.

I think that's very well said and I could have never said it the way you said it. And I think there's a lot to absorb here.

I'm sorry.

Podcast. No. No. It was great, dude. It was great. I'm this is one of the things that I love about you. You're very thorough.

Yeah. Thorough is one thing. My friends always say Bill's tism is starting to show.

Ah, you got a touch of the tism. But I think that's good. Like I said, just like ADHD, I think it's a superpower. Lot to absorb. So, I think we'll wrap it up right here. But thank you. This was an awesome conversation. I really appreciate it. It was really great.

Yeah. Um.

We could do this again, too. I'm sure we could probably have 30 or 40 of these.

We didn't even get to AI. I wanted to get to AI because I I think I have a very anti-pattern to AI and how you understand it. But um we if you want we can save that for another time.

Yeah, we'll do that for our next one because I think that's another four hours.

Yeah, probably.

Yeah, for sure. And by then who knows where it's going to meet Jensen Jensen Huang from Nvidia recently declared that we've reached AGR.

Yeah. So, I would I would Yeah, I would I could Yeah, I just couldn't disagree more and I think I could in the same way I just elucidated.

You're not the only one. Quite a few people.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's consciousness projection and I'll sum it up in a minute. At the end of the day, um, neural networks are mathematical functions. They rest in, you know, weighting neurons based on training data and applying power to train models. It's all mathematic. Um, there's no sense of knowing there in that um, you know, I Penrose I've read a lot of um on his or if people want to read about that, I won't explain it. Um, um, orchestrated objective reduction and how the mind works and these fleets of consciousness that we have, these shimmers of consciousness that we have based around what, you know, he describes in the microtubial.

We'll do that next time. Definitely.

Um but if people we you mentioned the app.

By the time we do it next time, who knows what the fuck is going to be going on with AI too.

Yeah. But uh if people want to learn more about me or my company, it's sp if I can say that.

Yeah, please.

Uh it's spartanforge.ai. We're built on the rubric of individual freedom. I want people outdoors. I want people hunting. I want people experiencing nature. I want people um providing for their families. The best part of my day is when my kids are eating a back strap of an animal that I took. And I want to enable people to go out and do that. Even though it's paradoxical through an app, you can get lost. You got to conserve time. You got to ecout. You got to learn things before you go out there. So, we built this company under that. It's one of my I've got three other companies that I'm doing, but Spartan Forges is the one that I'm worth it's an awesome app really working on.

Good luck with that now.

Well, I I tried to. I spent about two hours every morning doing it, but uh thank you, Joe, for having me.

Thanks, brother. Appreciate you very much.

Yeah. Have a great day.

All right. You too. Bye, everybody.