#2473 - Bill Thompson

Bill Thompson is a retired U. S. Army Chief Warrant Officer and the founder and CEO of Spartan Forge, a company that develops AI-powered mapping and predictive tools for hunting.www.youtube.com/@spartanforgeaiwww.spartanforge.ai Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Visit https://ketone.com/Rogan for 30% OFF, or find Ketone-IQ at Target nationwide. Visit https://ThreatLocker.com/JRE to learn more Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  What's up, Phil? How you doing? Good to see you, bro. Good to see you. This is, this might be one of the coolest things anybody's ever given me. So, he gave me this knife to explain all this.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  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 five. My brother and I grew up doing, um, these things called rendezvous. Have you ever heard of them?

• 0:36Joe Rogan?

  In what way? What is a rendezvous?

• 0:37Speaker 02

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

• 0:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay. Like Civil War reenactments?

• 0:48Speaker 02

  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 are 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, well, you're in the camp, everything in the camp has to be 1840 or prior. So, there can be no modern pertinences, nothing like a, you know, refrigerator, nothing like that.

• 1:14Joe Rogan?

  1840? Why that year?

• 1:16Speaker 02

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

• 1:21Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:30Joe Rogan?

  How'd you guys dress?

• 1:31Speaker 02

  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'd actually started working on with my brother a while ago. I do more of like the brain tanning, tomahawk.

• 1:51Joe Rogan?

  And when you're saying brain tanning, you're talking about using brains to tan animal hides, right?

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:56Joe Rogan?

  Using animal brains?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57Joe Rogan?

  What, what does brains do? Why does brains work?

• 1:59Speaker 02

  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. 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 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 like a really nice soft um feel to it.

• 2:37Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:39Speaker 02

  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 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. And that's a knife that um my brother picked up that was from 1860. It was totally rusted. We had to grind it back or he had to grind it back down.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  And then the sheath is uh is traditional like, you know, you could, the cool thing about doing rendezvous and the cool thing about this is. You could have a DeLorean and drop that in 1840 and somebody pick it up and think it was made yesterday. And so everything on there has been done traditionally from the um the quilling on the beadwork is made from porcupine quills. The backing is um buffalo brain tan. And then the front is beaver hide or beaver tail. I'm sorry. And then um the sides are horse and turkey hair hanging off of it.

• 3:51Joe Rogan?

  And these are bear teeth?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  And those are bear teeth, yep. 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.

• 4:07Joe Rogan?

  Well, you're an interesting dude.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  I thought, what can 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 helped me out with it tremendously.

• 4:23Joe Rogan?

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

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Well, he found it. My brother is even more esoteric and odd than I am, believe it or not. And he collects this kind of stuff. I mean, the guy who dated it said 1860 to 1890 is what they figured. 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, we did 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. And so it's at least, you know, 130, 140, but most likely 160, 170.

• 5:06Joe Rogan?

  It actually fits my hand perfect.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's also something my brother and I talked about, about how long it was going to be. And 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 practical, like it's not something you'd be gutting an elk out with, but um.

• 5:28Joe Rogan?

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

• 5:32Speaker 02

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

• 5:38Joe Rogan?

  It's a good way to go out.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:40Joe Rogan?

  That's awesome, man.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the rendezvous, we did those from.

• 5:44Joe Rogan?

  How long do they last?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  They vary from a week and then some go up to three weeks.

• 5:49Joe Rogan?

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

• 5:51Speaker 02

  So inside of your lodge, so there's two types of rendezvous. 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 inside of my teepee, you can have a cooler and some modern appurtenances.

• 6:10Joe Rogan?

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

• 6:12Speaker 02

  I mean, they had ice boxes and like steel ice boxes and that type of thing, but nothing like we have today.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  You know, stuff was getting dug out, buried in the ground or put into the ground, like cool areas of the ground or dig out. And they dried everything. So pemmican would have been the, you know, everyday. Thing to eat, that's just dried.

• 6:31Joe Rogan?

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

• 6:33Speaker 02

  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 gonna 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 Big Horns. So, you know, you talk to a rancher, get everything packed up. You go into the back of the Big Horns, and everything in camp has to be pre 1840, as close as it can get. They'll even look at your stitching and say, oh, that was sewn with a, with a sewing machine.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  You gotta take that off. And it's always these weird, like eccentric history teachers that run them, like guys who, you know, teaches history at Berkeley or something like that, or other places. 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 on 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. And it's, it's an eccentric cult, kind of, it's not a cult, it's an eccentric group of people.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  It's a lot of fun, people take it very, community, people take it very seriously. They, there's, there's more advertising surrounding it now than there used to be, because numbers are kind of dwindling. But 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. His, he was half Native American, his grandfather was.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Ajibway or something, Chipwa, something like that. And he was, I don't remember what his role was, but anyway, I went, we deployed to Iraq together. And his grandpa made me this war shirt. Oh, there you found it, Jamie? He pulled it up. That's my lodge.

• 8:50Joe Rogan?

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

• 8:54Speaker 02

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

• 9:19Joe Rogan?

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• 12:05Speaker 02

  And so there's no reenacting, like there's not like civilians walking around.

• 12:09Joe Rogan?

  It's not like Renaissance.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:28Joe Rogan?

  And you just cook over, open fire.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Everything gets done traditionally that way.

• 12:31Joe Rogan?

  And did you bring your own meat?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, you bring your own meat and stuff in the cooler. And then 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 they do gambling at nights. So you'll walk into like a huge, they call marquees, but it's like a huge 100-foot square lodge. There'll be three gambling tables and there are girls in like the low-cut shirts and dealing cards and smoking cigars and just having an amazing time. And there are, you go by camp names while you're in there. Nobody uses their real name. Well, some people use their real name. I'd say 60% of people don't use their real names.

• 13:07Joe Rogan?

  What was your camp name?

• 13:10Speaker 02

  This is embarrassing.

• 13:11Joe Rogan?

  It should be.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I got my camp name, I got christened with my camp name in the Big Horns when I was fourteen or thirteen. And it was Talks A Lot.

• 13:23Joe Rogan?

  Talks A Lot.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Sue, it was pronounced Iaota. And uh.

• 13:27Joe Rogan?

  Just because you talk a lot?

• 13:28Speaker 02

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

• 13:49Joe Rogan?

  Those are the people that are the most fun.

• 13:51Speaker 02

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

• 13:54Joe Rogan?

  Probably would have been your friend.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  But uh, yeah, they they called me Iaota. And you know, we got christened and 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.

• 14:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Something to say, you're a man and I'm gonna start treating 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 it's important to me, so.

• 14:26Joe Rogan?

  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, oh, I went through that. I became a black belt and I started fighting.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  And you had a group of men telling you, you're at this level, we're gonna treat you like that. And if you fall from grace, we're gonna remind you right away.

• 14:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  And we just don't do that with young men and we have a society now where young men act like young men till they're forty five or fifty or sixty.

• 14:53Joe Rogan?

  And sometimes never stop.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know, women, nature imposes itself on women. They become fertile, they're able to have babies and and they gotta seek security or find a husband or a really good job that will supplement whatever a husband would provide. And they gotta start acting like a woman, whereas men can sit in a basement, you know, and it becomes very dangerous.

• 15:14Joe Rogan?

  Especially men that never have children.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:17Joe Rogan?

  They they're perpetual children.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  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 gonna 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, the foot chopped off and you're thirty five 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 responsibility or seeking meaning or any of those things. Until I was in the military and like I said, my father died when I was five, so I really had no central male authority until I was about thirteen or fourteen when I met this guy Steve.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  And he kind of initiated some of those rights for me and held me to account. But it was really the military, which was a turning point for me where there was a standard and I was expected to hold it.

• 16:10Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:20Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Yep, and it's not about you anymore, it's about other people, like that, for me, having children, I've got four kids. 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. And I need to be willing to break my back for these people who depend on me.

• 16:53Joe Rogan?

  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. You know, and then they fuck up the kids.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. God, we have so many rabbit holes, we could go down on this, but I mean, it was, you know, growing up in the eighties and the early nineties. It was really like a divorce culture. And I obviously understand that if you're in a bad relationship or an abusive relationship or, you know, there's certainly there's a threshold where marriage should dissolve. No question. But I kind of feel like it are 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.

• 17:56Joe Rogan?

  And it's normalized.

• 17:57Speaker 02

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

• 18:09Joe Rogan?

  Or an abusive step person.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Or abusive. And that is, you know, when you look up the stats on that, like remarriage and having a new family like that, that becomes the single most likely vector of abuse in a child, a young child's life is that new person, right? Because now they're raising someone else's kid or whatever.

• 18:26Joe Rogan?

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

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:30Joe Rogan?

  You know?

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:31Joe Rogan?

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

• 18:36Speaker 02

  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, cause I wasn't a single mom home and 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. And there's of course some truth to that. We shouldn't deride someone because they come from a broken family,

• 19:21Speaker 02

  but we shouldn't elevate it like it's at the same level as a unified family. And, and that's a tricky line to, to walk, but also the people who are making those movies in that culture came from the fifties and sixties where divorce was just not in the cards. And so that was a, you know, hooks law as you bend any object, it wants to return back to its natural state. And hooks law kind of played there where nobody could get divorced in the forties, thirties, forties, fifties and sixties. And then you had the baby boomers who kind of culturally said, you know, actually there's, it's not as bad as we think, but then it overcorrected and it became kind of, kind of part of that cultural zeitgeist.

• 20:00Joe Rogan?

  That's kind of what humans do, right?

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:02Joe Rogan?

  We always overcorrect.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, we do.

• 20:04Joe Rogan?

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

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:11Joe Rogan?

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• 21:23Speaker 02

  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, 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 it almost ends up propagating itself. And so that makes me, I'm still a proponent for change, but it should be slow and thought out and done in pockets first.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  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 learned there and there'll be goodness, you know? Hot baristas 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 founders intent with federalism. They're really federalist minded, state minded. And there's, you know, even for that being of 250 years ago, there's a profound amount of profanity in that. Like, let's change things slowly and let social experiments take place. And adopt the best parts of those things and then integrate them to the culture overall as we move along.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  But, you know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

• 22:54Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:05Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:39Joe Rogan?

  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, you say that you need discipline, that well, 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. And in that sense, I think California is, that is a giant part of what's wrong with California. What's wrong with California when it comes to crime, what's wrong with California, you know, they're,

• 24:21Joe Rogan?

  the way they address crime and the way they address homelessness and all these issues that they have, they don't put their foot down. At a certain point in time, you gotta realize like what God said called suicidal empathy. A society can suffer from suicidal empathy and at a certain point in time, you gotta enforce rules and you gotta make it so that people have to get their shit together.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that suicidal empathy becomes a way for the person who's imposing it on someone else to feel good about themselves, which makes it even trickier and even more insidious because they're feeling good from the weaponization of other people's lot in life. 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

• 25:21Speaker 02

  you. So let me give you pittance that I'm gonna take from someone else, and that makes me benevolent. I get to feel good about that."

• 25:28Joe Rogan?

  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 a 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, median income raises, less homeless people, you should get paid more. And you should get paid less if homelessness goes up, if crime goes up, if there's more destruction, if there's more, you know, assaults

• 26:11Joe Rogan?

  and home invasions, you should get paid less.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:14Joe Rogan?

  You're doing a shitty job. 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.

• 26:24Speaker 02

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

• 26:30Joe Rogan?

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

• 26:34Speaker 02

  I'm being cynical.

• 26:35Joe Rogan?

  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 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.

• 27:03Speaker 02

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

• 27:06Joe Rogan?

  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, it'd be 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.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  It's way bigger than it should be.

• 27:35Joe Rogan?

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

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:41Joe Rogan?

  You know, and that was some of the stuff that was uncovered during Doge, 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're really just funneling money into these people's hands, like the homeless thing in California.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness.

• 28:06Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:23Joe Rogan?

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

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:31Joe Rogan?

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

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it was one of the things, my last three years in the military.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  I was advising a Colonel and a two-star general and they were in charge of all of the offensive cyber development, ethical hacking, offensive cyber development. I was their technical advisor. And one of the things 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. So while they're in there, you know, I've never seen a field grade officer get dressed down more than when he didn't spend all of the money that he was budgeted for, for that year.

• 29:20Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that crazy?

• 29:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:31Joe Rogan?

  And what people don't understand is if you don't spend that money, your budget for the next year will be lower because there's no need to have a higher budget.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Instead of tying it to mission to say,

• 29:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Did you achieve your mission objectives?

• 29:43Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  We started the year agreeing from the President's Framework, the NIPF, 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%. 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, and that kind of-

• 30:04Joe Rogan?

  What a sick society.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  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 O6s, that Colonel's feet to the fire, they also have an incentive to, because they were part of that trickle down. 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, then you think about that for a minute and you're like, well, it's no longer a question

• 30:50Speaker 02

  why we have $30 trillion of, of- Debt.

• 30:53Joe Rogan?

  Thirty nine.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Thirty nine trillion and then what like a hundred and fifty trillion of unfunded liability. In other words, we've promised people money for the next thirty years. And and it's debt that, you know, I don't see how we'll ever escape that debt. 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.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  My politics are are like yours in that I'm a kind of a man without a home. 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.

• 31:40Joe Rogan?

  That's supportive for the community, though. That's how people are supposed to do charity.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  And 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 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.

• 32:01Joe Rogan?

  As long as someone's not getting hurt.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, as long as no one's getting hurt, consenting adults. Like, I I have enough problems and I screw up enough and people have 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 and 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 or liberal or or classically liberal. All of these monikers. Don't work for me because they break down at at some level of analysis.

• 32:40Joe Rogan?

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

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 32:49Joe Rogan?

  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. Really justify like trans women in sports. Like, what the fuck are you doing? You know, like we're, you know, we're being inclusive. Like, no, you're not.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  Or loving the borders of Ukraine while hitting our own border.

• 33:09Joe Rogan?

  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, you define yourself as this person. I am this. I am a hardcore, right wing, blah, whatever it is. You, you immediately close the door to all the very productive and interesting things of the other side thinks.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you're also making yourself into a tool of propaganda. Cause if I, if someone, if I meet someone and they just say, I'm this.

• 33:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 33:41Speaker 02

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

• 33:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 02

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

• 33:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  I can't seek to learn from them, cause I could just pick up the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf. And have a pretty good understanding of who I'm dealing with, and therefore a conversation's not, is not relevant. It's not needed.

• 33:59Joe Rogan?

  A lot of people are afraid of social ostracization too, so they're, they're afraid of, 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 dog shit. If you don't agree entirely with even things that don't even make any sense.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:17Joe Rogan?

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

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:22Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  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. Believe it or not. And, cause I'm, as we talk more, you'll figure out I'm pretty anti-institutions. I'm, 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. Trump fits a pattern. And this is what people, I think, kind of lack when they. My whole life is built around pattern analysis. I really enjoy patterns and exhuming and looking into patterns.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  And there's a pattern of like, you'll laugh when I say this first part of the pattern, but then I'll make it make more sense later. But he fits the pattern. Well, first, he's a Jacksonian, and in that, he's a pragmatic person, the way that he governs, which I liked. Or at least I did. And, you know, there's some things he's done recently that I don't enjoy. And, but he's also a outsider, or a savior type, Allah, you know, I don't remember the movie, but The Magnificent Seven back in the day. I don't remember the actor's name. There's this group of, you know, there's this western town, everything's going to shit. These seven guys walk in. I think Chris Pratt remade it with Denzel Washington or someone else.

• 36:01Joe Rogan?

  Oh, really?

• 36:01Speaker 02

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

• 36:05Joe Rogan?

  God, there's too many movies.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. And 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, you know, man, these seven guys are talking. 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 gonna be even happier when we leave. And Trump kind of fits that narrative. Wolverine from the X-Men would be another one who fits this narrative. Like, is he gonna be at the X-Men Christmas party? No. Right? Is he trying

• 36:50Speaker 02

  to hit on Scott Gray's wife, Cyclops? I'm a comic nerd, so I'm sorry. Is he trying to hit on, is he trying to sleep with Cyclops's wife? Yes. 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 gonna 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 pattern as well. Other people who fit this would be like Patton, right? Married his cousin. Slap soldiers who had-

• 37:23Joe Rogan?

  Did he really?

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:24Joe Rogan?

  He married his cousin?

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it was his third cousin.

• 37:26Joe Rogan?

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• 38:09Joe Rogan?

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• 39:37Joe Rogan?

  Uh, how many cousins removed doesn't become okay?

• 39:41Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 39:42Joe Rogan?

  Is it third, fourth?

• 39:44Speaker 02

  If there's blood.

• 39:45Joe Rogan?

  Have you never met them?

• 39:45Speaker 02

  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, 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, it's, you know.

• 40:02Joe Rogan?

  Is it such a small community?

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Less than a million people, all on one island, you know? So you're trying to prevent that stuff. But anyway, um, Patton, yeah, uh, slapped 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, 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, 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. Um, but the part of this pattern that people should understand, or when they examine this pattern is it never ends well for these anti-heroes.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  They're always killed and they're always killed or defamed in the final analysis. So when the submagnus seven come in, they'll go to another town and all get killed. When Patton retired, he died in some weird Jeep accident. Um, you know, Wolverine, he's the only guy left, uh, on this desolate, like world where the Hulk's in charge. And it's a horrible existence. Uh, Patton, or not Patton, um, Petraeus is another one. I, I, you know, I, I briefed Petraeus, I worked for, not for him, but for people who worked for him in, in Iraq. And, um, he was the guy that got us through with the surge. But, um, he, he was really a weird guy when you would talk to him, like you, you knew that he knew something you didn't. And that he was seeing things that you weren't.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  But even for myself, as being like a chief warrant officer at that time, a low level technician, he would ask questions like he got it. He didn't act like other generals, like other generals would have their three things they want to talk about, then they'd want to get out of Dodge. He would ask questions that really had implications. And, and, and he is another one of these outsiders who came in to write a system that was not working vis a vis Iraq in 2006. And then what happens to him when he leaves? He, they put him in charge of the CIA. They knew he had been screwing around with this woman. And they're like, okay, we, he served his function, now he needs to get out of Dodge. And then he, now he's, you know. Uh, got tried for all these things and sleeping with someone while he wasn't married. And you know, there's, it's not a ceremonious end for these types. I saw and

• 42:15Joe Rogan?

  Is that really what happened to Petraeus? That's how he ended?

• 42:18Speaker 02

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

• 42:22Joe Rogan?

  That's it?

• 42:22Speaker 02

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

• 42:23Joe Rogan?

  While he was married?

• 42:24Speaker 02

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

• 42:26Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 42:26Speaker 02

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

• 42:31Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  You know what I'm saying? And so when I examined Trump, I, I, 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. Uh, but he seems to be saying these things like he's gonna 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 gonna take advantage of them. I wouldn't be a pragmatist if I didn't. When he started saying stuff like that, it seemed to me like he was gonna upend this system. Uh, the jury's out on that because I don't know how I feel these days. We can get into that if you need to, if we want to, but, um,

• 43:14Speaker 02

  uh, he's an outsider personality and I thought he was gonna really reset the system. And, and there are, you know, good things that are happening, you know? If I were to grade him, I would probably give him a C plus or a B minus. Um, he's certainly better than, you know, what was happening under Biden. Um, I was still in the military when Biden was in charge and it was awful to say the least.

• 43:33Joe Rogan?

  Um, What were the problems?

• 43:35Speaker 02

  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're 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.

• 44:00Joe Rogan?

  It's woke politics.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was woke politics and it, 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, eighty percent of them. I think the numbers bear out about eighty percent 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. And they died for their cause and, uh, and now you're saying that those people who make up the majority of the combat deaths are somehow part of this problem. And that other people aren't benefiting from it.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  I don't believe, race to me is disgusting, even to talk about someone's race. Even, you know, on both sides of the spectrum, when they were, you know, electing that Supreme Court Justice. I can't remember her name right now off the top of my head, just because I'm a little nervous still. She was black and they were talking.

• 45:02Joe Rogan?

  Katanji Brown Jackson.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're talking about how it's historic because she's black and Biden had said he's gonna hire a black woman to do this job. 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. And anything beyond that to me is discriminatory on its face.

• 45:47Joe Rogan?

  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've 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.

• 46:08Speaker 02

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

• 46:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Because nothing's easy really and it gives them like white guy bad. 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.

• 46:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  And, and it gives people, 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.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:52Joe Rogan?

  They said that in a military briefing?

• 46:54Speaker 02

  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, at this military organization where we're developing these offensive cyber capabilities, a lot of civilians in there. And 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. You're going to be pulled out of that office. This is all going to happen despite what you meant. So the idea probably was good.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  We want to prevent sexual harassment inside of the office.

• 47:42Joe Rogan?

  But it was weaponized.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  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 standard would be in a particular situation. And from the time I joined the military until that time, we'd been at war. My entire time in the military, we were at war. I deployed throughout my career. And I wouldn't say that I was a warhorse. I was not a long tabor. 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. So I was not, you know, a super badass in that regard. I was a nerd for super badasses. And, but we also all engaged in gallows humor.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  And we would, you know, the jokes and stuff, even someone, even someone who had recently died, we'd make a joke about. It's because you have this tremendous pressure. And comedy is the relief valve for that in a lot of ways.

• 48:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  And, but then someone would overhear that joke or something. And now you're looking down the barrel of a 15 six, 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 at the next dress and now your life's being ruined. 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.

• 49:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 49:30Joe Rogan?

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

• 49:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:33Joe Rogan?

  What did he ask you? 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, 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.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Well, for sure.

• 49:52Joe Rogan?

  Now, you're in a different world.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Hundred percent, hundred percent.

• 49:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:55Joe Rogan?

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

• 50:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 50:02Joe Rogan?

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

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:08Joe Rogan?

  That's it.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Healthy.

• 50:10Joe Rogan?

  It's not, you look great, I'd like to get you naked. Now, we've crossed the Rubicon, right?

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Yes, for sure, for sure.

• 50:15Joe Rogan?

  But just, you look great, or I like your dress. That's, like, if you said that to a man, like, hey, great suit.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:23Joe Rogan?

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

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I need to file a complaint.

• 50:26Speaker 02

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

• 50:28Joe Rogan?

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

• 50:32Speaker 02

  That would have worked during the Biden administration.

• 50:34Joe Rogan?

  That is fucking crazy.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  That would have worked.

• 50:36Joe Rogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  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, on very important matters. I wasn't high, I wasn't high in the dominance hierarchy, but I was adjacent to people who were as an advisor. And, um,

• 51:03Speaker 02

  The the amount of in this briefing in particular, they had gotten into, you know, it's bad that there are so many white people. This I'm doing high points here, but we need more diversity. I was part of a accepted career program that they were starting to call like the old white boys network because most of the people. So the requirements for the for this network were you had to speak a couple of languages. You needed an engineering degree or some kind of demonstrated engineering background. You had to have deployed. They wanted you to speak the language very well. They wanted you to be able to go through these engineering courses, these other things.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  And and what happens naturally is you now need people who are interested in engineering. All right. So you've got somebody who's maybe more constrained in their thinking. You need somebody who speaks languages. Well, now they also need to be kind of, you know, speak French, speak Russian, whatever it was. So they had to have studied or lived in an area and done this. And they need to be able to go through these crazy tactical and strategic strategic types of courses. By virtue of those things, you're going to get men. And and there are were lots of women, but then there'll be more white men. And it's it's not because the pool presented itself that way. Now you have to extract from that pool. And so in this briefing, when they were talking about like the old white boys network or

• 52:28Speaker 02

  how we need to change things, I said, you know, do you realize that most men are have more in common than most women? Or like if there's a if if if I if I say I need more diversity in a particular room, if you said diversity of thought, I'd be fine with that. But but Joe and, you know, random black guy in the in the same program in the same office have far more in common than the white woman. But if all but what you're saying is these people need to have all separate different colors and different and different like all of this needs to be this way. It's going to naturally present itself that way because men in the military generally are disagreeable. Men in the military who like engineering are generally hyper disagreeable.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  And and the the only difference between these two people is the pigment of their skin. So this fake diversity quota that they're putting on top of us doesn't achieve anything other than giving some officer a bullet on their OER. And, you know, I got pulled into the office afterward. I said way more than that, but essentially afterwards they're like, hey, chief, you can't, you can't say that in those briefings, like the way that you were getting animated in there and what you're saying, what you're doing like, yeah, this is not going to fly. And this was like 2018 or 2019 or something.

• 53:41Joe Rogan?

  Just being rational.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 54:10Joe Rogan?

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

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure, for sure.

• 54:16Joe Rogan?

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

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're you're denigrating lethality.

• 54:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  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 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. It valued individual rights and.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  States' rights and it and it and and this and the founders and this was another thing I said in that briefing was the founders knew. Yes, they were all slaveholders, but they knew that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence would eventually lead to a system. Where we had to acknowledge these people as people and we fought a civil war where a million white dudes died. To see this experiment through the scaffolding was there. You have to look at the things the zeitgeist of the time if they had just said, nope. Everyone's going to be free. There will be no slaves. You would have never gotten ratification through the southern states. But they knew that there are and when you read the Federalist Papers, they knew that they were erecting this system.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  When you look at Thomas Jefferson and some of these other great thinkers who, yes, he owned slaves. I get it.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  They knew what they were building and they knew that what would ultimately terminate in and then we had a civil war. Where we destroyed our country from the inside to see this dream come about. And now we're just going to all go back and say they're all slave owners. Like I know this has all been said here a million times. But this stuff animates me because it's built with blood and treasure.

• 56:11Joe Rogan?

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

• 56:17Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 56:17Joe Rogan?

  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's just always works that way.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  Did you know Joe had a gas powered car?

• 56:39Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. That kind of stuff. Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Did you know that?

• 56:42Joe Rogan?

  You consumed more, you flew more, you ate more meat, you did whatever you did. You were a problem.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  He was a problem.

• 56:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  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. You know what I mean, like someone, you know, stores your stuff for 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 refuse to apologize for it, and it it led it, 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, and it led to an updating

• 57:31Speaker 02

  of a system. I think it's very important for culture to have free and open dialogue so we can update our system. So bad ideas can die, so we don't have to die instead of our bad ideas. 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.

• 57:47Joe Rogan?

  And the celebration of good ideas.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  And the celebration of good ideas. And 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. 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, and he talks about lowering debt, getting out of debt, actually, working with Newt Gingrich to get out of debt, securing the borders, making work and education freely accessible, I'm voting for that guy.

• 58:30Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, he did. We had a surplus when he left the office. Amazing.

• 58:46Joe Rogan?

  Did a fucking amazing job. So he got his dick sucked. 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, I mean, he would get cancelled. It's like you, you have to recognize that those, this ideological- Logical bubble that we find ourselves in left versus right. Bill Clinton does not fit in that. Bill Clinton is securely on the right in terms of, you know, 1996 standards applied to today.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  He would never want to hear that.

• 59:19Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:28Joe Rogan?

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

• 59:38Speaker 02

  I know.

• 59:38Joe Rogan?

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

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:43Joe Rogan?

  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. And everybody cheers.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:52Joe Rogan?

  Like, that is a hardcore right wing 2026 perspective.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  Obama did it too in 2012.

• 59:58Joe Rogan?

  Absolutely. And Obama deported more people than Trump did.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:00:01Joe Rogan?

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• 1:00:42Joe Rogan?

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• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:01:19Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  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 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 fall short of that standard all the time.

• 1:01:52Joe Rogan?

  It's part of being a human.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  I try to live by that standard and I I feel like that will always be me even into my nineties like.

• 1:01:58Joe Rogan?

  Unless something goes horribly wrong, right?

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  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 thirties I wasn't quite sure who I was as a human and 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 gonna be the top of the of the decision matrix for me, the top of the hierarchy for me. I'm gonna try not to cut corners whenever I can and help good people around me and and and the truth is the way that I'll organize and and function myself in life and that I will try to only

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  judge people as individuals and the world you know these are Christ's teachings from two thousand years ago and but the world for me has just opened up in a way that I could have never predicted using a very simple rubric. It's not easy but it's simple. And if more people just took those and this isn't me, I didn't come up with this. This is the result of you know watching a bunch of experiments go bad but if people just adopted that very simple thing and just tried it for three months, you'll feel better about yourself, you'll feel better about the world, you feel better about the people proximally around you. It might make you hate the government more.

• 1:03:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  But uh.

• 1:03:23Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean.

• 1:03:29Joe Rogan?

  When you were working in cyber defense like what?

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Cyber offense.

• 1:03:33Joe Rogan?

  Cyber offense. What was the the primary function? Like what did you do?

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

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

• 1:03:45Joe Rogan?

  I don't like short answers.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I just, I always feel like I'm-

• 1:03:48Joe Rogan?

  I like a good long answer.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Joe Rogan?

  Don't worry about that.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  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. How they function.

• 1:04:01Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  I wish I had. I really do.

• 1:04:06Joe Rogan?

  I wish you had too.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I really do. I was more in the signals intelligence side of the house. 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 man packable SA7 here, there's a SA10 here, there's this here, there's there. And then telling these pilots so they didn't get shot out of the sky. 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.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  And that was at that time off of cell phones, off of push-to-talk radios, repeaters. Long haul networks, terrestrial networks, extraterrestrial networks, and what I mean by that is the stuff, satellites in the sky.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  And doing analysis on those to try to inform the, what we call the common operating picture of the battlefield for a combatant commander. So combatant commander wants to know where the bad guys are, what they're doing, what they're saying. To the amount that we could, my job was to, um, come up with solutions and conduct, you know, passive and active, um, signals analysis on these things. And then inform the commander so that we could, you know, mitigate risk. It was all about mitigation of risk. Um, for this is two thousand and eight or so. I'd been doing this for about seven years, eight years. And um, from there it shifted to the phones getting smart. And essentially it went from you walking around with a two G phone or a three G phone

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  that had limited compute capability to now there's robust compute capability with the advent of like the iPhone. And now it's like, well, now we've got to get after guys who are, you know, essentially walking around with a computer we could never have envisioned twenty years ago in their pocket with all this capability. Because the military and our, and our, our forces that we're fighting against, it all comes down to our ability to shoot, move, and communicate. Communication being the part that I was focused on. So as the advent of the iPhone and those things came out, the army realized we didn't have a computer network operations MOS. We didn't have a offensive cyber component. We didn't have a defensive cyber component. So we kind of, I was there at the ground floor when we were building out these new MOSs now that are all over the military. But at that time,

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  there was a thought going into, you know, we need to have people who know how to be on it operators. Ethical hacking, as paradoxical as that sounds. That's how the lawyers called it that. So attacking at the end of the day, but ethical hacking because you've got the backing of the US government. And so we set up that framework and really started launching into operations, you know, two thousand six, seven, eight, all the way into my last deployment in twenty seventeen or twenty fifteen, seventeen. It was all focused on computer network operations and how they lash up with terrestrial networks. How do we exploit all of that was one facet of my job. And um, uh, your question was how did I?

• 1:07:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

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

• 1:07:11Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  Uh, go, so, you know, there's, there's, I'll stick to terms that are more generally understood by the public, but learning how to do things like war driving, collecting on networks, wifi, you know, endpoints, cell phones, 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 the bad guy, um, we could derive maximum intelligence value from the hand, from the handset to plan other operations. And so, you know, it would be passive monitoring of networks to inform the intelligence

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  picture, which would lead to either combat operations or active computer network operations. Where now it's like, well, there's, you know, a, I don't know, a, an Iraqi or an Afghani router that hasn't been patched in three years, and we think we can either write or find a zero day, which is just an exploit of those routers, where we can muck with their router in a way where they think they're getting a good information and they're not, or they're or erecting other things to mitigate risk for the commander. And so that really, you know, exploded at that point.

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  And between that and human intelligence, which is kind of the, the actual gathering of intelligence from other people, you know, you would call it spy or, you know, James Bond, but that's, James Bond was a horrible spy. 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. You know, generally you don't want to be sleeping with your sources or, 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, become a force multiplier for people conducting overt and clandestine operations throughout the theater at that time.

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  My, you know, my deployments and my time was spent in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Northern Africa. And then a lot of people don't know it, but we were in active combat operations in the Southern Philippines as well for a fair amount of time. I want to maybe say seven or 10 years, we were doing combat operations When was this? In the Southern Philippines. My first deployment to the Southern Philippines was 2007.

• 1:09:50Joe Rogan?

  Who are we doing operations against?

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  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, Jamaa Islamia, 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. And this, in the southern part of the Philippines, I don't, can I say it? Can I say the word?

• 1:10:17Joe Rogan?

  What do you mean?

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

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

• 1:10:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, say that, say that term. Yeah, pull it up, Jamie.

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  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...

• 1:10:40Joe Rogan?

  God, look how many islands.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  I know. 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?

• 1:10:52Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  At the tip of that penis is called Zamboanga.

• 1:10:55Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  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, their 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...

• 1:11:23Joe Rogan?

  That's all the Philippines?

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

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

• 1:11:26Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  So this is called, there's a mountain in there, I think it was called Mount Tumatac 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 gonna get his name wrong perhaps, but I believe his name, it was either Inselan Haplan... Or, oh, it's Jamar Patek, Jamal Patek. He was actually arrested outside of Osama bin Laden's compound the day after he was killed. We were trying to kill him on that island. Or in and around that island is where we were trying to find him and kill him. Uh, so they're terrorist facilitators. Um, they did the USS Cole bombing.

• 1:12:09Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so up north, up north in Manila is mostly the Christian. Um, population and as you get down south, it's the autonomous region of Muslim men now. 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 Zambuanga. I'm not sure anymore because it's been five years. Four years since I retired. But, um, yeah, we were doing counter insurgency operations down there and guys died down there and there are combat operations and, uh. I was out there, um, I was in a tactical military intelligence battalion and I was attached to the first special forces group. And we were down there a couple of times and a lot of people don't even know about it, so.

• 1:12:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I never heard about it.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, uh, anyway.

• 1:13:00Joe Rogan?

  I'm just, I'm sorry.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 1:13:03Joe Rogan?

  Sidebar, but I'm so stunned at how many islands are in the Philippines, so spread out of this.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's insane and the, the, the thing about it is, is I 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're called bongarays or something like that, but they were like these mayors of each one of these little islands. And there'd be terrorists in and around those areas and we'd try to make friends with these guys so they'd give us some information. 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.

• 1:13:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

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

• 1:13:44Joe Rogan?

  Nicest people too.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  Oh, Filipino people are some of my favorite people, man, like you want to talk. The guys that we worked with out there, they're scout, I think they're called scout sniper scout rangers. And they were 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.

• 1:14:11Joe Rogan?

  Fun fact, they're some of the best pool players on earth too.

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:14:14Joe Rogan?

  Great, some of the greatest pool players of all time, came out of the Philippines.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  They're just great people. I mean, I just.

• 1:14:18Joe Rogan?

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• 1:15:02Joe Rogan?

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• 1:15:47Joe Rogan?

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• 1:16:29Joe Rogan?

  Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  The people down there were fantastic. And it was awful because those guys would be bombing churches, Christian churches and stuff like that. And they're doing counter-operate, like I said, counter...

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  Intelligence operations, I was doing intelligence operations collection to inform that battle picture, but those guys had direct links with Osama bin Laden and other people.

• 1:16:55Joe Rogan?

  Wow, I had no idea.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, right after, like I said, I think it was, I think if you look it up, I think his name is 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.

• 1:17:09Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Because we thought he was still down there. There was another guy that we, I believe we killed him, his name was Al-Bader Perad. 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, like obviously lying, yeah, call the people out. I prefer to call people out face to face, but 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 hollow or in Afghanistan or anywhere else and tape around my glasses

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  and, you know, Pez dispenser and my radio and collection equipment, looking like a true blue American nerd. But I was not the guy who kicked the door in, I was always the guy who pointed the door out. So I'd be safe in the Humvee in the back, you know, eat an M R E and somebody that looked like another gorilla, you know, like an Annie Stumpf or Tim Kennedy or someone like that. I'd be like, is that the house? I'd be like, pretty sure that's the house. You guys might want to be safe, but go ahead, I'll be in the Humvee. I'll be out here or I'll be in an airplane above, you know. And yeah, it was, it was, being born in North Dakota and, and, you know, my mother, single mother, after she left that first guy, trailer house in the middle of this little town called

• 1:18:32Speaker 02

  Cavalier, North Dakota. I had no options. I was a horrible student and what did-

• 1:18:37Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

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

• 1:18:56Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  There'd always be on the back page or it'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 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.

• 1:19:21Joe Rogan?

  Really? With no battery?

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, just tiny little, little radio.

• 1:19:25Joe Rogan?

  How did it, what was the power?

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  The electromagnetic radiation. And you would just, kind of like a record, uh, like, you know, how you, you hit a record? Electromagnetic radiation would hit the coil and the coil would feed up to an amplifier or, or up to an earpiece and the earpiece, you could hear chatter and you could tune it.

• 1:19:41Joe Rogan?

  Did the earpiece have a battery?

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:46Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:49Joe Rogan?

  Powered by electromagnetic radiation?

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:55Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:19:58Joe Rogan?

  This thing.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  Like here or here?

• 1:19:59Joe Rogan?

  Right here, look at my finger. Yeah, I've been meaning to do that, like literally when everybody uses this fucking thing, it's wobbling around, ready to fall off.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:20:13Joe Rogan?

  Electromagnetic radiation powered it, that's bananas.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:20:23Joe Rogan?

  Right, but it uses...

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  Or DC.

• 1:20:24Joe Rogan?

  But it uses power to send it.

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I, 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...

• 1:20:35Joe Rogan?

  Like what kind of things?

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  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 a old 286 SX IBM.

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  And it was just sitting in his basement. And I told my mom, I was like, hey, if I clean for like a month, can I have that computer? Like, he doesn't use it. He's got a new 486 up in his place here. And he instantly said I could have it. And then that started me down the computer networking realm. And like, look, how could I get this 286 to act like a 386? Or how could I force it to run Windows? Or how do I update the memory? How do I do these things? In this little town, Edinburgh, North Dakota, there was a guy who had a computer store in a basement of an old general store. And his name was Jeff Munser-Broton. And I would go there and ask him questions about computers and just start learning like ins and outs. And how do I update the RAM? How do I get memory better? How do I augment the storage? Uh, how, how could I force this thing to run Windows 3.1? So I could have a GUI instead of using a command line.

• 1:21:50Joe Rogan?

  GUI mean graphic user interface?

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  Graphic user interface, yeah. Yeah, sorry. 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 I could, I would go for three days.

• 1:22:08Joe Rogan?

  I don't believe in ADHD. I might be wrong. I think it's a superpower.

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

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

• 1:22:19Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, 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.

• 1:22:32Joe Rogan?

  Me neither.

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  There was this teacher, I always tell the story, it's a great teacher. She's still around. Um, her name is Connie Trendbeth. And she was my English teacher, literature teacher, something like that. She might not even remember the story, but here I am telling it on your podcast. I remember it. 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, 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. And, uh, essentially what she was telling me is you're a waste of life.

• 1:23:11Speaker 02

  Like, all you do is you come in here, you disrupt the class, you upset people, no one can talk. Sounds like me. You're trying to dominate every conversation, but when, you know, 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." She's like, "If you could just do that every time." And I was not hearing it. Like, I remember the conversation, because I actually remember, 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 clock's 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

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  I want to do for my business. And, um, and so I joined the military, and the absurdity of life is this. I had joined to be a military policeman, which I absolutely would have hated. Um, all of them got turned into infantry people, or stand gate guard, which is a needed function in the military, but it doesn't apply to my personality. But when I went to the recruiter station out in Far- Minneapolis, I think it was, I was a bonehead and I forgot my driver's license. And they're like, "Well," and I was supposed to leave. And at this time, I had dumped my girlfriend, told everyone goodbye, I'd wiped the dust off my boots, like, left Cavalier, North Dakota. And, um, I was like, "Hey, uh, I'm not going back, so,

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  whatever we gotta do right now." And he's like, "Well, we can, you can go home, get your license," because the MEPS station was in Minneapolis, was it Fargo? It doesn't matter, it was five, six, seven hours away. And they're like, "Well, you're not leaving today without a driver's license." So I looked at my recruiter and I was like, "I don't know what job you need to get me into, but it needs to be a different job." And they're like, "Well, you scored, you know, exceptionally high in your general technical, um, part of your ASVAB, which is like, understanding machines and objects and stuff." So we could get you into this like Intel job where you'd learn about radars and stuff. And that immediately clicked for me. And then he's like, well, we gotta go brief you in this skiff room. There's a, you know, secure compartmented information facility.

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  There's only one guy who's got a clearance and he can brief you on the job. And if you want that job, then you can leave tomorrow. I instantly started hearing like the James Bond music, you know.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  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. Maybe 17, no, I was turning 17 that December. When I signed up for the military,

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  I can connect with a string to forgetting my driver's license to being here with you today.

• 1:25:55Joe Rogan?

  You can, you can sign up when you're 16?

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  I, I think I was turning 17.

• 1:26:00Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  I had signed my delayed entry program thing. And I left a little bit before my 18th birthday. So I was 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. So, uh, yeah, I was 17, almost 18 when I left.

• 1:26:23Joe Rogan?

  You make a radio out of that?

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

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

• 1:26:26Joe Rogan?

  You call it a crystal radio?

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say crystal controlled.

• 1:26:29Joe Rogan?

  That's a radio?

• 1:26:30Speaker 02

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

• 1:26:35Joe Rogan?

  Slinky made it?

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  Well, they bought the brand, they just let the Slinky brand now bought this toy. But there's a bunch of these all over the internet, yeah.

• 1:26:42Joe Rogan?

  Wow, make your own working radio without batteries?

• 1:26:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it uses a, I was gonna say crystal controlled radio because it uses a crystal diode on it.

• 1:26:51Joe Rogan?

  Would you say Tesla coil, Jamie?

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a Tesla coil. This guy's explaining it. So this thing has a kinda cool, let me find this thing. A rocket radio they called, which is a like further development, this thing. It attached to a phone. 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.

• 1:27:15Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is almost.

• 1:27:23Joe Rogan?

  Onto a phone. What year was this?

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  Man, this is old.

• 1:27:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:28Speaker 03

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

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

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

• 1:27:41Joe Rogan?

  Crazy that has no battery.

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

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

• 1:27:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:51Speaker 03

  Weak power.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then the frequency modulation, like amplitude modulation isn't as efficient as frequency modulation when it comes to for the voc order 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 met more information, which is why it sounds better. So FM sounds better, but it doesn't travel as far.

• 1:28:24Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:28:24Speaker 02

  AM sounds worse. I always, when I was training people in the military on this, I always use the analogy of if a party is happening next door, you can hear the bass music. 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. 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 a 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. So it's the dispersal and, you know,

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  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 cellphone 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.

• 1:29:25Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 1:29:49Speaker 02

  You really can't.

• 1:29:50Joe Rogan?

  You really can't?

• 1:29:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:30:01Joe Rogan?

  Then how do you explain things like Pegasus?

• 1:30:04Speaker 02

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

• 1:30:09Joe Rogan?

  Explain Pegasus to people that don't know.

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  It was a persistent implant on cellphones for people.

• 1:30:15Joe Rogan?

  Initially, it was, you had to click it. It was a clickable exploit.

• 1:30:18Speaker 02

  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, 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, 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. And so they, I won't get into the very specifics of where and how they did this, because I'm not sure if I got this information from the government or not, so I won't say it. But they stored it in a place where it wasn't normal.

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  And you can read papers on your own and look at the forensics of it and how the actual implant was executed. But it essentially, you know, a lot of people that own your phone, and, you know, was the kind of implant I only dreamed of when I was helping develop my own implants, implants in the military. Mostly what we would rely on is, you know, zero-day architecture and looking for something in a phone that either they hadn't patched, or that the phone that you were looking at hadn't been patched. So phones, as they have their own red teams, are going through the phone for their own, because they want to sell a product that people will use, and people won't use stuff that can get hacked. So they'll do their own red teaming.

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  And they'll discover like, oh, you know, we, we, on this router we developed, we left this port open and it shouldn't have been open. So now we're going to write a patch that will close that port so that this port is no longer accessible by a guy like me, so I can't go in there and, and do something to this particular type of router. Another great thing, I'll say something good about the administration, they're, they're doing some stuff right now to make sure that we're getting rid of Chinese technology and Chinese routers. And, um, um, you know, there's a widespread network of, um, uh, there's, the PLA has a, and I can't remember the name of the botnet, but they essentially implanted a bunch of old, unpatched routers to get access to government and business, um, proximal people. And it was widespread and huge.

• 1:32:28Speaker 02

  And, you know, they, it looked like to me, I haven't read this anywhere, but if I were looking at this implant and how it was done, they were trying to really cause some trouble. Um, it was being placed at critical places, think power, think energy, think banking. Like, they really wanted to cause some ruckus. And I have not been part of this administration, so I'm not saying anything classified for those of you who are listening. And so, but there was a decision to say, hey, we need to make sure that these things get patched, and also that we're not bringing in, um, architecture from the overseas because they don't play by the same rules that we at least say we play by.

• 1:33:05Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's why they banned Huawei devices.

• 1:33:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, and ZTE.

• 1:33:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. 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, gonna 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'd 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 the routers and some of their, um, some of their network devices that they had engineered in order to be able to access them by third-party. And this, because of...

• 1:33:54Joe Rogan?

  Whatever, lack of understanding, lack of knowledge of how these things are constructed. The people that purchased them didn'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 cellphone towers that people, you know, inadvertently bought from China.

• 1:34:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:34:16Joe Rogan?

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• 1:35:53Speaker 02

  And that's really, I mean, I can tell you firsthand from having done some other 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 essential. 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 of 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 remains on this phone? What was it being used for? I would do this in the military so that when we did do an operation and I was part of some of the largest ones ever done out in Afghanistan, there would be treasure troves of phones and all of these computers

• 1:36:37Speaker 02

  and stuff like that. And it was my job and I had a great team that worked for me. In 20, my deployment in 2015, we would go in afterwards, gather up all of this stuff and you know, the task force commander would literally be standing by and we'd say, you know, here's the intelligence that we've derived, here's the multi-point analysis, you know, it was on this hard drive, it was here, it was here, you know, there's a bad guy place out here. And those guys would be rolling like within moments after the last operation. Like some operations we'd do where we'd be rolling one after another target because we were getting really good at media forensics and the intelligence that was there. And then getting into active media forensics, which is a different discipline, but essentially,

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  I'll get in, I can get into that later if you want to, but launching and doing these follow-on operations off, you know, dumping the binary from a phone and examining it at the ones and zeros level to say everything that was going on with this thing, or if it was a really high, like the organization that I worked for at that time, did the analysis of the Osama bin Laden media. And, you know, on that media, we're doing far more than we would for another piece of media and that we're, you know, x-raying it and we're looking at maybe what the disk looked like before, what was destroyed or reconstructing things, spending millions of dollars on that intelligence analysis because we wanted to fully understand everything that this guy was involved in and what he was doing and where he was and who he was talking to.

• 1:38:00Speaker 02

  And so that was another part of my career that I did for about five years or so.

• 1:38:05Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:38:08Speaker 02

  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 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 you would use. And they weren't doing it. So they were creating persistent backdoors, either by actively placing code on there that would allow, you know, root access, or they were leaving things open, especially in Africa. Like, the work that we, you know, I was working in Africa. The Chinese were just owning Africa. They were just giving them communications infrastructure. And they were doing that because they wanted their resources and they wanted to know what these people were saying

• 1:38:53Speaker 02

  and what they were doing. And so I'm a free market real, like, I'm as free market as a guy can get. I want the best people building the best products and I want everyone to be able to compete. But in that case, I would never own a Huawei or a ZTE or anything else.

• 1:39:09Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  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, 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. So it's really about, you know, getting all of that data and constructing, you know, an analyst notebook essentially outline of who's talking to who, who do we need to implant? And it, but it's for business as well. Like, they're really trying to, they would want this in the hands of somebody who's in charge of a business

• 1:40:03Speaker 02

  because they want their IP. They would want this in soldiers' hands, so they had no deployment dates or who's going where and who's doing what. They want this in router. Because routers are usually the most unpatched piece of technology in that you're not especially, you know, these days are more automated patching. But back in the day, like you had to manually update a router. If you didn't, well, then you had potential exploits that were sitting on that router where I could gain access to your the router in your home, or I could gain access to a BGP router, which is like a border gateway, which is moving all of the internet data, or I could get access to a microwave terminal. You know, if you look at a cell phone, they've got the microwave terminals on there that are sending information in between them. If those are Chinese parts that are either being used for the processing, the CPU,

• 1:40:48Speaker 02

  or the physical infrastructure of that, the products that they were putting out would give me direct access to the information that's being passed on those terminals. So you're getting, you know, system level, root level access through machinery, through communication devices and through things like routers where you can know everything you want to know about your enemy.

• 1:41:08Joe Rogan?

  Wow. And so as far as today's technology, I see you use an Android phone. Like, is there a phone that is more secure or a platform that is more secure?

• 1:41:19Speaker 02

  It all depends, like, 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.

• 1:41:41Speaker 02

  You know, the phones today are pretty secure, especially versus a few years ago. If you're a reporter, now the nexus is, do you trust the government? And do you trust Apple? If you trust the government, you trust Apple, then Apple's probably your best bet. For using, you know, there's lockdown mode on an Apple phone. Or they used to call it back in the day, I think it was called reporter mode. But there was way to ways to encrypt the devices and to encrypt the chatter and the tunnel coming out of the phone. The RF coming out of the phone and.

• 1:42:13Joe Rogan?

  What is lockdown mode?

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:42:20Joe Rogan?

  What personal reasons?

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  I don't trust Apple.

• 1:42:23Joe Rogan?

  How so?

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  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'll get these questions where it says, 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, tell us your mom's this, your mom's that.

• 1:42:48Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:43:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when I was advising guys back in the day on going out and doing like a high-risk source meet, so 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 would always tell 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 out.

• 1:43:24Joe Rogan?

  So can you still send iMessages?

• 1:43:26Speaker 02

  You can still text and call.

• 1:43:28Joe Rogan?

  Text and call, that's it.

• 1:43:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, but there's other things that you can't do.

• 1:43:31Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  Why would they do that?

• 1:43:37Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

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

• 1:43:49Joe Rogan?

  I'm sorry. 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.

• 1:44:13Speaker 02

  That's what I mean. And I said, why don't you trust Apple? It's the same reason I don't trust Meta. They're not interested.

• 1:44:18Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  That's a horrible narrative.

• 1:44:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it seems squirrely.

• 1:44:36Joe Rogan?

  Um, so, oh, you've read your last free article.

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 1:44:42Joe Rogan?

  Give me money, motherfucker.

• 1:44:43Speaker 02

  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 I'm happy to have you disagree with me, and I love to have this conversation. In my opinion, we're the only ones that are.

• 1:45:01Joe Rogan?

  After May 8, 2026, announced 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 giants 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. But WhatsApp is a little squirrely, right?

• 1:45:37Speaker 02

  WhatsApp, yeah, I mean, they're all squirrely. Um, and that's the problem. And, and so you asked me why I don't trust them. It's because they want to, they want to use, 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. A lot of my time also in the military was spent in art. 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. But, um, they need consciousness to train their models.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  So when Google offers you, Meta, or Instagram, or whoever else offers you photo storage, it's because they want your face to train neural networks. If they're gonna pay for the compute, if they're gonna pay for the storage for these things, they're doing it because they're gonna use the data. If you're getting a free app, in essence, any free app, if the product's free, then you're the product. So when Google is allowing you to use a Google Drive and get a gig of storage, they're gonna use those photos to train neural networks to do better facial recognition.

• 1:46:51Joe Rogan?

  What if you're paying for Google Drive?

• 1:46:53Speaker 02

  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 neural network examine the Terms of Service. And then you can pretty much understand, like, here's my focus, here's the 40-page Terms of Services document, when you click that link that you got, what are they able to do with my data? So that's how I sign up for apps, and it's one of the great uses of a large language model, in my opinion, is to quickly understand 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 products of the product. And that is because they're trying to build the most powerful, capable, artificial intelligences, which I think is a misnomer, and again, we can get into it later, but they're trying

• 1:47:37Speaker 02

  to build these hyper-competent artificial intelligences, and 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. And they need more training data. So if I wanna build a replica of Joe Rogan that I can make hyper-realistic AI videos for, I need every picture of your face from every angle, I need every wince, every squint, everything you've ever done, so I can introduce more training data to better train that neural network in order to generate more hyper-realistic versions of yourself. And so when a company's offering you something for free, and it's fine, like, if people

• 1:48:20Speaker 02

  are fine with that idea, then by all means, download all the free apps that you want. But if you're downloading a free app, it's because you are the product. They either wanna see how you type, they wanna see what you're saying, they want to see how you're thinking about things, they wanna understand your political biases, they wanna look at your photos. And this isn't because they're a deep-seated nation- State actor, they can become that, but it's because they're trying to build the best products. Because the big money is in AI. That's where the biggest money is. So anytime you're doing any of these things, and it's just been obvious to me from the on, not from the onset, but pretty close to the onset. That um.

• 1:48:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, this is a good example, right? Pokemon Go players built a thirty billion photo map. That's how training robots to deliver your pizza.

• 1:49:03Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 1:49:05Speaker 02

  Um, so you, you know, they view P 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.

• 1:49:27Joe Rogan?

  What is the difference between using Apple and using Android?

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  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 cart, 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, and I'm actually selling a product, not people's data or people's photos. 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 principle and what do they care about in the company?

• 1:50:13Speaker 02

  And I just made that trade and said, I'm gonna have to become a public person and start putting things out there and. Uh, so, you know, I started a company, we started our first Instagram and I started my, my marketing team started my first Instagram. And 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. We don't sell their data. We don't sell emails. I can make a half million dollars off my email list tomorrow and I've been offered that money. You know, we've got millions of emails from people who have signed up for our apps. Other companies who are starting companies, they want to go out and reach marketing people. So if you're starting another hunting app, maybe for cameras or for a call or a turkey call or an out call or something.

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  And you have found Spartan Forge and you said, man, they've got two million emails. I could pay them a half million dollars for that two million dollars and start some top of mark, top of line marketing, top of funnel marketing. And go blast them. So they'd pay me a lot of money for those emails. I will never do that. I'll never sell my company's emails. The people's emails. I'll never do any of those things because the product is the product for my company. It's not the people.

• 1:51:24Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:51:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, custom OSs and uh.

• 1:51:33Joe Rogan?

  But yeah, you don't use it.

• 1:51:34Speaker 02

  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 Android. 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. I'm for the free and open version because at least if something, at least if I'm worried about my phone having a problem, I can actually dump binary.

• 1:52:16Speaker 02

  Or I can create Neo one file and exhume. I can look at the binary and say, is my phone acting like it should or doing what it should? Or is there some kind of persistent implant? I wouldn't be able to do that with a, I would have to trust Apple and Apple's ecosystem and whoever their McCaffey. Or whatever they're using. I would have to trust them, which I don't. Um, so I like the Android, um, because.

• 1:52:36Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:52:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:52:51Joe Rogan?

  And how would you do that?

• 1:52:52Speaker 02

  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, Celebrate, you could get a Celebrate. Uh, or there's other things called forensic toolkit, other things like that, that allow you to examine your phone at a deeper level.

• 1:53:11Joe Rogan?

  Is this an app, forensic?

• 1:53:14Speaker 02

  They're products.

• 1:53:15Joe Rogan?

  Products?

• 1:53:15Speaker 02

  They're products.

• 1:53:15Joe Rogan?

  So it's a physical product?

• 1:53:16Speaker 02

  Some of them have.

• 1:53:17Joe Rogan?

  Dump your phone into?

• 1:53:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they're software. Um, and there's connecting and all of that type of stuff. Tools I used throughout my military, um, career. Um, Celebrate 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.

• 1:53:49Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:53:51Speaker 02

  You're not the average person.

• 1:53:52Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 1:54:00Speaker 02

  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 phone, 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. 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 what is this code? And then with a neural network, you could prob, I don't, I've never done it, but I'm sure you could figure out what the intent is of that code, even for a layperson.

• 1:54:45Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:54:52Speaker 02

  Ostensibly 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.

• 1:55:01Joe Rogan?

  Sort of just try.

• 1:55:02Speaker 03

  To be like, can you help me examine my Android phone is doing, looking for any malicious actors?

• 1:55:06Joe Rogan?

  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? For 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 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.

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, just asking, like, why do you want to do this?

• 1:55:40Joe Rogan?

  So this is just something that you could do with an Android phone that you just can't do with Apple?

• 1:55:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, Apple's not open.

• 1:55:44Joe Rogan?

  What are the reasons you don't trust Apple?

• 1:55:46Speaker 02

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

• 1:55:51Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:55:52Speaker 02

  Because I want to answer your first question that we've already gone past. If you, can you bring perplexity back up, please?

• 1:55:58Speaker 03

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

• 1:55:59Speaker 02

  No, this is fine. Just say, "My friend helped me carve an EO1 file, Echo Oscar EO1 file."

• 1:56:13Speaker 02

  And he says

• 1:56:16Speaker 02

  that there is code in there

• 1:56:20Speaker 02

  that doesn't comport with the rest of the Android system.

• 1:56:23Speaker 03

  Comport?

• 1:56:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, P-O-R-T. The rest of the system.

• 1:56:30Speaker 02

  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 because I've never done it.

• 1:56:40Joe Rogan?

  Could you tell me? Could you tell me, Jamie?

• 1:56:43Speaker 02

  Could you tell me what it means? Yeah.

• 1:56:48Joe Rogan?

  Get the "you" out. Get the "you." Tell me "you."

• 1:56:52Speaker 02

  Could I have some of your coffee, please?

• 1:56:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, absolutely. It's for you. Okay, let's see what it says.

• 1:56:59Joe Rogan?

  Yes, you can paste suspicious code here and I can help explain 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 numbers. Perplexity is our sponsor.

• 1:57:18Speaker 02

  I love that because you'd never get that from ChatGPT. You'd want all that information.

• 1:57:22Joe Rogan?

  Perplexity is the shit. And so you're not sharing personal or case-sensitive information.

• 1:57:29Speaker 02

  Wonderful perplexity.

• 1:57:30Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:57:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:57:45Joe Rogan?

  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 is 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.

• 1:58:04Speaker 02

  Yep, exactly. So yeah, I thought that would be the answer. I've just never done it. And so you can do a forensic examination of an app, by the way. 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, I can get an understanding of the very inner workings. So if something's being done, for instance, at the kernel, or you could think about it as like the lowest level of the phone, something that wouldn't normally get caught in a forensic examination, I wouldn't be able to do that with Apple.

• 1:58:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:36Speaker 02

  So, and the nation-state actors 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 would miss that. It'd be like the fingerprint under the couch cushion or something like that.

• 1:58:51Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:59:02Speaker 02

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

• 1:59:22Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 1:59:29Speaker 02

  You're much more in control of the ecosystem. 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. You control the background services that can be run on the phone. So if you're getting hot mic'd, or if your camera's taking pictures of you and you're not looking, or it's listening to you for advertising content, stuff like that, you would be in control of all of that in a way that you're not in control of on a native Android app.

• 1:59:55Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:59:58Speaker 02

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

• 2:00:01Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:00:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:00:15Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:00:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, because that's

• 2:00:23Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:00:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's easy to do. 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.

• 2:00:33Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:00:37Speaker 02

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

• 2:00:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:00:41Speaker 02

  Because you're going to jack things up. You have to, you know, get the bootloader. And 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

• 2:00:53Joe Rogan?

  Is that available for all Android phones?

• 2:00:55Speaker 02

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

• 2:00:59Joe Rogan?

  Is that available for Samsung phones?

• 2:01:00Speaker 02

  No, not this one. You can't, so the question has to become, can you lock, unlock the bootloader? And that is the starting, think of it as the starting engine of the rest of the phones.

• 2:01:09Joe Rogan?

  Why is it only available on Google Pixel phones?

• 2:01:11Speaker 02

  I'm not sure why they do it that way. I haven't looked into that. It's just pixels and the older Samsung's. Made it available, older Galaxy S7s, S10s. You could do more than you can with like, and I've got the Galaxy Fold here. And you can do almost none of that on here.

• 2:01:28Joe Rogan?

  That is fucking sweet, though.

• 2:01:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love this phone. But like I said, I went away from doing all that. A, because it was work. B, because I'm not working in national security anymore and I'm not, you know. I haven't written and exploit in years. I don't do this type of work anymore and I need to sell a product. And 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.

• 2:01:57Joe Rogan?

  Spartan Forge, your app work, run on graphene?

• 2:01:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it could, yeah, it would. You have to sideload the app. But again, a large language model could walk you through doing that. So we haven't gotten to that level of...

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

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

• 2:02:12Speaker 02

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

• 2:02:17Speaker 03

  That's, I mean...

• 2:02:17Joe Rogan?

  So the process is officially supported in the Android settings under Developer Options, allowing users to toggle OEM locking, simple fastboot method. Pixels use standard fastboot commands that work consistently across all models to unlock the bootloader accessibility.

• 2:02:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I was talking about. So, yeah, I don't know why they do it. It might be people can, well, the Android open source project exists. So it would stand to reason that you would want a way for someone, because 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 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. I've got friends who do that. So...

• 2:03:02Joe Rogan?

  You and I talked about Eric Prince's phone.

• 2:03:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:03:06Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:03:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just by virtue, and look, Eric's a wonderful guy and he's, the principles that he used...

• 2:03:22Speaker 02

  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 gonna 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 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. So, the other thing being, if you're building on the Android open source project, that means the code that you're using as the engine, let's just call it that of your phone, is examinable by the public.

• 2:04:07Speaker 02

  So, you're relying on Android to publish these, you know, updates to the phone, and you're relying on those things to be as good as possible. Now, you might harden it some more, but as long as the code is out there, it can always be mucked with. As long as people have to interact with the device and type, and you have to see what you're typing, a phone's gonna be, it's gonna have Swiss cheese. So, when people say something is unhackable, as you said, that's just not true.

• 2:04:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it didn't make sense to me. It's just not true.

• 2:04:37Speaker 02

  You and I talked about it. Yeah, we talked about it quite a bit. I have, like I said, great guy, done lots of great things for the country, and 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's just, just like, if I insult, if I came up with an app that had a, you know, "Look at the TikTok Terms of Service on the first TikTok."

• 2:05:01Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's bonkers.

• 2:05:02Speaker 02

  "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 gonna lock you up in secondary at Customs in China, or in Canada, and I'm gonna separate you from your phone, and I've seen you unlock it. Well, now I'm gonna get in there with NCase, or I'm gonna get in there with FTK, or I'm gonna get in there with Celebrite, and I'm going to dump your phone."

• 2:05:47Speaker 02

  And and just by virtue of it being built on the Android open source project, that's a great thing. It's a good thing. Just don't call it totally unhackable. Because a guy like me, I don't need but a week or two to tell you on this current build, like here, here's the hole in this Swiss cheese. Now, is it far better than having a Google phone with standard firmware and standard OS or an Apple phone? I don't know about Apple, because again, you asked me about Apple and I said, I don't know Apple. I don't know what's happening at the top of that company. But I know that they like to monetize people and that's pervasive in my mind. And using data that people don't know is getting used, even though it's in a 40-page terms and services document is pervasive.

• 2:06:31Speaker 02

  So I just don't know at that highest level of analysis. And that's why I said to answer your question about the safest phone, I would ask you what you're using it for, who you are and what are you doing in the world. Is the best way to answer that question.

• 2:06:43Joe Rogan?

  So me, like what would you recommend I use?

• 2:06:47Speaker 02

  I mean, I wouldn't want to. I mean, okay, 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. 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. Because that just that checks and balances is what I would want. But for you, I would say you should take something like 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, which is a VPN that I use that's very good. And, you know, everything should be routed through that.

• 2:07:30Speaker 02

  And if you trust Apple, continue using Apple. If you don't trust Apple, then, you know, use Android. And you could do, you could use a Pixel and do graphene and you could use Signal on there and those other things, you're gonna be relatively safe. But again, if I'm a nation state actor, I can create circumstances where I'm going to get access to your shit and I'm going to lock you down. And there, some of them are more expensive than other methods to do it, but I'm a pragmatist and you can always come up with a method to get a hold of somebody's shit. You can always create the circumstances, especially if you're a nation state actor, to get a hold of somebody's stuff. That would be the very high level of things that I would recommend to you.

• 2:08:11Joe Rogan?

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• 2:08:50Joe Rogan?

  So whether it's your first pair or your 15th, you gotta check out Tacovas in-store or online at tacovas.com. That's T-E-C-O-V-A-S dot com. And right now, get 10% off at tacovas.com/rogan when you sign up for email and texts. This episode is brought to you by Armra. Every week, there's some new wellness hack that people swear by. And after a while, you start thinking, why do we think we can just outsmart our bodies? That's why Armra colostrum caught my attention. It's something the body already recognizes and has hundreds of these specialized nutrients

• 2:09:32Joe Rogan?

  for gut stuff, immunity, metabolism, et cetera. I first noticed it working around training, especially workout recovery. Most stuff falls off, but I am still taking this. If you want to try, Armra is offering my listeners 30% off. Go to armra.com/rogan.

• 2:09:50Speaker 02

  Just out the gate?

• 2:09:52Joe Rogan?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's very concerning because it seems like these things keep getting stronger and more capable.

• 2:09:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:09:59Joe Rogan?

  Like the Pegasus 2 being a non-click exploit.

• 2:10:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:10:03Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:10:06Speaker 02

  Yep. And that's, you know, 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. You know, all of these things we think are added for layers of protection. For instance, you used to get that pop up 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. 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.

• 2:10:49Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 2:11:31Speaker 02

  I'm very worried about the rights of the individual now and going forward because we have an uneducated class of people. For all of the reasons in the world, like if you want to just focus on your family and you're not thinking about these things, I don't hate that for you. But the idea of individual autonomy and rights has been so shit on in, in recent years. That where this, when we get more uneducated and we rely, large language models are great, but they're not a foundation of learning. In other words, we have a lot of people with access to information, but no wisdom. It's like when your parents would say, learn how to do addition and subtraction on paper before you use a calculator.

• 2:12:13Speaker 02

  Like, understand how to do research and cite sources and understand, you know. How to conduct really good analysis before you just use a neural network for everything. Because as we lose focus of our civics and and and what our founders were trying to do and the uniqueness of it, which is truly unique, which is, you know, when I joined the army, I joined the army to get out of North Dakota. When I reenlisted in the army, it's because I believed in the experiment. And that's another five hour podcast, but um the the the the foundation of the experiment is good, but we've eroded it in so many ways over the years and given up so many individual rights in the name of security. And I'm sure it's been said on here before, but Franklin said, anybody who gives up their individual rights in the name of security deserves neither.

• 2:12:57Speaker 02

  Your freedoms in the name of security deserve neither. And it's some of the ways that they've done it have been really above the surface. And it frankly blows my mind that we let the government get away with some of these things that we let them get away with. Where you even explained it to people and like, I don't see it like, I don't see how that was a big deal. And I'm like, it was a total recalibration of the system that allowed the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to usurp your rights in a way that if you knew any better, you'd probably be protesting. Like some of the ways that they've done this, you know, we can go with the easy stuff like the Patriot Act, right? In the name of security, we're gonna start collecting on Americans, you know, and the Biden and Obama administration.

• 2:13:41Speaker 02

  I will say this, at risk of, you know, getting in trouble because I used to have a clearance.

• 2:13:48Speaker 02

  They had a massive vacuum cleaner and they knew what it was vacuuming up. And they kept vacuuming it up anyway in the name of security. I'm not saying they were going after American citizens, but they certainly knew they were. And they just vacuumed shit up and collected it and stored it in a database.

• 2:14:05Joe Rogan?

  In case they needed it.

• 2:14:06Speaker 02

  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 a 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 Seventeenth Amendment. Do you know the Seventeenth Amendment of the Constitution? I don't. So Seventeenth, so when the founders, when you read the Federalist Papers and the Federalist Papers, I really love reading the Federalist Papers. I love reading how they informed the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration even. John Jay,

• 2:14:49Speaker 02

  James Madison, wrote these documents explaining the framework and the Seventeenth Amendment, essentially how the Senate, the Senate, right, the fifty 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. The reason that the founders did that was because they, the state governments, had to give power to the federal government to exist. They were back with the Articles of, Articles of Confederation, Confederation, is that right? Articles of, I think it's Articles of Confederation. I'm blowing up, sorry, I'm going nuts. Back before there was a strong centralized American government, we had problems with money, we had problems with interstate commerce and

• 2:15:32Speaker 02

  those types of things, and those Articles eventually turned into what is the Constitution. But the states had to grant that power, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution knew that the states needed to be the small projects that we talked about before, where if California wanted to go nuts, let them go nuts. But it shouldn't impact what's happening in Texas, it shouldn't impact what's happening over New England, it shouldn't impact what's happening in the Midwest. But if that goes nuts and it fails, it needs to fail. So the state senators, I'm sorry, the state legislatures would come together and they would vote for a senator, they would elect a senator. And that senator's job was to go to the federal government and protect the rights of the state, not to

• 2:16:13Speaker 02

  protect the rights of individuals per se, and certainly not to abold the federal government. But with the Seventeenth Amendment, what happened was, the House of Representatives' function was to be the petulant children of government. So their job was to come up with crazy ideas, crazy laws, all of those things. The more liberal version of- Government jurisprudence would be the the House of Representatives. You're crazy ideas. And then you had state senators who were supposed to be between the House and the president, who would say, well, here's a good idea, but the rest of this is retarded, AOC. Like, we're not doing all this. That's crazy. Or whoever else. Name a Republican who's an asshat as well. We're not doing these things. And that's because it would erode the state's rights and the state's constitution and what made this state great.

• 2:16:58Speaker 02

  Because what the legislatures would do is say, hey, Joe Rogan, you've made a lot of money and you've got a big podcast and a big voice and you've learned some lessons around the way and you were able to do that in Texas and you decided to come to Texas because we had all of these things that California didn't have. We need you to go to the Senate for three years, or six years, or seven years, whatever it was back then, and represent those same principles. So when Obamacare comes through, you can say, not only no, but fuck no. Like, I'm not voting for this thing. And it was to protect the state. But what the Seventeenth Amendment did was, it was redundant with the House of Representatives, which was, in the founders' eyes, the only popular vote part of the of the American government was the popular vote.

• 2:17:43Speaker 02

  And then you had, you know, the way the president gets elected through electors, but you had the state senate, which was appointed by the states. So legislatures, and I'll use North Dakota where I'm from, you'll have one big city, two big cities, Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota. It's where the universities are, it's where your crazy kids are, crazy thought exists, hyper crazy ideas, but some of them are useful. The rest of the state's agriculture, right? So all of those legislators, from all of those counties, those legislative districts, would get together and say, we're gonna put Bill Thompson, that would never happen, but in charge, he's gonna be at the senate representing North Dakota, but he has to represent the whole state. In other words, you can't do things that will that will help Grand Forks or Fargo

• 2:18:26Speaker 02

  because that's where the universities are, that's where all of the crazy politics are. You also need to be thinking about the guys out in the western counties, Lamore County in North Dakota or way out west. You have to protect agriculture, you have to protect small businesses, you have to protect families. What the 17th Amendment under Woodrow Wilson and how they really usurped the Constitution and made the Senate a redundant, they made it a redundant House of Representatives and using the popular vote. So now we use popular vote for that. But if you want the popular vote in North Dakota, 85% of the population is in Fargo and Grand Forks. So now you've got, if I want to run for Senate in North Dakota, I'm just going to spend all of my time in Fargo and Grand Forks. Because if I can repeat back to those people all the

• 2:19:08Speaker 02

  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 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 gonna, 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

• 2:19:49Speaker 02

  who might be a free, you know, market absolutist and a classical liberal, he's not being funded. But under the state architecture, you might have been a better representation of the state, and that's why the legislators had to vote for you to put you in as a senator. You had to represent the whole state. But now, all that, someone who wants to be a senator needs to do is go to the Republican National Committee or the Democrat National Committee and say, I'll do all the things you tell me to do, fund my campaign, and I'm going to go stump in Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota, and the hell with the rest of the state. It's very important, it's a very important sleight of hand. And when that happened, you made a redundant House of Representatives, and the state no longer

• 2:20:31Speaker 02

  was protected at the federal level. And what happened was all of the power from all of these states and these legislatures and these individuals got sucked up into the federal government. And then after that, you see all of these things that would never have been passed by a state getting passed. Things like Obamacare, things like the Patriot Act, certain war resolutions.

• 2:20:52Speaker 02

  All kinds of things where it just further erodes the power of the state. And federal government wants that because it puts all of the power up in the federal government. And people always say we need to get money out of politics. No, we need to get power out of politics. That power that they've taken, you know, over the last 130 years or so, used to exist at the state and local levels because they wanted these thought experiments happening where we could pluck the best things out of them and forget the rest. But all of that power has now gone up to the federal government and the federal government won't ever release that power and they only want more budget and more spending to execute that power. And that's also because the interest groups that want to go, they don't want to have to go and convince a whole state of whether or not something is good that people are going to vote on.

• 2:21:36Speaker 02

  They just want to go take a lobby and go up to the federal government because they want all of the power up there as well. And the federal government wants all the power up there as well because they make $300,000 a year before they become a politician and they're worth $30 million when they're done being a politician. Because all of the money has to go to the federal government because they're in charge of light bulbs we can use, computers we can use, flush toilets we can have, how our roads are going to look, what our medical care looks like. None of those powers are explicitly written in the Constitution of the United States and they use things like the commerce law and other things in order to create things like Obamacare, where really we want competing states. If Texas comes up with a great way to do healthcare and North Dakota's isn't so great,

• 2:22:19Speaker 02

  they can look at that experiment, they can adopt the principles and they can have it at that level. But it's much easier to get change at the local level when the power is derived from the state and the individual because if I want to change the way that my state does healthcare, I have one of two options, or three options. I can run for office, I can support someone who is going to go into office and do what I want, or I can move. But when everything's centralized at the federal government and everything flows from the federal government, all of the money, power and gravity is up there and the individual, the 300 million of us or so, have really no power now to exercise either states' rights or individual rights at the higher level. I hope I'm elucidating this correctly. You are. But it's a real usurpation of individual and state autonomy.

• 2:23:01Speaker 02

  That really got rid of state power, which was, if you read the Federalist Papers, was so important to the founders that there was this state, that the state's needs were organized because the state was where the founders wanted these thought experiments. You read Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or John Locke, or Montesquieu, all of them talked about this great experiment that was being set up and how it was built on all of this Western politics and everything that had came before it, on how we could have a government that was forced to respect the rights of individuals and allowed for these competing think tanks of ideas, and that the power would never rest at the federal government. But the Seventeenth Amendment was a way that a lot of that power went from the state level and the state legislatures. And now, to become the president, they want to do a popular

• 2:23:46Speaker 02

  vote. And under a popular vote, you would just have to campaign in New York and LA.

• 2:23:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:23:50Speaker 02

  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 democracy allows 51% to rule 49%. 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'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 this is 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

• 2:24:35Speaker 02

  because I doubt this is what they wanted to do. But similar things happened with the Supreme Court, Marbury v. Madison, and allowing the Supreme Court to have judicial review. That was never a thing that was in the Constitution. And the Supreme Court, if you like the Supreme Court, being able to have the power to describe everything as being either constitutional or unconstitutional, then you're not ruled by a democracy, you're ruled by an oligarchy. You've got eight people in robes that are going to tell you whether or not laws are good or bad. And that's not the founding of this country. It's not how it was intended to work. And that all started back in Marbury v. Madison with Thomas Jefferson and these writs of mandamus, that where the Supreme Court, long story short, essentially granted itself the power to conduct judicial review. Under the old system, or the old system,

• 2:25:18Speaker 02

  the system that was ratified and that the founders approved was, if a law was deemed unconstitutional...

• 2:25:25Speaker 02

  It would go before the Supreme Court and they just wouldn't rule, they would rule in favor of the person. And then eventually the government would figure, figure out, oh, this law doesn't work. But it was never on the Supreme Court to say constitutional, unconstitutional. You would get arrested for some law, you'd go, and it would get appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court would say, we're not punishing this person. This is against the Constitution. But the government would have to keep arresting people. And they'd have to keep going in front of the federal government. So what I'm saying is, and I'm sorry to go off on this, we can go back to tech. But all I'm saying is, the core of the American experiment in individual rights and what makes this country so great and why I was willing to die for it after my initial enlistment. And why I have such love for this is because it was the only experiment where the value of the individual was held at the top of the hierarchy.

• 2:26:10Speaker 02

  And that people could truly be allowed to flourish. And in 250 years, we did more than any society could have hoped to have achieved in tens of thousands of years. Or not that it's been around that long, but in thousands of years. Everything tends towards disorder and everything, power always gets centralized. And we had a framework to do that, but we were willing participants in our own demise. And now we're scratching our heads and wondering why there's no individual and why there's no individual autonomy. Why a guy can't smoke weed on the weekend. Or why a guy can't do X, Y, or Z because we have centralized the authority and the power and the decision-making structure. And we're allowing them to be, there would be no problem with money in politics if the federal government had only the powers that were outlined to it in the Constitution.

• 2:26:54Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:27:01Speaker 02

  I'm sorry.

• 2:27:02Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:27:07Speaker 02

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

• 2:27:11Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:27:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:25Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:27:28Speaker 02

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

• 2:27:37Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:27:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably.

• 2:27:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, for sure. And by then, who knows where it's gonna, I mean, Jensen, Jensen Huang from Nvidia recently declared that we've reached AGI.

• 2:27:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I would, I would, yeah, I could. Yeah, I just couldn't disagree more. And I think I could, in the same way, I just elucidate- You're not the only one. There's 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, 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. There's no sense of knowing there in that, you know, Penrose, I've read a lot of, is ORC OR, if people want to read about that, I won't explain it.

• 2:28:27Speaker 02

  Orchestrated Objective Reduction. And how the mind works in these fleets of consciousness that we have, these shimmers of consciousness that we have based around what, you know, he describes in the microtubule. We get conscious thought, and that conscious thought we project into things. AI is very good conscious projection, but well, it will never have consciousness or knowing because it has no system of values. And if we were to instill values in it, it would still be consciousness projection. You saw my dad's cabin. My dad died when I was five, but I bought it back and was working on it. And inside of his cabin, I got to learn a lot about my father by working on the cabin that he built. Like, who would measure things and cut things right on walls and that type of stuff. That's all consciousness projection that allowed me to get to know him away. I might not even have known him if he were alive.

• 2:29:12Speaker 02

  But I got to re-experience and understand my father and his thoroughness through that cabin. AI is consciousness projection. It's projected consciousness. It's getting very good. But on a calculator, you could get the same thing out of a neural, that you get out of a neural network if you had sufficient time. I could present you a question, just like you did on Perplexity. I could sit here with a rulebook and I could type in a calculator. It might take me a million years, but I could do it and I could give you the same answer that a neural network would give you. That doesn't mean consciousness or knowing or AGI is presence, is present. It relies on its training data. It can only give you what the training data gives it. It can, it needs human consciousness projection, like we talked about with the captures,

• 2:29:54Speaker 02

  or we talked about with uploading photos to Google Drive. It needs that training data. And to me, it's just really fancy clever math. And having trained these networks from dozens of years, or a dozen years now, and working with them, they're just really clever consciousness projection. And so, yeah, that is four hours and we can do that next time.

• 2:30:15Joe Rogan?

  We'll do that next time, definitely.

• 2:30:17Speaker 02

  But if people, you mentioned the app.

• 2:30:19Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:30:22Speaker 02

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

• 2:30:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 2:30:27Speaker 02

  It's spartanforge.ai. We're built under the rhetoric of individual freedom. I want people outdoors. I want people hunting. I want people experiencing nature. I want people providing for their families. The best part of my day is when my kids are eating a backstrap 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've got to conserve time. You've got to e-scout. You've 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 Forge is the one that I'm.

• 2:30:57Joe Rogan?

  It's an awesome app.

• 2:30:58Speaker 02

  Really working on. Well, I really appreciate that. We've put a lot of work into it. And we've got a lot more coming over the summer, so.

• 2:31:03Joe Rogan?

  Dope.

• 2:31:03Speaker 02

  If people want to support us or want to get out there and get some hunting done, please check it out. And I answer all the Instagram DMs, so if you have a question for me.

• 2:31:11Joe Rogan?

  Good luck with that now.

• 2:31:13Speaker 02

  Well, I try to. I spend about two hours every morning doing it. But.

• 2:31:17Joe Rogan?

  Good luck.

• 2:31:17Speaker 02

  Thank you, Joe, for having me.

• 2:31:18Joe Rogan?

  Thanks, brother. Appreciate you very much.

• 2:31:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I get that.

• 2:31:20Joe Rogan?

  All right, you too. Bye, everybody.

• 2:31:36Speaker 04

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