#2473 - Bill Thompson

>> The Joe Rogan experience.

>> Join my day Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. [MUSIC] >> What's up, Bill? >> How you doing, Jesse, Brad? >> This is, this might be one of the coolest things anybody's ever given me.

So, gave me this knife, to explain all this. >> All right, so, I mean, there's a larger explanatory reason behind this. My brother and I grew up, my father died when I was five.

“My brother and I grew up doing, these things called Ronda Vus, have you ever heard of him?”

>> In what way, what is it? >> So, there you go, so, Ronda Vus is, it's not, you know, you go to those like, what I don't even know what they call, but people do like reenactments. >> Oh, okay, like civil war reenactments, not like that. >> So, that's the closest thing, approximation to probably what it is.

You get invited to them, or these days are easier to get to, but my stepfather, the guy my mother remarried, brought us to him, all you do is camp, but you're only allowed to camp, and no one comes to the camp, or sometimes they might have people at the end, but, while you're in the camp, everything in the camp has to be 1840 or prior.

So, that can be no modern pertinences, nothing like a, you know, refrigerator, or nothing like that. >> 1840, 18 years, but at the end of the fur trapping. In the end, 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-tank, high, to learn how to traditionally,

or do traditional archery, stuff like that. So, anyway, this knife was a knife. I actually started working on my brother a while ago. I do more of like the brain-taning, a tomahawk. >> And when you say brain-taning, you talk about using brains to tan animal highs.

>> Yes, using animal brains. >> Yeah, what does brains do? What does brain-taning? >> It softens the leather in a natural way. And what's cool about it is every animal, no matter what animal you kill,

has the exact amount of brain-needed in order to tan the hide. So, you don't need any additional, like people use egg yolks or mayonnaise or something like that. All you do is you take the brain out of the cavity, you grind it up, you mix it into some water, and then after you've, after you've cleaned the leather, and you've scraped it clean, you stretch it, I usually use like a dull shovel,

you stretch it over the dull shovel, and then you soak it in the brain-water mixture, and then you just keep repeating that pattern, and the leather gets a 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 fat or I haven't gotten that deep into it, but it breaks down the leather and just makes it feel really soft, really nice.

So anyway, this knife here, I killed that bear, so the jaw is made out of two bear jaws, or out of one bear jaw is split in half. So that was a bear I killed in Canada in 2017, because my biggest black bear. And so we split the jaw, put that together, it's Irish linen threading, and 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, the cool thing about doing round of food, and the cool thing about this is you could have a delorean and drop that in 1840, and somebody picked 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 these 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

“where you'd want to have me on here, so, are you an interesting dude?”

I thought, what can I give this guy that 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, is what they figured. And you can tell by the way that like around the hilt and the way that it's the painting 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.

The type of steel in the way that it was worked and the way that it is around the hilt run on the bottom there.

Yeah, actually, it fits my hand perfect.

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

Yeah, I mean, if you're going to make a last stand, you know, that's a pretty good, that's a pretty good knife to make your last stand with. It's a good way to go out. Yeah, exactly. That's awesome, man.

“Yeah, so the rendezvouss, um, we did those from, how long did they last?”

Uh, they vary from a week and then some go up to three weeks. And what do you do for food, wire out there? Um, so inside of your, so there's two types of rendezvouss. And 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 TP that I take to these things.

And uh, inside of my TP, you can have a cooler, uh, and 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, um, 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 Pemicon would have been the, you know, every day, thing to eat. That's just dried. So did you bring your own food? Did you have to hunt for food? Uh, 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 they're called. I think I might be speaking out of school. Somebody might send me an email after this, but I'm going to talk about it in the weeks. And I've ever got read the right act.

“They're called jury, I think they called them jury'd southerns.”

And I've only been in one of those. And that's where everything in the camp has to be pre-1840. And you meet down in a parking lot. You put everything on the back of a mule. And when I did mine, it was up in the, uh, I think it was the big horns.

So, you know, he talked to our rancher, um, get everything packed up. You go into the back of the big horns. And everything in camp has to be pre-1840. As close as it can get. They'll even look at your stitching and say, oh, that was sewn with a, with a sewing machine.

You got to take that off.

And it's always these weird, like, eccentric history teachers that run them.

Like, guys who, you know, uh, teaches history at Berkeley or something like that. There's 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. And you're hunting with traditional archery.

And it's really good for kids. Like, the internet wasn't a problem as much when I was a kid. I was certainly into computers. I have been since I was a child. But you could just detach everyone's running around, crazy, sitting around the campfire at night.

People are singing with, you know, songs in the guitar. You're learning how to do things like this. You're learning how to brain-tank. You're learning how to live traditionally. And it's, it's a eccentric cult kind of, it's not a cult.

It's an eccentric group of people. It's a lot of fun people take a very community. People take it very seriously. There's more advertising surrounding it now than there used to be. Because the numbers kind of do indeling.

But I did my last one last year with my brothers. 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. His, he was half Native American, his grandfather was a jib way or something. Chip was something like that.

And he was, I don't remember what his role was. But anyway, I went, we deployed to Iraq together. And his grandpa made me this war shirt. Oh, there he 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 shower and area, a shower and area where it's just like pallets. That's the inside of my lodge.

So there's a cooler at this one. This is not a jury round of blue. And so you can shower while you're, some of them, they call them hooters. They'll be like a latrine in a shower area in camp. But also like some of them, I don't, I don't do it at all.

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And so there's no reenactment like there's not like civilians walking around and it's not like reenasants for free. Yeah, exactly.

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 like all the recipes to do with like a Dutch oven, like an old cast iron oven. And they do gambling at nights. So you'll walk into like a huge, they call markies, but it's like a huge 100 foot square lodge.

There'd be three gambling tables in there. Girls are like the low-cut shirts and dealing cards and smoking cigars and just having an amazing time. And you go buy 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. Oh, this is 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 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'd really bad ADHD. They kind of diagnosed me with having some low level version of aspirators. 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 front school. I wouldn't 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 missing in culture today. Or something that I'm trying to re-invigorate, especially with my son. And with other young men that I run into, is kind of like coming of age rights. Yeah. Something to say, you're a man, and I'm going to start treating like a man from this moment

forward. What does that? There should be structure to that. We are tribal, and it's important to me.

“So I think that is really something that's missing from society.”

I used to think that it was silly when I was young, and then as I got older, 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. Yeah. 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 to their 45 or 50 or 60.

And sometimes never stop.

Yeah. You know, women, nature, and poses itself on women, they become fertile, they're able to have babies, and they've got a seek security, or find a husband, or a really good job. That will supplement whatever a husband would provide, and they've got to start acting like a woman, whereas men can sit in the basement, and it becomes very dangerous, especially

men that never have children. Yeah. And they're perpetual children. Yeah. And if you don't impose nature on yourself by undergoing those types of rights and understanding

what it means to become a man, nature will impose itself on you by either you're never going to have children and therefore you're dead forever, or be it will kill you because you're fat in your mom's basement, you get diabetes, and the foot dropped off, and you're 35. And, you know, we just don't tell men, we don't have a military did it for me.

I'd really put off responsibility or seeking meaning or any of those things until I was in the military. And, like I said, by father die 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. I think there's a reason why most ancient cultures, 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 responsibility, but then having children and realizing, this isn't about me at

all. And I need to be willing to break my back for these people who depend on me. This is weird. Second primal feeling that, you know, you're responsible for these, like, very vulnerable little people that you love more than life itself, it just changes everything, it just

kicks you into gear. But for some people, it doesn't, you know, some people that are so stuck in that perpetual childhood thing, they just wind up deciding it's too much of a drag and they get divorced.

Yeah, 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 a marriage should dissolve. No question, but I kind of feel like it, 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 normal. 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 a abusive, and that is, you know, when you look up the stats on that, like remarriage and having a new family, like that, that becomes

“a single, most likely vector of abuse and a child's life is that new person, right, because”

now they're raising someone else's kid or whatever. I mean, that's in every old movie, the evil step mother, you know, or evil step father,

but in the old movies, it's always a step mother that abuses the girl, 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 heart 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, and they all need to be venerated, and 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, you know, Hook's law, as you bend any object, it wants to return back to its natural state, and Hook's law kind of played there where nobody could get divorced in the 40s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, and then he had the baby boomers who kind of culturally said, you know, actually, it's not as bad as we think, but then it over-corrected, and it became kind of part of that

cultural zeitgeist, and that kind of won't humans do, right? Yeah, always over-corrected.

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 are immense. So when I need my brain to lock in for hours and hours and fire it, it's fastest, most alert state, I'm taking ketone IQ. It's an energy shot powered by this little miracle molecule that your body already

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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, as I agree systems need to change, but they need to change slowly and pragmatically, so we,

because any social scientist or their salt will know, a social experiment almost never

has the outcome that we thought it was going to have. In other words, we thought doing something to society would form society this way, but almost has the inverse, the anti-pattern like we talked about before, and 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 California be crazy

for a while and see how that works out for them. But let's not nationalize the craziness.

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, and solve for that, and, you know, that was kind of the founders intent with federalism. They're really federalist-minded state minded, and there's, you know, even for that being as 250 years ago, there's a profound amount of profanity in that. Like, let's change things slowly and let social experiments take place, and adopt the best parts of those things, and then integrate them to the cultural

overall as we move along. But, you know, 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. Yeah. And discipline is associated with conservatism, and because of that, like, a lot of people think that I don't think I'm anything. I think I have politically or ideologically, I have a lot of everything in me. I don't think I identify with one side or another. But if one thing that I agree with conservative people on conservative people, then more towards

the importance of discipline, hard work, discipline, don't complain, get things done, deal the hand that you've been dealt with, and just sort it out and get to work. Yeah. Don't cry. Don't look for other people to save you. They're not going to. And this is not something that's celebrated in society. It's thought of as a cruelty that if you say that you need discipline, that you're not treating these people that are victims of circumstance with

“the proper respect or with the proper empathy. And I think a certain amount of empathy is”

probably not so good for you at a certain point in time. There comes a point in time where you're letting people whileow in their bullshit and just make excuses for why they're not getting anything done. And in that sense, I think California is that is a giant part of what's wrong with California. What's wrong with California? When it comes to crime, what's wrong with California? You know, they're 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. And at a certain point in time, you've got to realize like, would God sad call suicidal empathy, a society can suffer from suicidal empathy. And at a certain point in time, you got in force rules and you've got to make it so that people have to get their shit together. Yeah. And that suicide element that the 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. So let me give you patents that I'm going to 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 homeless 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 and made it better for society. Yeah. And then they would just inevitably change the ways that we track and measure those things.

And pay themselves more money. Well, they shouldn't have the opportunity to do that. Then you need some sort of an oversight that's basically illegal. You'll be right. You're right it to be cynical because that's what they do about everything. Some of those are 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'd be like one of the things that they do when they raise jobs, like they increase GDP.

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 just the beginning of it where you got to see the curtain pulled back and get to see exposure of so many of these fraudulent,

supposedly charitable organizations that were really just money laundering. They're really just funneling money into these people's hands. Like the homeless thing in California. Oh my goodness.

It's about bonkers situation where they've spent $24 billion. They cannot track it.

They've tried to audit it. The government has vetoed these audits and they have no idea where that $24 billion went and yet homelessness went up. Yeah. But you've got a giant machine that is this homeless establishment, this homeless industrial complex 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 story 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 a technical advisor and one of the things that kind of learned about government at that point was these systems have their own incentive and this tentives not the output of their purported mission. The incentive is the growing of the organization and the execution of budget.

So while they're in there, you know, I've never seen a field great 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 and 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 percent. 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, what a six as a, 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 or 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. This is during the Biden administration. I believe”

Higgseth 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 beside. But they have bureaucracies and the incentive of the bureaucracy is to make sure that we grow. And that's it. And then you'd 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 trillion. And then what like 150 trillion of unfunded liability.

In other words, we've promised people money for the next 30 years. And it's debt that, you know, I don't see how we'll ever escape that debt. And it's the thing about it is is, and I don't want to be pigeonholed because I'm actually quite liberal when it comes to my politics are like yours and 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. And even in my community, I'll help someone out out of pocket or do something for them. That's a strain on my time or might hurt something else because there are really no solutions. There's just trade-offs. That's supportive for the community.

“Yeah, that's how people are supposed to do charity. And I'm also very non-judgmental”

and someone how they care, I don't care what they do in their house. I don't care if it's a Roman origin on the weekends. Like be a predictable, productive person Monday through Friday and go do your Roman origin on the weekend. I don't care. I won't judge you. Like I don't, I really have enough crap in my own life. As long as someone's not getting hurt. Yeah, as long as no one's getting hurt, consent to adults. Like I have enough problems. I screw up enough and people have

there's a laundry list of things that people can say about me how I 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

monikers 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. Yes. They're supposed to adopt these opinions.

“And some of them just don't fit. And that's how people get pigeon. That's like on people on the”

left. They get pigeonholed into weird stuff that you can't really really justify like trans women in sports. Like what the fuck are you doing? Yeah. Like we're, you know, we're being inclusive. Like no you're not. We're loving the borders of Ukraine while hating our own border. Yeah, fucking blockers. Yeah. There's so many crazy things. There's so many crazy things that people just adopt that don't make any sense. And, you know, when you subscribe to an ideology, the problem is

if like if you define yourself as this person, I am this. I am a hardcore right wing blob. Whatever it is, you immediately close the door to all the very productive and interesting things of the other side. Thanks. Yeah. And you're also making yourself into a tool of propaganda. Because if someone, if I meet someone and they just say, I'm this. Right. It's like, well, I could reasonably predict everything that's going to come out of your mouth. Yeah. That's not

entertaining. I don't want to have a conversation with that person. Right. I can't seek to learn from them because I could just pick up the communist manifesto or mine comp. We're going to have a pretty good understanding of who I'm dealing with and therefore conversations that is not relevant. It's not needed. A lot of people are afraid of social ostracization too. So they're, they're afraid of string outside of the narrative, whatever side they're supposed to be on. And, you know,

some groups are really good at making you feel like dark shit if you don't agree entirely with even things that don't even make any sense. Yeah. So that's why people go along with stuff that's illogical, like open borders or whatever it is. Yeah. They go along with things that's not in their best interest because they're scared. They're scared of being ostracized. They're scared of being cast out of the kingdom. They're, you know, they're scared of being excommunicated.

Yeah. I dealt with a lot of people. First of all, my retiree from the military. And then more

recently leading up to the last election where, you know, I was entertaining the deal of doing some work for government. Believe it or not. And because I'm, 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 they, my whole life is”

built around pattern analysis. I really do have patterns and exhuming and looking into patterns. And there's a pattern of like a, there's, you'll laugh when I say this first part of the pattern,

but then I'll, I'll make it make more sense later. But he fits the pattern. Well, first he's a

jacksonian and, and, and, and that he's a pragmatic person the way that he governs, which I liked. Or at least I did, and, you know, there's some things he's done recently that I don't enjoy. And, but he's also a, an outsider or a, or a savior type. All of, you know, I don't remember the movie, but the magnificent seven back in the day. I don't remember the actor's name. There's a scoop 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 a grandpa. God, there's too many movies. Yeah. And there's this pattern where you wouldn't invite these guys to a dinner party. You wouldn't want them in church on Sunday. But when a system is so corrupt and so

“horrible, you have to rely on these types of people to come in and be a check to the system.”

But then also, you don't want them to stick around when the system is reset. So there's a, seen in the movie where he says, you know, man, these, this seven guys are talking, they said, man, these people must really want it as like, it's crazy. They must be happy. We're here. And I think it's Gary Cooper, 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, he's 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 pattern. Right, Mary, this cousin. Slap soldiers. Really? Oh yeah, this cousin? Yeah, I think it's the third cousin.

if you never met them? I'm Icelandic. So I really can't say anything, right? They literally

“have apps in Iceland. Like, my grandparents are in 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 or cousin. So, you know, you know, less than such a small community. Less than a million people. Right. All in one island, you know. So you're trying to prevent that stuff. But anyway, patent. Yeah. Slap soldiers who had tuberculosis, one of them probably had shell-shock. It got in a newspaper. They wanted this head. And thankfully the generals were like,

no, he's the guy that we need for the moment, right? He who 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 this, 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

that 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 submagness of his seven come in, they'll go to another town and all get killed. When patent retired, he died in some weird G-baccident. You know Wolverine, he's the only guy left on this desolate like world where the Hulk's in charge and it's a horrible existence patent or not patent. Patreus is another one. You know, I brief Patreus, I work for not for him, but for people who work for him and I rack. And he was the guy that got us through

with the surge. But he was really a weird guy when you had talked to him. 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 three things they want to talk about, then they'd want to get out of Dodge. He would ask questions that really had implications.

And 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? They put him in charge of the CIA. They knew he had been screwing around with this woman. And they're like, okay, he served as function. Now he needs to get out of Dodge. And then he now he's, you know, got tried for all these things and sleeping with someone while he wasn't married. And you know, there's, it's not a ceremony

as N for these types. I saw, and somebody would have been a betrayer so he ended. Yeah, he was sleeping with someone girl that was writing his book or something along those lines. Well, I'm not saying that's the end of him. All I'm saying is that the history will remember the pattern is ending unfavorably. You know what I'm saying? And so when I examine Trump, I, I, I said, yeah, I don't like what he says. I wouldn't want him around my daughters. I don't want, wouldn't want him out of 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. That wouldn't be a pragmatist if I

didn't. When 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 B minus. 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 are a problem in the modern day military because this whole things built on systemic racism. You have in built implicit bias that you can't escape even if you wanted to or you recognize that is world politics. Yeah, it was world politics. And it was, um, and it was, you know, I would sit there and say, you know, all of the people that I know who have died during

this war, not all of them, but 80% of them. And the numbers bear this at 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. We're 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.

majority of the combat deaths are somehow part of this problem and that other people aren't benefiting

“from it. Um, 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 a name right now at the top of my head just because I'm a little nervous still. Um, she was black. And they were talking to you, Brown Jackson. Yeah, they were talking about how it's historic because she's black and Biden had said he's going to hire a black woman to do this job. If I had worked my whole life to do something, but now I'm only being elevated to

this next position because of my gender and the color of my skin. I would turn that job down so fast because it's not what I want to be known for. These are a mutable characteristics that I'm not

in control of. I wasn't, I didn't choose to be born white or blue eyes. I didn't choose to be born

in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere without a dad at five. I didn't choose any of those things. I don't see how I benefit from these things at the individual level. And, you know, the individual

“level of analysis for me is really the only way to evaluate someone for their pluses and their”

minuses and anything beyond that to me is discriminatory on its face. Of course, it's just a great way to control people because he 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 egg shells and think that, you know, victimized people in order to get to their position and then they have to be shameful of who they are that they had no control over. And also get to people in easy, rubric to judge other people.

Yeah, because nothing's easy really and it gives some like white guy bad, you know, black guy good, Chinese guy, as long as he's not applying the college, I want to get into he's good. Right. And, and it gives people people want easy answers really at the end of the day. They want to be told the easy rubric to navigate life because really, now if it's easy and it requires discipline, like you said before, and thought. And, and so, but 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 with the person felt when you said it. Did you said that in a military? It was the military equal opportunity briefing. So then, 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 less civilians in there. And, so, you know, woman x walks into and she's got to dress on. And the

thought in your head is, I'd like to get my wife that dress or something like it or find out where she bought it. And you just say, that's a nice dress. Anyway, here's the TPS reports. If she heard something sexual or didn't like the connotation or whatever, there's going to be an investigation. You're going to be pulled out of that office. This is all going to happen, despite what you meant. So, the idea probably was good. We want to prevent sexual harassment inside of the office.

But it was weaponized. But it was weaponized. It was carried out in a way where it's only about how people feel and not what a reasonable person standard would be in a particular situation. And from the time I joined the military until that time, we'd been at war. My entire time in the military, we were at war. I deployed throughout my career. And I wouldn't say that I was a war horse. I was not a long taber. I was not a cool guy kicking indoors. It was my job with the as the guy

with tape over his glasses to point out the door for someone else and say bad guys in there. So, I was not a super badass in that regard. I was a nerd for super badass. But we also all engage in a gallows humor, and we would, 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, they're relief valve for that in a lot of ways. And but then someone would

over here 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, they're career, a terminal end because of a dumb joke or something. It's like you can't be expected to go out and shoot people in the face and then be sensitive to someone's feelings an hour later. It's just

it doesn't, it does not work. Now, should you talk to that guy and say, hey, you know, you made woman ex-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,

at that? Like, does this, is this rational? Like, you can't be in an office if you're that sensitive.

“Like, it's one thing that the guy said, I'd like to get you out of that dress. Okay, sure. Now we're”

now in a different world. 100% and 100% right. Yeah, if someone says, you look great. You know, have you lost weight? You look fantastic. That's a compliment. Yeah. And if someone gets upset, I felt sexually objectified. I felt harassed. Like, okay, he just said, you look great. Yeah. That's it. Health. It's not. You look great. I'd like to get you naked. Right. Now we've crossed the rubicon. Yeah, for sure. For sure. But just you look great or I like your dress.

That's like, if you said that to a man, like, hey, great suit. Yeah, he's like, how do you be trying to make a complaint? Yeah. I need your final complaint. Yeah, you've trimmed up, Joe. You're

looking great, Bill. Like, oh my god, I'm 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 this briefing, which is where I kind of, you know, the last couple of years by military career, I got in trouble a couple of times, or I should say, called down. I was a senior, I was a CW4. I was one rank from the top. I was advising

“to star generals, kernels on very important matters. I wasn't high. I wasn't high in the,”

in the dominance hierarchy. But I was adjacent to people who were as an advisor. And the amount of, in this briefing in particular, they had gotten into, you know, it's bad that there are so many white people. This, I'm doing high points here, but we need more diversity. I was part of 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 the for this network were, you had to speak a couple 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, there are lots of women, but then there'll be more white men. And it's,

“it's not because the pool, the pool, presented itself that way, and 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 have more in common than most women, or like if there's a, if, if, if I say I need more diversity in a particular room, if you said diversity of thought, I'd be fine with that. But, but Joe and, you know, random black guy in the, in the same program in the same office have far more in common than the white woman.

But if all, but what you're saying is these people need to have all separate different colors and different, 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, and the, the only difference between these two people is the pigment of their skin. So this fake diversity quota that they're putting on top of

us doesn't achieve anything other than giving some officer a bullet on their OER. And, you know, I got pulled in the office afterward. I said, but way more than that, but essentially afterwards they're like, hey, Chief, you can't say that. And those briefings like the way that you're getting animated and then there and what you're saying, what you're doing like, uh, yeah, this is not going to fly. And this was like 2018 or 2019 or this is being rational. Yeah, just trying to

be rational and say that there's, there's, there's more difference in groups than there is between groups. And that the similarities and the way that things stack up, you recruit from a pool of volunteers in candidates. If I'm recruiting from a pool of volunteers in candidates who are 80% male and white, I have to expect that the selected individuals are going to be a 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. For sure. Anything other than that is literally a threat to national security. Yeah, you're you're you're denigrating leafality. 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, there's the, there's the two things that we need to do with

And if you work to muck with him, he will beat you senseless. That's it. Now whether or not we should be using that all the time or how we use it 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, valued individual rights and states rights. And, and, and, and, and this, and the founders, and this was another thing I said in

that briefing was the founders knew, yes, they were all slaveholders. But they knew that the constitution and the bill of rights and the declaration of independence would eventually lead to a system where we had to acknowledge these people as people. And we fought a civil war where a

“million white dudes died to see this experiment through the scaffolding was there. You have to look”

at the things the zeitgeist of the time. If they had just said, 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 there are, and 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 would ultimately terminate in. And then we had a civil war where we destroy our country from the inside to see this dream come about. And now we're just going to all go back and say they're all

slave owners. Like, I know this has all been said here a million times, but this stuff animates me because it's built with blood and treasure. Well, it's also, you can't judge people from the past based on the standards of the present. For sure. Because culture changes, people understand things better. We have a much greater recognition of what was wrong with things a hundred years ago, 200 years ago. And I'm sure in the future, we're going to look back on today with the same lens.

There's, it's just always works that way. 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. Yeah. 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're refused to apologize for it and led to a lot of great things. But it led to an updating of the system and you did it with dialogue with the dealogos 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. Yeah. Because if I can't express a bad idea, I have to act it out. And if I act out the bad idea, it could kill me. And the celebration of good ideas. And the celebration of good ideas. Yeah. And it's just really, there's just been such an weird inversion and politics where the free, hippy-loving liberals of yesterday year are now the one telling you what

words you can use. There are no borders, all of these crazy things. And I always say to people,

I said it to Andy, some fun. My last podcast with him. I'm like a 1996 Bill Clinton Democrat. If you go watch the state of the union, it talks about lowering debt, getting out of debt actually, working with nuclear and bridge 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? I mean, that's why the problem of labels doesn't work, ideological labels. Because if you go back far enough and look at Clinton

for example, he's one of the best one. And by the way, did balance the budget. Yeah, he did. Actually, we had a surplus when you left the office. Yeah, amazing. Did a fucking amazing job. So he got his dick sucked. Who didn't? Back then, that's the other thing. Judging people by the standards of the past, you know, JFK doesn't look so good. And the me too movement, you know, you know what I mean, he wouldn't have canceled. Yeah. 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, you know, 1996 standards applied to today. He would never want to hear that. No, he would never want to hear that because he's kind of shifted

“with the zeitgeist because that's what you kind of have to do if you want to stay in your”

party and be protected by your party. Yes. You know, but he's essentially, he had a lot of the item. We've talked about this before. We've played clips of Hillary Clinton from 2008 and she's

If you've been convicted of a crime, get out. You know, if you stay here, pay a stiff penalty and

“you have to get in the line and you have to learn English. Everybody cheers. Yeah. Like that is a”

hardcore right wing, 2026 perspective. Obama did it to in 2012. Yes. Absolutely. And Obama deported more people than Trump. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. 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, constantly chasing threats instead

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like my thought is always, I'm always updating, I'm always updating my systems. I'm always getting

told things. I always have a pre-prescribed way of looking at the world that I'll have a good conversation with someone and I'll update my system. But generally, my principles aren't place. And when you watch these people who get into 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, and they're core foundational principles are changing. That really should give you cause for concern. Because like you were saying this at this time, and now you're saying this at that time, it's like generally

my rubric that I don't think will change about myself is I'm fervently for the individual,

“and I'm fervently for truth. And 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. Those are, that's principally, if you, I try to live that standard up to myself. I fall fall short of that standard all the time. It's probably any human.

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

like, at least something goes horribly wrong, right, right. And I've pretty much been here since, you know, the past seven or eight years or so, like even into my 30s, I wasn't quite sure who I was as a human. And, 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 have really been born out of that last seven years of the truth's going to be the top

of the decision matrix for me, the top of the hierarchy for me. I'm going to 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 two thousand years ago. And but the world for me has just opened

up in a way that I could have never predicted using a very simple rubric. It's not easy, but it's

simple. And if more people just took those, and this isn't me, I didn't come up with this. This is the result of, you know, watching a bunch of experiments go bad. But if people just adopted that very simple thing and just tried it for three months, you'll feel better about yourself, you'll feel better about the world, you feel better about the people proximally around you. It might make you hate the government more. But I don't think if you don't hate the government, I think you're not paying

attention. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, when you were working in cyber defense, like what 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, like short answer. Okay, I just, I always feel like I'm a like a good longer. Yeah, I agree well 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. Do you guys ever see any weird shit? Like you have folks? I wish I had. I really do. Yeah, I really do. Yeah, I really do. I was more in the signals intelligence side of the house, focusing first on electronic signals or emanations from radars, mapping them so that, you know, if we were going to go do the ground invasion, and there it's going to be some air support going in first and blowing shit up. We would tell them,

hey, there's a man packable SA7 here. There's a SA10 here. There's this here. There's there. And then telling these pilots, let's get shot out of the sky. Quickly, when the war kicked off, that became irrelevant because there was no surface air missile surface missiles in Iraq.

So I kind of retrained on communications intelligence. And that was at that time off of cell phones,

“off of, uh, push-to-talk radios, repeaters, um, long-haul networks, terrestrial networks,”

extraterrestrial networks, and what I mean by that is stuff that satellites in the sky. And doing analysis on those to try to inform the, the, the, what we call the common operating picture of the battlefield for a combat commander. So combat 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, you know, passive and active signals and

analysis on these things. And then inform the commander so that we could, you know, mitigate risk. It was all about mitigation of risk. Um, this is 2008 or so. I've been doing this for about seven years, eight years. And, um, from there, it shifted to the phones getting smart. And essentially, it went from, you walking around with a 2G phone or a 3G phone that had limited compute capability to,

“now there's robust compute capability with the advent of like the iPhone. And now it's like,”

well, now we've got to get after guys who are, you know, essentially walking on the computer,

we could never have been vision 20 years ago in their pocket with all of this capability.

Because the military and our, and our, our forces that were fighting against, and 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, MLS. We didn't have a, offensive cyber component. We didn't have a defensive cyber component. So we kind of,

I was there at the ground floor when we were building out these new MLSs, now that are all over the military. But at that time, there was a thought going into, you know, we need to have people who know how to be on it operators, ethical hacking, as paradoxical as that sounds.

“That's how the lawyers called it that. So attacking at the end of the day, but ethical hacking”

because you've got the backing of the U.S. government. And so we set up that framework and really started launching into operations, you know, 2006, '78 all the way into my last deployment in 2017 or 2015. It was all focused on computer network operations and how they lash up with trash real 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, how do you get into it? What was like, what was

the operational aspect of it? How did you actually would it do? So, you know, 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, endpoints, cell phones, understanding the internet out of them, 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 hand, from the hand set 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. We're now, it's like, well, there's, you know, I don't know, and I rack your an Afghani router that hasn't been patched in three years. And we think we can either write or find a zero day, which is just an exploit of those

routers, where we can muck with their router in a way where they think they're getting a good information and they're not or they're or erecting other things to mitigate risk for the commander. And so, that really, you know, exploded at that point in 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, or that's James Bond was a horrible spy. Was he? I mean,

yeah, you know, your jobs to remain anonymous and you're walking into a casino and there's

gold finger 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 ten 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. And then there's a lot of people don't know it,

but we were an active combat operations and the Southern Philippines as well for a fair amount of time. I want to maybe say seven or ten years. We were doing combat operations in the Southern Philippines.

So, there were terrorist elements down there that were traveling back and forth from Pakistan

and Afghanistan. And there was a terrorist organization down there called the Abu Sayyaf group.

“And 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 and 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 jamey can you pull up a map of the Philippines? Can you pull it up? Oh, say that. I want to turn. Yeah, I've pulled up jam but listening to it forever So there's what called the autonomous region of Muslim men and now Which is the southern part from like a place called Zam Wanga down to Hulu or holo island and there's a

It's a funny joke because if you zoom in to Zam Wanga, which is God, look how any island. I know it's go down to the south there She's sample go down right there right right zoom right there on that island now move to sorry now move to the southwest See that penis

But the tip of that penis is called Zam Wanga. Mm-hmm. 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 the Zam Wanga city this they're terrorist operations in here now if you go to that main island called There's holo island. That's where I was on this tiny island out in the middle of nowhere and on that There's a map that's all the Philippines. Well, no, I mean this is all the Philippines down here yet

“Wow, so this is called there's a mountain in there. I think it was called mountain tombotalk or something like that on the nearer”

On the eastern part of the island called Luke. It's called Luke. Yeah, so there's mountains. There's a mountain this 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 gonna get his name wrong. Perhaps but I believe his name it was either it's in salon haplon Or jomar patek jomar 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 it didn't around that island is where we were trying to find him and kill him So their terrorist Facilitators. They did the USS Cole bombing Well, just soon back out. I want to see the Philippines more time like all the islands When you zoom all the way out It's so nuts how many islands are on. Yes, so up north. Up north and 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 pull out of there. There might be still some people in Zamboanga. I'm not sure any more because it's been five years”

Four years since I retired, but yeah, we were doing counter incersions. He operations down there and guys died down there and there are combat operations And I was out there I was in a tactical military intelligence battalion and I was attached to the first special forces group And we were down there a couple of times and a lot of people don't even know about it

So yeah, I never heard about it. Yeah, so uh anyway

I'm sorry, no, no, I'm so stunned at how many islands are in the Philippines and spread out of it Yeah, it's it's insane and the the thing about it is is I go up to all of these little outposts and these out islands We're always debriefing these guys and I'm gonna 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 were like these mayors of each one of these little islands

And there would be terrorists in and around those areas and we tried to make friends with these guys so they'd give us some information And every one of those places was absolutely beautiful Like you can go there and be like man, Hilton could turn this into something in a short order Right, you know when you're out of these places beautiful beach beautiful lush jungles the best swimming water There's people too. Oh, the Filipino people are some of my favorite people, man

Like you want to talk the guys that we worked with out there. They're a scout I think they're called scout sniper scout Rangers and they were especially 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-dike type of guys you'll ever meet in your life like you know So-and-so said this about you last week and I could kill him. It's like now did 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 great. Some of the greatest pool players of all time came out They're just great people. I mean, I just the people down there were fantastic And it was awful because those guys would be bombing churches Christian churches and stuff like that and the doing counter operated like it's a counter Intelligent operations either doing intelligence operations collection to inform that battle picture

But those guys had direct links with the summer bed lawn and other people No idea right after we like I said I think it was I think if you look it up I think his name is pot tech P-A-T-T-P-A-T-E-K and he was arrested outside of a summer bed lawns compound

There was another guy that we believe we killed him. This name was Elbator Parade

But yeah, my job was not I always say that some podcasts because the veteran communities wild right now

They love to cut each other down right now. There's something weird going on where it's 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 grill my beard out and act like a cool guy

But I was really a nerd for cool guys. I've literally got pictures of myself down in the in the hole over in Afghanistan or anywhere else tap around my glasses and you know Pesda Spencer and my radio and collection equipment looking like a true blue American nerd But I was not the guy who kicked the door and I was always the guy pointed the door out So I'd be safe in the Humvee in the back, you know eat an MRA and somebody that looked like another gorilla

“You know like an any stone for Tim Kennedy or someone like that would be like is that the house?”

I'm 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. I'll be in an airplane above, you know and yeah, it was it was Being born in North Dakota and and 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 crazy that you're so smart, but you were horrible students? I wouldn't yeah, I would 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're always be on the back page or it'd always be like little cool stuff like you could get like, you know

A pair of gloves or a hat or something anyway one time there was a A coil radio that you could order with an earpiece and you put this coil radio together and with an earpiece No battery it was just the electric magnetic radiation would would would Activate the coil and the coil would you could listen to

“Radio chatter really with no battery. Yeah. Yeah, just tiny little little radio. How did it?”

What was the power the electromagnetic radiation and you would just kind of like a record of like, you know, how you Hit a record Ledger magnetic 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 just hear the earpiece have a battery. No, I don't think anything had a battery on it It yeah, I think it was just a

Wow, I could be mistaken, but I don't believe I was by electro magnetic radiation. Yeah, I mean you could look at a Jamie if you want sorry to say that again, but I don't think down the things Drive me crazy. Yeah, sorry. Oh, but like you're here right here. Look my finger Yeah, I've been mean to do that like literally when everybody uses this fucking thing It's wobbling around ready to follow up. Yeah, but if you look up a coil a coil radio with small earpiece

I could be wrong. I don't remember they're being a battery on it Electromagnetic radiation powered and that's bananas. Yeah, so kind of like a like the same thing with like, you know Not the same wattage, but a microwave right since power through the air, right, but it uses DC But it uses power. Yeah, 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 me wasn't 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 as they was filled Colp and

He had an old 286SX IBM and It was just sitting in his basement and I told my mom I was like, hey, if I clean it for like a month Gonna have that computer like he doesn't use it. He's got a new 486 up in his place here And he instantly said I could have it and then that started me down the computer networking realm and like look how could I get this

“286 to act like a 386 or how could I force it to run windows or how do I update the memory?”

How do I do these things and this little town Edinburgh North Dakota there was a guy who had a computer store and a basement of an old general store And his name was Jeff months abroad and and I would go there and ask him questions about computers and just start learning like Inns and outs on 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 a window 3.1 So I could have a gooey instead of using a command line Gooey mean graphic graphics you see interface. Yeah, yes, 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 I think I would go for yeah, I don't remember to leave in ADHD

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'll I can get into after but that started me down that road

But in school I couldn't pay attention to me either. There's this teacher. I always tell the story. It's great teacher

She's still around her name is a Connie trend Beth 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 once she goes. You know, I knew your dad bill and You know your your uncles roll smart and your my grant my my great uncle has an engineering wing of a school name bathroom 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 and you disrupt the class you upset people no one can talk I was like me you've tried to dominate every conversation, but when you know I you had written one paper on something that interested you and I don't remember what it was 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 set that like you're wasting like you're obviously

My RP my CPU clocks high. I'm always thinking even when I'm not thinking and even as we're sitting here talking

I'm thinking about other things or stuff I want to do when I get back to my computer or stuff I want to do for my business and And so I joined the military and the 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 standgate guard, which is a needed function in the military

But it doesn't apply to my personality But when I went to the recruiter station out and far manyapolis, 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'd wipe 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, we can you can go home get your license because The Meps station was in Minneapolis was it far go doesn't matter. It was five six seven hours away And they're like well, you're not leaving today without a driver's license

“So I looked at my recruiter and I was like I don't know what job you need to get me into”

But it needs to be a different job and they're like well you scored you know exceptionally high in our general technical Part of your as-bad, which is like understanding machines and objects and stuff So we could get you into this like intel job where you'd learn about radar and stuff and that immediately clicked for me And then he's like well, we got to go brief you in this skip room There's this you know

Secure compartmented 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 And so they walk me into this back place and you know nothing super crazy and Briefed me up on the job and I went back out and I said yeah, this is actually the job for me So the absurdity of life is me forgetting my driver's license when I was 16. I was 16 when I signed up

Maybe 17. No, I was turning 17 that December when I signed up for the military I can connect with a string to forgetting my driver's license to being here with you today You can you can sign up when you're 16. I think I was turning 17. You can sign up when I didn't even know you can sign my delayed entry program thing And I left a little bit before my 18th birthday. So I was graduated from my school But yeah, you can sign up when you're 16. I believe as long as your parent signed the waiver my mother signed the waiver

She's happy to get me out of that trailer So yeah, I was 17 almost 18 when I left radio out of that. Yeah, right there So that's all the pieces Yeah, I was gonna say Chris a controlled that's a radio there. It's that's actually the exact thing that looks almost that is almost exactly what it's like He made it. They bought the bread. They just lit 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 a I was gonna say crystal controlled radio because it uses a crystal diode on it Would you say Tesla coil James? It's a Tesla coil 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 on to a phone key. There's a picture of it somewhere on here, but It explains like you're picking up. There you go

This is a little yeah

“It also shows here. This is like you're picking up power from a radio tower. Yeah”

And their power for the signal. This is quite like what they're paying for the FCC the more power for your radio tower

The longer and more people you can reach crazy. There's no battery And that's also why some radio signals come in very well on your radio and some don't miss like dog shit Yeah, we power. Yeah, and then the frequency modulation like amplitude modulation isn't as efficient as frequency modulation when it comes to For the vocoder to produce sound amplitude modulation travels farther, but it doesn't have the The amount of information. It's not modulated with the that was the carrier wave can't be modulated with as much information as you need

Whereas frequency modulation is much quicker megahertz and you can amplitude and add more Sound or met more information, which is why it sounds better. So FM sounds better, but it doesn't travel as far

Right, I always when I was training people in the military on this. I was using the analogy of if a party is happening next door

“You can hear the bass music. You can hear the treble. You can hear the bass music because that frequency travels farther because that's lower in their frequency band”

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

So it's the dispersal and you know a lot of my you know mid part of my career was explaining this stuff to you know Military guys who are trying to understand like here's how a cell phone works and this is how frequency works And this is how we send information and just kind of demystifying, you know how You know a GSM network works. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about that is when new technology is emerging how How do you how

do you stay a head of the ability to

“Extract information from this technology hack into networks”

You really can't you really can't 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 will first off explain Pegasus to people that don't know It was a a persistent implant on cell phones for people Initially it was you had a click it. It was a click initially. It was a click a click and then it became a non-click exploit So in other words, you had to interact with something on the phone in order to initialize and install the implant and

Then after and but the the reason why it was so good is because it wasn't stored in the It wasn't stored in the usual areas that you would want a persistent or where you would have a persistent implant For instance, you know, you might want to put it in the application layer of an app or something like that where there's a binary that can run and execute commands or functions And so they I won't get into the very specifics of where and how they did this because I'm not sure if I got this information from the government or not

So I won't say it but they stored it in a place where it wasn't normal and you can read papers on your own and look at the forensics of it and how the actual implant was executed But it essentially you know all people that own your phone and and and you know was the kind of Implant I only dreamed of when I was helping develop my own plants implants in the military Mostly what we would rely on is you know zero-day architecture and Looking for something in a phone that either they hadn't patched or that the phone that you were looking at hadn't been patched

So phones as they have their own red teams are going through the the phone for their own because they want to sell a product That people will use and people won't you stuff that can get hacked so they'll do their own red teaming and they'll discover like oh, you know We we on this router we developed we left this port open and it shouldn't have been open So now we're going to write a patch that will close that port so that this port is no longer accessible by guy like me So I can't go in there and and do something to this particular type of router another great thing

I'll say something good about the administration They're they're doing some stuff right now to make sure that we're getting rid of Chinese technology and Chinese routers and You know, there's a wide spread net work of There's the PLA has an I can't remember the name of the bot net

Proximal people and it was widespread in huge and you know they look 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 cost them trouble it was being placed at critical places think power think energy

Think banking like they really wanted to cost them 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've been”

Huawei devices. Oh, yeah, ZTE. Yeah, well Huawei had a phone that I was really interested in back in the day They had a Porsche design had partnered with Huawei and made this insane Android phone with like the best camera The best battery. It was like really high level and I was like gonna buy it and then also and 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 And 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 the routers and some of their

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 didn't we weren't aware of them and these things had gotten into place And they had gotten into place in

Universities they got into place in Military establishments. They were using them in cell phone towers that people had you know inadvertently bought from China. Yep, and that's really I mean

I can tell you first and from having done some other forensic exploitation on this stuff another large part of my career

And talk about what'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's 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 and I was part of some of the largest ones ever done out in Afghanistan There would be treasure troves of phones and all of these computers and stuff like that and it was my job And that a great team that worked for me in 20 my deployment in 2015 We would go in afterwards gather up all of this stuff and you know the task force commander would literally be standing by

And we would say you know here's the intelligence that we've derived here's the multipoint analysis here You know it was on this hard drive it was here was here, you know, there's a bad guy place out here And those guys would be rolling like within moments after the last operation like some operations We'd do where we'd be rolling one after and 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 here's a different discipline

“But essentially I'll get and I can get to that later if you want to but um”

Launching and and doing these these follow-on operations off, you know dumping the binary from a phone and examining it That ones in zero's level to say everything that was going on with this thing or if it was a really high like the organization that I worked for at that time Did the analysis of this some have been lot in media and you know at that on that media We're doing far more than we would for another piece of media and that were you know X-raying it and we're looking at maybe what the the disc 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 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 Will was going on with the wall-way forums like what were they doing with them? I mean they were there were there were either some of them were coming out implanted in other words There was access built in for a foreign actor

And then other in other terms other places with routers with the ZTE stuff There were just things that you would patch or that you would fix as a company who was trying to protect the consumer and create a product that would people you would use and they weren't doing it So they were creating persistent back doors Either by actively placing code on there that would allow you know root access or they were leaving things open

Especially in Africa like the work that we you know when 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

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 to 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 you used to do this pork back in the eggs 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 and you know Add a list 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. They had no deployment dates or who's going wearing what who's doing what they want this in routers because Routers are usually the most unpatched piece of technology in that

“You know especially you know these days are more automated patching”

But back in the day like you had to manually update or 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 the router in your home or I could gain access to a BGP router Which is like a board of gateway, which is moving all of the internet data where I could get access to a microwave terminal You know if you look at a cell phone You've got the microwave terminals on there that are sitting 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 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 Rout 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 technologists you use an entered phone Link is there a phone that is more secure or a platform that is more secure It all depends like

I always take this from time of soul. 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 if you're just an average everyday citizen you're just going about your job You know the phones say 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 and Apple's probably your best bet for using and 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 is way too ways to encrypt the devices and to encrypt the chatter and the tunnel coming out of the phone The RF coming out of the phone and

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 you know you'll you'll get these questions where it says If you could pass words lost you can back up your password in these ways tell us where you were born tell us your mom's maiden name

Tell us your mom's this your mom's that lockdown mode's extreme optional protection it only be used You believe you may be personally targeted by a house sophisticated cyber attack. There are 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 lock-down mode I knew that it did those things. I didn't know if that was the term or if I thought so can you still said I message is You can still text and call Text and call this is 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? Well they said that it's for protection or whatever to make sure the people are doing bad things I don't know what see what their Explanation or what was it? I'm worried about this reporter. I'm sorry meta meta recently announced that they're no longer encrypting your DMs on Instagram and a lot of people are up and arms and they're

The idea is that other people can read your stuff now

“Now whether it's meta can read your stuff or who that's what I mean”

Yeah, I said why don't you trust Apple it's the same reason I don't trust meta They're not just the dangers behind meta killing end-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs

Meta blamed users are not opting into the privacy protecting feature experts fear the move could be the first major

Domino to fall for end-to-end encryption tech world. That's a horrible narrative. Hmm. Yeah, it seems squirrely Um, so Oh, you've read your last free article Oh my god, you mean money mother but but what Apple and meta want to do is that like they're trying to build these new neural networks

They're trying to you know humans and we can get into this two later if you want humans are the only thing in my opinion I'm happy to have you to screw with me and I love to have this conversation in my opinion where the only ones that are After May 8, 206 announced plans discontinue support for end-to-end encryption for chats on Instagram

“You have chats that are impacted by this change. We'll see instructions on how you can download any media or messages”

You may want to keep social media giants set 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 reach for comment this what meta had to say very few people are opting for end-to-end encrypted messages and DMs So we're moving this option from Instagram in the coming months Anyone wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp

But what's app is a little squirrely, right? What's app? Yeah, I mean they're all squirrely And that's the problem and so you ask me why I don't trust them. It's because they want to they want to you so humans in my opinion and some animals are the only things Better have the ability to project consciousness and Projecting consciousness is how you train a neural network and it's how you train all of these large networks

That would a lot of my time also in the military spent in our I was doing artificial intelligence in 2012 2011 like before it was even a catch term We were using artificial intelligence to map dynamic networks and to do other things more pragmatic Uses of it than how it's being used today with large language models or convolutional neural networks But 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 an essence any free app any if you're the products free then you're the product So when Google is allowing you to use a Google drive and get a gig of storage

They're 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 the large language models is any product I download I have the the neural network exam in the terms of service And then you can pretty much understand like here's how here's my focus

Here's the 40 page terms of services document when you click that link that you got

“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 intelligence is which I think some misnomer and again we can get into it later, but they're trying to build these Hypercompetent artificial intelligence and you need training two things for that really is training data and you need compute And that's why you start seeing them coming out with like metas billing its own nuclear engineering facility or something A nuclear facility or something like that and they need more they need more training data

So if I want to build a you know 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 once 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 Because the big money is in AI that's where the biggest money is so anytime you're doing any of these things

And it's just been obvious to me from the on not from the onset, but pretty close to the onset

That 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

Which they well could they might put out of the statement that saying that that's not they're doing

“But I'm telling you as a person who has done media forensics who has done computer network operations and who has trained”

Artificial intelligence models. That is precisely what they are doing that is there and know What is the difference between using apple and using Android well Android will do the same things and Google will do the same things It's just that I can root my phone or I can install a custom operating system like graphene or something like that Which I'm not doing right now I had to make a sacrifice when I started my carton my company Spartan forge and the sacrifice was I had to be the face of this product

And so I never had a social media until I started the company and I didn't upload things to the cloud until I started this company

And it became just like I have to sell a product I have to you know And I'm actually selling a product not people's data or people's photos I have to sell this product. I have to let people people often don't know who is the company or who is

“The organizing principle and what do they care about in the company 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 I started a company we started our first in-scrame. I started my my marketing team started my first in-scrame 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've signed up for our apps other companies who are starting Companies they want to go out and reach marketing people so if you're starting another hunting app Maybe for cameras or for a

Call or trick you call or an out call or something and you Found Spartan 4G said man they got two million emails I could pay them a half million dollars for that two million dollars and start some top of market 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 yes, you don't use it Not now, but what I still can use and what I still do use is Android also publishes their their their framework in an open source

Fashion where you can exit you can look at the and it's called a OSP Android open source project So 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 make up is Published so you can look at how things work on the inside Apple goes the opposite way and they don't publish any of that You can't see any of that stuff. I'm for the free and open version because at least if

At least if I'm worried about my phone having a problem. I can actually dump binary or I can create Neo one file and 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. What I don't So I like the Android

Because 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 fall along with the large language model and do it your own Android and how would you do that?”

Well, there's you'd have to buy some expensive there. There is some thing you'd either have to pay a firm to do it or you could download things like Celebrate you could get a celebrate or there's other things called forensic tool kit other things like that That allow you to examine your phone at a deeper level and is this an app for answer their products products So it's a physical product some of them have to dump your phone into yeah and they're software And they're just connecting and all of that type of stuff tools. I used throughout my military. I'm career

Celebrate was one of them, but there is rarely 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 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

Then it is on Apple so for the average person like for me like if I you're not the average person Well, let's pretend if I got an Android phone and I wanted to examine my phone What would I what would be the process? Well, you'd download some of the software that I talked about. You would jack your phone into it

The everything in your phone it would start you could create a one to one amulation of your phone if you wanted to And then you would be able to get under the hood and examine the apps you'd be able to examine the binary You what's the executable code? You'd be able to look all of those things and then determine because Android open-source Project is published you could do a one for one and say well, you know at the kernel level There's this weird code. That's not in the Android

Build so what is this code and then with the neural network you could probably I don't I've never done it

But I'm sure you could figure out what the intent is of that code even for a lay person so I could take that information

“I could put it into perplexity and perplexity would lay out what's going on with it?”

ostensibly would be able to yes unless it was some type of weird code. I don't know if I haven't used perplexity So I don't know if they have something like chat GPT's code x But Just try just to be like and you help me examine my Android phone 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. We're not using the phone unusual data usage

Particularly in the background apps you don't remember installing or icons briefly appearing and then disappearing lots of pops up pop-ups redirects in browser or new default search launcher strange calls SMS messages you didn't send yourself if any of those ring a bell will focus on them in later steps So this is just something that you could do with an Android phone that you just can't do Yeah, apples not open. So what are the reasons you don't trust Apple?

“Well, could I ask kind of do one thing before you remember that question because I want to forget it could I give you a prompt?”

Because I want to answer your first question. Okay, we've already gone past If you can you bring perplexity back up, please no, this is fine. Just say my friend helped me Carve an E01 file E O Echo Oscar 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 the answer is yes, but I just didn't want to answer it because I've never done it

Could you tell me could you tell me could you tell me could you tell me what it means? Get the you out Get the you tell me you Could I have some of your coffee, please? Yeah, absolutely. It's for you. Okay. Let's see what it says Don't doubt yes, you can paste a suspicious code here and I could help explain what it would 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 all kinds of keys tokens IPs email addresses phone Proplexities are sponsored. I love that because you'd never get that from chat GPT You'd want all that info because it is 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, etc So we can help keep track I can do static analysis here read and reason about the code But I cannot actually execute it in a sandbox right so this is more like a careful forensic read through Then a full dynamic malware analysis go ahead and paste the code snippet Your friend flag does not fitting with the rest of the system and tell me in a sentence or two

Where in the EO1 it came from? Example app folder system partition random file path. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I thought that would be the answer I've just ever done it and so you can do a forensic examination of an apple by the way I'm sorry if I misspoke there, but you can't do it to the level that you can with Because the Android open-source project publishes all of the code

I can get an understanding of the very inner working, so if something's being done for for instance at the kernel or you could think about it It's like the lowest level of the phone something that wouldn't normally Get caught in her forensic am examination. I wouldn't be able to do that with apple right so and the nation-state actors are doing They are doing things at very low levels in the code framework For that exact reason because most people who aren't very deep in her 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?”

What someone could do with an Android for phone with the standard Android operating system versus graphing? So that gets into you know if you wanted to war drive or sample

Barrage attack on a Wi-Fi end point you could work that in there to do things with the phone that you couldn't otherwise do with a standard app

“With a standard Android operating kit, but as far as on a consumer level like what protections do you have by running graphing?”

That you don't have by running Android You're much more in control of the ecosystem You're you have a firmer understanding and again you could use a large language model to do this to understand exactly what's being run on the phone You control the background services that can be run on the phone So if you're getting hot mic or if your camera's taking pictures of you and you're not looking or it's listening to you for advertising content

stuff like that you would be in control of all of that in a way that you're not control of on a native and right app and Control like how so would it alert you that this is happening or just the functionality wouldn't be there for it to take place Right because the functionality is yet. It's only designed for the standard Android operating system And I haven't installed graphing in a while so a lot of all of us updates and I could be saying things that are incorrect my date 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 Yeah, because that's 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. He could sit there and be walked through on how to do it Which is a great you know part of that is a complicated like for a person like me. That's not that a student

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

All right because you're gonna jack things up. You have to you know get the bootloader and Essentially the starting you know the starting mechanisms of the phone that launches all of the other things

“You have to get down to a level and unlock that so that you can 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. Is that available for Samsung phones? No, not this one. You can't so the question has to become can you lock unlock the bootloader and That is the starting think of it as the starting engine of the rest of the lines. It's an only available on Google pixel phones That's not sure why they do it that way. I haven't looked into that. It's just pixels and the older amp Samsung's Beta available older Galaxy S7s tends 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. Oh, I can 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'm not you know I haven't written in exploit in years I don't do this type of work anymore and I need to sell a product and it just you know working with other employees like

That run my Instagram or you know Assistant going through my email and all those other types of things. It just it wasn't pragmatic anymore for me to keep doing that And I had to do so far towards your app or run on graphing Yeah, well it could yeah wood we have you have the 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

It makes sense here that this is it's easier because Google makes it easier. Yeah, he was just asking me why they make it easier No, I don't know that answer. That's I mean to the process officially supported in the Android settings under developer options allowing users to toggle OEM locking Simple fast boot method pixels use standard fast boot commands That work consistently across all models to unlock the boot loader accessibility

Yeah, I was talking about so yeah, I don't know why they do it it might be people can well Well the Android open source project exists so it would stand a reason that you would want away for someone because what you want is people Interacting with that code and red teaming it and making the code better and then offering you know bug bounties

So that you can tell Android like hey you've got a critical flaw in your system architecture here and then they'll pay you 20 grand for that

Right, I've got friends who do that so you and I talked about Eric princess fall. Yes, that which is So the the narrative is that that is an unhackable phone. Yeah, it's just by virtue and look Eric's a wonderful guy and He's the principles that he used For the first-in-saniation that phone are the correct principles, which is we need to get it if you want if you're security

“Focus at all you should get away from these big large conglomerates because none of your data is private”

That's a correct principle and in correct principle and I'm gonna get shit about this But I told you in the beginning I care about the truth and I do care about the truth is that when you're using a PKI Subsystem that relies on Microsoft then you're not control the PKI certificate signing and Microsoft could cause a bunch of problems and they were using that So the other thing being if you're building on the Android open source project that means the code that you're using as the engine

Let's just call it that up your phone is examinable by the public. So you're relying on Android to publish these

Now you might harden it some more, but as long as the code is out there, it can always be

“Mucked with as long as people have to interact with the device and type and you have to see what you're typing”

a phone's gonna be it's gonna have Swiss cheese So when people say something is unhackable as you said, that's just not true. Yeah, it didn't make sense to me It's just not right talked about yeah, we talked about it quite a bit I have like I said great guy. I'd done lots of great things for the country and It's just if they had just said something along the lines of it's hackable as any phone is hackable because by virtue of you having to interact with it

It's hackable It's just like if I and so if I came up with an app that had a you know, look at the tick-tock terms of service on the first tick-tock It's bonkers With those terms of services I will own your phone and I'm not saying you can install tick-tock 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 can easily put a key logger in that and now I know your signal password or your signal pin or or you know I get you you know, you're going to China so I stop you in secondary and while you're in secondary I've got a CCTV on you and you unlock your phone now. I know how to unlock your phone

Now I'm gonna lock you up in second-second-dairy at at customs in China or in Canada, and I'm gonna separate you from your phone

And I've seen you unlock it. Well now I'm gonna get in there with N-case So I'm gonna get in there with FTK. I'm gonna get in there with a celebrite and I'm going to dump your phone and And just by virtue of it being built on the Android open-source project That's a great thing. It's a good thing. Just don't call it totally unhackable because a guy like me We I don't need but a week or two to tell you on this current build like here

Here's the hole in this Swiss cheese now is it far better than having a Google phone With standard firmware 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. It's pervasive

“So I just don't know what 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? It's the best way to answer that question. So me like what would you recommend I use I Mean I wouldn't want it I mean, okay, I'll tell you generally what I would say because if 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's just that checks and balances is what I would want but for you I would say you should take something like a a Raspberry Pi and you should run wire guard 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 wire guard Which is a VPN that I use that's very good and

You know everything should be routed through that and if you trust Apple continue using Apple if you don't trust Apple Then you know use Android and you could do you could use a pixel and do graphene and you could use signal on there And those are the things you could be relatively safe But again if I'm a nation state actor I can create circumstances where I'm going to get access to your shit and I'm going to lock you down And there are some of them are more expensive than other methods to do it

But I'm a pregnant test and you can always come up with a method to get a hold of somebody's shit

You can always create the circumstances especially if you're a nation state actor To get a hold of somebody's stuff that would be the very high level of things that I would recommend to you Just out the gate Mm, yeah, it's a 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 is essentially it's just know your number. Yep

And that's you know You just make yourself a difficult target would be my best

“Recommendation when you're going to answer questions about password reset don't answer them honestly right down in a physical journal or something”

How you answered those questions don't answer them honestly. Um, you know all of these things We think are added for layers of protection for instance You used to get that pop up on your phone where it said, you know, there'd be like blocks of pictures And it would say click all of the pictures Right with a with a traffic light and I was just gonna say that a traffic light in it

Yeah, part of that might be for security the our 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 right you think you're getting security out of it

Yeah, and how they can look and all those different instantiations of traffic lights

So and and again like we have to separate causality and intention and outcomes and that the companies might do this because they want to create the greatest AI ever But when you're issuing someone a 40 page terms of service document on Everything they can do with your thing that you paid $2,000 for it's just, you know We need more ethical people at least what Eric Prince was trying to do was right which was We need to offer 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

In recent years that where this when we get more uneducated we rely largely what 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 You know how to conduct really good analysis before you just use a neural network for everything

Because as we lose focus of our civics and and what are founders are trying to do in the uniqueness of it Which is truly unique which is you know when I joined the army I joined the army to get out of North Dakota when I re-enlisted in the army

“It's because I believe in the experiment and that's a another five-hour podcast, but”

The the foundation of the experiment is good, but we've eroded it in so many ways over the years and given up so many Individual rights in the name of security. 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 and 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 like I don't see it like I don't see how that was a big deal And I'm like it was a total recalibration of the system that allowed the democratic party and the Republican party To you serve your rights in a way that if you knew any better, you'd probably be protesting Like some of the ways that we've they've done this, you know We can go with the easy stuff like the Patriot Act right in the name of security. We're gonna start collecting on Americans

You know, and the Biden and Obama administration. I will say this At risk if you know 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 any way 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 need in case at some point

We needed to you know Come up with a narrative or get rid of somebody who's inconvenient or whatever else that just flies in the face of individual American rights in American An autonomy and Is really in my mind The anti-pattern to freedom

It's just really really bad. I mean, I'll give you a one that people always crap on me whenever I talk to them about it

But there's two that really bother me one of them being like the 17th Amendment Do you know the 17th Amendment of the constitutional so the 17th so when the founders when you read the federal This papers and the federal papers. I really love reading the federal papers. I love reading how they inform the Constitution to 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 Senate right the 50 people there that are supposed to be representing us was originally constructed was a state What have legislatures and the state legislatures in the governor would appoint the senator the reason that the founders did that was because They the state government had to give power to the federal government to exist they're back with the articles of Articles of confederation

“Confederation is that right articles of I think is it articles? Confederation I'm blowing up sorry. I'm going nuts”

Back before there was a strong centralized American government We had problems with money. We had problems with interstate commerce and those types of things and those articles Eventually turn into what is the Constitution, but the states had to grant that power and the and the signers at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution knew That the states needed to be the small projects that we talked about before where if California wanted to go nuts Let them go nuts, but it shouldn't impact was happening in Texas shouldn't impact was happening over New England

But if that goes nuts and it fails it needs to fail. So the state senators

“I'm sorry the state um legislators 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 have boldened the federal government But with the 17th amendment what happened was the the House of Representatives function was to be The petulant children of government, so their job was to come up with crazy ideas crazy laws all of those things the more liberal

Version of Government jurisprudence would be the the House of Representatives or 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 of this. That's crazy or whoever else Name your Republic and he's the ass hat as well. We're not doing these things and that's because it would erode the state's rights in the state's

Constitution and what made this state great because what the legislatures would do is say Hey Joe Rogan we 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 in a bomb a care comes through you can say not only no, but fuck now Like I'm not voting for this thing and it was to protect the state but what the 17th amendment did was It it was we done it with the House of Representatives which was in the founders eyes the only popular vote Part of the constitute of the of the American government was that was the popular vote and then you had You know the way the president gets elected through electors

But you had the state Senate which was appointed by the states so 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 I'm sure 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 states agriculture, right? So all of those legislators from all of those counties was legislative districts would get together and say

We're gonna put Bill Thompson. I would never happen, but in charge or if you can be at the Senate representing North Dakota

But he has to rep those represent the whole state in other words. You can't do things that will that will help Grand Forks or 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

“The more county in North Dakota or way out west. You have to protect agriculture. You have to protect small businesses. You have to protect families”

What the 17th Amendment under one rule else and and how they really use surplus 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 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 gonna 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 gonna win that vote and I don't have to represent those people out in the rest of the state and anything Right, so they created or we'd done it in house of representatives but another reason why it happened was They wanted popular vote because there is no amount of money that you could stick into a legislature out in the Western part of North Dakota You can't bribe these people, but the DNC and RNC now can say look

There's two senators are running. We like this guy, so we're gonna this guy will do whatever we tell him to do And it's nothing to do with the state or represent in the states rights or the rest of those legislative districts

We're gonna pick this senator and he's getting a $300 million for his election bid and this other guy

He's you know a slower moving constitutional conservative who might be a free, you know market absolutist and a Classical liberal he's not being funded

“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 wants to be a senator and he's to do is go to the Republican National Committee or the The Democrat National Committee and say I'll do all the things you tell me to do Funding my campaign and I'm gonna go stump and far go on ground for oxenarth Dakota and the hell with the rest of the state It's very important is a very important slide of hand and when that happened you made it

We'd done it 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 past 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

Politics, no we need to get power out of politics

“That power that they've taken you know over the last”

130 years or so used to exist at the state and local levels because they wanted these thought experiments happening Where we could pluck the best things out of them and forget the rest But all of that power is now gone up to the federal government and the federal government Well, ever released that power and they only want more budget and more spending to execute that power and That's also because the interest groups that want to go they don't want to have to go and convince a whole state of whether or not something is good

That people are going to vote on they just want to go take a lobby and go up to the federal government because they want all of the power up there as well And the federal government wants all the power up there as well because they make $300,000 a year before they become a politician

And they're worth $30 million when they're done being a politician because all of the money has to go to the federal government because they're in charge of

Lightbulbs 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 That none of those powers are explicitly written in the Constitution in the United States and they use things like the commerce law and other things in order to create things like Obamacare

“We're really we want competing states if Texas comes up with a great way to do health care 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 in the individual because if I want to change the way that my state does health care have one of two options Or three options I can run for office. I can support someone who is going to go and office and do what I want or I can move But when everything 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 real 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 state's needs were organized Because the state was where the founders wanted these thought experiments you read Thomas Hobbs Levi's then or John Locke or Montiske you 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 and 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 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 peer to peer democracy allows 51% to rule 49%

And that was another thing the founders were working

“Fervently to get away from and that's why we had an electoral college and it's actually quite beautiful”

When you actually read about it in the examinance 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 politics And it was a beautiful thing and I could go on for 15 more things about that I won't do it for the sake of your listeners because I doubt this is what they wanted to do But similar things happened with the Supreme Court Marbury V Madison and allowing this Supreme Court to have judicial review

That was never a thing that was in the Constitution in the Supreme Court

If you like the Supreme Court being able to have the power to describe everything is being either constitutional or unconstitutional Then you're not ruled by a democracy you ruled by an oligarchy You've got eight people in a robe. They're going to tell you whether or not laws are good or bad That's not the founding of this country is not how I was intended to work and that I'll start it back in Marbury, Marbury V Madison with Thomas Jefferson And these rits of man-damous

That were the Supreme Court long story short essentially granted itself the power to conduct judicial review on to the old system or the system Old system the system that was ratified and that the founder to prove was if a law was deemed unconstitutional It would go before the Supreme Court and they just weren't ruled look they would rule in favor of the person And then eventually the government would figure out oh, this law doesn't work But it wasn't ever on the Supreme Court to say constitutional unconstitutional

You would get arrested for some law You'd go and it would get appealed to the Supreme Court the Supreme Court would say we're not punishing this person This is against the Constitution But the government would have to keep arresting people And have to keep going in front of the federal government

So what I'm saying is 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 come

It was the only experiment where the value of the individual is 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 or not that it's been around that long But in thousands of years everything tends towards Disorder and everything

Power it always gets centralized and we had a framework to do that

But we were willing participants in our own demise and now we're scratching our heads and wondering why there's no individual and why there's no individual autonomy Why 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 in 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”

And I think there's a lot to absorb here. I'm sorry. No, no was great. It was great I'm this is one of the things that I love about you very thorough There was one thing my friends always say it builds tism is starting to show You got a touch of the tism, but I think that's good like I said it was just like ADHD. I think it's a super power Lot to absorb so I think we're 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 to I'm sure probably 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-pattern to AI and how you understand it But we if you want we can save that for another time Yeah, we'll do that for our next one because I think that's another four hours. Yeah, probably. Yeah, yeah, sure And by then who knows where it's gonna meet Jensen Jensen whining from Nvidia recently declared that we've reached AGR

Yeah, so I would I would yeah, I could

“Yeah, I just couldn't disagree more and I think I could in the same way. I just elucidate”

Not the only one. I'm just caught a few people. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's consciousness projection and I'll sum it up in a minute at the end of the day Neural networks are mathematical functions. They rest in you know waiting neurons based on training data and applying power to train models It's all mathematics There's no sense of knowing there in that You know pen rows. I've read a lot of

On is orc OR if people aren't worried about that. I won't explain it Orc Australia objective reduction and how the mind works in these fleets of consciousness that we have these shivers of consciousness that we have Based around what you know he describes in the microtubule We get conscious thought and that conscious thought we project into things AI is very good conscious projection

But well, it will never have conscious this or knowing because it has no system of values and if we were to instill values

And it would still be conscious this 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 who would measure things and cut things right on walls on that type of stuff That's all conscious this projection that allowed me to get to know him away I might not even 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 is projected consciousness. It's getting very good

But on a calculator You could get the same thing. I'd have 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 propelcity. I could sit here with a rule book and I could type in a calculator

It might take me a million years

But I could do it and I could give it the same answer than a neural network would give you That doesn't mean consciousness or knowing or AGI's 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 from dozens of years now and working with them They're just really clever consciousness projection and so yeah that that is four hours and we can do that next time We'll do that next time But if people we mentioned the app time we do it next time who knows what the fuck is going to be going out with AI Yeah, but if people want to learn more about me or my company. It's spark if I can say that

Yeah, please it's Spartanforged.ai We're built on the real Rick of individual freedom. I want people outdoors. I want people hunting on people experiencing nature I want people Providing for their families the best part of my days and 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 got a concern of time. You got to e-scout. You got to learn things before go out there So we built this company under that. It's one of my I've got three other companies that I'm doing But Spartanforged is the one that I'm worth. It's an awesome app really working on why I really appreciate that

Please check it out and I answer all the Instagram DMs so if you want to have a question for me

“Good luck with that now. Well, I tried to I spend about two hours every morning doing it”

But good luck. Thank you Joe for having thanks brother. Appreciate you very much. Yeah. I gave it all right YouTube fire funny

You