#2473 - Bill Thompson

0:00The Joe Rogan Experience Showing my day Joe Rogan podcast my night all day What's up, Bill? How you doing, Jesse? Good to see you, bro. This is this might be one of the coolest things anybody's ever given me. So, gave me this knife, explain all this. Alright, 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 these things called rendezvous. Have you ever heard of them? In what way? What is a rendezvous? So, there you go. So, what a rendezvous is is it's not, you know you go to those like, I don't even know what they're called, but people do like reenactments. Oh, okay. Like civil war reenactments? It's not like that. So, that's the closest thing approximation to probably what it is. It's like a room or these days are easier to get to but my stepfather, the guy my mother remarried, brought us to him. All you do is camp but you're only allowed to camp,

1:02no 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 refrigerator or nothing like that. 1840. Why that year? At the end of the fur trapping. That was considered like Jeremiah Johnson's time like peak fur trapping. So there's people, you know, they dress like either, you know, revolutionary, like American revolutionaries or they dress like mountain men or they dress like Indians. How'd you guys dress? Mountain men. So 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, or do traditional archery, stuff like that. So anyway, this knife was a knife. I had actually started working on my brother a while ago. I do more of like the brain tanning, Tomahawk fun. When you're saying brain tanning, you talk about using brains to tan animal hides. Yes, using animal brains. What does brains do? What does brains do? It softens the leather in a natural way. And what's cool about it is every animal,

2:03no 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 cleaned the leather, and you've scraped it clean, you stretch it. I usually use like a dull shovel. You stretch it over the dull shovel, and then you soak it in the brain water mixture, and then you just keep repeating that pattern. And the leather gets like a really nice soft feel to it. What is it about the brain, is it the fat? It breaks down the leather. I'm not sure if it's the pattern. I haven't gotten that deep into it, but it breaks down the leather and just makes it feel really soft, really nice. So anyway, this knife here, I started, I killed that bear, so the jaw is made out of two bear jaws, or out of one bear jaw, split in half. So that was a bear I killed in Canada in 2017. It was my biggest black bear.

3:04And so we split the jaw, put that together. It's Irish linen threading. Then that's a knife that my brother picked up that was from 1860. It was totally arrested. We had to grind it back, or he had to grind it back down. And then the sheath is traditional, like you know, 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 quilling on the beadwork is made from porcupine quills. The backing is buffalo brain tan. And then the front is beaver hide, or a beaver tail. I'm sorry. And then the sides are horse and turkey hair, hanging off of it. And those are bear teeth. 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

4:05where you'd want to have me on here. So how interesting, dude. 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 my brother, Aaron, helped me out with it tremendously. So how did you find this knife from the 1860s? 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. That 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, but the type of steel on the way that it was worked and the way that it is around the hilt and on the bottom there. And so it's at least, you know, 130, 140, but more likely 160, 170.

5:07It actually fits my hand perfectly. Yeah, so that's also something my brother and I talked 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 a elk out with, but. Well, if we get attacked by zombies in the studio, it's a good thing to have on the desk. Yeah, I mean, if you're gonna make a last stand, you know, that's a pretty good, that's a pretty good knife to make your last stand with. It's a good way to go out. Yeah, exactly. That's awesome, man. Yeah, so the rendezvouss, we did those from... How long do they last? They vary from a week and then some go up to three weeks. And what do you do for food while you're out there? So inside of your lodge, so there's two types of rendezvouss. And at most rendezvouss 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

6:08and some modern pertinences. Did they have any kind of coolers in the 1800s? I mean, they had ice boxes and like steel ice boxes and that type of thing, but nothing like we have today. 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 Pemicin would have been the, you know, everyday thing to eat. That's just dried. So did you bring your own food? Did you have to hunt for food? So you bring your own food, but there are other rendezvouss 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 I might be speaking out of school, somebody might send me an email after this, but I'm going to talk about it anyway because I never got read the ride act. They're called juried. I think they called them juried Sutherans. 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 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.

7:08You 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 sewing machine. You got to 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. And they just really enjoy living like this. And at those ones, if they're in season, you can hunt whatever's in season. You're hunting with traditional archery. And it's really good for kids. Like the internet wasn't a problem as much when I was a kid. I was certainly into computers. I have been since I was a child. But you could just detach. Everyone's running around crazy. You're sitting around the campfire at night. People are singing with, you know, songs in 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 an eccentric kind of, it's not a cult. It's an eccentric group of people. It's a lot of fun. People take it very, community. People take it very seriously. There's more advertising surrounding it now than there used to be,

8:09because the 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 went to war with, he was half Native American. His grandfather was a jibway or something. 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, you found it, Fent, Jamie, he pulled it up. That's my lodge. How much do you enjoy a shower after you get out of here? I mean, as long as you keep, you know, they have showers and camp. They've got a showering area, a showering area where it's just like pallets. That's the inside of my lodge. So these are cooler at this one. This is not a jirid rendezvous.

9:09And so you can shower while you're in, some of them they call them hooters. They'll be like a latrine and a shower area in camp. But also like some of them I don't, I don't do it at all. This is why. This episode is brought to you by Zippercrooter. When you want to train your dog, you don't want just any rando off the streets who likes animals. You want someone with the skills to get your pet where you want them to be. Someone who can help you help them. So why wouldn't you do the same when it comes to hiring for your business? Skill-based hiring is the thing to do right now. And a good way to go about that is Zippercrooter. Especially since you can try it for free at zippercrooter.com. Zippercrooter can help you find the perfect match for your role. There's smart matching technology works fast to find candidates. While screening questions help ensure you find quality talent with the skills you're looking for. It even has filters you can use to see who's been recently active on the site.

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11:14And so there's no reenacting. There's not civilians walking around it. It's not like Renaissance, for sure. Yeah, exactly. It's just more like, I want to act like it's 1840 for a couple of weeks and not look at my phone one time and not worry about the news. It's amazing after a week here. You really forget about the world and you're like, don't even know you're supposed to be stressed out about things. You're just out there doing your thing for a couple of weeks. And you just cook over open fire. Everything gets done traditionally that way. And did you bring your own meat? Yeah, you bring your own meat and stuff in the cooler. And then there's also cooking classes where they teach you all the recipes to do with 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 hundred foot square lodge. There'll be three gambling tables in there, girls in like the low cut shirts and dealing cards and smoking cigars and just having an amazing time. And there are, 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 name.

12:16What was your camp name? This is embarrassing. It should be. Yeah, so I got my camp name. I got christened with my camp name in the big horns when I was 14 or 13. And it was talks a lot. Talks a lot. Yeah, and Sue, it was pronounced Iota. And just because you talk a lot. Or 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. They kind of diagnosed me with having some low level version of Asperger's. And I was a rap scallion in class. Just never shut up, never listened, never did anything. And those are the people that are the most fun. Well, they didn't enjoy me in high school or in high school. I probably would have been your friend. But yeah, they can't call me Iota. And we got christened. And it was one of the things we're kind of missing in culture today, or something that I'm trying to reinvigorate,

13:16especially with my son. And with other young men that I run into, it's kind of like coming of age rights. Yeah. Something to say, you're a man. And I'm going to 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 I think that is really something that's missing from society. I think that it's, 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. And you had a group of men telling you, you're at this level. We're going to treat you like that. And if you fall from gray, so we're going to remind you right away. Yeah. And we just don't do that with young men. And we have a society now where young men act like young men until they're 45 or 50 or 60. And sometimes never stop. Yeah. And, you know, women nature imposes itself on women. They become fertile. They're able to have babies. And they've got to seek security or find a husband or a really good job that will supplement whatever a husband would provide.

14:17And they've got to start acting like a woman. Whereas men can sit in a basement, you know, and it becomes very dangerous, especially men that never have children. Yeah. They're perpetual children. Yeah. And if you don't impose nature on yourself by undergoing those types of rights and understanding what it means to become a man, nature will impose itself on you by either A, you're never going to have children. And therefore you're dead forever. Or B, it will kill you. Because you're fat and in your mom's basement, you get diabetes, the foot chopped off, and you're 35. And, you know, we just don't tell men. We don't have a, the military did it for me. I had really put off a responsibility or seeking meaning or any of those things until I was in the military. And like I said, by father died when I was five. So I really had no central male authority until I was about 13 or 14 when I met this guy, Steve. And he kind of initiated some of those rights for me and helped 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.

15:19I think there's a reason why most ancient cultures and a lot of ancient religions have these rights of passages where you are like now officially, officially a man. Yeah. Officially, you know, you're responsible, you have to think of yourself as a different thing now. Whereas if you leave it up to your own decision, men sort of dwindle into this perpetual state of childhood. Yep, and it's not about you anymore. It's about other people. Like that for me, having children, I've got four kids. Really, you know, the military was kind of the first inkling of a responsibility, but then having children and realizing this isn't about me at all. Right. And I need to be willing to break my back for these people who depend on me. This is 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

16:21and they get divorced. Yeah. And then they fuck up the kids. 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 80s and the early 90s, 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 the central thrust of a lot of culture at that time was about like divorce or not getting married or, you know, discovering yourself and that type of thing, which in some ways is good. There's goodness there. But when it becomes a central thrust or a central narrative and divorce becomes very easy or it's happening everywhere, it's super normalized. And it's normalized. It's super destructive. Children are the ones who suffer the most on it. And I think the data is clear on that. When you look at, you know, single parent homes or no parent homes or being raised, you know, without an authority or an abusive step person. Or an abusive step person. And that is, you know, when you look up the stats on that,

17:22like remarriage and having a new family, like that becomes the single most likely vector of abuse in a young child's life is that new person, right? Because now they're raising someone else's kid or whatever. I mean, it's a, that's in every old movie, the evil stepmother, you know? Or evil stepfather, but in the old movies, it's always the stepmother that abuses the girl. Yes. And so, you know, I kind of, I kind of resented that part of that time, that culture was, I shouldn't say when I was a child, I should say, as I got older, because I wasn't a single mom home. And the guy that my mother remarried right after my father died was abusive. And, you know, he really got hard on my younger brother and, you know, my mother moved us out almost immediately, but when I re-examine that time, it really was, 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 special in particular in its own way,

18:24and 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, but we shouldn't elevate it, like it's at the same level as a unified family. And that's a tricky line to walk, but also the people who were making those movies and that culture came from the 50s and 60s where divorce was just not in the cards. And so that was a, you know, hoax law, as you bend any object that wants to return back to its natural state. And hoax law kind of played there where nobody could get divorce in the 40s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. And then you had the baby boomers who kind of culture, they said, you know, actually, it's not as bad as we think, but then it over-corrected. And then it became kind of part of that cultural zeitgeist. And kind of what humans do, right? We always over-correct. Yeah, we do. Yeah. We go in one direction until we realize it's destructive and then we over-correct until we realize that's destructive. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Ketone IQ, the demands on my time, energy and focus arguments.

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20:26That's how confident they are that you're gonna love the increased focus you get from Ketone IQ. And I would say 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 because any social scientist worth their salt will know a social experiment almost never has the outcome that we thought it was gonna have. In other words, we thought doing something to society would form society this way but it almost has the inverse, the anti-patterant. 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, kind of federalism. Let's do little changes here. Let's let California be crazy for a while and see how that works out for them. But let's not nationalize the craziness. Let's learn from what they learn there

21:26and there'll be goodness. Hopper racism, a 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 that was kind of the founders intent with federalism. They're really federalist, minded state, minded and there's even for that being as 250 years ago there's a profound amount of profundity 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. But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. 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. 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.

22:28I don't think I identify with one side or another but if one thing that I agree with conservative people on conservative people lend more towards the importance of discipline. Hard work, discipline, don't complain. Get things done, deal with the hand that you've been dealt with and just sort it out and get to work. Yeah, don't cry, don't look for other people to save you they're not going to. And this is not something that's celebrated in society. It's thought of as a cruelty that if you say that you need discipline that you're not treating these people that are victims of circumstance with the proper respect or with the proper empathy and I think a certain amount of empathy is probably not so good for you at a certain point in time. It 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?

23:29They're 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's had called suicidal empathy. A society can suffer from suicidal empathy in the certain point in time. You gotta enforce rules and you gotta make it so that people have to get their shit together. 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 you.

24:30So let me give you a pittance that I'm gonna take from someone else. And that makes me benevolent. I get to feel good about that. That's a giant part of government for sure. That's a giant part of what's the problem with like liberal governments. Liberal governments should, they should get paid based on whether or not the city does better or worse financially than when they were in office. If their policies lead to a greater domestic production of goods and services and GDP does better and everything does better, then you should get paid more. If more real estate sales, more people are making more money. Medium income raises less homeless people. You should get paid more. And you should get paid less if homelessness goes up, if crime goes up, if there's more destruction, if there's more assaults and home invasions, you should get paid less. You're doing a shitty job. And if you did that, I think they would impose laws that made it safer and healthier

25:30and made it for better for society. Yeah, and then they would just inevitably change the ways that we track and measure those things and pay themselves more. Well, they shouldn't have the opportunity to do that. And then you need some sort of an oversight that's completely cynical. You're right, though. You're right to be cynical because that's what they do about everything. Someone's 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. That's interesting. I've never thought about that before. It 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 another eliminated, it means like one of the things that they do when they raise jobs, like they increase GDP. We've added 200,000 jobs to the market.

26:34Well, 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. It's way bigger than it should be. Way bigger. And those jobs, a lot of them are bullshit and waste a lot of them. Yeah. And that was some of the stuff that was uncovered during doge. The limited amount of access that doge had to it. Just the beginning of it, where you got to see the curtain pulled back and get to see exposure of so many of these fraudulent, supposedly charitable organizations that were really just money laundering. They were really just funneling money into these people's hands, like the homeless thing in California. Oh my goodness. It's a bonkers situation where they've spent $24 billion. They cannot track it. They've tried to audit it. The government has vetoed these audits. And they have no idea where that $24 billion went and yet homelessness went up. But you've got a giant machine

27:34that is this homeless establishment, this homeless industrial complex. That is being funneled money into that. And that actually aids the GDP, which is kind of crazy. Yeah, I mean, it was one of the things my last three years in the military. 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 that kind of learned about government at that point was these systems have their own incentive and the incentives, 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, 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. Isn't that crazy? He would go to the Pentagon and they'd be like, well, you didn't execute $300 million of OCO, of overseas contingent operations funds here.

28:38And they would dress them down for an hour. And what people don't understand is, if you don't spend that money, your budget for the next year will be lower because there's no need to have a higher budget. Instead of tying it to mission to say, did you achieve your mission objectives? 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 achieve them and we save 25%. But instead, it's, we achieve them, but we didn't execute all of this money while you're fired. And I literally have seen that happen. I've literally seen that happen. And that kind of... Let us, six as I... Yeah, and that kind of shifted my thinking in that these systems have their own incentive to exist and to grow. Because those guys that were holding that general officer, that O6 is 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.

29:38This is 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 side. But they have bureaucracies and the incentive of the bureaucracy is to make sure that we grow. And that's it. And then you think about that for a minute and you're like, well, it's no longer a question why we have $30 trillion of debt. 39. 39 trillion. And then what, like, 150 trillion of unfunded liability. In other words, we've promised people money for the next 30 years. And it's a debt that, you know, I don't see how well ever escape that debt. And it's the thing about it is, and I don't want to be pigeonholed because I'm actually quite liberal when it comes to... My politics are like yours in that. I'm kind of a man without a home. 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 forgive them everything they need. I'm trying to give them structure.

30:39And even in my community, I'll help someone out out of pocket or do something for them that's a strain on my time or might hurt something else because there are really no solutions. There's just trade-offs. That's supportive for the community, though. That's how people are supposed to do charity. And I'm also very non-judgmental in someone how they care... I don't care what they do in their house. I don't care if it's a Roman orgy on the weekends. Like, be a predictable, productive person Monday through Friday and go do your Roman orgy on the weekend. I don't care. I won't judge you. I really have enough crap in my own life. It's long as someone's not getting hurt. Yeah, as long as no one's getting hurt, consenting adults. Like, I have enough problems. And I screw up enough and people have... There's a laundry list of things that people could say about me how I've screwed up in my life. But then as I graduate and get higher and higher, more conservatism takes place. And that's a result of just having an engineering mindset when I'm looking at life and understanding that it's just not Republican or Democrat or leftist or rightist or liberal

31:41or classically liberal. All of these monarchers don't work for me because they break down at some level of analysis. 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. You're supposed to adopt these opinions. And some of them just don't fit. And that's how people get pigeoned. That's like on the people on the left, they get pigeonholed into weird stuff that you can't really justify. Like trans women in sports. Like, what the fuck are you doing? And you're like, we're being inclusive. Like, no, you're not. We're loving the borders of Ukraine while hating our own border. Yeah, fucking bonkers. Yeah, there's so many crazy things. There's so many crazy things that people just adopt that don't make any sense. And when you subscribe to an ideology, the problem is if you define yourself as this person, I am this. I am a hardcore, right-wing blah, but whatever it is. You immediately close the door to all the very productive and interesting things

32:41of the other side thinks. Yeah, and you're also making yourself into a tool of propaganda. Because if I meet someone and they just say, I'm this. It's like, well, I could reasonably predict everything that's going to come out of your mouth. That's not entertaining. I don't want to have a conversation with that person. I can't seek to learn from them because I could just pick up the communist manifesto or mind-conf and have a pretty good understanding of who I'm dealing with. And therefore, a conversation is not relevant. It's not needed. A lot of people are afraid of social ostracation, too. So they're afraid of straying outside of the narrative, or whatever side they're supposed to be on. And some groups are really good at making you feel like dark shit if you don't agree entirely with even things that don't even make any sense. So that's why people go along with stuff that's illogical, like open borders or whatever it is. 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. They're scared of being excommunicated. Yeah, I dealt with a lot of people,

33:43first of my retirement from the military, and then more recently leading up to the last election where I was entertaining the deal and doing some work for government, believe it or not. And because as we talk more, you'll figure out I'm pretty anti-institutions. I'm really 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 my whole life is built around pattern analysis. I really enjoy patterns and exhuming and looking into patterns. And there's a pattern of like a, you'll laugh when I say this first part of the pattern, but then I'll make more sense later. But he fits the pattern. Well, first he's a Jacksonian and that he's a pragmatic person the way that he governs, which I liked,

34:43or at least I did, and there's some things he's done recently that I don't enjoy. And, but he's also an outsider or a savior type. Alla, 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. I think so. I can't remember. But there's an old one that I used to watch from the grandpa. There's too many movies. 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. And he said, man, these people must have really wanted us. Like, it's crazy. They must be happy we're here.

35:43And I think it's Gary Cooper or someone or one of these guys says, it looks at him and says, they're going to 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 going to be at the X-Men Christmas party? No, right? Is he trying 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 going to need him. And so we have to put up with all of this other stuff because we understand that when the system is corrupt at every level, you need to 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 Patten, right? Mary, his cousin, Slap Soldiers. Did it really? Oh, yeah. I think it's his third cousin. This episode is brought to you by Mementus. Creatines' strength benefits are already backed by tons of research, but what's really interesting is where the research is headed.

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37:46This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. People always ask me what my website is powered by and the answer is Squarespace. Their design tools are unmatched. You don't have to be a tech wizard to build something that actually looks professional and fits your brand. They've even got an AI powered website builder that lets you put together a fully custom site in just a few steps. Try it for yourself. Head to squarespace.com slash Rogan for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, just use the offer code Rogan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. How many cousins removed? Or does it become okay? I don't know. Is it third? If there's blood, have you never met them? I'm Icelandic, so I really can't say anything, right? I literally have apps in Iceland, like my grandparents and my great grandparents are all from Iceland. 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,

38:48it's such a small community. Less than a million people all in one island, you know. So you're trying to prevent that stuff. But anyway, Patton, yeah. Slap soldiers who had tuberculosis, one of them probably had shell shock. It got in the newspaper, they wanted his head. And thankfully, the generals were like, no, he's the guy that we need for the moment, right? He had the ivory pistols and he dressed like not like a general. He didn't talk like a general. He wasn't like a Eisenhower where he had the veneer of a general. But we knew he was the only guy we could have at the battle of the bulge. Like the Germans talked about him like he was already a mythic legend in his own, in his lifetime. 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. They're always killed and they're always killed or defamed in the final analysis. So when the submagnus of his seven come in, they'll go to another town and I'll get killed. When Patton retired, he died in some weird jeep accident. You know, Wolverine, he's the only guy left

39:48on this desolate, like, world where the Hulk's in charge. And it's a horrible existence. Patton, or not Patton. Petraeus is another one. I, you know, I brief Petraeus. I worked for, not for him, but for people who worked for him in Iraq. And he was the guy that got us through with the surge. But he was really a weird guy when you would talk to him. Like, you knew that he knew something you didn't and that he was seeing things that you weren't. But even for myself, as being like a chief worn-off for 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 wanna talk about, then they'd wanna get out of dodge. He would ask questions that really had implications. 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 as function.

40:49Now he needs to get out of dodge. And then he, now he's, you know, got tried for all of 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 sorry, what happened to Petrion? So that's how he ended? Yeah, he was sleeping with some girl that was writing his book or something along those lines. That's it. Well, I'm not saying that's married. Yeah, I'm not saying that's the end of him. All I'm saying is that history will remember the pattern is ending unfavorably. You know what I'm saying? And so when I examine Trump, I said, yeah, I don't like what he says. I wouldn't want him around my daughters. I don't want, wouldn't want him at a dinner party. But he seems to be saying these things like he's going to reset this system. You know, I think it was Chappelle was on your show or another show or someone like that where he talked about Hillary saying, you know, something about the tax loopholes or whatever. And he just hit right back at her and said, well, the people who are funding your campaign take advantage of those same loopholes. And if they're there, I'm going to take advantage of them. I wouldn't be a pragmatist if I didn't.

41:50When he started saying stuff like that, it seemed to me like he was going to upend this system. 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 he's an outsider personality. And I thought he was going to really reset this system. 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. He's certainly better than, you know, what was happening under Biden. I was still in the military when Biden was in charge and it was awful to say the least. What were the problems? Oh my goodness. 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 your problem, you as a white man or a problem in the modern day military because this whole thing's built on systemic racism. You have built implicit bias that you can't escape even if you wanted to or you recognized it. His woke politics. Yeah, it was woke politics. And it was, and it was, you know, I would sit there and say,

42:53you know, all of the, all the people that I know who've died during this war, not all of them, but 80% of them and the numbers bear this out. When you look at them, they're all white guys from the middle of the country who were on their farms or, you know, not all of them, 80% of them, I think the numbers bear out about 80% of them. Were these guys from the Midwest or these places where they didn't really have a lot going? And they went off to fight a war that we probably shouldn't have been fighting in the first place, especially in Iraq. And they died for their cause. 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. 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 to you, Brown Josh. Yeah, they were talking about how it's historic because she's black and Biden had said he's gonna hire

43:53a black woman to do this job. If I had worked my whole life to do something, but not 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 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. 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 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.

44:54It also gives people an easy rubric to judge other people. Yeah. Because nothing's easy really. And it gives them like 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. Right. 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. And thought and so it was that stuff in the military. I remember getting told in an equal opportunity briefing we were getting, it doesn't matter what you meant when you said what you were saying. It only matters what the person felt when you said it. They'd said that in a military briefing. It was a military equal opportunity briefing. So, and the example they gave was if a woman walks into the, like we worked with a lot of civilians at this, at this military organization where we were developing these offensive cyber capabilities, lots of civilians in there.

45:56And so, you know, woman X walks into 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 gonna be an investigation. You're gonna be pulled out of that office. This is all gonna happen despite what you meant. So, the idea probably was good. We wanted to prevent sexual harassment inside of the office, but it was weaponized. But it was weaponized and it was carried out in a way where it's only about how people feel and not what a reasonable person centered 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 won't say that I was a war horse. I was not a long tab or I was not a cool guy kicking indoors. It was my job as the guy with, you know, tape over his glasses to point out the door

46:57for someone else and say bad guys in there. So, I was not, you know, a super bad ass in that regard. I was a nerd for super bad asses. And, but we also all engaged in gallows humor. And we would, you know, the jokes and stuff. Even someone who had recently died, we would make a joke about. It's because you have this tremendous pressure and comedies, the relief valve for that in a lot of ways. Yeah, of course. But then someone would overhear that joke or something. And now you're looking down the barrel of a 15-6, which is a military investigation. And all of these things that could permanently impact your life in a way and give you a scarlet letter to where you could never be employed again or do anything ever again because you were simply trying to relieve some pressure or you were trying to find out where to buy your wife 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.

48:00It's like you can't be expected to go out and shoot people in the face and then be sensitive to someone's feelings an hour later. Right. It doesn't, it does not work. Now should you talk to that guy and say, hey, you know, you made woman X feel so and so. Be more cognizant of that whenever you're around her in the future. Well, you should also have a rational discussion with the woman. Yes. And what did he ask you? He said, where did you get that dress? It's very lovely. I'd like to get one for my wife. Why were you upset at that? Like, does this, is this rational? Like how you can't be in an office if you're that sensitive? Like it's one thing if the guy said, I'd like to get you out of that dress. Okay, sure. Now we're in a different world. 100% 100%. Right. But if someone says you look great, you know, have you lost weight? You look fantastic. That's the compliment. Yes. And if someone gets upset, I felt sexually objectified. I felt harassed. Like, okay, he just said you look great. Yeah. That's it. Healthy. It's not you look great. I'd like to get you naked. Now we've crossed the Rubicon, right? Yes, we're into it.

49:00For sure, for sure. But just you look great or I like your dress. That's like, if you say that to a man, like, hey, great suit. Yeah, he's like, I need to file a complaint. Yeah, I need to file a complaint. Yeah, you've trimmed up, Joe. You're looking good. Looking great, Bill. Like, oh my God, I am being harassed. I need it like complaint. That would have worked during the Biden administration. That is fucking crazy. That would have worked. That's so crazy. And the other thing that they were doing in this briefing, which is where I kind of, you know, the last couple of years my military career, I got in trouble a couple of times or I should say, called down. I was a senior, I was a CW-4. 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 the amount of, in this briefing in particular, they had gotten into, you know, it's bad that there are so many white people.

50:01This, I'm doing high points here, but we need more diversity. I was part of an accepted career program that they were starting to call like the Old White Boys Network, because most of the people, so the requirements 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. 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 types of courses. By virtue of those things, you're going to get men. And there are, we're lots of women,

51:01but then there'll be more white men. And 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 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 I say I need more diversity in a particular room, if you said diversity of thought, I'd be fine with that. But Joe and, you know, random black guy in the same program in the same office have far more in common than the white woman. But what you're saying is these people need to have all separate different colors 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. And the only difference between these two people is the pigment of their skin.

52:02So 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 afterwards. I said way more than that. But essentially afterwards they're like, hey, Chief, 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 so. This is being rational. Yeah, just trying to be rational and say that there's more difference in groups than there is between groups. And that the similarities and the way that things stack up, you recruit from a pool of volunteers and candidates. If I'm recruiting from a pool of volunteers and candidates who are 80% male and white, I have to expect that the selected individuals are going to be male and white. The majority of people who join the military, I don't control this. I'm just, as an engineer, I'm looking at statistics. Also, if you want a highly functional productive group, it's got to be based on meritocracy. Yeah, for sure, for sure.

53:02Anything other than that is literally a threat to national security. Yeah, you're denigrating lethality. Yeah, the role of the army is to deter war through exuding superior military fighting and technology. And when deterrence fails to win, that's it. Those are the 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 them, 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, or that's a separate question. But the entity itself needs to comport itself in this way. Otherwise, you are endangering this truly special experiment, which, at least in its beginnings, valued the individual. It valued individual rights and states rights. 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

54:03would 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, no, everyone's going to be free. There will be no slaves. You would have never gotten ratification through this other in states. But they knew that when you read the Federalist papers, they knew that they were erecting this system. When you look at Thomas Jefferson and some of these other great thinkers, who, yes, the own slaves, they get it. They knew what they were building, and they knew what it 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. I know this has all been said here a million times, but this stuff animates me because it's built with blood and treasure. Well, it's also you can't judge people from the past based on the standards of the present.

55:03For sure. Because culture changes, people understand things better. We have a much greater recognition of what was wrong with things 100 years ago, 200 years ago. And I'm sure in the future, we're going to look back on today with the same lens. There's, it just always works that way. Did you know Joe had a gas powered car? Exactly. That kind of stuff. Yeah. Did you know that? You consumed more, you flew more, you ate more meat, you did whatever you did, you were a problem. He was a problem. Yeah. And now why would we ever, like I'm voting to get rid of the Joe Rogan experience from the National Archives? Because you drove a gas car? Yeah. You know what I mean? Like someone, you know, stores your stuff for a profundity sake for the future to hear about this. You know, 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.

56:04And let it, you know, led to a lot of great things. But it led to an updating of the system. And you did it with dialogue, with the deologus, with, you know, two people trying to learn things about each other. And it led to an updating 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. And the celebration of good ideas. 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. So I'm fond of my last podcast with him. I'm like a 1996 Bill Clinton Democrat. If you go watch the state of the union, and he talks about lowering debt, getting out of debt actually,

57:06working with Newt Greenbridge to get out of debt, securing the borders, making work and education freely accessible. I'm voting for that guy. I know, isn't it crazy? That's why the problem of labels doesn't work. Ideological labels. Because if you go back far enough and look at Clinton, for example, he's one of the best ones. And by the way, did balance the budget. Yeah, he did. We had a surplus when you left the office. Amazing. Did a fucking amazing job. So he got his dick sucked. Yeah. Who didn't? Back then, that's the other thing. Judging people by the standards of the past, JFK doesn't look so good in the Me Too movement. Right. He and our canceled. It's like you have to recognize that those, this ideological bubble that we find ourselves in, left versus right, Bill Clinton does not fit in that. Bill Clinton is securely on the right in terms of 1996 standards applied to today. He would never want to hear that. No, he would never want to hear that.

58:06Because he's kind of shifted with the zeitgeist, because that's what you kind of have to do. If you want to stay in your party and be protected by your party. Yes. But he's essentially, he had a lot of the, and we've talked about this before, we've played clips of Hillary Clinton from 2008. And she's more mega than mega. I know. Her take on the border was like hardcore. Was hardcore. If you've been convicted of a crime, get out. If you stay here, pay a stiff penalty, and you have to get in line. And you have to learn English and everybody cheers. That is a hardcore right wing 2026 perspective. Obama did it two in 2012. Absolutely. And Obama deported more people than Trump. Yes, exactly. This episode is brought to you by threat locker. Data breaches are happening more frequently than ever. And it's not because of sophisticated tactics. Attackers are using the same methods and exploiting the same vulnerabilities. What's changed is speed and scale. Reacting to breaches can leave you exhausted,

59:07constantly chasing threats, instead of preventing them. That's where threat locker comes in. With threat locker zero trust, you only allow what you need and block everything else by default. You control what runs, when, where, and how, blocking ransomware before it executes. Because no matter how you respond, a fast response simply isn't fast enough. Visit threatlocker.com slash JRE to learn more. And it's just, my thought is, I'm always updating, I'm always updating my systems. I'm always getting told things. I always have a pre-scribed 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 the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, and their core foundational principles are changing, it really should give you cause for concern. Because you were saying this at this time,

1:00:08and now you're saying this at that time, it's like, generally, my rubik that I don't think will change about myself is, I'm fervently for the individual, and I'm fervently for truth. And that we can, that the world you should measure it and look at, not what your intentions are, but what the outcomes are. And then evaluate the system and how it scales based on those outcomes. That's principally, I try to live that standard up to myself. I fall short of that standard all the time, but I try to be in a human. I try to live by that standard, and I feel like that will always be me, even into my 90s. Unless something goes horribly wrong. Right, right. And I've pretty much been here since the past seven or eight years or so, even into my 30s, I wasn't quite sure who I was as a human, but 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 my home and the things I've been able to do

1:01:10have really been born out of that last seven years of, the truth's gonna be the top 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 the truth is the way that I'll organize and function myself in life. And that I will try to only judge people as individuals. And the world, you know, these are Christ's teachings from 2000 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 proximately around you. It might make you hate the government more. Yeah. But I don't think if you don't hate the government,

1:02:11I think you're not paying attention. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, when you were working in cyber defense, like what cyber offense? Cyber offense. What was the primary function? Like what did you do? So in the beginning, I have no short answers, and I apologize. In the beginning? I don't like short answers. Yeah, I just, I always feel like I'm... I like a good lawyer. Yeah, I worry about that. Okay. When I joined the military, I was in signals intelligence. And essentially learning the ins and outs of radars. How radars work, what they do, how they function. Did you guys ever see any weird shit? Like UFO shit? I wish I had. I really do. I wish I had too. 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 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,

1:03:11SA-7 here, there's a SA-10 here, there's this here, there's there, and then telling these pilots, so they didn't get shot out of the sky. Quickly when the war kicked off, that became irrelevant because there was no surface air missiles, surface to surface missiles in Iraq. We had knocked them all out in the first few weeks. So then it shifted to communications intelligence. So I kind of retrained on communications intelligence, and that was at that time off of cell phones, off of push-and-talk radios, repeaters, long-haul networks, terrestrial networks, extraterrestrial networks, and what I mean by that, satellites in the sky. 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 a combatant commander wants to know where the bad guys are, what they're doing, what they're saying. To the event, to the amount that we could, my job was to come up with solutions and conduct passive and active signals analysis on these things, and then inform the commander so that we could mitigate risk.

1:04:14It was all about mitigation of risk. This is 2008 or so. I've been doing this for about seven years, eight years. And from there it shifted to the phones getting smart, and essentially it went from you walking around with a 2G phone or a 3G phone that had limited capability to, now there's robust 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 on with a computer we could never have envisioned 20 years ago in their pocket with all this capability. Because the military and our forces that were 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 defensive 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 there was a thought going into,

1:05:16you 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, 2006, 2008, all the way into my last deployment in 2017 or 2017. 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 your question was how did I get into all of that? And that was the, that was the, how do you get into it? What was, what was like, what was the operational aspect of it? Like how did you actually, what did you do? So, you know, there's, there's all stick to terms that are more generally understood by the public, but learning how to do things like war driving, collecting on networks, Wi-Fi, you know,

1:06:17endpoints, cell phones, understanding the internet, so that I'm understanding how to do forensic analysis of them. So after there was an operation and a bunch of gorillas have been sent in to kill a bad guy, we could derive maximum intelligence value from the handset to plan other operations. And so, you know, it would be passive monitoring of networks to inform the intelligence picture, which would lead to either combat operations or active computer network operations. Where now it's like, well, there's, you know, I don't know a, and Iraq, you're 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

1:07:17to mitigate risk for the commander. And so that really, you know, exploded at that point and between that and human intelligence, which is kind of 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. You was? I mean, yeah, you know, your job's to remain anonymous and you're walking into a casino and there's gold fingers 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 a 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 over and clandestine operations throughout the theater at that time. My, you know, my deployments and my time was spent in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Northern Africa.

1:08:18And 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. One of maybe say seven or 10 years, we were doing combat operations in the Southern Philippines. My first deployment to the Southern Philippines was 2007. Who were we doing operations again? So there were terrorist elements down there that we're traveling back and forth from Pakistan and Afghanistan. And there was a terrorist organization down there called the Abu Sayf group. And there were other ones as well, Jamah, Islamia, I think was the name of the other one. And they were conducting their own terrorist anti-Christian operations in the Southern part of the Philippines and the Southern part of the Philippines. I don't, can I say it? Can I say the word? What do you mean? Jamie, can you pull up a map of the Philippines? Can you pull it up? Oh, can you say that? I want to say the term, yeah, I've pulled up Jamah. Been listening to it forever. So there's what's called the autonomous region of Muslim Mininau, which is the Southern part from like a place called Zamwanga down to Hulu or Hulu

1:09:20Island. And there's a, it's a funny joke because if you zoom in to Zamwanga, which is... God, look at how many islands there. I know, go down to the south there. You see Zambo, go down right there, right, right, zoom right there on that island. Now move to, sorry, now move to the southwest. You see that penis? At the tip of that penis is called Zamwanga. All of our combat operations. Now if you zoom out a little bit more 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 Zamwanga city, this, their terrace operations in here. Now if you go to that main island called Sulu or Hulu Island, that's where I was. On this tiny island out in the middle of nowhere and on that, there's a mountain. That's all the Philippines? Well, no, I mean, this is all the Philippines down here yet. So this is called, there's a mountain in there. I think it was called Mount Tumatok or something like that. On the near, on the eastern part of the island called Luke. It's called Luke.

1:10:20Yeah, 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. In fact, there was a guy and I believe I'm going to get his name wrong, perhaps. But I believe his name, it was either insulin haplon or, oh, it's Jamar Patek. Jamar Patek. He was actually arrested outside of Osama Bin Laden's compound the day after he was killed. 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. So they're terrorists, facilitators. They did the USS Cole bombing. Well, you 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 are. Yeah, so up north. Up north of Manila is mostly the Christian 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. And I believe that mostly pulled out of there, might be still some people in Zambuanga.

1:11:21I'm not sure anymore because it's been five years, four years since I retired. But yeah, we were doing counter-insurgency operations down there and guys died down there and they're combat operations. And I was out there. I was an tactical military intelligence battalion and I was attached to a first special forces group. And we were down there a couple of times. And a lot of people don't even know about it. Yeah, I never heard about it. Yeah, so anyway. I'm sorry, but I'm so stunned at how many islands are in the Philippines, they'll spread out of this. Yeah, it's insane. And the thing about it is, I go to all of these little outposts in these out islands, we're 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 bonger eyes or something like that. But they're like these mayors of each one of these little islands. And there would be terrorists in and around those areas. And we'd try to make friends with these guys so they give us some information. And every one of those places was absolutely beautiful. Like you'd go there and be like, man,

1:12:22Hilton could turn this into something in a short order. You know, when you're out of these places, beautiful beach, beautiful lush jungles, the best swimming water. Nice as people too. Oh, Filipino people are some of my favorite people, man. Like you want to talk, the guys that we work with out there, they're scout, I think they're called scouts, sniper scout rangers. And they were, I think they were like their special forces. We go to the range with these guys and show them stuff. And they're the most rider 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 them. It's like, no, dude, it's cool. It's like, don't worry about it. Like fun fact, there's some of the best pool players on earth too. Oh, really? Some of the greatest pool players of all time. Came out of the pool space. They're just great people. I mean, I just, 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

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1:14:26It's one of those small upgrades that actually makes a noticeable difference every single day. Look with over 30 million pairs sold. There are thousands of people wearing Tommy John right now who are way more comfortable than you. Don't settle, upgrade, I upgraded my day with Tommy John and you should too. Go to TommyJohn.com slash Rogan right now and experience comfort perfected. Save 25% off your first order with code Rogan. That's TommyJohn.com slash Rogan. People down there were fantastic, and it was awful because those guys would be bombing churches, Christian churches and stuff like that, and the doing counter operations, counter intelligence operations out there doing intelligence operations collection to inform that battle picture. But those guys had direct links with Asama Bin Laden and other people. No idea. Yeah, right after we, like I said, I think it was, I think if you look it up, I think his name is Patek, P-A-T-E-K, and he was arrested outside

1:15:26of Asama Bin Laden's compound, and we had been chasing him in the Philippines. Wow. Because we thought he was still down there. There was another guy that I believe we killed him. His name was El-Bader Parade. 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 Holo or in Afghanistan or anywhere else, taper around my glasses and, you know, pes 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 MRE and somebody that looked like another gorilla, you know, like an anti-stum

1:16:28for Tim Kennedy or someone like that would 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 and 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, you know, my mother, single mother, after she left that first guy, trailer house in the middle of this little town called Cavalier North Dakota. I had no options. I was a horrible student. And what did you get? That's crazy that you're so smart, but you were horrible students. I wouldn't, yeah, I'd call myself curious before I'd call myself smart. But, you know, my mother, 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. They'll always be on the back page and it'll 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 coil radio that you could order with an earpiece

1:17:30and you put this coil radio together. And with an earpiece, no battery. It was just the electromagnetic radiation would activate the coil and the coil would, you could listen to radio chatter. Really, with no battery? Yeah, yeah, just tiny little radio. How did it, what was the power? The electromagnetic radiation. And you would just kind of like a record of like, you know, how you hit a record. Electromagnetic radiation would hit the coil and the coil would feed up to an amplifier or up to an earpiece and the earpiece, you could hear chatter and you could do that. Did the earpiece have a battery? No, I don't think anything had a battery on it. Yeah, I think it was just a... Wow. I could be mistaken, but I don't believe it was. I was by electromagnetic radiation. Yeah, I mean, you could look it up, Jamie, if you want. Sorry to say that again, but... I think that thing down there, things driving crazy. Yeah, sorry. Like you're here. Right here, look at my finger. It's right here. Yeah, I've been meaning to do that like literally when everybody uses this fucking thing, it's wobbling around ready to fall off. Yeah, but if you look up coil radio with small earpiece,

1:18:31I could be wrong. I don't remember there being a battery on it. Electromagnetic radiation power, that's bananas. Yeah, so kind of like a... It's the same thing with like, you know, not the same wattage, but a microwave, right? Sends power through the air. Right, but it uses DC. But it uses power to send it. Yeah, but I could be wrong. But at any rate, that was the first time I got a radio and I was hearing things and I'd put it together and I'm listening to things and... Like what kind of things? HF radio, VHF radio, people talking, that type of stuff. And 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 really changed 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 Colp. And he had an old 286 SX IBM. And it was just sitting in his basement. I told my mom, I was like, hey, if I clean for like a month, can I have that computer?

1:19:31Like 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 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 Monser-Brotten. 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? How could I force this thing to run Windows 3.1 so I could have a GUI instead of using command line? GUI mean graphic user interface. Graphic user interface. Yeah, sorry. And so that kind of started being on that. And that, for me, like I said, I had all kinds of problems with the tension deficit disorder and not being able to pay attention. That was the only time that I would go for yesterday. I don't remember. Believe in ADHD.

1:20:32I might be wrong. No, I think it's a superpower. I mean, I remember I would spend two days working on a problem and not sleeping. That's what I'm saying. I think it's a superpower. I think it just keeps you from being interested in things you're not interested in. Yeah, I have a theory on that too that I can get into after. But that started me down that road. But in school, I couldn't pay attention to this. Me neither. There was this teacher. I always tell a story. It's a great teacher. She's still around. Her name is Connie Trenbeth. And she was my English teacher or literature teacher, or something like that. She might not even remember the story, but here I am telling it on your podcast. I remember it. She kept me after class one. She goes, you know, I knew your dad bill. And, you know, your uncles roll smart. And 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 of this great stuff and built all this stuff. And essentially what she was telling me is you're a waste of life. Like all you do is you come in here,

1:21:34you 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. Yeah. 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 her. I think she said, waste of life. I think she actually said that. Like you're wasting, like you're obviously, my CPU clocks high. I'm always thinking even when I'm not thinking and even as we're sitting here talking, I'm thinking about other things. Or stuff I want to do when I get back to my computer or stuff I want to do for my business. And so I joined the military and the absurdity of life is this. I joined to be a military policeman, which I absolutely would have hated. All of them got turned into infantry people or stand gate guard, which needed function in the military. But it doesn't apply to my personality. But when I went to the recruiter station

1:22:35out in 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 dumped my girlfriend, told everyone goodbye. I wiped the dust off my boots, like left Cavalier, North Dakota. And I was like, hey, I'm not going back. So whatever we got to do right now. And he's like, well, you can go home, get your license because the MEPs station was in Minneapolis. Was it far ago? 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 exceptionally high in your general technical 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 got to go brief you in this skiff room.

1:23:36There's a secure compartmental information facility. 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, I'm dangling, I'm dangling. I was like, yeah, I don't know. And so they walked me into this back place and 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, I can connect with a string to forgetting my driver's license to being here with you today. You can sign up when you're 16? I think I was turning 17. You can sign up when you, I didn't even know you can sign up when you're 17. Yeah, I didn't sign my delayed entry program thing. And I left a little bit before my 18th birthday. So I was graduated from high school. But yeah, you can sign up when you're 16, I believe. As long as your parents signed the waiver. My mother signed the waiver, she was happy to get me

1:24:37out of the trailer. So yeah, I was 17, almost 18 when I left. I made a radio out of that. Yeah, right there. That's all the pieces. They call it a crystal radio. Yeah, I was going to say crystal controlled. That's a radio. There it is. That's actually the exact thing. That looks almost, that is almost exactly what it looks like. Slinky made it. Well, they bought the brand, they just let the slinky brand now. There's a bunch of these all over the internet, yeah. Wow. Make your own working radio without batteries. Yeah, and it uses, I was going to say crystal controlled radio because it uses a crystal diode on it. Would you say Tesla coil, Jamie? It's a Tesla coil. He's going to explain it again. So this thing has a kind of cool to 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, there's a picture of it somewhere on here. But it explains, like you're picking up, there you go. Wow, no battery, a current needed,

1:25:40hence no operating expense and long life. Yeah, this is a little space onto a phone. What year was this? Man, this is a little. Yeah. It also shows here, you're picking up power from a radio tower. Yeah. Wow. And they're powerful. This is cool, like what they're paying for at the FCC, the more powerful your radio tower, the longer and more people you can reach. Crazy, that has no battery. And that's also why some radio signals come in very well on your radio. And some don't, it's like dog shit. Yeah. Yeah. And then the frequency modulation, like amplitude modulation isn't as efficient as frequency modulation when it comes to, for the vocorder, to produce sound. Amplitude modulation travels farther, but it doesn't have the amount of information. It's not modulated with the carrier away if 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 sound

1:26:40or met more information, which is why it sounds better. So FM sounds better, but it doesn't travel as far. Right. And it sounds worse. I always, when I was training people in the military on this, I always used the analogy of, if a party is happening next door, you can hear the bass music. You can't hear the treble. You can hear the bass music because that frequency travels farther because it's lower in their frequency band. But you can hear the treble, 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 VLF comms coming off of 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 VHF or UHF comms, where there's lots of modulation. So it's the dispersal. And a lot of my, part of my career was explaining this stuff to military guys who were trying to understand, here's how a cell phone works. And this is how frequency works. And this is how we send information.

1:27:40And just kind of demystifying how a GSM network works. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about that is when new technology is emerging, how do you stay ahead of the ability to extract information from this technology, hack into networks before people understand the capability? You really can't. You really can't. And that's the beauty of the free market, is that the innovation to perform the function that you want someone to pay for will always move faster than your ability to exploit the technology. Then how do you explain things like Pegasus? Well, I mean, something like Pegasus, well, first off, explain Pegasus to people that don't know. It was a persistent implant on cell phones for people. Initially, it was, you had to click it. It was a click. Initially, it was a click, a click,

1:28:40and 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, but the reason the white 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 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. 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 allowed people to own your phone and was the kind of implant I only dreamed of when I was helping develop my own implants

1:29:42in the military. Mostly what we would rely on is 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 and they'll discover like, oh, you know, 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 this port is no longer accessible by guy like me. So I can't go in there and do something to this particular type of router. Another great thing, I'll say something good about the administration. They're doing some stuff right now to make sure that we're getting rid of Chinese technology and Chinese routers. And there's a widespread network of them. The PLA has, 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

1:30:43and business proximal people. And it was widespread and huge. And 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. 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 architecture from the overseas because they don't play by the same rules that we at least say we play by. That's why they banned Huawei devices. Oh yeah, and ZTE. Yeah. Well, Huawei had a phone that I was really interested in back in the day. They had a Porsche design, had partnered with Huawei and made this insane Android phone. It was like the best camera, the best battery. It was like really high level.

1:31:44And 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 went into a deeper and I said, no, it seems like there's third party input on some of their routers and some of their network devices that they had engineered in order to be able to access them by third party. And this, because of whatever, lack of understanding, lack of knowledge of how these things are constructed, the people that purchased them, weren't aware of them. And these things had gotten into place. And they had gotten into place in universities. They got into place in military establishments. They were using them in cell phone towers that people had, you know, inadvertently bought from China. Yep. This episode is brought to you by Focus Features. On March 27th, Focus Features invite you to be a part

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1:33:46or you can grab some of their limited release stuff directly from their website. Go to AthleticBruing.com slash Rogan to find stores near you or get brews shipped right to your door. Use code Rogan to get 15% off your first online order. Near beer, terms and condition and certain limitations apply, Athletic Brewing Company fit for all times. 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 didn't talk about that's just on mobile forensics and media forensics, which is essentially you think of like CSI Miami or CSI whatever the city was. There's a crime, someone was killed, you have forensics that are doing forensics on like blood and fingerprints and blood splatter and all that stuff. There's a whole another part of that same forensics branch that focuses on media forensics. What was deleted off this phone at one point, what 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

1:34:47and it 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 and stuff like that. And it was my job and I had a great team that worked for me. In my deployment in 2015, we would go in afterwards, gather up all of this stuff. And the task force commander would literally be standing by and we'd say, here's the intelligence that we've derived. Here's the multipoint analysis. It was on this hard drive. It was here, it was here. 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 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 was just a different discipline. But essentially, I'll get into that later if you want to. But launching and doing these follow on operations off, dumping the binary from a phone and examining it, the ones and zeros level to say everything that was going on

1:35:49with this thing or if it was a really high, like the organization that I worked for at that time, did the analysis of the sum of bin Laden media. And on that media, we're doing far more than we would for another piece of media and that we're x-raying it and we're looking at maybe what the disk looked like before or 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. And so that was another part of my career that I did for about five years or so. What was going on with the Huawei phones? Like what were they doing with them? I mean, some of them were coming out implanted and 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 would use and they weren't doing it. So they were creating persistent backdoors

1:36:51either 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 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 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. 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? 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 is a guy who used to do this work back in the day

1:37:53because you're talking to the president or you're talking to this guy or that guy and I can build out 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 an, 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 go, they would want this in the hands of somebody who's in charge of a business because they want their IP, they would want this in soldier's hands so they would know deployment dates or who's going where and who's doing what? They want this in routers because routers are usually the most unpatched piece of technology in that, especially, you know, these days they're more automated patching, but back in the day, like you had to manually update a router. And if you didn't, well, then you had potential exploits that were sitting on that router where I could gain access to your router in your home or I could gain access to a BGP router, which is like a board of a gateway, which is moving all of the internet data

1:38:53or 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 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. Wow. And so as far as today's technologist, you use an Android phone. Is there a phone that is more secure or a platform that is more secure? It all depends. Like I always take this from Thomas Sol. There are no answers. There are only trade-offs. So 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,

1:39:55if you're just an average everyday citizen, you're just going about your job, you know, the phones today are pretty secure, especially versus a few years ago. If you're a reporter, now the next 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 an, 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 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. What is lockdown mode? I don't know if that's exactly what it was called or not because I've never really used Apple just for my own personal reasons. What personal reasons? I don't trust Apple. How so? 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,

1:40:56you'll get these questions where it says, if you're the passwords 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. Lockdown mode is an extreme optional protection. 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. Yeah, so when I was advising guys back in the day on going out and doing like a high risk source meet, so they're going to go meet, you know, a spy for another country and you're a military guy and you're debriefing someone or doing something, I was always telling them to use lockdown mode. I knew that it did those things. I didn't know if that was the term or if I thought that out. So can you still send iMessages? You can still text and call. Text and call, that's it. But there's other things that you can't do. And so when you're like meta just recently announced they're no longer encrypting your DMs. Why would they do that?

1:41:56Well, they said that it's for protection or whatever to make sure that people are doing bad things. I don't know what, see what their explanation for it was. Well, I'm worried about this reporter. 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. 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. Dangerous behind meta killing end-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs, meta-blamed users are not opting into the privacy protective feature. Experts fear the move could be the first major domino to fall for end-to-end encryption tech worldwide. That's a horrible narrative. Yeah, it seems squirrely. So, oh, you've read your last free article.

1:43:00Oh my God, give me money, motherfucker. 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'd love to have this conversation. In my opinion, we're the only ones that are, after May 8, 2026, announced plans, discontinue support for end-to-end encryption for chats on Instagram. If you have chats that are impacted by this change, you will see instructions on how you can download any media or messages you may want to keep. Social media giant said in a help document, if you're on an older version of Instagram, you may also need to update the app before you can download your affected chats. When reached for comment, this is what meta had to say. Very few people are opting for end-to-end encrypted messages in 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? WhatsApp. Yeah, I mean, they're all squirrely. And that's the problem.

1:44:00And so you ask me why I don't trust them. It's because they want to, so humans, in my opinion, and some animals are the only things 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 spent our, I was doing artificial intelligence in 2012, 2011. Before it was even a catch term, we were using artificial intelligence to map dynamic networks and do other things. More pragmatic uses of it than how it's being used today with large language models or convolutional neural networks. But they need consciousness to train their models. So when Google offers you meta or Instagram or whoever else offers you photo storage is because they want your face to train neural networks. If they're going to pay for the compute, if they're going to pay for the storage for these things, they're doing it because they're going to use the data. If you're getting a free app, in essence, any free app, any, if you're, the product's free,

1:45:00then you're the product. So when Google is allowing you to use a Google drive and get a gig of storage, they're going to use those photos to train neural networks to do better facial recognition. What if you're paying for Google Drive? I don't know about their terms of service now. That is one of the best things that I use with large language models is any product I download, I have the neural network examine the terms of service. And then you can pretty much understand, 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 that's one of the great uses of a large language model in my opinion is to quickly understand what how these things are being used. And that's why I say with Apple, with Meta, with all of these large information, you are more the product than the products, the product. And that is because they're trying to build the most powerful, capable, artificial intelligences, which I think some is no more. And again, we can get into it later, but they're trying to build these hyper-competent, artificial intelligences. And you need two things for that.

1:46:01Really, is training data and you need compute. And that's why you start seeing them coming out with like Meta's building. It's on nuclear engineering facility, or something nuclear facility, or something like that. And they need more training data. So if I want to 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 companies offering you something for free, and it's fine, like if people 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 want to see how you type. They want to see what you're saying. They want to see how you're thinking about things. They want to understand your political biases. They want to 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

1:47:02because the big money is in AI. That's where the biggest money is. So anytime you're doing any of these things, it's just been obvious to me from the onset, but pretty close to the onset that, yeah, this is a good example, right? Pokemon Go players built a 30 billion photo map. That's how training robots deliver your pizza. There you go. So they view and they can say they don't. And maybe if someone from there catches this podcast, which they well could, they 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. And what is the difference between using Apple and using Android? Well, Android will do the same things and Google will do the same things. It's just that I can route my phone or I can install a custom operating system like graphene or something like that, which I'm not doing right now. I had to make a sacrifice when I started my company,

1:48:04Spartan 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. And I just made that trade and said, I'm gonna have to become a public person and start putting things out there. And so, you know, when I started the company, we started our first Instagram and I started my marketing team started my first Instagram. And I had to start uploading things and talking about how I felt about things because 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.

1:49:05Other 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 tricky call or an out call or something, and you found Spartan forage and you said, man, I think about two million emails. I could pay them a half million dollars for that two million dollars and start some 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. So the reason why you use Android over Apple is the ability to root it and install things like graphene. Yeah, custom OSs and... But yeah, you don't use it. I'm not now, but what I still can use and what I still do use is Android also publishes their framework in an open source fashion where you can look at the, it's called AOSP, Android open source project.

1:50:06So the basis of Android, the nuts, think of it as the nuts and bolts. I'll try not to talk in two 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. They don't publish any of that. You can't see any of that stuff. I'm for the free and open version because at least if I'm worried about my phone having a problem, I can actually dump binary or I can create Neo1 file in Exume. 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 they're, McAfee or whatever they're using. I would have to trust them, which I don't. So I like the Android because... Is that option available for the average consumer that's not that learned in computers? Well, the great part about large language models now is if you wanted to dump your own phone today, you could follow along with the large language model

1:51:08and do it. Your own Android. And how would you do that? Well, you would have to buy some expensive... There is something... You'd either have to pay a firm to do it or you could download things like a... Celebrate, you could get a celebrate. Or there's other things called forensic toolkit, other things like that, that allow you to examine your phone at a deeper level. And is this an app for... They're products. Products. So it's a physical product that you... You have to dump your phone into? Yeah, and they're software. And they're just connecting and all that type of stuff. Tools I used to throw out my military career. Celebrate was one of them, but they're Israeli owned. I've got nothing against Israel. I've just got everything against foreign actors. Just if they're not an American company that automatically kicks them down a level for me. So anyway, there's all kinds of... Android just makes it much easier to examine your phone or to understand if you've got something going on that's funky than it is on Apple. So for the average person, like for me, like if I...

1:52:10You're not the average person. Well, let's pretend I am. If I got an Android phone and I wanted to examine my phone, what would be the process? Well, 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 the binary of your phone. 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 all of those things. And then determine because Android open source project is published, you could do a one-for-one and say, well, at the kernel level, there's this weird code that's not in the Android build. So what is this code? And then with the neural network, you could... I've never done it, but I'm sure you could figure out what the intent is of that code, even for a layperson. So I could take that information, I could put it into perplexity. And perplexity would lay out what's going on with it.

1:53:10Ostensively, it would be able to, yes, unless it was some type of weird code. I don't know if I haven't used perplexity, so I don't know if they have something like ChatGBT's codex. But... I just tried just to be like, can you help me examine my Android phone and is doing a looking for any malicious actors? Yes, I can walk 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 and 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. Just asking like, why do you want to do it? So this is just something that you could do with an Android phone that you just can't do with the Apple. Yeah, Apple's not open. So what are the reasons you don't trust Apple? Well, could I ask, can I do one thing before we... Remember that question, so I want to forget it. Could I give you a prompt?

1:54:11Because I want to answer your first question that we've already gone past. Can you bring perplexity back up, please? You want to go to addition of that or start a new one? No, this is fine. Just say, my friend helped me carve an E01 file. E-E-E-E-E-O-O-Squer, E01 file. And he says that there is code in there that doesn't comport with the rest of the Android system. Yeah, PRT, the rest of the system. Could I dump that code here and could you tell me what it means? I'm sure it the answers yes, but I just didn't want to answer it because I've never done it. Could you tell me? Could you tell me, Jeremy? Could you tell me what it means? Yeah. Get the U out. Get the U. Tell me you. Could I have some of your coffee, please?

1:55:12Yeah, absolutely. It's for you. Okay, let's see what it says. Done out. Yes, you can paste a spacious code here and I can help explain what it means. 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 using names, passwords, keys, tokens, IPs, email addresses, phone, perplexities are sponsored. I love that because you'd never get that from chat GPT. You'd want all that information. Perplexities, the shit. And so you're not sharing personal or case-sensitive information. Wonderful perplexity. If it's very long, send in chunks, and tell me chunk one, dash three, chunk two, dash three, et cetera, 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. 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

1:56:12with the rest of the system. And tell me, in a sentence or two, where in the EO1, it came from example app folder, system partition, random file path. Yep, no, 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 Apple, by the way. I'm sorry if I mispoke there, but you can't do it to the level that you can with. Because the Android OpenSource project publishes all of the code, I can get an understanding of the very inner working. So if something's being done, for instance, at the kernel, or you could think about it as 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. 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. And what is the difference between what someone can do

1:57:14with an Android phone with the standard Android operating system versus graphing? 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 Android operating kit. But as far as on a consumer level, like what protections do you have by running graphene that you don't have by running Android? Much more in control of the ecosystem. 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 or if your camera is taking pictures of you when 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 control of on a native Android app. In control of how so would it alert you that this is happening?

1:58:17Or just the functionality wouldn't be there for it to take place. Right, because the functionality is, it's only designed for the standard Android operating system. And I haven't installed graphene in a while. So a lot of us, all of us updates, and I could be saying things that are incorrect. My data, I stopped doing this about three years ago. I know that there was, I forget what country it was, but they were focusing on people who use Google Pixel phones, for example. Because that's one of the phones that are more commonly rooted. 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 part of that. Is it complicated? For a person like me that's not that astute? No, it's not something I would do with a phone that you care about the first few times. Because you're going to jack things up. You have to get the boot loader. And essentially, 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. Is that available for all Android phones? No, no, not all Android phones. Lots of them lock it down so you can't do that.

1:59:17Is that available for Samsung phones? No, not this one. So the question has to become, can you unlock the boot loader? And that is the starting, think of it as the starting engine of the rest of the phones. Why is that only available on Google Pixel phones? I'm not sure why they do it that way. I haven't looked into that. It was just pixels. And the older Samsung's made it available. The older Galaxy S7s S10s, you could do more than you can with like, you know, I've got the Galaxy Fold here. And you can do almost none of that on here. That is not going to be sweet, though. 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 haven't written an 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, I'm assistant going through my email and all those other types of things. It just wasn't pragmatic anymore for me to keep doing that. And I had to give up that part. Does it start in the forward, your app, or run on graphene?

2:00:18Yeah, well, it could. Yeah, wood. You have to side load the app. But again, a large language model could walk you through doing that. So we haven't gotten to that level of. Does it make sense here that this is easier because Google makes it easier? Yeah, he was just asking me why they make it easier. I don't know that answer. 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. 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 a 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 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.

2:01:19I've got friends who do that. So you and I talked about Eric Prince's phone. Yes. That which is, so the narrative is that that is an unhackable phone. Yeah, just by virtue of, look, Eric's a wonderful guy. And he's the principles that he used for the first instantiation that phone are the correct principles, which is we need to get if you want, if your security focused at all, you should get away from these big, large conglomerates because none of your data is private. That's a correct principle. An incorrect principle. And I'm going to get shit about this. But I told you in the beginning, I care about the truth. And I do care about the truth. Is that when you're using a PKI subsystem that relies on Microsoft, then you're not controlled the PKI of 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

2:02:21using as the engine, let's just call it that of your phone, is examinable by the public. So you're relying on Android to publish these 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 going to be, it's going to have Swiss cheese. So when people say something is unhackable, as you said, that's just not true. Yeah, it didn't make sense to me. It was just not true. I talked about it. Yeah, we talked about it quite a bit. Like I said, great guide and 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. Just like, if I came up with an app that had a, you know, look at the TikTok Terms of Service on the first TikTok. Oh, it's bonkers.

2:03:21With 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 key logger in that. And now I know your signal password or your signal pin or, you know, you're going to China, so I stop you in secondary. And while you're in secondary, I've got a CCTV on you and you unlock your phone. Now I know how to unlock your phone. Now I'm going to lock you up in secondary at Customs in China or in Canada. And I'm going to separate you from your phone. And I've seen you unlock it. Well, now I'm going to get in there with end case, or I'm going to get in there with FTK, or I'm going to get in there with Celebrate. And I'm going to dump your phone. And just by virtue of it being built on the Android Open Source project, that's a great thing. That'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,

2:04:21like here's the hole in the Swiss cheese. Now is it far better than having a Google phone with standard firmware, 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 of services document is pervasive. 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. So me, what would you recommend I use? I mean, I wouldn't want to. I mean, OK, 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 checks and balances is what I would want.

2:05:24But 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 everything should be routed through that. And if you trust Apple, continue using Apple. If you don't trust Apple, then use Android. And you could use a pixel and do graphene, and you could use signal on there, and those other things. You're going to 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 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 whole of somebody shit. You can always create the circumstances, especially if you're a nation state actor, to get a whole of somebody's stuff.

2:06:25That would be the very high level of things that I would recommend to you. This episode is brought to you by SimplySafe. We spend an absurd amount of time on our devices. And some days, there are times when I can't stand to look or even think about all the notifications that pop up on my phone. But it's not a good idea to ignore everything, like a ping from your security camera. That could be a disaster. There are times when you just can't answer your phone, though, like if you're out in the middle of nowhere, camping or hiking or fishing with little to no cell phone reception. That's why it's important to get a security system that can take action when you can't, like SimplySafe. These guys do a great job of being proactive about your safety and well-being. Because in addition to smart cameras, they also have live monitoring agents at the ready. If an alarm goes off or a camera spots something suspicious, they'll jump in and take action. And that's not the only thing that makes SimplySafe a good choice. There's no long-term contracts and an anti-theft guarantee.

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2:08:26specialist will fix it back by another good number, the million dollar protection package. In fact, restoration is guaranteed or your money back. Don't face identity theft and financial losses alone. There's strength in numbers with LifeLock identity theft protection for tax season and beyond. Visit LifeLock.com slash JRE and save up to 40% your first year. That's 40% off at LifeLock.com slash JRE. Terms apply. Just out the gate. Yeah, it's very concerning because it seems like these things keep getting stronger and more capable. Yes, like the Pegasus 2 being a non-click exploit. Yes. So all they have to do essentially is just know your number. Yep. And that's, you know, you just make yourself a difficult target, would be my best recommendation.

2:09:28When you're going to answer questions about password reset, don't answer them honestly. Write down in a physical journal or something. How you answer those questions, don't answer them honestly. 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 with a traffic light. I was just going to say that, a traffic light in it. 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. You're a product at that point. 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 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

2:10:29with your thing that you paid $2,000 for, it's just, you know, we need more ethical people. At least what Eric Prince was trying to do was right, which was we need to off ramp from some of these big things because the way that this government is going, I'm very worried about the rights of the individual now 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 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 recent years that when we get more uneducated and we rely, largely, which 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. Like understand how to do research and site sources and understand how to conduct really good analysis

2:11:33before you just use a neural network for everything. Because as we lose focus of our civics and what our founders are trying to do and the uniqueness of it, which is truly unique, which is when I joined the army, I joined the army to get out of North Dakota when I re-enlisted in the army, it's because I believed in the experiment. And that's another five-hour podcast, but 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. 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 explain it to people and they're like, I don't see it, I don't see how that was a big deal. And I'm like, it was a total recalibration of the system

2:12:33that 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, we can go with the easy stuff like the Patriot Act, right? In the name of security, we're gonna start collecting on Americans. And the Biden and Obama administration, I will say this at risk of getting in trouble because I used to have a clearance. 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. In case they needed it. In case at some point, we needed to 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 is really in my mind the anti-pattern to freedom.

2:13:36It's just really, really bad. I mean, I'll give you one that people always crap on me whenever I talk to them about it but there's two that really bother me. One of them being like the 17th Amendment. Do you know the 17th Amendment of the Constitutional? 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 J. James Madison wrote these documents explaining the framework and the 17th Amendment, essentially how the Senate, the 50 people there that are supposed to be representing us, was originally constructed was a state would have legislatures and the state legislatures and the governor would appoint the senator. The reason that the founders did that was because the state governments had to give power to the federal government to exist. Back with the articles of what, articles of Confederation, Confederation, is that right? Articles of, I think it's the Articles of Confederation.

2:14:36I'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 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 those 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 protect the rights of individuals per se and certainly not to uphold the federal government. But with the 17th Amendment, what happened was the House of Representatives function

2:15:37was 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 House of Representatives, your 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, namely a Republican who's a ass-hat 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. 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're 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 Obama came through, you can say,

2:16:37not only know, but fuck no. Like, I'm not voting for this thing. And it was to protect the state. But what the 17th Amendment did was it was redundant. What the House of Representatives, and the founder's eyes, the only popular vote part of the American government was the popular vote. And then you had the way the president gets elected through electors, but you had the state Senate, which was appointed by the states. So the 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 was sort of 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 going to put Bill Thompson, I've never happened, but in charge, he can 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 help

2:17:38Grand Forks Fargo, 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, Lamor County and 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 Wendell 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 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. 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.

2:18:39You can't bribe these people, but the DNC and RNC now can say, look, these two senators are running. We like this guy, so we're going to, this guy will do whatever we tell him to do. And it 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 slow-removing constitutional conservative 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 and 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 and far go on ground forks in North Dakota and the hell with the rest of the state. It's very important. It's a very important slide of hand.

2:19:40And when that happened, you made a redundant house of representatives, and the state no longer 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, 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 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

2:20:40to 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. 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 and 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 isn't so great, 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

2:21:42because 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. But it's a real use or patient of individual and state autonomy that really got rid of state power, which was if you read the federal's papers was so important to the founders that there was the state that the states 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 it came before it, on how we could have a government that was forced to respect the rights of individuals

2:22:43and allowed for these competing think tanks of ideas and that the power would never rest at the federal government. But the 17th 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 vote. And under a popular vote, you would just have to campaign in New York and LA. All right. You would get the popular vote out of the likely voting people and now the rest of the country is not. And that would be another, you hear all these people saying we need a popular vote. We can't have the electoral college, we can't have all of these things. Everything needs to be pure democracy allows 51% to rule 49%. And that was another thing the founders were working for 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 in 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.

2:23:44And I could go on for 15 more things about that. I won't do it for the sake of your listeners because I doubt this is what they wanted to do. But similar things happen with the Supreme Court and 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 a robe that are gonna 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 Ritz and Mandamus that were the Supreme Court long story short, essentially granted itself the power to conduct judicial review under the old system or the old system. The system that was ratified and that the founders approved was if a law was deemed unconstitutional, it would go before the Supreme Court and they would rule in favor of the person. And then eventually the government would figure out oh, this law doesn't work.

2:24:46But it was never on the Supreme Court to say constitutional, unconstitutional. You would get arrested for some law, and it would appeal 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 it would 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 and 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 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. 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

2:25:47why there's no individual and why there's no individual autonomy, why I can't smoke weed on the weekend or why I 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 and politics if the federal government had only the powers that were outlined to it in the constitution. I think that's very well said and I could have never said it the way you said it. I think there's a lot to absorb here. I'm sorry. No, no it was great and it was great. This is one of the things that I love about you. You're very thorough. Yeah, thorough is one thing. My friends always say Bill's Tism is starting to show. You gotta touch the Tism, but I think that's good. Like I said, just like ADHD, I think it's a superpower. A lot to absorb. So I think we'll wrap it up right here, but thank you. This was an awesome conversation. I really appreciate it. It was really great. Yeah, we could do this again too. I'm sure you probably know 30 or 40 of these. We didn't even get to AI. I wanted to get to AI because I think I have a very anti-patterant to AI and how you understand it.

2:26:47But if you want, we can save that for another time. Yeah, we'll do that for our next one because I think that's another four hours. Yeah, probably. Yeah, for sure. And by then, who knows where it's going to be? Jensen, Jensen Hawaiian from NVIDIA, recently declared that we've reached AGR. Yeah, so I would, yeah, I could, yeah. I just couldn't disagree more. And I think I could, in the same way, just elucidate. You're not the only one on the conversation, people. Yeah, yeah. 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, waiting 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 on his ORC OR if people on read about that, I won't explain it. Or 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,

2:27:48he 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. We would measure things, cut things right off walls on that type of stuff. That's all consciousness projection that allowed me to get to know him away. I might not even know him if you were alive, 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 Propelixity. I could sit here with a rule book, and I could type in a calculator.

2:28:48It 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 as presence is present. It relies on its training data. It can only give you what the training data gives it. It needs human consciousness projection, like we talked about with the captures, 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 for dozens of 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. We'll do that next time, definitely. But if people, you mentioned the app. By the time we do it next time, who knows what the fuck is going on with AI, too? But if people want to learn more about me or my company, if I can say that. It's Spartanforge.ai. We're built under the rubric of individual freedom. I want people outdoors, I want people hunting, I want people experiencing nature.

2:29:48I 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, and 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 we go out there. So we built this company under that. It's one of my, I know I've got three other companies that I'm doing, but Spartanforge is the one that I'm working. It's an awesome app, really working on it. Well, I really appreciate that. We've really, a lot of work into it, and we've got a lot more coming over the summer. So 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 want, have a question for me. Good luck with that now. Well, I tried to, I spent about two hours every morning doing it. But, good luck. Thank you, Joe, for having me. Thanks brother, I appreciate you very much. Yeah, I gave it. All right, you too. Fire, buddy. This episode is brought to you by Tommy John. A lot of people are trying to feel better day-to-day, clear heads, better routines, just making small changes that actually improve how you feel.

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