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#0100 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with Bill Thompson · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast
• 0:08
  by night.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: All day.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: What's up, Bill?
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: How you doing, Jeff?
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Good to see you, bro. Good to see you. This
• 0:15
  might be one of the coolest things anybody's ever given me. So,
• 0:19
  you gave me this knife. Explain all this.
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  Speaker 2: All right, so, I mean, there's a larger explanatory reason
• 0:26
  behind this. My brother and I grew up... My father
• 0:28
  died when I was five. My brother and I grew
• 0:31
  up doing... These things called rendezvous. Have you ever heard
• 0:34
  of them?
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: In what way? What is a rendezvous?
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: So there you go. So what a rendezvous is, is
• 0:39
  it's not, you know, you go to those like, I
• 0:43
  don't even know what they're called, but people do like reenactments.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Oh, okay. Like Civil War reenactments?
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: It's not like that. So that's the closest thing, approximation
• 0:51
  to probably what it is. You get invited to them
• 0:54
  or these days are easier to get to. But my stepfather,
• 0:57
  the guy my mother remarried, brought us to him. All
• 1:00
  you do is camp. But you're only allowed to camp
• 1:02
  and no one comes to the camp or sometimes they
• 1:04
  might have people at the end. But while you're in
• 1:06
  the camp, everything in the camp has to be 1840
• 1:08
  or prior. So there can be no modern appurtenances, nothing
• 1:12
  like a refrigerator or nothing like that.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: 1840, why that year?
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: At the end of the fur trapping. That was considered
• 1:19
  like Jeremiah Johnson time, like peak fur trapping. So there's people,
• 1:24
  they dress like either– you know, revolutionary, like American revolutionaries,
• 1:28
  or they dress like mountain men, or they dress like Indians.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: How'd you guys dress?
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  Speaker 2: Mountain men. So while we're there, you learn all kinds
• 1:35
  of stuff while you're reenacting. Like I learned how to
• 1:37
  brain tan hides. I learned how to traditionally art or
• 1:41
  do traditional archery, stuff like that. So anyway, this knife
• 1:44
  was a knife I had actually started working on with
• 1:46
  my brother a while ago. I do more of like
• 1:49
  the brain tanning.
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  Speaker 1: And when you're saying brain tanning, you're talking about using
• 1:53
  brains to tan animal hides, right?
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Yes, yes.
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  Speaker 1: Using animal brains. Yeah. What does brains do? Why does
• 1:58
  brains work?
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  Speaker 2: It softens the leather in a natural way. And what's
• 2:01
  cool about it is every animal, no matter what animal
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  you kill, has the exact amount of brain needed in
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  order to tan the hide. So you don't need any
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  additional– like people use egg yolks or mayonnaise or something
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  like that. All you do is you take the brain
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  out of the cavity. You grind it up. You mix
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  it into some water. And then after you've cleaned the
• 2:19
  leather– And you scraped it clean. You stretch it. I
• 2:23
  usually use like a dull shovel. You stretch it over
• 2:25
  the dull shovel. And then you soak it in the
• 2:28
  brain water mixture. And then you just keep repeating that pattern.
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  And the leather gets like a really nice soft feel
• 2:36
  to it.
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  Speaker 1: What is it about the brain? Is it the fat?
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: It breaks down the leather. I'm not sure if it's
• 2:42
  the fat or not. I haven't gotten that deep into it.
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  But it breaks down the leather and just makes it
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  feel really soft, really nice. So anyway, this knife here.
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  I started, I killed that bear. So the jaw is
• 2:52
  made out of two bear jaws or out of one
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  bear jaw split in half. So that was a bear
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  I killed in Canada in 2017. It was my biggest
• 3:02
  black bear. And so we split the jaw, put that together.
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  It's Irish linen threading. Then that's a knife that my
• 3:11
  brother picked up. That was from 1860. It was totally rusted.
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  We had to grind it back or he had to
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  grind it back down. And then the sheath, is traditional.
• 3:22
  The cool thing about doing rendezvous and the cool thing
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  about this is you could have a DeLorean and drop
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  that in 1840 and somebody would pick it up and
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  think it was made yesterday. And so everything on there
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  has been done traditionally from the quilling on the beadwork
• 3:36
  is made from porcupine quills. The backing is buffalo brain tan.
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  And then the front is beaver hide or beaver tail.
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  I'm sorry.
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  Speaker 3: And then.
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  Speaker 2: The sides are horse and turkey hair hanging off of it.
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  And these are bear teeth? And those are bear teeth, yep,
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  from the same bear. So when I was thinking about
• 3:57
  what I was– because I wanted to give you something
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  for inviting me on because it's still a shock to
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  me that you did it. Even though we've been talking
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  for so long, I just never imagined a scenario where
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  you'd want to have me on here.
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  Speaker 1: Well, you're an interesting dude.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: I thought, what could I give this guy that money
• 4:11
  or people or whatever couldn't get you? And so I
• 4:14
  thought this is the right thing to do. So it
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  went from a me project to a you project. And, uh,
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  my brother, Aaron, uh, helped me out with it tremendously.
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  Speaker 1: So how'd you find this knife from the 1860s?
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  Speaker 2: Well, he found it. My brother is, um, even more
• 4:28
  esoteric and odd than I am, believe it or not. And, uh,
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  he collects this kind of stuff. Um, they, I mean,
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  the guy who dated it said 1860 to 1890 is
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  what they figured. And, uh, And you can tell by
• 4:42
  the way that like around the hilt and the way
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  that it's– the pitting on it and stuff like that
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  and the way that it was made that it fits
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  that era. I mean it could have been somebody redid
• 4:51
  it in 1900, but it's definitely that old. The type
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  of steel and the way that it was worked and
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  the way that it is around the hilt or on
• 4:58
  the bottom there. Wow. And so it's at least 130, 140,
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  but most likely 160, 170. It actually fits my hand perfect. Yeah.
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  So– That's also something my brother and I talked about,
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  about how long it was going to be. And we
• 5:14
  made some educated guesses and put it all together. So, yeah,
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  I mean, like I said, not something you can just
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  go pick up somewhere or something that will, you know,
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  hopefully mean something. Not saying it's practical. Like it's not
• 5:25
  something you'd be gutting an elk out with.
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  Speaker 1: Well, if we get attacked by zombies in the studio,
• 5:30
  it's a good thing to have on the desk.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, if you're going to make a last stand.
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  You know, that's a pretty good knife to make your
• 5:37
  last stand with.
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  Speaker 1: That's a good way to go out.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
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  Speaker 1: That's awesome, man.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, so the rendezvous, we did those from— How long
• 5:45
  do they last? They vary from a week, and then
• 5:48
  some go up to three weeks.
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  Speaker 1: And what do you do for food while you're out there?
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  Speaker 2: So inside of your— so there's two types of rendezvous. At
• 5:56
  most rendezvous inside of your lodge, you can have a
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  cooler as long as it doesn't leave the lodge. So
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  I have like a 20-foot teepee that I take to
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  these things. And inside of my teepee, you can have
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  a cooler and some modern appurtenances.
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  Speaker 1: Did they have any kind of coolers in the 1800s?
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  Speaker 2: I mean, they had ice boxes and like steel ice
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  boxes and that type of thing, but nothing like we
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  have today. You know, stuff was getting dug out, buried
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  in the ground or put into the ground, like cool
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  areas of the ground or digouts. And they dried everything.
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  So pemmican would have been the, you know, everyday thing
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  to eat. That's just dried.
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  Speaker 1: So did you bring your own food or did you
• 6:32
  have to hunt for food?
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  Speaker 2: So you bring your own food, but there are other
• 6:36
  rendezvous that are kind of invite only. And I don't
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  even think a lot of people who do rendezvous knew
• 6:40
  about these. But there's ones that I think they're called.
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  I think I might be speaking out of school. Somebody
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  might send me an email after this, but I'm going
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  to talk about it anyway because I never got read
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  the right act. They're called juried. I think they called
• 6:50
  them juried Southerns. And I've only been to one of those.
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  And that's where everything in the camp has to be pre-1840.
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  You meet down in a parking lot. You put everything
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  on the back of a mule. When I did mine,
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  it was up in the, I think it was the Bighorns. So,
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  you know, you talk to a rancher, get everything packed up.
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  You go into the back of the Bighorns, and everything
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  in camp has to be pre-1840, as close as it
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  can get. They'll even look at your stitching and say, oh,
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  that was sewn with a sewing machine. You've got to
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  take that off. And it's always these weird, like, eccentric
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  history teachers that run them, like guys who, you know,
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  teaches history at Berkeley or something like that or other places.
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  And they just really enjoy living like this. And at
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  those ones, if they're in season, you can hunt whatever's
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  in season. You're hunting with traditional archery. And it's really
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  good for kids. Like the internet wasn't a problem as
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  much when I was a kid. I was certainly into computers.
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  I have been since I was a child. But you
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  could just detach. Everyone's running around crazy, sitting around the
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  campfire at night. People are singing songs on the guitar.
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  You're learning how to do things like this. You're learning
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  how to brain tan. You're learning how to live traditionally.
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  And it's an eccentric cult kind of. It's not a cult.
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  It's an eccentric group of people. It's a lot of fun.
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  People take it very seriously. There's more advertising surrounding it
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  now than there used to be because numbers are kind
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  of dwindling. But I did my last one last year
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  with my brother. So if you go on my Instagram,
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  there's a picture of my brother, my son, and I doing,
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  I think, our second rendezvous together. And we're just dressed like,
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  you know. I've actually got an awesome war shirt. I
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  can show you the picture. I've got an awesome war
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  shirt that a friend of mine, I went to war
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  with his, he was half native American. His grandfather was, um,
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  a jibway or something, Chippewa, something like that. And he was,
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  I don't remember what his role was, but anyway, I went, we,
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  we deployed to Iraq together and his grandpa made me
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  this war shirt. Oh, there you found it. Jamie, he
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  pulled it up. That's my lodge.
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  Speaker 1: Um, how much do you enjoy a shower after you
• 8:53
  get out of here?
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  Speaker 2: I mean, as long as you keep– they have showers
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  in camp. They've got a showering area where it's just
• 9:02
  like pallets. That's the inside of my lodge. So there's
• 9:05
  a cooler at this one. This is not a juried rendezvous.
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  And so you can shower while you're– some of them,
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  they call them hooters. They'll be like a latrine in
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  a shower area in camp. But also like some of them,
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  I don't do it at all. This is wild.
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  Speaker 1: This is wild.
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  Speaker 2: And so there's no reenacting. There's not like civilians walking around.
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  Speaker 1: It's not like Renaissance.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. It's just more like I want to act
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  like it's 1840 for a couple of weeks and not
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  look at my phone one time and not worry about
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  the news. It's amazing after a week here, you really
• 9:36
  forget about the world. And you're like, don't even know
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  you're supposed to be stressed out about things. You're just
• 9:41
  out there doing your thing for a couple of weeks.
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  Speaker 1: And you just cook over open fire.
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  Speaker 2: Everything gets done traditionally that way.
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  Speaker 1: And did you bring your own meat?
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you bring your own meat and stuff in the cooler. Um,
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  and then, uh, there's also cooking classes where they teach
• 9:54
  you like all the recipes to do with like a
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  Dutch oven, like an old cast iron oven. And, uh,
• 10:00
  they do gambling at nights. So you'll walk into like
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  a huge, they call them marquees, but it's like a
• 10:05
  huge 100-foot square lodge. There'll be three gambling tables and
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  there are girls in like the low-cut shirts and dealing
• 10:10
  cards and smoking cigars and just having an amazing time.
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  And you go by camp names while you're in there.
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  Nobody uses their real name. Well, some people use their
• 10:19
  real name. I'd say 60% of people don't use their
• 10:22
  real name.
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  Speaker 1: What was your camp name?
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  Speaker 2: This is embarrassing.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: It should be.
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: So, uh, I got my camp name. I got christened
• 10:31
  with my camp name in the big horns when I
• 10:33
  was 14 or 13 and it was talks a lot.
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  Speaker 1: Talks a lot.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. And Sue, it was pronounced Iota.
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  Speaker 1: And, uh, just cause you talk a lot or when I.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: Was a kid, I talked a lot. Actually as an adult,
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  I don't talk that much unless I know you. Um,
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  But as a kid, I would never shut up. I
• 10:51
  had really bad ADHD. They kind of diagnosed me with
• 10:54
  having some low-level version of Asperger's. And I was a
• 10:59
  rapscallion in class, just never shut up, never listened, never
• 11:03
  did anything.
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  Speaker 1: Those are the people that are the most fun.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: Well, they didn't enjoy me in high school or in
• 11:09
  grade school.
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  Speaker 1: I probably would have been your friend.
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  Speaker 2: But, yeah, they called me Iota. And, you know, we
• 11:16
  got christened. And it was a– you know, it's a–
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  One of the things we're kind of missing in culture
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  today or something that I'm trying to reinvigorate, especially with
• 11:23
  my son and with other young men that I run
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  into is kind of like coming of age rights.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: Something to say, you're a man and I'm going to
• 11:32
  start treating like a man from this moment forward. Like,
• 11:35
  you know, what does that there should be structure to that?
• 11:37
  You know, we're tribal and it's important to me.
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  Speaker 1: So I think that is really something that's missing from society.
• 11:45
  I think that. I used to think it was silly
• 11:47
  when I was young. And then as I got older,
• 11:49
  I realized, oh, I went through that. I became a
• 11:51
  black belt and I started fighting.
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  Speaker 2: And you had a group of men telling you, you're
• 11:56
  at this level. We're going to treat you like that.
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  And if you fall from grace, we're going to remind
• 11:59
  you right away. Yeah. And we just don't do that
• 12:03
  with young men. And we have a society now where
• 12:05
  young men act like young men until they're 45 or
• 12:07
  50 or 60.
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  Speaker 1: And sometimes never stop.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: And, you know, women, nature imposes itself on women. They
• 12:14
  become fertile. They're able to have babies and they got
• 12:18
  to seek security or find a husband or a really
• 12:20
  good job that will supplement whatever a husband would provide.
• 12:24
  And they got to start acting like a woman, whereas
• 12:26
  men can sit in a basement, you know, and it
• 12:28
  becomes very dangerous.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: Especially men that never have children. Yeah. They're perpetual children. Yeah.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: And if you don't impose nature on yourself by undergoing
• 12:37
  those types of rights and understanding what it means to
• 12:39
  become a man. Nature will impose itself on you by
• 12:41
  either A, you're never going to have children and therefore
• 12:43
  you're dead forever. Or B, it will kill you because
• 12:47
  you're fat and in your mom's basement. You get diabetes
• 12:49
  and a foot chopped off and you're 35. And, you know,
• 12:52
  we just don't tell men. We don't have a– the
• 12:55
  military did it for me. I had really put off
• 12:59
  responsibility or seeking meaning or any of those things. Until
• 13:03
  I was in the military. And like I said, my
• 13:05
  father died when I was five. So I really had
• 13:07
  no central male authority until I was about 13 or
• 13:10
  14 when I met this guy, Steve. And he kind
• 13:14
  of initiated some of those rights for me and held
• 13:17
  me to account. But it was really the military, which
• 13:19
  was a turning point for me where there was a
• 13:23
  standard and I was expected to hold it.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: I think there's a reason why most ancient cultures and
• 13:28
  a lot of ancient religions have these rites of passages
• 13:31
  where you are like now officially, officially a man.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: Officially, you know, you're responsible. You have to think of
• 13:39
  yourself as a different thing now. Whereas if you leave
• 13:42
  it up to your own decision, men sort of dwindle
• 13:47
  into this perpetual state of childhood.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: Yep. And it's not about you anymore. It's about other people.
• 13:52
  Like that for me, having children, I've got four kids. Um, really,
• 13:57
  you know, the military was kind of the first inkling
• 14:00
  of responsibility, but then having children and realizing this isn't
• 14:03
  about me at all.
• 14:04
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: And I need to be willing to break my back
• 14:06
  for these people who depend on me. Um, there's this.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: Weird primal feeling that, you know, you're responsible for these
• 14:12
  like very vulnerable little people that you love more than
• 14:16
  life itself. It just changes everything. It just kicks you
• 14:19
  into gear. But for some people, it doesn't, you know,
• 14:22
  some people that are so stuck in that perpetual childhood thing.
• 14:26
  They just wind up deciding it's too much of a
• 14:28
  drag and they get divorced.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: And then they fuck up the kids. Yeah.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: God, we have so many rabbit holes we could go
• 14:35
  down on this. But I mean, it was, you know,
• 14:38
  growing up in the 80s and the early 90s, it
• 14:42
  was really like a divorce culture. And I obviously understand
• 14:46
  that if you're in a bad relationship or an abusive
• 14:47
  relationship or, you know, there's certainly there's a threshold where
• 14:51
  marriage should dissolve. No question. But I kind of feel
• 14:54
  like it. The central thrust of a lot of culture
• 14:57
  at that time was about divorce or not getting married
• 15:00
  or discovering yourself and that type of thing, which in
• 15:03
  some ways is good. There's goodness there. But when it
• 15:06
  becomes a central thrust or a central narrative and divorce
• 15:08
  becomes very easy or it's happening everywhere, it's super– And
• 15:12
  it's normalized. And it's normalized. It's super destructive. Children are
• 15:15
  the ones who suffer the most on it, and I
• 15:16
  think the data is clear on that.
• 15:17
  Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: When you look at, you know, single parent homes or
• 15:20
  no parent homes or being raised, you know, without an authority.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: Or an abusive step person.
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: And that is, you know, when you look up the
• 15:28
  stats on that, like remarriage and having a new family
• 15:31
  like that, that becomes the single most likely vector of
• 15:34
  abuse in a young child's life is that new person. Right.
• 15:38
  Because now they're raising someone else's kid or whatever.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's a that's in every old movie. The
• 15:44
  evil stepmother. Yeah.
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Or evil stepfather, but in the old movies, it's always
• 15:49
  the stepmother that abuses the girl.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: Yes. And, and, and so, you know, I kind of, uh,
• 15:56
  I kind of resented that part of that time. That
• 15:58
  culture was, um, I shouldn't say when I was a child,
• 16:02
  I should say as I got older, cause I wasn't
• 16:03
  a single mom home. And, uh, the guy that my
• 16:05
  mother remarried right after my father died was abusive. And, um,
• 16:10
  you know, he really got hard on my younger brother
• 16:13
  and you know, my mother moved us out almost immediately. But, uh,
• 16:17
  when I reexamined that time, it really was, uh, you know,
• 16:20
  I don't know how to describe it, but you know,
• 16:23
  there are no rules when it comes to relationships and
• 16:27
  family and every family special in particular in its own way.
• 16:30
  And they all need to be venerated. And there's of course,
• 16:33
  some truth to that. We shouldn't deride someone because they
• 16:35
  come from a broken family, but we shouldn't elevate it.
• 16:38
  Like it's at the same level as a unified family. Um,
• 16:42
  and that's a tricky line to, But also the people
• 16:45
  who are making those movies in that culture came from
• 16:47
  the 50s and 60s where divorce was just not in
• 16:50
  the cards. And so that was Hook's Law. As you
• 16:55
  bend any object, it wants to return back to its
• 16:57
  natural state. And Hook's Law kind of played there where
• 17:01
  nobody could get divorced in the 40s, 30s, 40s, 50s,
• 17:03
  and 60s. And then you had the baby boomers who
• 17:05
  kind of culturally said, actually, it's not as bad as
• 17:09
  we think. But then it overcorrected. And it became kind
• 17:12
  of part of that cultural zeitgeist. That's kind of.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: What humans do, right?
• 17:17
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: We always overcorrect.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we do.
• 17:19
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: We go in one direction until we realize it's destructive.
• 17:22
  And then we overcorrect until we realize that's destructive.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 17:27
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• 18:38
  Speaker 2: And I would say that's the– this isn't a political thing.
• 18:41
  This is just the reality of it. That's mostly what
• 18:44
  makes me conservative in nature is I agree systems need
• 18:47
  to change, but they need to change slowly and pragmatically.
• 18:51
  Because any social scientist worth their salt will know a
• 18:57
  social experiment almost never has the outcome that we thought
• 19:00
  it was going to have. In other words, we thought
• 19:02
  doing something to society would form society this way, but
• 19:05
  it almost has the inverse, the anti-pattern like we talked
• 19:08
  about before and almost ends up propagating itself. And so
• 19:12
  that makes me– I'm still a proponent for change, but
• 19:16
  it should be slow and thought out. and and done
• 19:20
  in pockets first yeah kind of you know federalism let's
• 19:24
  do little changes here let's let california be crazy for
• 19:27
  a while and see how that works out for them
• 19:29
  but let's not nationalize the craziness let's learn from what
• 19:32
  they learn there and there'll be goodness you know hot
• 19:35
  baristas that make great coffee and it's cool art and
• 19:38
  let's take those parts but how about the rampant homeless
• 19:42
  let's find out what caused that and solve for that.
• 19:46
  And that was kind of the founder's intent with federalism.
• 19:49
  They're really federalist-minded, state-minded. And there's– even for that being
• 19:53
  250 years ago, there's a profound amount of profanity in that.
• 19:57
  Like let's change things slowly and let social experiments take
• 20:01
  place and adopt the best parts of those things and
• 20:03
  then integrate them to the culture overall as we move along. But,
• 20:07
  you know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yeah.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: I think in this country, one of the primary problems
• 20:13
  that people have is a profound lack of respect for
• 20:16
  discipline and how important discipline is for your life. And
• 20:20
  discipline is associated with conservatism. And because of that, like
• 20:25
  a lot of people think that I'm– I don't think
• 20:28
  I'm anything. I think I have politically or ideologically, I
• 20:33
  have a lot of everything in me. I don't think
• 20:35
  I identify with one side or another. But if one
• 20:37
  thing that I agree with conservative people on, conservative people
• 20:41
  lend more towards the importance of discipline, hard work, discipline.
• 20:46
  Don't complain. Get things done. Deal with the hand that
• 20:50
  you've been dealt with and just sort it out and
• 20:53
  get to work. Don't cry. Don't look for other people
• 20:56
  to save you. They're not going to. And this is
• 20:59
  not something that's celebrated in society. It's thought of as
• 21:03
  a cruelty. That if you say that you need discipline,
• 21:07
  that you're not treating these people that are victims of
• 21:10
  circumstance with the proper respect or with the proper empathy.
• 21:14
  And I think a certain amount of empathy is probably
• 21:17
  not so good for you at a certain point in time.
• 21:19
  There comes a point in time where you're letting people
• 21:21
  wallow in their bullshit and just make excuses for why
• 21:24
  they're not getting anything done. And in that sense, I
• 21:26
  think California is– that is a giant part of what's
• 21:30
  wrong with California.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: What's wrong with California when it comes to crime? What's
• 21:33
  wrong with California? The way they address crime and the
• 21:38
  way they address homelessness and all these issues that they have,
• 21:41
  they don't put their foot down. At a certain point
• 21:43
  in time, you've got to realize like what Gad Saad
• 21:46
  calls suicidal empathy. Society can suffer from suicidal empathy. At
• 21:50
  a certain point in time, you've got to enforce rules
• 21:52
  and you've got to make it so that people have
• 21:54
  to get their shit together.
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that suicidal empathy– becomes a way for the
• 21:58
  person who's imposing it on someone else to feel good
• 22:00
  about themselves, which makes it even trickier and even more
• 22:04
  insidious because they're feeling good from the weaponization of other
• 22:09
  people's lot in life. And the thing about that is
• 22:16
  none of the rules that you're going to impose, especially
• 22:18
  as a legislator or as somebody in a think tank,
• 22:21
  you'll never feel the repercussions of them. You'll never have
• 22:24
  to actually deal with it day to day. You're just
• 22:26
  imposing it on someone else and saying, I better understand
• 22:29
  the structure of reality and the fabric.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: Of the world.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: And you can't help but be this way. It's the
• 22:35
  system that's done this to you. So let me give
• 22:37
  you pittance that I'm going to take from someone else.
• 22:40
  And that makes me benevolent. I get to feel good
• 22:43
  about that.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: That's a giant part of government for sure. That's a
• 22:46
  giant part of what's the problem with like liberal governments.
• 22:49
  Liberal governments should– they should get paid based on whether
• 22:55
  or not the city does better. or worse financially than
• 23:00
  when they were in office. If their policies lead to
• 23:04
  greater domestic production of goods and services and GDP does
• 23:09
  better and everything does better, then you should get paid more.
• 23:12
  If more real estate sales, more people are making more money,
• 23:15
  medium income raises, less homeless people, you should get paid more.
• 23:19
  And you should get paid less if homelessness goes up,
• 23:22
  if crime goes up, if there's more destruction, if there's
• 23:25
  more assaults and home invasions, you should get paid less.
• 23:30
  You're doing a shitty job. And if you did that,
• 23:33
  I think they would impose laws that made it safer
• 23:36
  and healthier and made it better for society.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and then they would just inevitably change the ways
• 23:42
  that we track and measure those things and pay themselves more.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: Well, they shouldn't have the opportunity to do that. Then
• 23:48
  you need some sort of an oversight. I'm being cynical.
• 23:50
  You're right, though. You're right to be cynical because that's
• 23:52
  what they do about everything. Someone was explaining to me
• 23:55
  yesterday that One of the problems with cleaning up fraud
• 24:01
  is that fraud is responsible for a giant percentage of GDP.
• 24:05
  And if you have hundreds of billions of dollars of
• 24:08
  fraud in this country and you eliminated that, you actually
• 24:12
  lower GDP because you actually lower the amount of money
• 24:17
  that's in circulation.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: That's interesting. I've never thought about that before.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: He was explaining to me and I was like, oh,
• 24:22
  my God, that is crazy. that a giant percentage of
• 24:26
  our GDP is fraud. And if that was somehow or
• 24:29
  another eliminated, it'd be like one of the things that
• 24:32
  they do when they raise jobs, like they increase GDP.
• 24:36
  We've added, you know, 200,000 jobs to the market. Well,
• 24:41
  what are those jobs? Like what are those jobs? Are
• 24:43
  these government jobs? Because the government is a giant percentage
• 24:47
  of our GDP. Government jobs.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: It's way bigger than it should be.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: Way bigger. And those jobs, a lot of them are
• 24:53
  bullshit and waste. A lot of them.
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: And that was some of the stuff that was uncovered
• 24:58
  during Doge. The limited amount of access that Doge had
• 25:01
  to it. Just the beginning of it where you got
• 25:05
  to see the curtain pulled back and get to see
• 25:07
  exposure of so many of these fraudulent supposedly– Charitable organizations
• 25:13
  that were really just money laundering. They're really just funneling
• 25:16
  money into these people's hands like the homeless thing in California.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, my goodness.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: It's a bonkers situation where they've spent $ 24 billion. They
• 25:27
  cannot track it. They've tried to audit it. The government
• 25:30
  has vetoed these audits. And they have no idea where
• 25:34
  that $ 24 billion went. And yet homelessness went up.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: But you've got a giant machine that is this homeless establishment,
• 25:44
  this homeless industrial complex.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: That is being funneled money into that. And that actually
• 25:50
  aids the GDP, which is kind of crazy.
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: I mean, it was one of the things my last
• 25:56
  three years in the military, I was advising a colonel
• 26:00
  and a two-star general. And they were in charge of
• 26:02
  all of the offensive cyber development, ethical hacking, offensive cyber development.
• 26:08
  I was their technical advisor. And one of the things
• 26:12
  I kind of learned about government at that point was
• 26:16
  these systems have their own incentive. And the incentive is
• 26:20
  not the output of their purported mission. The incentive is
• 26:23
  the growing of the organization and the execution of budget.
• 26:27
  So while they're in there, I've never seen a field
• 26:30
  grade officer get dressed down more than when he didn't
• 26:33
  spend all of the money that he was budgeted for
• 26:35
  for that year.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: Isn't that crazy?
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: He would go to the Pentagon and they'd be like, well,
• 26:38
  you didn't execute $ 300 million of OCO, of Overseas Contingent
• 26:42
  Operations funds here. And they would dress him down for
• 26:45
  an hour.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: And what people don't understand is if you don't spend
• 26:49
  that money. your budget for the next year will be
• 26:51
  lower because there's no need to have a higher budget.
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: Instead of tying it to mission to say, did you
• 26:57
  achieve your mission objectives? We started the year agreeing from
• 27:01
  the president's framework, the NIPF, the National Intelligence Priority Framework.
• 27:05
  We wanted to achieve these effects. What you would want
• 27:08
  to hear is we achieve them and we save 25%.
• 27:10
  But instead it's we achieve them, but we didn't execute
• 27:13
  all of this money. Well, you're fired. And I literally
• 27:16
  have seen that happen. I've literally seen that happen.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: What a sick society.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that kind of shifted my thinking in that
• 27:25
  these systems have their own incentive to exist and to
• 27:28
  grow because those guys that were holding that general officer,
• 27:31
  that 06, that colonel's feet to the fire, they also
• 27:35
  have an incentive because they were part of that trickle down.
• 27:38
  And they've got bureaucracy that surrounds them. And if they
• 27:41
  didn't execute it, that means they didn't execute it. And
• 27:43
  that means they have to go to whomever. This was
• 27:45
  during the Biden administration. I believe Hegseth, for everything we
• 27:49
  could say, has actually tightened this up quite a bit.
• 27:51
  And he's kind of rehauled the way development works, especially
• 27:54
  on the offensive cyber side. But they have bureaucracies and
• 27:58
  the incentive of the bureaucracy is to make sure that
• 27:59
  we grow. And that's it. And then you think about
• 28:03
  that for a minute and you're like, well, it's no
• 28:04
  longer a question why we have $ 30 trillion of debt.
• 28:08
  $ 39 trillion. And then what, like $ 150 trillion of unfunded liability?
• 28:14
  In other words, we've promised people money for the next
• 28:17
  30 years. And it's debt that, you know, I don't
• 28:20
  see how we'll ever escape that debt. And it's the
• 28:24
  thing about it is, and I don't want to be
• 28:26
  pigeonholed because I'm actually quite liberal when it comes to
• 28:30
  my politics are like yours in that I'm kind of
• 28:33
  a man without a home. But they also change at
• 28:35
  different levels of analysis. I'm very liberal with my family
• 28:39
  and I'm very like communist. I protect them. I give
• 28:42
  them everything they need. I'm trying to give them structure.
• 28:46
  And even in my community, I'll help someone out out
• 28:48
  of pocket or do something for them that's a strain
• 28:51
  on my time or might hurt something else because there
• 28:53
  are really no solutions. There's just tradeoffs.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: That's supportive for the community, though. That's how people are
• 28:58
  supposed to do charity.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: And I'm also very nonjudgmental in someone how they care.
• 29:02
  I don't care what they do in their house. I
• 29:03
  don't care if it's a Roman orgy on the weekends. Like,
• 29:06
  be a predictable, productive person Monday through Friday and go
• 29:10
  do your Roman orgy on the weekend. I don't care.
• 29:12
  I won't judge you. Like, I don't. I really have
• 29:15
  enough crap in my own life.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: As long as someone is not getting hurt.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, as long as no one is getting hurt, consenting adults.
• 29:20
  Like I have enough problems and I screw up enough
• 29:22
  and people have– there's a laundry list of things that
• 29:25
  people can say about me, how I've screwed up in
• 29:26
  my life. But then as I graduate and get higher
• 29:29
  and higher, more conservatism takes place. And that's a result
• 29:35
  of just having an engineering mindset when I'm looking at life.
• 29:40
  and understanding that it's just not Republican or Democrat or
• 29:45
  leftist or rightist or liberal or classically liberal. All of
• 29:50
  these monikers don't work for me because they break down
• 29:54
  At some level of analysis.
• 29:56
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: I think that's the problem. I think the problem is
• 29:58
  these ideologies that people subscribe to. We have a predetermined
• 30:02
  pattern of thinking that you're supposed to adopt.
• 30:04
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: You're supposed to adopt these opinions. And some of them
• 30:08
  just don't fit. And that's how people get pigeonholed. That's
• 30:10
  like people on the left. They get pigeonholed into weird
• 30:13
  stuff that you can't really justify, like trans women in sports. Like,
• 30:17
  what the fuck are you doing? We're being inclusive. Like, no,
• 30:20
  you're not.
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: We're loving the borders of Ukraine while hating our own border.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: Fucking bonkers.
• 30:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: There's so many crazy things. There's so many crazy things
• 30:29
  that people just adopt that don't make any sense. And
• 30:33
  when you subscribe to an ideology, the problem is if
• 30:36
  you define yourself as this person, I am this. I
• 30:40
  am a hardcore right-wing blah, blah, whatever it is. You
• 30:44
  immediately close the door to all the very productive and
• 30:47
  interesting things that the other side thinks.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And you're also making yourself into a tool of propaganda.
• 30:52
  Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: Because if I meet someone and they just say, I'm this,
• 30:56
  it's like, well, I could reasonably predict everything that's going
• 30:59
  to come out of your mouth. That's not entertaining. I
• 31:02
  don't want to have a conversation with that person. I
• 31:03
  can't seek to learn from them because I could just
• 31:05
  pick up the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf and have
• 31:09
  a pretty good understanding of who I'm dealing with. And therefore,
• 31:11
  a conversation is not. It's not relevant. It's not needed.
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: A lot of people are afraid of social ostracization too.
• 31:17
  So they're afraid of straying outside of the narrative, whatever
• 31:21
  side they're supposed to be on. And some groups are
• 31:25
  really good at making you feel like dog shit if
• 31:28
  you don't agree entirely with even things that don't even
• 31:31
  make any sense. So that's why people go along with
• 31:34
  stuff that's illogical like open borders or whatever it is.
• 31:37
  They go along with things that's not in their best
• 31:40
  interest because they're scared. They're scared of being ostracized they're
• 31:43
  scared of being cast out of the kingdom there's you
• 31:45
  know they're scared of being excommunicated.
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah i dealt with a lot of people first when
• 31:50
  i retired from the military and then more recently um
• 31:54
  leading up to the last election where you know i
• 31:56
  was entertaining the deal of doing some work for government
• 31:59
  um believe it or not and because i'm as we
• 32:02
  talk more you'll figure out i'm pretty anti institutions i'm
• 32:07
  really uh against those types of things but I really
• 32:11
  felt– if you would have asked me three years ago
• 32:13
  how I felt about the Trump election and all of
• 32:14
  that stuff, I was very excited because he was saying
• 32:17
  a lot of things that I wanted someone to say.
• 32:19
  Trump fits a pattern and this is what people I
• 32:22
  think kind of lack when they– my whole life is
• 32:26
  built around pattern analysis. I really enjoy patterns and exhuming
• 32:30
  and looking into patterns. And there's a pattern of like
• 32:34
  a– You'll laugh when I say this first part of
• 32:37
  the pattern, but then I'll make it make more sense later.
• 32:40
  But he fits the pattern. Well, first, he's a Jacksonian
• 32:44
  and in that he's a pragmatic person, the way that
• 32:48
  he governs, which I liked, or at least I did. And,
• 32:51
  you know, there's some things he's done recently that I
• 32:53
  don't enjoy. And but he's also a an outsider or
• 32:58
  or a savior type Allah, you know. I don't remember
• 33:03
  the movie, but The Magnificent Seven back in the day.
• 33:05
  I don't remember the actor's name. There's this group of–
• 33:08
  there's this western town. Everything is going to shit. These
• 33:12
  seven guys walk in. I think Chris Pratt remade it
• 33:14
  with Denzel Washington or someone else.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: Oh, really?
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: I think so. I can't remember. But there's an old
• 33:19
  one that I used to watch with my grandpa.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: God, there's too many movies.
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And there's this pattern where you wouldn't invite these
• 33:25
  guys to a dinner party. You wouldn't want them in
• 33:27
  church on Sunday. But when a system is so corrupt
• 33:30
  and so horrible– you have to rely on these types
• 33:33
  of people to come in and be a check to
• 33:35
  the system. But then also you don't want them to
• 33:38
  stick around when the system is reset. So there's a
• 33:41
  scene in the movie where he says, you know, man, these,
• 33:43
  this set, these seven guys are talking and they said, man,
• 33:46
  these people must have really wanted us. Like, it's crazy.
• 33:48
  They must be happy. We're here. And I think it's
• 33:50
  Gary Cooper or someone, or one of these guys says,
• 33:52
  it looks at him and says, they're going to be
• 33:54
  even happier when we leave. And Trump kind of fits
• 33:57
  that narrative. Wolverine from the X-Men would be another one
• 33:59
  who fits this narrative. Like, Is he going to be
• 34:02
  at the X-Men Christmas party?
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: No, right?
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: Is he trying to hit on Scott Gray's wife, Cyclops?
• 34:07
  I'm a comic nerd, so I'm sorry. Is he trying
• 34:11
  to sleep with Cyclops' wife? Yes. Did he chop a
• 34:14
  guy's head off and throw it at a car? Yes.
• 34:16
  But we're about to go face Galactus, and we're going
• 34:19
  to need him. And so we have to put up
• 34:21
  with all of this other stuff because we understand that
• 34:25
  when the system is corrupt at every level, you need
• 34:28
  someone who's outside of the system to come in and
• 34:29
  set the system right. It's a Western pattern as well.
• 34:34
  Other people who fit this would be like Patton, right?
• 34:36
  Married his cousin, slapped soldiers.
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: Did he really?
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: Married his cousin? Yeah, I think it was his third cousin.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: How many cousins removed does it become okay?
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: Is it third?
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: Fourth? If there's blood.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: Have you never met them?
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: I'm Icelandic, so I really can't say anything, right? They
• 34:52
  literally have apps in Iceland. Like my grandparents and my
• 34:55
  great-grandparents are all from Iceland. They settled in Manitoba, Gimli, Manitoba,
• 34:59
  which is this Icelandic community. And they literally have apps
• 35:02
  in Iceland to make sure you're not dating your cousin.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: Is it such a small community?
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: Less than a million people on one island. So you're
• 35:12
  trying to prevent that stuff. But anyway, Patton, yeah, slapped
• 35:15
  soldiers who had tuberculosis. One of them probably had shell shock.
• 35:19
  It got in the newspaper. They wanted his head. And thankfully,
• 35:23
  the generals were like, no, he's the guy that we
• 35:24
  need for the moment, right? He had the ivory pistols
• 35:27
  and He dressed like not like a general. He didn't
• 35:29
  talk like a general. He wasn't like a Eisenhower where
• 35:32
  he had the veneer of a general. But we knew
• 35:36
  he was the only guy we could have at the
• 35:38
  Battle of the Bulge. Like the Germans talked about him
• 35:40
  like he was already a mythic legend in his lifetime.
• 35:46
  But part of this pattern that people should understand or
• 35:48
  when they examine this pattern is it never ends well
• 35:50
  for these antiheroes. They're always killed or defamed in the
• 35:54
  final analysis. So when Magnus and Seven come in, they'll
• 35:58
  go to another town and all get killed. When Patton retired,
• 36:01
  he died in some weird Jeep accident. Wolverine, he's the
• 36:05
  only guy left on this desolate world where the Hulk's
• 36:09
  in charge and it's a horrible existence. Pat, or not Patton,
• 36:13
  Petraeus is another one. I briefed Petraeus. I worked for,
• 36:18
  not for him, but for people who worked for him
• 36:20
  in Iraq. And he was the guy that got us
• 36:24
  through with the surge. But he was really a weird
• 36:28
  guy when you would talk to him. Like you knew
• 36:31
  that he knew something you didn't and that he was
• 36:33
  seeing things that you weren't. But even for myself as
• 36:36
  being like a chief warrant officer at that time, a
• 36:38
  low-level technician, he would ask questions like he got it.
• 36:41
  He didn't act like other generals. Like other generals would
• 36:43
  have their three things they want to talk about and
• 36:45
  then they'd want to get out of Dodge. He would
• 36:47
  ask questions that really had implications. And he is another
• 36:51
  one of these outsiders who came in to write a
• 36:53
  system that was not working– vis-a-vis Iraq in 2006. And
• 36:58
  then what happens to him when he leaves? He, they
• 37:00
  put him in charge of the CIA. They knew he
• 37:02
  had been screwing around with this woman and they're like, okay, we,
• 37:06
  he served his function. Now he needs to get out
• 37:07
  of Dodge. And then he, now he's, you know, uh,
• 37:11
  got tried for all of these things and sleeping with
• 37:13
  someone while he wasn't married. And you know, there's, it's
• 37:16
  not a ceremonious end for these types. I saw. Is
• 37:19
  that really what happened to Petraeus?
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: That's how he ended his.
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he was sleeping with some girl that was writing
• 37:24
  his book or something along those lines.
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: That's it?
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: While he was married? Yeah, I'm not saying that's the
• 37:29
  end of him. All I'm saying is history will remember
• 37:33
  the pattern as ending unfavorably. You know what I'm saying?
• 37:37
  And so when I examined Trump, I said, yeah, I
• 37:40
  don't like what he says. I wouldn't want him around
• 37:42
  my daughters. I wouldn't want him at a dinner party.
• 37:46
  But he seems to be saying these things like he's
• 37:48
  going to reset this system. you know, I think it
• 37:51
  was Chappelle was on your show or another show or
• 37:53
  someone like that, where he talked about Hillary saying, uh,
• 37:56
  you know, something about the tax loopholes or whatever. And
• 37:59
  he just hit right back at her and said, well,
• 38:00
  you're the people who are funding your campaign, take advantage
• 38:03
  of those same loopholes. And if they're there, I'm going
• 38:05
  to take advantage of them. I wouldn't be a pragmatist
• 38:07
  if I didn't. When he started saying stuff like that,
• 38:09
  it seemed to me like he was going to upend
• 38:11
  this system. Uh, the jury's out on that because I
• 38:14
  don't know how I feel these days. We can get
• 38:15
  into that if you need to, if we want to, but, um,
• 38:19
  He's an outsider personality and I thought he was going
• 38:21
  to really reset the system. And there are good things
• 38:25
  that are happening. If I were to grade him, I
• 38:27
  would probably give him a C plus or a B minus.
• 38:30
  He's certainly better than what was happening under Biden. I
• 38:33
  was still in the military when Biden was in charge
• 38:35
  and it was awful to say the least.
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: What were the problems?
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: Oh, my goodness. Books that general officers were being told
• 38:43
  to read and that I as an advisor were being
• 38:45
  told to read. Books like White Rage. Like understanding why
• 38:50
  you're a problem– you as a white man are a
• 38:53
  problem in the modern-day military because this whole thing is
• 38:57
  built on systemic racism. You have built implicit bias that
• 39:01
  you can't escape even if you wanted to or you
• 39:03
  recognized it.
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: It's woke politics.
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was woke politics and it was– I would
• 39:10
  sit there and say all of the people that I
• 39:14
  know who have died during this war, not all of
• 39:15
  them but 80 percent of them. And the numbers bear
• 39:18
  this out when you look at them. They're all white
• 39:19
  guys from the middle of the country who were on
• 39:23
  their farms or, you know, not all of them, 80%
• 39:25
  of them. I think the numbers bear out about 80%
• 39:27
  of them were these guys from the Midwest. or these
• 39:30
  places where they didn't really have a lot going. And
• 39:33
  they went off to fight a war that we probably
• 39:35
  shouldn't have been fighting in the first place, especially in Iraq.
• 39:38
  And they died for their cause. And now you're saying
• 39:41
  that those people who make up the majority of the
• 39:43
  combat deaths are somehow part of this problem and that
• 39:47
  other people aren't benefiting from it. I don't believe race
• 39:51
  to me is disgusting. Even to talk about someone's race, even,
• 39:55
  you know, on both sides of the spectrum, when they were,
• 39:58
  you know, electing that Supreme court justice, I can't remember
• 40:01
  her name right now at the top of my head,
• 40:02
  just cause I'm a little nervous still. She was black
• 40:06
  and they.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: Were talking to Angie Brown.
• 40:07
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: They're talking about how it's historic because she's black and,
• 40:10
  Biden had said he's going to hire a black woman
• 40:12
  to do this job. If I had worked my whole
• 40:15
  life to do something, but now I'm only being elevated
• 40:18
  to this next position because of my gender and the
• 40:20
  color of my skin, I would turn that job down
• 40:23
  so fast because that's not what I want to be
• 40:25
  known for. These are immutable characteristics that I'm not in
• 40:28
  control of. I didn't choose to be born white or
• 40:31
  with blue eyes. I didn't choose to be born in
• 40:33
  a trailer park in the middle of nowhere without a
• 40:35
  dad at five. I didn't choose any of those things.
• 40:38
  I don't see how I benefit from these things at
• 40:40
  the individual level. And the individual level of analysis for
• 40:44
  me is really the only way to evaluate someone for
• 40:46
  their pluses and their minuses. And anything beyond that to
• 40:49
  me is discriminatory on its face.
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: Of course. It's just a great way to control people
• 40:54
  because you pit people against each other that way. And
• 40:57
  it's just an awesome way that they can stay in
• 41:00
  control and make everybody walk on eggshells and think that
• 41:03
  They've victimized people in order to get to their position
• 41:07
  and they have to be shameful of who they are
• 41:11
  that they had no control over.
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: It also gives people an easy rubric to judge other people. Yeah.
• 41:16
  Because nothing is easy really and it gives some– like
• 41:19
  white guy bad. Black guy good. Chinese guy, as long
• 41:23
  as he's not applying to the college I want to
• 41:25
  get into, he's good. Right. And it gives– people want
• 41:29
  easy answers.
• 41:30
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 41:30
  Speaker 2: Really, at the end of the day, they want to
• 41:32
  be told the easy rubric to navigate life because really
• 41:35
  none of it is easy and it requires discipline like
• 41:36
  you said before and thought. And so it was that
• 41:42
  stuff in the military. I remember getting told in an
• 41:45
  equal opportunity briefing we were getting, it doesn't matter what
• 41:50
  you meant when you said what you were saying. It
• 41:53
  only matters what the person felt when you said it.
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: They said that in a military briefing?
• 41:58
  Speaker 2: It was a military equal opportunity briefing. So– and the
• 42:01
  example they gave was if a woman walks into the–
• 42:04
  like we worked with a lot of civilians at this
• 42:08
  military organization where we're developing these offensive cyber capabilities. A
• 42:13
  lot of civilians in there. And so if a woman
• 42:17
  X walks in today and she's got a dress on
• 42:18
  and the thought in your head is, I'd like to
• 42:20
  get my wife that dress or something like it or
• 42:22
  find out where she bought it. And you just say,
• 42:25
  that's a nice dress. Anyway, here's the TPS reports. If
• 42:28
  she heard– something sexual or didn't like the connotation or whatever,
• 42:34
  there's going to be an investigation. You're going to be
• 42:36
  pulled out of that office. This is all going to
• 42:39
  happen despite what you meant. So the idea probably was good.
• 42:43
  We want to prevent sexual harassment inside of the office. Um,
• 42:47
  but it was weaponized, but it was weaponized and it
• 42:50
  was carried out in a way where it's only about
• 42:51
  how people feel and not what a reasonable person standard
• 42:54
  would be in a particular situation. And from the time
• 42:57
  I joined the military, um, until that time we'd been
• 43:00
  at war my entire time in the military, we were
• 43:02
  at war. Um, I deployed throughout my career and I,
• 43:06
  I wouldn't say that I was a war horse. I
• 43:08
  was not a long tabber. I was not a cool
• 43:09
  guy kicking in doors. It was my job with the,
• 43:12
  as the guy with, you know, tape over his glasses
• 43:15
  to point out the door for someone else and say,
• 43:17
  bad guys in there. Um, so I was not, you know,
• 43:20
  a super bad-ass in that regard. I was a nerd
• 43:22
  for super bad-asses and, um, but we also all engaged
• 43:26
  in gallows humor and we would, you know, The jokes
• 43:30
  and stuff. Even someone who had recently died we would
• 43:33
  make a joke about. It's because you have this tremendous pressure.
• 43:39
  And comedy is the relief valve for that in a
• 43:42
  lot of ways.
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, of course.
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: But then someone would overhear that joke or something. And
• 43:45
  now you're looking down the barrel of a 15-6, which
• 43:48
  is a military investigation. And all of these things that
• 43:53
  could permanently impact your life in a way and give
• 43:55
  you a scarlet letter. to where you could never be
• 43:58
  employed again or do anything ever again because you were
• 44:00
  simply trying to relieve some pressure or you were trying
• 44:03
  to find out where to buy your wife the next
• 44:06
  dress and now your life's being ruined. And I know
• 44:08
  guys who suffered under that sword. Like I wouldn't name them,
• 44:11
  but I know guys who, you know, their career met
• 44:15
  a terminal end because of a dumb joke or something.
• 44:18
  It's like you can't be expected to go out and
• 44:20
  shoot people in the face and then be sensitive to
• 44:22
  someone's feelings an hour later. Right. It's just– it doesn't–
• 44:26
  it does not work. Now, should you talk to that
• 44:28
  guy and say, hey, you made woman X feel so-and-so?
• 44:32
  Be more cognizant of that whenever you're around her in
• 44:34
  the future.
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: Well, you should also have a rational discussion with the woman.
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: What did he ask you? He said, where did you
• 44:40
  get that dress? It's very lovely. I'd like to get
• 44:42
  one for my wife. Why were you upset at that?
• 44:45
  Like does this– is this rational? Like you can't be
• 44:49
  in an office if you're that sensitive. Like it's one
• 44:52
  thing if the guy said, I'd like to get you
• 44:54
  out of that dress. Well, for sure.
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: Now you're in a different world. 100%.
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: 100%.
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: Right. Yeah. And if someone says, you look great, you know,
• 45:02
  have you lost weight? You look fantastic. That's a compliment.
• 45:06
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: And if someone gets upset, I felt sexually objectified. I
• 45:09
  felt harassed. Like, okay, he just said you look great.
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's it. Healthy.
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: It's not, you look great. I'd like to get you naked.
• 45:16
  Now we've crossed the Rubicon, right? Now we're into it.
• 45:18
  For sure. For sure.
• 45:19
  Speaker 3: For sure.
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: But just you look great or I like your dress.
• 45:23
  That's like if you said that to a man like, hey,
• 45:26
  great suit.
• 45:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: He's like, I need to file a complaint.
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: I need to file a complaint.
• 45:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: You've trimmed up, Joe.
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: You're looking great, Bill. Like, oh, my God, I'm being harassed.
• 45:35
  I need it like complaint.
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: That would have worked during the Biden administration.
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: That is fucking crazy.
• 45:39
  Speaker 2: That would have worked.
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: That's so crazy.
• 45:41
  Speaker 2: And the other thing that they were doing this briefing,
• 45:43
  which is where I kind of, you know, the last
• 45:45
  couple of years, my military career, I got in trouble
• 45:47
  a couple of times or I should say called down.
• 45:49
  I was a senior– I was a CW4. I was
• 45:52
  one rank from the top. I was advising two-star generals,
• 45:55
  colonels on very important matters. I wasn't high. I wasn't
• 45:59
  high in the dominance hierarchy, but I was adjacent to
• 46:03
  people who were as an advisor. And the amount of–
• 46:11
  in this briefing in particular, they had gotten into– it's
• 46:16
  bad that there are so many white people I'm doing
• 46:20
  high points here, but we need more diversity. I was
• 46:23
  part of an accepted career program that they were starting
• 46:25
  to call like the old white boys network because most
• 46:28
  of the people– so the requirements for this network were
• 46:32
  you had to speak a couple languages. You needed an
• 46:34
  engineering degree or some kind of demonstrated engineering background. You
• 46:39
  had to have deployed. They wanted you to speak the
• 46:43
  language very well. They wanted you to be able to
• 46:45
  go through these engineering courses, these other things. And what
• 46:50
  happens naturally is you now need people who are interested
• 46:53
  in engineering. All right. So you've got somebody who's maybe
• 46:56
  more constrained in their thinking. You need somebody who speaks languages. Well,
• 47:00
  now they also need to be kind of, you know,
• 47:03
  speak French, speak Russian, whatever it was. So they had
• 47:07
  to have studied or lived in an area and done this.
• 47:09
  And they need to be able to go through these
• 47:10
  crazy tactical and strategic types of courses. By virtue of
• 47:15
  those things, you're going to get men. And there were
• 47:19
  lots of women, but then there'll be more white men.
• 47:21
  And it's not because the pool presented itself that way.
• 47:25
  Now you have to extract from that pool. And so
• 47:29
  in this briefing, when they were talking about like the
• 47:31
  old white boys network or how we need to change things,
• 47:33
  I said, you know, do you realize that most men
• 47:37
  have more in common than most women? Or like if
• 47:42
  I say I need more diversity in a particular room,
• 47:45
  if you said diversity of thought, I'd be fine with that.
• 47:47
  But Joe and random black guy in the same program,
• 47:53
  in the same office, have far more in common than
• 47:56
  the white woman. But what you're saying is these people
• 48:00
  need to have all separate different colors and different– like
• 48:04
  all of this needs to be this way. It's going
• 48:06
  to naturally present itself that way because men in the
• 48:09
  military generally are disagreeable. Men in the military who like
• 48:12
  engineering are generally hyper-disagreeable. Yeah. And the only difference between
• 48:18
  these two people is the pigment of their skin. So
• 48:20
  this fake diversity quota that they're putting on top of
• 48:23
  us doesn't achieve anything other than giving some officer a
• 48:27
  bullet on their OER. And I got pulled into the
• 48:30
  office afterward. I said way more than that. But essentially afterwards,
• 48:33
  they're like, hey, chief, you can't say that in those briefings.
• 48:36
  Like the way that you were getting animated in there
• 48:38
  and what you're saying, what you're doing, like, yeah, this
• 48:41
  is not going to fly. And this was like 2018
• 48:43
  or 2019 or something.
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: Just being rational.
• 48:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, just trying to be rational and say that there's
• 48:49
  more difference in groups than there is between groups. And
• 48:53
  that the similarities and the way that things stack up,
• 48:56
  you recruit from a pool of volunteers and candidates. If
• 48:59
  I'm recruiting from a pool of volunteers and candidates who
• 49:01
  are 80% male and white, I have to expect that
• 49:04
  the selected individuals are going to be male and white.
• 49:08
  The majority of people who join the military, I don't
• 49:11
  control this. I'm just As an engineer, I'm looking at statistics.
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: Also, if you want a highly functional, productive group, it's
• 49:17
  got to be based on meritocracy.
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: Sure. Anything other than that is literally a threat to
• 49:23
  national security.
• 49:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you're denigrating lethality. The role of the army is
• 49:28
  to deter war through exuding superior military fighting and technology.
• 49:34
  And when deterrence fails to win, that's it. Those are
• 49:38
  the two things that we need to do with our military.
• 49:41
  It needs to look like the guy in the playground
• 49:42
  who you would not muck about with. And if you
• 49:44
  were to muck with him, he will beat you senseless.
• 49:48
  That's it. Now, whether or not we should be using
• 49:50
  that all the time or how we use it, that's
• 49:51
  a separate question. But the entity itself needs to comport
• 49:55
  itself in this way. Otherwise, you are endangering this truly
• 50:00
  special experiment, which at least in its beginnings valued the individual.
• 50:05
  It valued individual rights and states' rights and the founders.
• 50:11
  And this was another thing I said in that briefing
• 50:13
  was the founders knew, yes, they were all slaveholders. But
• 50:17
  they knew that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
• 50:19
  and the Declaration of Independence would eventually lead to a
• 50:22
  system where we had to acknowledge these people as people.
• 50:26
  And we fought a civil war where a million white
• 50:29
  dudes died to see this experiment through. The scaffolding was there.
• 50:35
  You have to look at the things– the zeitgeist of
• 50:37
  the time. If they had just said, nope, everyone is
• 50:39
  going to be free. There will be no slaves. You
• 50:43
  would have never gotten ratification through the southern states. But
• 50:46
  they knew that there are– and when you read the
• 50:47
  Federalist Papers, they knew that they were erecting this system.
• 50:51
  When you look at Thomas Jefferson and some of these
• 50:52
  other great thinkers, yes, he owned slaves. I get it.
• 50:56
  They knew what they were building and they knew what
• 50:58
  it would ultimately terminate in. And then we had a
• 51:01
  civil war where we destroyed our country from the inside.
• 51:05
  To see this dream come about. And now we're just
• 51:08
  going to all go back and say they're all slave owners.
• 51:10
  I know this has all been said here a million times.
• 51:13
  But this stuff animates me because it's built with blood
• 51:15
  and treasure.
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: Well, it's also you can't judge people from the past
• 51:19
  based on the standards of the present.
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: For sure.
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: Because culture changes. People understand things better. We have a
• 51:27
  much greater recognition of what was wrong. With things 100
• 51:32
  years ago, 200 years ago. And I'm sure in the
• 51:35
  future we're going to look back on today with the
• 51:38
  same lens. It just always works that way.
• 51:41
  Speaker 2: Did you know Joe had a gas-powered car?
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: Exactly. That kind of stuff. Yeah.
• 51:45
  Speaker 2: Did you know that?
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: You consumed more. You flew more. You ate more meat.
• 51:49
  You did whatever you did. You were a problem.
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: He was a problem.
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: And now why would we ever– like I'm voting to
• 51:56
  get rid of the Joe Rogan experience from the National
• 51:58
  Archives because he drove a gas car. You know what
• 52:01
  I mean? Like someone stores your stuff for profundity's sake
• 52:04
  for the future to hear about this. I've always loved
• 52:09
  your podcast, Joe. And it was because you're a genuinely
• 52:12
  curious person. And I'm not kissing your ass right now.
• 52:15
  You're a genuinely curious person that was saying things that
• 52:18
  were not in the current zeitgeist at the time. And
• 52:20
  you refused to apologize for it. And it led to
• 52:23
  a lot of great things. But it led to an
• 52:27
  updating of the system. And you did it with dialogue,
• 52:29
  with the dialogos, with two people trying to learn things
• 52:33
  about each other. And it led to an updating of
• 52:36
  a system. I think it's very important for culture to
• 52:38
  have free and open dialogue so we can update our system.
• 52:41
  So bad ideas can die so we don't have to
• 52:43
  die instead of our bad ideas. Yeah. Because if I
• 52:46
  can't express a bad idea, I have to act it out.
• 52:49
  And if I act out the bad idea, it could
• 52:50
  kill me.
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: And the celebration of good ideas.
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: And the celebration of good ideas. Yeah. And– It's just
• 52:56
  really– there's just been such a weird inversion in politics
• 53:00
  where the free hippie-loving liberals of yesteryear are now the
• 53:06
  ones telling you what words you can use. There are
• 53:08
  no borders, all of these crazy things. And I always
• 53:12
  say to people– I said it to Andy. So I'm
• 53:14
  on my last podcast with him. I'm like a 1996
• 53:17
  Bill Clinton Democrat. If you go watch his State of
• 53:20
  the Union and he talks about lowering debt. Getting out
• 53:23
  of debt actually, working with Newt Gingrich to get out
• 53:26
  of debt, securing the borders, making work and education freely accessible.
• 53:33
  I'm voting for that guy.
• 53:34
  Speaker 3: I know.
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: Isn't it crazy? I mean that's why the problem of
• 53:37
  labels doesn't work, ideological labels. Because if you go back
• 53:42
  far enough and look at Clinton, for example, he's one
• 53:45
  of the best ones. And by the way, did balance
• 53:47
  the budget.
• 53:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, he did.
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: He actually did.
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: We had a surplus when he left the office.
• 53:50
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 53:50
  Speaker 2: Amazing.
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: Did a fucking amazing job. So he got his dick sucked. Yeah.
• 53:55
  Who didn't? Back then, that's the other thing. Judging people
• 53:57
  by the standards of the past, you know, JFK doesn't
• 54:01
  look so good. In the Me Too movement. Right.
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: I mean he would have got canceled.
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: It's like you have to recognize that those– this ideological
• 54:10
  bubble that we find ourselves in left versus right, Bill
• 54:13
  Clinton does not fit in that. Bill Clinton is securely
• 54:17
  on the right in terms of 1996 standards. Apply to today.
• 54:22
  Speaker 2: He would never want to hear that.
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: No, he would never want to hear that because he's
• 54:25
  kind of shifted with the zeitgeist because that's what you
• 54:27
  kind of have to do if you want to stay
• 54:29
  in your party and be protected by your party.
• 54:31
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: But he's essentially– he had a lot of the– I
• 54:35
  mean we've talked about this before. We've played clips of
• 54:38
  Hillary Clinton from 2008 and 2008. She's more MAGA than MAGA.
• 54:43
  Her take on the border was like hardcore, was hardcore.
• 54:48
  If you've been convicted of a crime, get out. If
• 54:51
  you stay here, pay a stiff penalty and you have
• 54:53
  to get in line and you have to learn English
• 54:55
  and everybody cheers. That is a hardcore right-wing 2026 perspective.
• 55:00
  Speaker 2: Obama did it too in 2012.
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. And Obama deported more people than Trump did.
• 55:04
  Speaker 2: Yes, exactly.
• 55:06
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• 55:09
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• 55:56
  Speaker 2: And, and it's just, I'm not saying like my thought
• 55:59
  is I'm always updating. I'm always updating my systems. I'm
• 56:03
  always getting told things. I always have a pre pre
• 56:07
  prescribed way of looking at the world that I'll have
• 56:09
  a good conversation with someone. I'll update my system, but
• 56:12
  generally my principles are in place. And, When you watch
• 56:15
  these people who get into their 30s, 40s, 50s and
• 56:17
  60s and their core foundational principles are changing, that really
• 56:22
  should give you cause for concern. Because like you were
• 56:25
  saying this at this time and now you're saying this
• 56:27
  at that time. It's like generally my rubric that I
• 56:30
  don't think will change about myself is I'm fervently for
• 56:33
  the individual and I'm fervently for truth. And that we
• 56:38
  can– that the world– you should measure it and look
• 56:42
  at not what your intentions are but what the outcomes are.
• 56:45
  And then evaluate the system and how it scales based
• 56:48
  on those outcomes. Those are– that's principally if you– I
• 56:52
  try to live that standard up to myself. I fall
• 56:55
  short of that standard all the time. It's part of
• 56:56
  being a human. I try to live by that standard.
• 56:58
  And I feel like that will always be me even
• 57:01
  into my 90s. Unless something goes horribly wrong, right? Right, right.
• 57:06
  And I've pretty much been here since the past seven
• 57:09
  or eight years or so. Like even into my 30s,
• 57:11
  I wasn't quite sure who I was as a human.
• 57:16
  But I'm pretty steadfast in that. And the amount of
• 57:20
  opportunities and the amount of goodness in my life and
• 57:24
  my children and my home and the things I've been
• 57:27
  able to do have really been born out of that
• 57:30
  last seven years of the truth is going to be
• 57:32
  the top of the decision matrix for me, the top
• 57:35
  of the hierarchy for me. I'm going to try not
• 57:38
  to cut corners whenever I can and help good people
• 57:42
  around me. And the truth is the way that I'll
• 57:44
  organize and function myself in life. And that I will
• 57:48
  try to only judge people as individuals and the world,
• 57:52
  you know, these are crisis teachings from 2000 years ago. And,
• 57:56
  but the world for me has just opened up in
• 57:59
  a way that I could have never predicted using a
• 58:01
  very simple rubric. It's not easy, but it's simple. And
• 58:06
  if more people just took those, and this isn't me,
• 58:08
  I didn't come up with this. This is the result of,
• 58:11
  You know, watching a bunch of experiments go bad. But
• 58:14
  if people just adopted that very simple thing and just
• 58:16
  tried it for three months, you'll feel better about yourself.
• 58:19
  You'll feel better about the world. You feel better about
• 58:21
  the people approximately around you. It might make you hate
• 58:24
  the government more.
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But I don't think if you don't hate the government,
• 58:29
  I think you're not paying attention.
• 58:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: I mean— When you were working in cyber defense, like
• 58:36
  what– Cyber offense. Cyber offense. What was the primary function?
• 58:41
  Like what did you do?
• 58:43
  Speaker 2: So in the beginning– I have no short answers and
• 58:47
  I apologize.
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: In the beginning– I don't like short answers.
• 58:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I just– I always feel like I'm– I like
• 58:52
  a good long answer.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: Don't worry about that.
• 58:54
  Speaker 2: OK. When I joined the military, I was in signals
• 58:57
  intelligence and essentially learning the ins and outs of radars,
• 59:01
  how radars work, what they do. How they function.
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: Did you guys ever see any weird shit? Like UFO shit?
• 59:08
  Speaker 2: I wish I had. I really do.
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: I wish you had too.
• 59:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I really do. I was more in the signals
• 59:15
  intelligence side of the house, focusing first on electronic signals
• 59:18
  or emanations from radars, mapping them so that, you know,
• 59:22
  if we were going to go do the ground invasion
• 59:24
  and there was going to be some air support going
• 59:26
  in first and blowing shit up, we would tell them, hey,
• 59:28
  there's a, man-packable SA-7 here. There's a SA-10 here. There's
• 59:32
  this here. There's there. And then telling these pilots so
• 59:34
  they didn't get shot out of the sky. Quickly, when
• 59:37
  the war kicked off, that became irrelevant because there was
• 59:40
  no surface-to-air missiles, surface-to-surface missiles in Iraq. We had knocked
• 59:45
  them all out in the first few weeks. So then
• 59:47
  it shifted to communications intelligence. So I kind of retrained
• 59:51
  on communications intelligence, and that was at that time off
• 59:54
  of cell phones, off of push-to-talk radios, repeaters. long-haul networks,
• 1:00:00
  terrestrial networks, extraterrestrial networks, and what I mean by that
• 1:00:03
  is satellites in the sky, and doing analysis on those
• 1:00:07
  to try to inform what we call the common operating
• 1:00:11
  picture of the battlefield for a combatant commander. So a
• 1:00:14
  combatant commander wants to know where the bad guys are,
• 1:00:16
  what they're doing, what they're saying. To the amount that
• 1:00:18
  we could, my job was to come up with solutions
• 1:00:22
  and conduct passive and active signals analysis on these things
• 1:00:28
  And then inform the commander so that we could, you know,
• 1:00:31
  mitigate risk. It was all about mitigation of risk. This
• 1:00:36
  is 2008 or so. I'd been doing this for about
• 1:00:37
  seven years, eight years. And from there it shifted to
• 1:00:42
  the phone's getting smart. And essentially it went from you
• 1:00:45
  walking around with a 2G phone or a 3G phone
• 1:00:48
  that had limited compute capability to now there's robust compute
• 1:00:52
  capability with the advent of like the iPhone. And now
• 1:00:55
  it's like, well, now we've got to get after guys
• 1:00:57
  who are, you know, essentially walking on with a computer
• 1:01:00
  we could never have envisioned 20 years ago in their
• 1:01:02
  pocket with all this capability. Because the military and our
• 1:01:06
  forces that we're fighting against, it all comes down to
• 1:01:09
  our ability to shoot, move, and communicate, communication being the
• 1:01:12
  part that I was focused on. So as the advent
• 1:01:14
  of the iPhone and those things came out, the Army
• 1:01:17
  realized we didn't have a computer network operations MOS. We
• 1:01:20
  didn't have an offensive cyber component. We didn't have a
• 1:01:23
  defensive cyber component. So we kind of– I was there
• 1:01:26
  at the ground floor when we were building out these
• 1:01:28
  new MOSs now that are all over the military. But
• 1:01:31
  at that time, there was a thought going into we
• 1:01:34
  need to have people who know how to be on-net operators,
• 1:01:37
  ethical hacking, as paradoxical as that sounds. That's how the
• 1:01:41
  lawyers called it that. So it's hacking at the end
• 1:01:43
  of the day but ethical hacking because you've got the
• 1:01:45
  backing of the US government. And so we set up
• 1:01:49
  that framework and really started launching into operations 2006, 2007, 2008.
• 1:01:54
  All the way into my last deployment in 2017 or 2017,
• 1:01:58
  it was all focused on computer network operations and how
• 1:02:03
  they lash up with terrestrial networks. How do we exploit
• 1:02:06
  all of that was one facet of my job. And
• 1:02:11
  your question was how did I get into all of that?
• 1:02:13
  And that was the.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: How do you get into it? What was like– what
• 1:02:17
  was the operational aspect of it? Like how did you
• 1:02:20
  actually– what did you do?
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 2: So– there's, there's, I'll stick to terms that are more, um,
• 1:02:28
  generally understood by the public, but learning how to do
• 1:02:30
  things like war driving, um, collecting on networks, wifi, you know, endpoints, um,
• 1:02:36
  cell phones, uh, understanding the ins and outs of them,
• 1:02:39
  understanding how to do forensic analysis of them. So after
• 1:02:43
  there was an operation and a bunch of gorillas had
• 1:02:45
  been sent in to kill a bad guy, um, we
• 1:02:48
  could derive maximum intelligence value from the hand, from the
• 1:02:51
  handset to plan other operations. Um, And so it would
• 1:02:56
  be passive monitoring of networks to inform the intelligence picture,
• 1:03:02
  which would lead to either combat operations or active computer
• 1:03:07
  network operations where now it's like, well, there's an Iraqi
• 1:03:14
  or an Afghani router that hasn't been patched in three years.
• 1:03:18
  And we think we can either write or find a
• 1:03:21
  zero day, which is just an exploit of those routers.
• 1:03:24
  where we can muck with their router in a way
• 1:03:28
  where they think they're getting good information and they're not,
• 1:03:31
  or erecting other things to mitigate risk for the commander.
• 1:03:39
  And so that really exploded at that point. And between
• 1:03:43
  that and human intelligence, which is kind of the actual
• 1:03:47
  gathering of intelligence from other people, you would call it
• 1:03:51
  spy or James Bond, but James Bond was a horrible spy.
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: Was he?
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 2: I mean, yeah. Your job is to remain anonymous and
• 1:03:59
  you're walking into a casino and there's Goldfinger calling you
• 1:04:02
  by your first and last name. It's not a great look. Generally,
• 1:04:08
  you don't want to be sleeping with your sources or
• 1:04:12
  using your real name or whatever. So human intelligence. And
• 1:04:15
  then my focus for the last 10 years was how
• 1:04:18
  does signals intelligence, computer network operations become a force multiplier
• 1:04:22
  for people conducting– overt and clandestine operations throughout the theater
• 1:04:27
  at that time. My deployments and my time was spent
• 1:04:31
  in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, northern Africa. And then a lot
• 1:04:36
  of people don't know it, but we were in active
• 1:04:38
  combat operations in the southern Philippines as well for a
• 1:04:42
  fair amount of time. I want to maybe say seven
• 1:04:44
  or ten years we were doing combat operations.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 4: When was this?
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 2: In the southern Philippines. My first deployment to the southern
• 1:04:50
  Philippines was 2007.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: Who are we doing operations against?
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 2: So there were terrorist elements down there that were traveling
• 1:05:00
  back and forth from Pakistan and Afghanistan. And there was
• 1:05:04
  a terrorist organization down there called the Abu Sayyaf Group.
• 1:05:08
  And there were other ones as well. Jamaah Islamiyah, I think,
• 1:05:11
  was the name of the other one. And they were
• 1:05:14
  conducting their own terrorist anti-Christian operations in the southern part
• 1:05:17
  of the Philippines. In the southern part of the Philippines,
• 1:05:20
  I don't– can I say it? Can I say the word?
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: What do you mean?
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 2: Jamie, can you pull up a map of the Philippines?
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 2: Can you pull it up?
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: Oh, say that?
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 2: Say that term?
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, pull it up, Jamie.
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 2: I've been listening to it forever. So there's what's called
• 1:05:30
  the autonomous region of Muslim Mindanao, which is the southern
• 1:05:34
  part from like a place called Zamboanga down to Hulu
• 1:05:37
  or Holo Island. And there's a– it's a funny joke
• 1:05:41
  because if you zoom into Zamboanga, which is– God, look
• 1:05:44
  how many islands there are in the Philippines.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: I know.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: Go down to the south there. Go down right there.
• 1:05:49
  Zoom right there on that island. Now move to– sorry.
• 1:05:52
  Now move to the southwest. Southwest. See that penis? Mm-hmm.
• 1:05:58
  At the tip of that penis is called Zamboanga.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 2: All of our combat operations. Now, if you zoom out
• 1:06:03
  a little bit more and pan more south and zoom
• 1:06:07
  out just a little bit more so the joke hits.
• 1:06:09
  All that sperm south of the tip of the Zamboanga city,
• 1:06:15
  there are terrorist operations in here. Now, if you go
• 1:06:17
  to that main island called Sulu, there's Holo Island. That's
• 1:06:21
  where I was. On this tiny island out in the
• 1:06:24
  middle of nowhere and on that there's a mountain.
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: That's all the Philippines? Well, no.
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: I mean this is all the Philippines down here, yeah. Wow.
• 1:06:30
  So this is called– there's a mountain in there. I
• 1:06:32
  think it was called Mount Tumatoc or something like that
• 1:06:35
  on the eastern part of the island called Luke. It's
• 1:06:38
  called Luke?
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: So there's mountains. There's a mountainous region there. There are
• 1:06:42
  a bunch of terrorists up there. They were killing people
• 1:06:44
  in the area, conducting bombings. They were getting trained. In fact,
• 1:06:48
  there was a guy and I believe– I'm going to
• 1:06:49
  get his name wrong perhaps– But I believe his name
• 1:06:52
  was either Insulon Haplon or– oh, it's Jamar Patek. Jamar Patek.
• 1:06:59
  He was actually arrested outside of Osama bin Laden's compound
• 1:07:02
  the day after he was killed. We were trying to
• 1:07:04
  kill him on that island or in and around that
• 1:07:06
  island is where we were trying to find him and
• 1:07:08
  kill him. So they're terrorist facilitators. They did the USS
• 1:07:12
  Cole bombing.
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: Zoom back out. I want to see the Philippines one
• 1:07:15
  more time, like all the islands. When you zoom all
• 1:07:18
  the way out. It's so nuts how many islands there are.
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so up north in Manila is mostly the Christian population.
• 1:07:27
  And as you get down south, it's the autonomous region
• 1:07:29
  of Muslim Mindanao. And that is all of where these
• 1:07:32
  terrorist operations were happening. And I believe that mostly pulled
• 1:07:36
  out of there, there might be still some people in Zamboanga.
• 1:07:39
  I'm not sure anymore because it's been five years, four
• 1:07:42
  years since I retired. But yeah, we were doing counterinsurgency
• 1:07:46
  operations down there and guys died down there and they're
• 1:07:48
  combat operations. And, uh, I was out there. Um, I
• 1:07:52
  was in a tactical military intelligence battalion and I was
• 1:07:55
  attached to the first special forces group. And we were
• 1:07:58
  down there a couple of times and a lot of
• 1:08:00
  people don't even know about it.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, I never heard about it.
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: So, uh, anyway, um, sorry to sidebar, but I'm so
• 1:08:08
  stunned at how many islands are in the Philippines. It'll
• 1:08:10
  spread out of this.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 2: It's, it's insane. And the, the, the thing about it is,
• 1:08:15
  is I go to all of these little outposts and
• 1:08:17
  these out islands and, We were always debriefing these guys.
• 1:08:20
  And I'm going to get these terms wrong, so I'm
• 1:08:21
  sure there will be people in the comments. But I
• 1:08:23
  think they were called bongerize or something like that. But
• 1:08:26
  they were like these mayors of each one of these
• 1:08:28
  little islands. And there would be terrorists in and around
• 1:08:31
  those areas. And we'd try to make friends with these
• 1:08:32
  guys so they'd give us some information. And every one
• 1:08:36
  of those places was absolutely beautiful. Like you'd go there
• 1:08:39
  and be like, man, Hilton could turn this into something
• 1:08:41
  in a short order. When you're out of these places,
• 1:08:44
  beautiful beach, beautiful lush jungles. The best swimming water.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: Nicest people, too. Oh, the Filipino.
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: People are some of my favorite people, man. Like, you
• 1:08:53
  want to talk... The guys that we worked with out there,
• 1:08:55
  they're a scout. I think they're called scout sniper, scout Rangers.
• 1:08:59
  And they were special. I think they were like their
• 1:09:00
  special forces. We go to the range with these guys
• 1:09:03
  and show them stuff. And they're the most, um, ride
• 1:09:07
  or die type of guys you'll ever meet in your life. Like,
• 1:09:09
  you know, so-and-so said this about you last week and
• 1:09:11
  I could kill him. It's like, no, dude, it's cool.
• 1:09:13
  It's like, Don't worry about it.
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: Fun fact, they're some of the best pool players on
• 1:09:17
  earth too.
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 2: Oh, really?
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: Some of the greatest pool players of all time came
• 1:09:20
  out of the Philippines.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: They're just great people. I mean, the people down there
• 1:09:22
  were fantastic. And it was awful because those guys would
• 1:09:25
  be bombing churches, Christian churches and stuff like that. And
• 1:09:28
  they're doing counter, like I said, counter intelligence operations. Now
• 1:09:34
  they're doing intelligence operations collection to inform that battle picture.
• 1:09:38
  But those guys had direct links with Osama bin Laden
• 1:09:40
  and other people. Wow.
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: I had no idea.
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 2: Right after we, like I said, I think it was,
• 1:09:45
  I think if you look it up, I think his
• 1:09:46
  name is Patek, P-A-T-E-K. And he was arrested outside of
• 1:09:52
  Osama bin Laden's compound. And we had been chasing him
• 1:09:54
  in the Philippines. Wow. Because we thought he was still
• 1:09:57
  down there. There was another guy that we, I believe
• 1:09:59
  we killed him. His name was Al-Bader Parad. But yeah,
• 1:10:03
  my job was not, I always say this on podcasts
• 1:10:06
  because the veteran community is wild right now. They love
• 1:10:09
  to cut each other down right now. There's something weird
• 1:10:11
  going on where like obviously lying. Yeah. Call the people out.
• 1:10:15
  I prefer to call people out face to face. Um, but, uh,
• 1:10:19
  I always make sure people know I was not a
• 1:10:21
  cool guy. Like sometimes I got to dress like one,
• 1:10:24
  you know, for a few years I didn't wear any
• 1:10:25
  uniforms and I got to grow my beard out and
• 1:10:27
  act like a cool guy. But I was really a
• 1:10:29
  nerd for cool guys. I've literally got pictures of myself
• 1:10:32
  down in the, in the holo or in Afghanistan or
• 1:10:35
  anywhere else and tape around my glasses and, You know,
• 1:10:38
  Pez dispenser and my radio and collection equipment looking like
• 1:10:42
  a true blue American nerd. But I was not the
• 1:10:45
  guy who kicked the door in. I was always the
• 1:10:47
  guy who pointed the door out. So I'd be safe
• 1:10:49
  in the Humvee in the back, you know, eat an
• 1:10:50
  MRE and somebody that looked like another gorilla, you know,
• 1:10:53
  like Annie Stumpf or Tim Kennedy or someone like that.
• 1:10:56
  I'd be like, is that the house? I'd be like,
• 1:10:58
  pretty sure that's the house. You guys might want to
• 1:10:59
  be safe, but go ahead. I'll be in the Humvee.
• 1:11:02
  I'll be out here or I'll be in an airplane above,
• 1:11:04
  you know. And yeah, it was it was. Being born
• 1:11:09
  in North Dakota and, you know, my mother, single mother,
• 1:11:13
  after she left that first guy, trailer house in the
• 1:11:17
  middle of this little town called Cavalier, North Dakota. I
• 1:11:20
  had no options. I was a horrible student.
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: That's crazy that you're so smart, but you were a
• 1:11:25
  horrible student. I wouldn't.
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I call myself curious before I'd call myself smart. But,
• 1:11:32
  you know, my mother, you know, I don't know if
• 1:11:34
  you remember, you would remember this, but maybe other people
• 1:11:37
  my age. You'd get these scholastic book order forms that
• 1:11:41
  you'd bring home from school and you could order books.
• 1:11:43
  They'd always be on the back page or it would
• 1:11:45
  always be like little cool stuff like you could get
• 1:11:47
  like a pair of gloves or a hat or something. Anyway,
• 1:11:51
  one time there was a coil radio that you could
• 1:11:54
  order with an earpiece and you put this coil radio together.
• 1:11:57
  And with an earpiece, no battery. It was just the
• 1:12:00
  electromagnetic radiation would activate the coil and the coil would–
• 1:12:05
  you could listen to radio chatter. Really?
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: With no battery?
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Just a tiny little radio.
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: How did it– what was the power?
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 2: The electromagnetic radiation. And you would just– kind of like
• 1:12:16
  a record, like how you hit a record. Electromagnetic radiation
• 1:12:21
  would hit the coil and the coil would feed up
• 1:12:23
  to an amplifier or up to an earpiece. And the earpiece,
• 1:12:26
  you could hear chatter and you could tune it.
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: Did the earpiece have a battery?
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 2: I don't think anything had a battery on it. I
• 1:12:31
  think it was just a– I could be mistaken, but
• 1:12:34
  I don't believe it was.
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: Powered by electromagnetic radiation. Yeah.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, you can look it up, Jamie, if you want.
• 1:12:40
  Sorry to say that again.
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: Tighten that thing down. That thing's driving me crazy.
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sorry. This thing. Like here or here? Right here.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: Look at my finger. Yeah, I've been meaning to do
• 1:12:49
  that like literally when everybody uses this fucking thing. It's
• 1:12:52
  wobbling around, ready to fall off.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but if you look up coil radio with small earpiece,
• 1:12:57
  I could be wrong. I don't remember there being a
• 1:12:58
  battery on it.
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: Electromagnetic radiation powered it. That's bananas.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so kind of like a– same thing with like,
• 1:13:05
  you know, not the same wattage but a microwave, right?
• 1:13:08
  Sends power through the air. Right, but it uses– Or DC.
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: But it uses power to send it.
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but I could be wrong. But at any rate,
• 1:13:16
  that was the first time I got a radio and
• 1:13:18
  I was hearing things and I put it together and
• 1:13:21
  I'm listening to things.
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: Like what kind of things?
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 2: HF radio, VHF radio, people talking, that type of stuff.
• 1:13:28
  And– It was just, and then I found out how
• 1:13:31
  to get an antenna to make the antenna larger and
• 1:13:33
  started ordering auxiliary pieces for it. And then what really
• 1:13:37
  changed me was my mother let me get a, my
• 1:13:39
  mother and I would clean houses. She was a waitress,
• 1:13:42
  but we also would go around and clean houses. And
• 1:13:43
  there was a lawyer that we worked for. His name
• 1:13:45
  was Phil Culp. And, um, he had a old two
• 1:13:49
  86 SX IBM, and, uh, it was just sitting in
• 1:13:53
  his basement. And I told my mom, I was like, Hey,
• 1:13:55
  if I clean for like a month, can I have
• 1:13:56
  that computer? Like he doesn't use it. He's got a
• 1:13:58
  new 486 up in his place here. And he instantly
• 1:14:01
  said I could have it. And then that started me
• 1:14:03
  down the computer networking realm. And like, look, how could
• 1:14:06
  I get this 286 to act like a 386? Or
• 1:14:08
  how could I force it to run Windows? Or how
• 1:14:10
  do I update the memory? How do I do these things?
• 1:14:12
  In this little town, Edinburgh, North Dakota, there was a
• 1:14:14
  guy who had a computer store in a basement of
• 1:14:17
  an old general store. And his name was Jeff Munsobraten.
• 1:14:20
  And I would go there and ask him questions about
• 1:14:22
  computers and just start learning like ins and outs on
• 1:14:25
  how do I update the RAM? How do I get
• 1:14:27
  memory better? How do I augment the storage? How could
• 1:14:30
  I force this thing to run Windows 3.1 so I
• 1:14:32
  could have a GUI instead of using a command line?
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: GUI mean graphic user interface.
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sorry. And so that kind of started me on that.
• 1:14:43
  And that, for me, like I said, I had all
• 1:14:47
  kinds of problems with attention deficit disorder and not being
• 1:14:50
  able to pay attention. That was the only time I
• 1:14:53
  would go for it. Yeah.
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: I don't believe in ADHD. I might be wrong. I
• 1:14:59
  think it's a superpower.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's certainly, I remember I would spend two
• 1:15:03
  days working on a problem and not sleeping.
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. I think it's a superpower. I
• 1:15:07
  think it just keeps you from being interested in things
• 1:15:10
  you're not interested in.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I have a theory on that too that I
• 1:15:13
  can get into after, but that started me down that road.
• 1:15:17
  But in school, I couldn't pay attention.
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: Me neither.
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 2: There was this teacher. I always tell this story. It's
• 1:15:21
  a great teacher. She's still around. Her name is Connie Trenbeth.
• 1:15:26
  And she was my English teacher, literature teacher, something like that.
• 1:15:29
  She might not even remember the story, but here I
• 1:15:31
  am telling it on your podcast. I remember it. She
• 1:15:34
  kept me after class once. And she goes, you know,
• 1:15:36
  I knew your dad, Bill. And, you know, your uncles
• 1:15:40
  were all smart. And my great uncle has an engineering
• 1:15:44
  wing of a school named after him out in Western
• 1:15:47
  North Dakota. And she goes, all these guys were thinkers.
• 1:15:50
  And your dad did all this great stuff and built
• 1:15:52
  all this stuff. And essentially what she was telling me
• 1:15:55
  is you're a waste of life. Like, all you do
• 1:16:00
  is you come in here, you disrupt the class, you
• 1:16:02
  upset people. No one can talk.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: Sounds like me.
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 2: You're trying to dominate every conversation. But when, you know,
• 1:16:08
  you had written one paper on something that interested you,
• 1:16:11
  and I don't remember what it was. And she's like,
• 1:16:13
  that was a wonderful paper. She's like, if you could
• 1:16:16
  just do that every time. And I was not hearing it.
• 1:16:21
  Like I remember the conversation because I actually remember– I
• 1:16:24
  think she said waste of life. I think she actually
• 1:16:26
  said that. Like you're wasting– like you're obviously– my CPU
• 1:16:31
  clocks high. I'm always thinking even when I'm not thinking
• 1:16:34
  and even as we're sitting here talking, I'm thinking about
• 1:16:36
  other things or stuff I want to do when I
• 1:16:38
  get back to my computer or stuff I want to
• 1:16:40
  do for my business. And so I joined the military
• 1:16:44
  and the absurdity of life is this. I joined to
• 1:16:48
  be a military policeman, which I absolutely would have hated. Um,
• 1:16:52
  all of them got turned into infantry people or stand
• 1:16:55
  gate guard, which is a needed function in the military,
• 1:16:57
  but it doesn't apply to my personality. But when I
• 1:17:00
  went to the recruiter station out in Minneapolis, I think
• 1:17:02
  it was, I was a bonehead and I forgot my
• 1:17:05
  driver's license. And they're like, well, and I was supposed
• 1:17:08
  to leave. And at this time I had dumped my girlfriend,
• 1:17:11
  told everyone goodbye. I'd wiped the dust off my boots,
• 1:17:14
  like left Cavalier, North Dakota. And, um, I was like, Hey, uh,
• 1:17:20
  I'm not going back. So, whatever we got to do
• 1:17:23
  right now. And he's like, well, we can, you can
• 1:17:26
  go home, get your license. Cause the MEPS station was
• 1:17:30
  in Minneapolis. Was it Fargo? It doesn't matter. It was five, six,
• 1:17:33
  seven hours away. And they're like, well, you're not leaving
• 1:17:35
  today without a driver's license. So I looked at my
• 1:17:39
  recruiter and I was like, I don't know what job
• 1:17:41
  you need to get me into, but it needs to
• 1:17:42
  be a different job. And they're like, well, you scored,
• 1:17:45
  you know, exceptionally high in your general technical part of
• 1:17:48
  your ASVAB, which is like understanding machines and objects and stuff.
• 1:17:52
  so we could get you into this like Intel job
• 1:17:55
  where you'd learn about radars and stuff. And that immediately
• 1:17:58
  clicked for me. And then he's like, well, we got
• 1:18:00
  to go brief you in this skiff room. There's a,
• 1:18:02
  you know, secure compartmented information facility. There's only one guy
• 1:18:06
  who's got a clearance and he can brief you on
• 1:18:08
  the job. And if you want that job, then you
• 1:18:09
  can leave tomorrow. I instantly started hearing like the James
• 1:18:12
  Bond music, you know, and so they walked me in
• 1:18:18
  this back place and you know, nothing super crazy. And,
• 1:18:22
  briefed me up on the job and I went back
• 1:18:23
  out and I said, yeah, this is actually the job
• 1:18:25
  for me. So the absurdity of life is me forgetting
• 1:18:28
  my driver's license. When I was 16, I was 16
• 1:18:30
  when I signed up, um, maybe 17. No, I was
• 1:18:33
  turning 17 that December when I signed up for the military. Um,
• 1:18:39
  I can connect with a string to forgetting my driver's
• 1:18:41
  license to being here with you today.
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: You can, you can sign up when you're 16.
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 2: I think I was turning 17.
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: You can sign up when I didn't even know you
• 1:18:48
  could sign my.
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 2: Delayed entry program thing, and I left a little bit
• 1:18:53
  before my 18th birthday, so I was graduated from high school. But, yeah,
• 1:18:58
  you can sign up when you're 16, I believe, as
• 1:19:00
  long as your parents sign the waiver. My mother signed
• 1:19:02
  the waiver. She was happy to get me out of
• 1:19:03
  the trailer. So, yeah, I was 17... almost 18 when
• 1:19:08
  I left. Can you make a radio out of that? Yeah,
• 1:19:10
  right there. So that's all the pieces.
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 3: They call it a crystal radio.
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to say crystal controlled.
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: That's a radio?
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 2: There it is. That's actually the exact thing. That looks almost,
• 1:19:20
  that is almost exactly what it looks like.
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: Slinky made it?
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 3: Well, they bought the brand, they just lent the Slinky
• 1:19:25
  brand now.
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: What?
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 3: There's a bunch of these all over the internet, yeah.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: Wow. Make your own working radio without batteries.
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it uses a, I was going to say
• 1:19:33
  crystal controlled radio because it uses a crystal diode on it.
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: Would you say Tesla coil, Jamie?
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a Tesla coil. This guy's explaining it. So
• 1:19:43
  this thing has a kind of cool tool.
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: Let me find this thing.
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 4: A rocket radio, they called, which is like further development,
• 1:19:49
  this thing. It attached to a phone.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: Oh.
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 4: So you plug that onto a phone cable. There's a
• 1:19:56
  picture of it somewhere on here, but it explains like
• 1:19:59
  you're picking up. There you go.
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 3: Wow. No power.
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: No battery or current needed, hence no operating expense and
• 1:20:07
  long life. Yeah, this is almost onto a phone. What
• 1:20:11
  year was this?
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 3: Man, this is old. Yeah.
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 4: It also shows here, this is like you're picking up
• 1:20:17
  power from a radio tower. Yeah.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 3: Wow. And they're powerful, the signal.
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 4: This is sort of like what they're paying for at
• 1:20:23
  the FCC. The more powerful your radio tower, the longer
• 1:20:26
  and more people you can reach.
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 2: Crazy.
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: That has no battery.
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 2: No battery.
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 3: And that's also why.
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 4: Some radio signals come in very well on your radio
• 1:20:34
  and some don't. They sound like dog shit.
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah. They got weak power.
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And then the frequency modulation, like amplitude modulation isn't
• 1:20:43
  as efficient as frequency modulation when it comes to for
• 1:20:46
  the voc order to produce sound. Amplitude modulation travels farther,
• 1:20:52
  but it doesn't have the amount of information. It's not modulated.
• 1:20:57
  The carrier wave can't be modulated with as much information
• 1:20:59
  as you need. Whereas frequency modulation is much quicker, megahertz,
• 1:21:03
  and you can amplitude and add more sound or more information,
• 1:21:07
  which is why it sounds better. So FM sounds better,
• 1:21:09
  but it doesn't travel as far.
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 2: AM sounds worse. When I was training people in the
• 1:21:14
  military on this, I always used the analogy of if
• 1:21:16
  a party is happening next door, you can hear the
• 1:21:18
  bass music, but you can't hear the treble. You can
• 1:21:21
  hear the bass music because that frequency travels farther because
• 1:21:25
  it's lower in the frequency band. But you can hear
• 1:21:27
  the treble better. because or you can't hear the treble
• 1:21:31
  i'm sorry because it's higher frequency and there's more modulation
• 1:21:34
  and so it disperses quicker and you can't hear it
• 1:21:37
  as well and it's the same thing with like vlf
• 1:21:39
  comms coming off of like a submarine can travel underwater
• 1:21:42
  for a very long ways but you can't put as
• 1:21:45
  much information in them as you could if you were
• 1:21:47
  doing you know vhf or uhf comms where there's lots
• 1:21:51
  of modulation so it's the dispersal and you know a
• 1:21:55
  lot of my you know mid Part of my career
• 1:21:57
  was explaining this stuff to military guys who were trying
• 1:22:00
  to understand like here's how a cell phone works and
• 1:22:03
  this is how frequency works and this is how we
• 1:22:05
  send information and just kind of demystifying how a GSM
• 1:22:11
  network works.
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: One of the things that I wanted to ask you
• 1:22:13
  about that is when new technology is emerging, how do
• 1:22:18
  you stay ahead of– The ability to extract information from
• 1:22:29
  this technology, hack into networks before people understand the capability.
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 2: You really can't.
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: You really can't.
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 2: And that's the beauty of the free market is that
• 1:22:39
  the innovation to perform the function that you want someone
• 1:22:43
  to pay for will always move faster than your ability
• 1:22:46
  to exploit the technology.
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: Then how do you explain things like Pegasus?
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, something like Pegasus. Well, first off– Explain
• 1:22:56
  Pegasus to people that don't know. It was a persistent
• 1:22:59
  implant on cell phones for people.
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: Initially, it was– you had to click it. It was
• 1:23:04
  a clickable exploit.
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 2: Initially, it was a click and then it became a
• 1:23:07
  non-click exploit. So in other words, you had to interact
• 1:23:09
  with something on the phone in order to initialize and
• 1:23:12
  install the implant. And then after– but the reason why
• 1:23:16
  it was so good is because it wasn't stored in
• 1:23:19
  the– It wasn't stored in the usual areas that you
• 1:23:23
  would want a persistent– or where you would have a
• 1:23:25
  persistent implant. For instance, you might want to put it
• 1:23:29
  in the application layer of an app or something like
• 1:23:32
  that where there's a binary that can run and execute
• 1:23:35
  commands or functions. And so they– I won't get into
• 1:23:40
  the very specifics of where and how they did this
• 1:23:42
  because I'm not sure if I got this information from
• 1:23:45
  the government or not. So I won't say it. But
• 1:23:47
  they stored it in a place where it wasn't normal.
• 1:23:50
  And you can read papers on your own and look
• 1:23:53
  at the forensics of it and how the actual implant
• 1:23:55
  was executed. But it essentially allowed people to own your
• 1:23:59
  phone and was the kind of implant I only dreamed
• 1:24:06
  of when I was helping develop my own implants in
• 1:24:08
  the military. Mostly what we would rely on is zero-day
• 1:24:13
  architecture and looking for something in a phone that either
• 1:24:16
  they hadn't patched or that the phone that you were
• 1:24:18
  looking at hadn't been patched. So phones, as they have
• 1:24:22
  their own red teams, are going through the phone for
• 1:24:24
  their own, because they want to sell a product that
• 1:24:26
  people will use and people won't use stuff that can
• 1:24:28
  get hacked. So they'll do their own red teaming and
• 1:24:31
  they'll discover like, oh, you know, we, we, on this
• 1:24:34
  router we developed, we left this port open and it
• 1:24:36
  shouldn't have been open. So now we're going to write
• 1:24:38
  a patch that will close that port so that this
• 1:24:40
  port is no longer accessible by a guy like me.
• 1:24:42
  So I can't go in there and and do something
• 1:24:44
  to this particular type of router. Another great thing, I'll
• 1:24:47
  say something good about the administration. They're doing some stuff
• 1:24:49
  right now to make sure that we're getting rid of
• 1:24:52
  Chinese technology and Chinese routers. And there's a widespread network of,
• 1:25:00
  the PLA has a, and I can't remember the name
• 1:25:03
  of the botnet, but they essentially implanted a bunch of
• 1:25:06
  old unpatched routers to get access to government and business
• 1:25:12
  proximal people And it was widespread and huge. And, you know,
• 1:25:16
  it looked like to me, I haven't read this anywhere,
• 1:25:20
  but if I were looking at this implant and how
• 1:25:21
  it was done, they were trying to really cause some trouble.
• 1:25:26
  It was being placed at critical places. Think power, think energy,
• 1:25:29
  think banking. Like they really wanted to cause some ruckus.
• 1:25:34
  And I have not been part of this administration, so
• 1:25:36
  I'm not saying anything classified for those of you who
• 1:25:38
  are listening. And so– but there was a decision to say, hey,
• 1:25:42
  we need to make sure that these things get patched
• 1:25:44
  and also that we're not bringing in architecture from the
• 1:25:47
  overseas because they don't play by the same rules that
• 1:25:50
  we at least say we play by.
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: Well, that's why they banned Huawei devices.
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, and ZTE.
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Huawei had a phone that I was really interested
• 1:25:58
  in back in the day. They had a Porsche design,
• 1:26:01
  had partnered with Huawei and made this insane Android phone
• 1:26:05
  with like the best camera, the best battery. It was
• 1:26:08
  like really high level. And I was like, going to
• 1:26:10
  buy it. And then all of a sudden they banned
• 1:26:12
  all the Huawei phones. And I was like, what's going on?
• 1:26:15
  And then I had heard some people say, oh, they're
• 1:26:17
  just trying to stop competition. It's like American companies are
• 1:26:21
  trying to stop it. And then I went into it
• 1:26:23
  deeper and I said, no, it seems like there's third-party
• 1:26:27
  input on some of the routers and some of their
• 1:26:31
  network devices that they had engineered in order to be
• 1:26:35
  able to access them by third party. And this– Because
• 1:26:40
  of whatever, lack of understanding, lack of knowledge of how
• 1:26:45
  these things are constructed, the people that purchased them didn't–
• 1:26:48
  weren't aware of them. And these things had gotten into
• 1:26:50
  place and they had gotten into place in universities. They
• 1:26:53
  got into place in military establishments. They were using them
• 1:26:57
  in cell phone towers that people had inadvertently bought from China.
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 2: That's really– I mean I can tell you firsthand from
• 1:27:05
  having done some other forensic exploitation on this stuff. Another
• 1:27:08
  large part of my career I didn't talk about was
• 1:27:10
  just on mobile forensics and media forensics, which is essentially
• 1:27:14
  you think of like CSI Miami or CSI whatever the
• 1:27:17
  city was. There's a crime. Someone was killed. You have
• 1:27:20
  forensics that are doing forensics on like blood and fingerprints
• 1:27:23
  and blood splatter and all that stuff. There's a whole
• 1:27:25
  another part of that same forensics branch that focuses on
• 1:27:29
  media forensics. What was deleted off this phone at one point?
• 1:27:32
  What remains on this phone? What was it being used for?
• 1:27:35
  I would do this in the military so that when
• 1:27:37
  we did do an operation and I was part of
• 1:27:39
  some of the largest ones ever done out in Afghanistan,
• 1:27:43
  there would be treasure troves of phones and all of
• 1:27:46
  these computers and stuff like that. And it was my job.
• 1:27:49
  And I had a great team that worked for me
• 1:27:51
  in my deployment in 2015. We would go in afterwards,
• 1:27:56
  gather up all of this stuff. And, you know, the
• 1:27:59
  task force commander would literally be standing by. And we'd say,
• 1:28:02
  you know, here's the intelligence that we've derived. Here's the
• 1:28:04
  multi-point analysis here. You know, it was on this hard drive.
• 1:28:07
  It was here, it was here. You know, there's a
• 1:28:09
  bad guy place out here. And those guys would be
• 1:28:11
  rolling like within moments after the last operation, like some
• 1:28:14
  operations we do where we'd be rolling one after another
• 1:28:16
  target because we were getting really good at media forensics
• 1:28:20
  and the intelligence that was there. And then getting into
• 1:28:23
  active media forensics, which is a different discipline, but essentially
• 1:28:27
  I'll get it. I can get into that later if
• 1:28:28
  you want to, but, um, launching and doing these follow-on
• 1:28:33
  operations off, dumping the binary from a phone and examining
• 1:28:36
  it at the ones and zeros level to say everything
• 1:28:39
  that was going on with this thing, or if it
• 1:28:41
  was a really high, like the organization that I worked
• 1:28:43
  for at that time, did the analysis of the Osama
• 1:28:46
  bin Laden media. And, you know, on that media, we're
• 1:28:50
  doing far more than we would for another piece of media.
• 1:28:53
  And that we're, You know, X-raying it and we're looking
• 1:28:56
  at maybe what the disk looked like before or what
• 1:28:59
  was destroyed or reconstructing things. Spending millions of dollars on
• 1:29:02
  that intelligence analysis because we wanted to fully understand everything
• 1:29:06
  that this guy was involved in and what he was
• 1:29:07
  doing and where he was and who he was talking to.
• 1:29:10
  And so that was another part of my career that
• 1:29:12
  I did for about five years or so.
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: What was going on with the Huawei phones? Like what
• 1:29:16
  were they doing with them?
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 2: I mean– They were– some of them were coming out implanted.
• 1:29:22
  In other words, there was access built in for a
• 1:29:24
  foreign actor. And then in other terms, other places with routers,
• 1:29:28
  with the ZTE stuff, there were just things that you
• 1:29:31
  would patch or that you would fix as a company
• 1:29:34
  who was trying to protect the consumer and create a
• 1:29:36
  product that people would use and they weren't doing it.
• 1:29:39
  So they were creating persistent backdoors either by actively placing
• 1:29:43
  code on there that would allow root access or Or
• 1:29:46
  they were leaving things open, especially in Africa, like the
• 1:29:50
  work that– when I was working in Africa, the Chinese
• 1:29:53
  were just owning Africa. They were just giving them communications infrastructure.
• 1:29:58
  And they were doing that because they wanted their resources
• 1:30:01
  and they wanted to know what these people were saying
• 1:30:03
  and what they were doing. And so I'm a free
• 1:30:06
  market– like I'm as free market as a guy can get.
• 1:30:09
  I want the best people building the best products and
• 1:30:11
  I want everyone to be able to compete. But in
• 1:30:13
  that case, I would never own a Huawei or a
• 1:30:16
  ZTE or anything else.
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: On a consumer level, what were they doing with those phones?
• 1:30:21
  Like if they had imported them to the United States,
• 1:30:24
  if they didn't have that ban, what would have been
• 1:30:26
  the issue?
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 2: Getting access to any number of people. The Chinese really
• 1:30:32
  want access to everybody. But you could start at the
• 1:30:35
  topical level of just saying getting Joe Rogan to use
• 1:30:39
  a ZTE would be That would be my wet dream
• 1:30:42
  as a guy who used to do this work back
• 1:30:43
  in the day because you're talking to the president or
• 1:30:45
  you're talking to this guy or that guy. And I
• 1:30:47
  can build out a network of understanding who you're in
• 1:30:50
  contact with, who you're talking to, what's being talked about.
• 1:30:53
  But then also finding out this person's phone number and
• 1:30:56
  now doing a deep dive on there. So it's really
• 1:30:58
  about getting all of that data and constructing an analyst notebook,
• 1:31:03
  essentially outline of who's talking to who, who do we
• 1:31:06
  need to implant. But it's for business as well. They
• 1:31:10
  would want this in the hands of somebody who's in
• 1:31:12
  charge of a business because they want their IP. They
• 1:31:14
  would want this in soldiers' hands so they had no
• 1:31:16
  deployment dates or who's going where and who's doing what.
• 1:31:18
  They want this in routers because routers are usually the
• 1:31:22
  most unpatched piece of technology in that. These days, they're
• 1:31:26
  more automated patching. But back in the day, you had
• 1:31:30
  to manually update a router. And if you didn't, well,
• 1:31:32
  then you had potential exploits that were sitting on that
• 1:31:35
  router where I could gain access to the router in
• 1:31:37
  your home, or I could gain access to a BGP router,
• 1:31:40
  which is like a border gateway, which is moving all
• 1:31:43
  of the internet data, or I could get access to
• 1:31:45
  a microwave terminal. You know, if you look at a
• 1:31:47
  cell phone, they've got the microwave terminals on there that
• 1:31:50
  are sending information in between them. If those are Chinese
• 1:31:53
  parts that are either being used for the processing, the CPU,
• 1:31:57
  or the physical infrastructure of that, the products that they
• 1:32:01
  were putting out would give me direct access to the
• 1:32:03
  information that's being passed on those terminals and So you're
• 1:32:06
  getting system level, root level access through machinery, through communication
• 1:32:12
  devices and through things like routers where you can know
• 1:32:15
  everything you want to know about your enemy.
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: Wow. And so as far as today's technology, I see
• 1:32:21
  you use an Android phone. Is there a phone that
• 1:32:25
  is more secure or a platform that is more secure?
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 2: It all depends. Like I always take this from Thomas Sowell.
• 1:32:33
  There are no answers. There are only tradeoffs. So there's
• 1:32:36
  like– the way to answer that question would be is
• 1:32:38
  like who are you? What are you trying to do
• 1:32:40
  with your life? What are you talking about on your phone?
• 1:32:42
  What are you doing on your phone? Most of these phones,
• 1:32:45
  if you're just an average everyday citizen who's just going
• 1:32:48
  about your job, the phones today are pretty secure especially
• 1:32:52
  versus a few years ago. If you're a reporter, now
• 1:32:57
  the nexus is do you trust the government and do
• 1:32:59
  you trust Apple? If you trust the government, you trust Apple,
• 1:33:03
  then Apple is probably your best bet. For using– there's
• 1:33:06
  lockdown mode on an Apple phone or– they used to
• 1:33:10
  call it back in the day. I think it was
• 1:33:11
  called reporter mode. But there was ways to encrypt the
• 1:33:14
  devices and to encrypt the chatter and the tunnel coming
• 1:33:18
  out of the phone, the RF coming out of the phone.
• 1:33:21
  What is lockdown mode? I don't know if that's exactly
• 1:33:25
  what it was called or not because I've never really
• 1:33:27
  used Apple just for my own personal reasons.
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: What personal reasons?
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 2: I don't trust Apple.
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: How so?
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 2: So they are more interested in monetizing people's data than
• 1:33:37
  they are providing them capability. So every time you take
• 1:33:40
  a photo, every time you upload a document, every time
• 1:33:42
  you talk to it, every time it asks you about–
• 1:33:46
  you'll get these questions where it says if your password
• 1:33:50
  is lost, you can back up your password in these ways.
• 1:33:52
  Tell us where you were born. Tell us your mom's
• 1:33:54
  maiden name. Tell us your mom's this, your mom's that.
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: Lockdown mode is an extreme optional protection. It can only
• 1:33:59
  be used if you believe you may be personally targeted
• 1:34:01
  by a highly sophisticated cyber attack. Most people are never
• 1:34:04
  targeted by attacks of this nature. When iPhone is in
• 1:34:07
  lockdown mode, it will not function as it typically does. Apps, websites,
• 1:34:10
  and features will be strictly limited for security, and some
• 1:34:13
  experiences will be completely unavailable.
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so when I was advising guys back in the
• 1:34:18
  day on going out and doing like a high-risk source meet,
• 1:34:22
  so they're going to go meet, you know, a spy
• 1:34:24
  for another country and you're a military guy and you're
• 1:34:27
  debriefing someone or doing something, I would always tell them
• 1:34:29
  to use lockdown mode. I knew that it did those things.
• 1:34:31
  I didn't know if that was the term or if
• 1:34:33
  I thought that out.
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: So can you still send iMessages?
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 2: You can still text and call.
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: Text and call, that's it.
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but there's other things that you can't do.
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: Well, like Meta just recently announced they're no longer encrypting
• 1:34:44
  your DMs.
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 2: Why would they do that?
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: Well, they said that it's for protection or whatever to
• 1:34:50
  make sure that people aren't doing bad things. I don't
• 1:34:52
  know what. See what their explanation was.
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 3: Sorry, I'm worried about this reporter.
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Meta recently announced that they're no longer encrypting
• 1:35:06
  your DMs on Instagram. And a lot of people are
• 1:35:09
  up in arms and they're stopping using any DMs on
• 1:35:13
  Instagram and any of that stuff. And the idea is
• 1:35:16
  that other people can read your stuff now. Now, whether
• 1:35:19
  it's Meta can read your stuff or who.
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 2: That's what I mean.
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 2: And I said, why don't you trust Apple? It's the
• 1:35:24
  same reason I don't trust Meta. They're not interested.
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: The dangers behind Meta killing end-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs.
• 1:35:31
  Meta blamed users for not opting into the privacy-protecting feature.
• 1:35:34
  Experts fear the move could be the first major domino
• 1:35:37
  to fall for end-to-end encryption tech worldwide.
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 2: That's a horrible narrative. Yeah.
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: It seems squirrely.
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 2: So.
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: Oh, you've read your last free article.
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: Give me money, motherfucker.
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 2: But what Apple and Meta want to do is like
• 1:35:55
  they're trying to build these new neural networks. They're trying to,
• 1:35:58
  you know, humans and we can get into this too
• 1:36:01
  later if you want. Humans are the only thing, in
• 1:36:03
  my opinion, and I'm happy to have you disagree with
• 1:36:06
  me and I love to have this conversation. In my opinion,
• 1:36:08
  we're the only ones that are.
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: After May 8, 2026. Announce plans to discontinue support for
• 1:36:14
  end-to-end encryption for chats on Instagram. If you have chats
• 1:36:17
  that are impacted by this change, you will see instructions
• 1:36:19
  on how you can download any media or messages you
• 1:36:22
  may want to keep. Social media giant said in a
• 1:36:24
  help document, if you're on an older version of Instagram,
• 1:36:27
  you may also need to update the app before you
• 1:36:29
  can download your affected chats. When reach for comment, this
• 1:36:33
  is what Meta had to say, very few people are
• 1:36:35
  opting for end-to-end encrypted messages and DMs, so we're removing
• 1:36:38
  this option from Instagram in the coming months. Anyone who
• 1:36:41
  wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do
• 1:36:44
  that on WhatsApp. But WhatsApp is a little squirrely, right? Yeah,
• 1:36:47
  I mean, they're all squirrely. And that's the problem. And
• 1:36:51
  so you asked me why I don't trust them. It's
• 1:36:53
  because they want to use... So humans, in my opinion,
• 1:36:57
  and some animals, are the only things that have the
• 1:37:02
  ability to project consciousness. And projecting consciousness is how you
• 1:37:06
  train a neural network. And it's how you train All
• 1:37:08
  of these large networks. A lot of my time also
• 1:37:11
  in the military was spent– I was doing artificial intelligence
• 1:37:13
  in 2012, 2011. Like before it was even a catch term,
• 1:37:17
  we were using artificial intelligence to map dynamic networks and
• 1:37:20
  to do other things. More pragmatic uses of it than
• 1:37:23
  how it's being used today with large language models or
• 1:37:25
  convolutional neural networks. But they need consciousness to train their models.
• 1:37:30
  So when Google offers you meta or Instagram or whoever
• 1:37:34
  else offers you photo storage, it's because.
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 2: They want your face to train neural networks. If they're
• 1:37:39
  going to pay for the compute, if they're going to
• 1:37:41
  pay for the storage for these things, they're doing it
• 1:37:44
  because they're going to use the data. If you're getting
• 1:37:47
  a free app, in essence, any free app, if the
• 1:37:50
  product's free, then you're the product. So when Google is
• 1:37:53
  allowing you to use a Google Drive and get a
• 1:37:55
  gig of storage, they're going to use those photos to
• 1:37:58
  train neural networks to do better facial recognition.
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: What if you're paying for Google Drive?
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 2: I don't know about their terms of service now. That
• 1:38:04
  is one of the best things that I use with
• 1:38:07
  large language models is Any product I download, I have
• 1:38:10
  the neural network examine the terms of service. And then
• 1:38:14
  you can pretty much understand, like, here's my focus. Here's
• 1:38:17
  the 40-page terms of services document. When you click that
• 1:38:20
  link that you got, what are they able to do
• 1:38:22
  with my data? So that's how I sign up for apps.
• 1:38:24
  And that's one of the great uses of a large
• 1:38:26
  language model, in my opinion, is to quickly understand how
• 1:38:29
  these things are being used. And that's why I say
• 1:38:32
  with Apple, with Meta, with all of these large information,
• 1:38:35
  you are more the product than the product's the product.
• 1:38:38
  And that is because they're trying to build the most powerful,
• 1:38:40
  capable artificial intelligences, which I think is a misnomer. And again,
• 1:38:45
  we can get into it later. But they're trying to
• 1:38:46
  build these hyper-competent artificial intelligences. And you need two things
• 1:38:51
  for that really is training data and you need compute.
• 1:38:55
  And that's why you start seeing them coming out with
• 1:38:56
  like Meta's building its own nuclear engineering facility or nuclear
• 1:39:00
  facility or something like that. And they need more training data.
• 1:39:04
  So if I want to build a replica of Joe
• 1:39:07
  Rogan that I can make hyper-realistic AI videos for, I
• 1:39:10
  need every picture of your face from every angle. I
• 1:39:13
  need every wince, every squint, everything you've ever done so
• 1:39:17
  I can introduce more training data to better train that
• 1:39:20
  neural network in order to generate more hyper-realistic versions of yourself.
• 1:39:25
  And so when a company is offering you something for free,
• 1:39:28
  and it's fine. Like if people are fine with that idea,
• 1:39:31
  then by all means, download all the free apps that
• 1:39:33
  you want. But if you're downloading a free app, it's
• 1:39:36
  because you are the product. They either want to see
• 1:39:38
  how you type. They want to see what you're saying.
• 1:39:40
  They want to see how you're thinking about things. They
• 1:39:43
  want to understand your political biases. They want to look
• 1:39:45
  at your photos. And this isn't because they're a deep-seated
• 1:39:48
  nation-state actor. They can become that. But it's because they're
• 1:39:51
  trying to build the best products because the big money
• 1:39:54
  is in AI. That's where the biggest money is. So
• 1:39:57
  anytime you're doing any of these things, it's just been
• 1:39:59
  obvious to me from the– not from the onset but
• 1:40:01
  pretty close to the onset that.
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a good example, right? Pokemon Go players
• 1:40:07
  built a 30 billion photo map. That's how training robots
• 1:40:11
  deliver your pizza.
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 2: There you go. So they view– and they can say
• 1:40:17
  they don't and maybe if someone from there catches this podcast,
• 1:40:21
  which they well could, they might put out a statement
• 1:40:23
  saying that's not what they're doing. But I'm telling you
• 1:40:25
  as a person who has done media forensics, who has
• 1:40:28
  done computer network operations and who has trained artificial intelligence models,
• 1:40:33
  that is precisely what they are doing.
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: That is– there's no– What is the difference between using
• 1:40:38
  Apple and using Android?
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 2: Well, Android will do the same things and Google will
• 1:40:42
  do the same things. It's just that I can root
• 1:40:45
  my phone or I can install a custom operating system
• 1:40:48
  like graphene or something like that, which I'm not doing
• 1:40:50
  right now. I had to make a sacrifice when I
• 1:40:54
  started my cart, my company Spartan forge. And the sacrifice
• 1:40:57
  was I had to be the face of this product.
• 1:40:59
  And so I never had a social media until I
• 1:41:02
  started the company and I didn't upload things to the
• 1:41:05
  cloud until I started this company. And it became just like,
• 1:41:08
  I have to sell a product. I have to, you know,
• 1:41:11
  And I'm actually selling a product, not people's data or
• 1:41:13
  people's photos. I have to sell this product. I have
• 1:41:15
  to let people– people often don't know who is the
• 1:41:18
  company or who is the organizing principal and what do
• 1:41:21
  they care about in the company. And I just made
• 1:41:24
  that trade and said I'm going to have to become
• 1:41:26
  a public person and start putting things out there. And
• 1:41:29
  so when I started the company, we started our first
• 1:41:32
  Instagram and I started my– my marketing team started my
• 1:41:35
  first Instagram. And I had to start uploading things and
• 1:41:38
  talking about how I felt about things because I wanted
• 1:41:42
  people to know that this company was not going to
• 1:41:44
  be like the other companies that are out there. We
• 1:41:46
  don't sell their data. We don't sell emails. I can
• 1:41:48
  make a half million dollars off my email list tomorrow.
• 1:41:51
  And I've been offered that money. We've got millions of
• 1:41:53
  emails from people who have signed up for our apps.
• 1:41:55
  Other companies who are starting companies, they want to go
• 1:41:59
  out and reach marketing people. So if you're starting another
• 1:42:02
  hunting app, maybe for cameras or for a call or
• 1:42:05
  a tricky call or an out call or something, and
• 1:42:08
  you found Spartan Forge and you said, man, they've got
• 1:42:12
  2 million emails. I could pay them a half million
• 1:42:15
  dollars for that $ 2 million and start some top of mark,
• 1:42:17
  top of line marketing, top of funnel marketing and go
• 1:42:20
  blast them. So they'd pay me a lot of money
• 1:42:22
  for those emails. I will never do that. I'll never
• 1:42:25
  sell my company's emails, the people's emails. I'll never do
• 1:42:28
  any of those things because the product is the product
• 1:42:31
  for my company. It's not the people.
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: So the reason why you use Android over Apple is
• 1:42:37
  the ability to root it and install things like Graphene?
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, custom OSs.
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: But yet you don't use it.
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 2: Not now, but what I still can use and what
• 1:42:45
  I still do use is Android also publishes their framework
• 1:42:50
  in an open source fashion where you can look at
• 1:42:53
  the– it's called AOSP, Android Open Source Project. So the
• 1:42:57
  basis of Android, the nuts– think of it as the
• 1:43:00
  nuts and bolts. I'll try not to talk in too
• 1:43:02
  technical terms here. But the basic framework, think about it
• 1:43:06
  like a car. The frame and the engine makeup is
• 1:43:09
  published so you can look at how things work on
• 1:43:12
  the inside. Apple goes the opposite way and they don't
• 1:43:14
  publish any of that and you can't see any of
• 1:43:16
  that stuff. I'm for the free and open version because
• 1:43:19
  at least if something– at least if I'm worried about
• 1:43:22
  my phone having a problem, I can actually dump binary
• 1:43:25
  or I can create an EO1 file and exhume. I
• 1:43:27
  can look at the binary and say, is my phone
• 1:43:30
  acting like it should or doing what it should? Or
• 1:43:32
  is there some kind of persistent implant? I wouldn't be
• 1:43:33
  able to do that with– I would have to trust
• 1:43:36
  Apple and Apple's ecosystem and whoever they're– McAfee or whatever
• 1:43:40
  they're using. I would have to trust them, which I don't.
• 1:43:43
  So I like the Android version.
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: Is that option available for the average consumer that's not
• 1:43:49
  that learned in computers?
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 2: Well, the great part about large language models now is
• 1:43:54
  if you wanted to dump your own phone today, you
• 1:43:56
  could follow along with a large language model and do it,
• 1:43:59
  your own Android.
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: And how would you do that?
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 2: Well, there's– you would have to buy some expensive– there
• 1:44:06
  is something– you would either have to pay a firm
• 1:44:08
  to do it or you could download things like Celebrite.
• 1:44:12
  You could get a Celebrite. or there's other things called
• 1:44:15
  forensic toolkit, other things like that that allow you to
• 1:44:19
  examine your phone at a deeper level.
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: And is this an app, forensic?
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 2: They're products.
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: Products.
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 2: They're products.
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: So it's a physical product that you dump your phone into?
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's software. And there's connecting and all that
• 1:44:31
  type of stuff. Tools I used throughout my military career,
• 1:44:34
  Celebrite was one of them, but they're Israeli-owned. I've got
• 1:44:38
  nothing against Israel. I've just got everything against foreign actors.
• 1:44:41
  Just if they're not an American company, That automatically kicks
• 1:44:44
  them down a level for me. So anyway, there's all
• 1:44:49
  kinds of– Android just makes it much easier to examine
• 1:44:52
  your phone or to understand if you've got something going
• 1:44:56
  on that's funky than it is on Apple.
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: So for the average person, like for me, like if I.
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 2: You're not the average person.
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: Well, let's pretend I am. If I got an Android
• 1:45:04
  phone and I wanted to examine my phone, what would
• 1:45:08
  be the process?
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 2: You would download some of the software that I talked about.
• 1:45:11
  You would jack your phone into it. You would open
• 1:45:13
  your phone and then it would start carving the binary
• 1:45:17
  of your– everything in your phone. It would start– you
• 1:45:21
  could create a one-to-one emulation of your phone if you
• 1:45:23
  wanted to. And then you would be able to get
• 1:45:25
  under the hood and examine the apps. You would be
• 1:45:28
  able to examine the binary. What's the executable code? You
• 1:45:30
  would be able to look at all of those things
• 1:45:32
  and then determine because Android open source project is published,
• 1:45:37
  you could do a one-for-one and say– Well, at the
• 1:45:40
  kernel level, there's this weird code that's not in the
• 1:45:43
  Android build. So what is this code? And then with
• 1:45:48
  a neural network, you could probably– I've never done it,
• 1:45:51
  but I'm sure you could figure out what the intent
• 1:45:53
  is of that code even for a layperson.
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: So I could take that information and I could put
• 1:45:57
  it into Perplexity and Perplexity would lay out what's going
• 1:46:01
  on with it?
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 2: Ostensibly, it would be able to, yes, unless it was
• 1:46:03
  some type of weird code. I don't know if– I
• 1:46:05
  haven't used Perplexity, so I don't know if they have
• 1:46:07
  something like ChatGPT's Codex.
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: I sort of.
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 4: Just tried just to be like, can you help me
• 1:46:12
  examine what my Android phone is doing, looking for any
• 1:46:15
  malicious actors?
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: Yes, I can walk you through structured non-destructive check for
• 1:46:18
  malware or other shady activity on your Android phone. A, first,
• 1:46:22
  what are you noticing? For tools, commands, quickly check for
• 1:46:25
  common warning signs, sudden big battery drain, you're not using
• 1:46:28
  the phone, unusual data usage. particularly in the background, apps
• 1:46:32
  you don't remember installing, or icons briefly appearing and then disappearing.
• 1:46:36
  Lots of pop-ups, redirects in browser, or new default search launcher,
• 1:46:41
  strange calls, SMS messages you didn't send yourself. If any
• 1:46:45
  of those ring a bell, we'll focus on them in
• 1:46:47
  later steps. So this is just something that you could
• 1:46:50
  do with an Android phone that you just can't do
• 1:46:52
  with Apple.
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Apple's not open.
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: What are the reasons you don't trust Apple?
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 2: Well, could I ask, can I do one thing before we,
• 1:46:58
  remember that question because I don't want to forget it.
• 1:46:59
  Can I give you a prompt?
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 4: Sure.
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 2: Because I want to answer your first question that we've
• 1:47:03
  already gone past. Can you bring perplexity.
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: Back up, please?
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 3: Do you want to go in addition to that or
• 1:47:08
  start a new one?
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 2: No, this is fine. Just say, my friend helped me
• 1:47:12
  carve an EO1 file. Echo Oscar EO1 file. And he
• 1:47:23
  says that there is code in there. That doesn't comport
• 1:47:30
  with the rest of the Android system. Yeah, P-O-R-T. The
• 1:47:36
  rest of the system. Could I dump that code here
• 1:47:41
  and could you tell me what it means? I'm sure
• 1:47:43
  the answer is yes, but I just didn't want to
• 1:47:45
  answer it because I've never done it.
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: Could you tell me? Could you tell me, Jeremy?
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 2: Could you tell me what it means?
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: Get the U out. Get the you. Tell me you.
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 2: Could I have some of your coffee, please?
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. It's for you. Okay, let's see what it says. Yes,
• 1:48:10
  you can paste suspicious code here, and I can help
• 1:48:12
  explain what it appears to do line by line and
• 1:48:15
  whether anything looks malicious before you paste a few important notes. Remove.
• 1:48:20
  or redact anything that looks like private data, usernames, passwords, keys, tokens, IPs,
• 1:48:25
  email addresses, phone numbers. Perplexity is our sponsor.
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 2: I love that because you'd never get that from ChatGPT.
• 1:48:31
  You'd want all that information.
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: Perplexity is the shit.
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: So you're not sharing personal or case-sensitive information.
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 2: Wonderful perplexity.
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: If it's very long, send in chunks and tell me
• 1:48:43
  chunk 1-3, chunk 2-3, et cetera, so we can help
• 1:48:47
  keep track. I can do static analysis here, read and
• 1:48:50
  reason about the code, but I cannot actually execute it
• 1:48:53
  in a sandbox. So this is more like a careful
• 1:48:56
  forensic read-through than a full dynamic malware analysis. Go ahead
• 1:49:00
  and paste the code snippet your friend flagged is not
• 1:49:02
  fitting with the rest of the system. And tell me
• 1:49:05
  in a sentence or two where in the EO1 it
• 1:49:08
  came from, example, app folder, system partition, random file path.
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I thought that would be the answer.
• 1:49:16
  I've just never done it. And so you can do
• 1:49:18
  a forensic examination of an Apple, by the way. I'm
• 1:49:22
  sorry if I misspoke there. But you can't do it
• 1:49:24
  to the level that you can with Apple. Because the
• 1:49:27
  Android open source project publishes all of the code, I
• 1:49:30
  can get an understanding of the very inner working. So
• 1:49:32
  if something is being done, for instance, at the kernel
• 1:49:35
  or you could think about it as like the lowest
• 1:49:36
  level of the phone, something that wouldn't normally get caught
• 1:49:41
  in a forensic examination, I wouldn't be able to do
• 1:49:44
  that with Apple. And the nation state actors are doing
• 1:49:48
  things at very low levels in the code framework for
• 1:49:52
  that exact reason because most people who aren't very deep
• 1:49:55
  into forensics would miss that. It would be like the
• 1:49:58
  fingerprint under the couch cushion or something like that.
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 1: And what is the difference between what someone can do
• 1:50:05
  with an Android phone with the standard Android operating system
• 1:50:09
  versus graphene?
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 2: So that gets into if you wanted to war drive
• 1:50:15
  or sample Wi-Fi networks in an area or if you
• 1:50:18
  wanted to run a barrage attack on a Wi-Fi endpoint.
• 1:50:24
  You could work that in there to do things with
• 1:50:26
  the phone that you couldn't otherwise do with a standard
• 1:50:28
  app– with a standard Android operating kit.
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: But as far as on a consumer level, like what
• 1:50:34
  protections do you have by running Graphene that you don't
• 1:50:37
  have by running Android?
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 2: You're much more in control of the ecosystem. You have
• 1:50:44
  a firmer understanding. And again, you could use a large
• 1:50:46
  language model to do this to understand exactly what's being
• 1:50:49
  run on the phone. You control the background services that
• 1:50:52
  can be run on the phone. So if you're getting
• 1:50:54
  hot-miked or if your camera is taking pictures of you
• 1:50:56
  and you're not looking or it's listening to you for
• 1:50:57
  advertising content, stuff like that, you would be in control
• 1:51:01
  of all of that in a way that you're not
• 1:51:02
  in control of on a native Android app.
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: In control, like how so? Would it alert you that
• 1:51:06
  this is happening?
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 2: Or just the functionality wouldn't be there for it to
• 1:51:09
  take place.
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: Right, because the functionality is only designed for the standard
• 1:51:14
  Android operating system.
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 2: And I haven't installed Graphene in a while. So all
• 1:51:19
  of this updates and I could be saying things that
• 1:51:21
  are incorrect. I stopped doing this about three years ago.
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: I know that there was– I forget what country it was.
• 1:51:27
  But they were focusing on people who use Google Pixel phones,
• 1:51:30
  for example. Yeah, because that's– Because that's one of the
• 1:51:33
  phones that are more commonly rooted.
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's easy to do. And you could do it
• 1:51:37
  with a large language model. You could sit there and
• 1:51:39
  be walked through on how to do it, which is
• 1:51:40
  a great.
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: Part of that. Is it complicated? Like for a person
• 1:51:44
  like me that's not that astute?
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 2: No, it's not something I would do with a phone
• 1:51:48
  that you care about the first few times because you're
• 1:51:50
  going to jack things up. You have to get the
• 1:51:52
  bootloader and essentially the starting mechanisms of the phone that
• 1:51:57
  launches all of the other things. You have to get
• 1:51:59
  down to a level and unlock that so that you can.
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: Is that available for all Android phones?
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 2: No, not all Android phones. Lots of them lock it down,
• 1:52:07
  so you can't do that.
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: Is that available for Samsung phones?
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 2: No, not this one. So the question has to become
• 1:52:13
  can you unlock the bootloader? And that is the starting–
• 1:52:16
  think of it as the starting engine of the rest
• 1:52:18
  of the phones.
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: Why is it only available on Google Pixel phones?
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure why they do it that way. I
• 1:52:22
  haven't looked into that. It's just Pixels and the older
• 1:52:25
  Samsung's made it available. Older Galaxy S7s, S10s, you could
• 1:52:31
  do more than you can with like– and I've got
• 1:52:34
  the Galaxy Fold here and you can do almost none
• 1:52:36
  of that on here.
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 1: That is fucking sweet though.
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love this phone. But like I said, I
• 1:52:41
  went away from doing all that, A, because it was work. B,
• 1:52:44
  because I'm not working in national security anymore and I'm
• 1:52:47
  not– I haven't written an exploit in years. I don't
• 1:52:51
  do this type of work anymore and I need to
• 1:52:53
  sell a product. And it just– working with other employees
• 1:52:56
  like that run my Instagram or assistant going through my
• 1:53:00
  email and all those other types of things. It just
• 1:53:03
  wasn't pragmatic anymore for me to keep doing that and.
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: I had to give up that part of myself. Does
• 1:53:06
  Spartan Forge, your app, run on graphene?
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 2: Well, it could. Yeah, it would. You have to sideload
• 1:53:12
  the app. But again, a large language model could walk
• 1:53:14
  you through doing that. So we haven't gotten to that
• 1:53:18
  level of– Does.
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 4: It make sense here that this says it's easier because
• 1:53:20
  Google makes it easier?
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah. He was just asking me why they make it easier.
• 1:53:24
  I don't know that answer.
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: So the process is officially supported in the Android settings
• 1:53:30
  under developer options, allowing users to toggle OEM locking, simple
• 1:53:34
  fast boot method. Pixels use standard fast boot commands that
• 1:53:38
  work– consistently across all models to unlock the bootloader accessibility.
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's what I was talking about. So, yeah, I
• 1:53:47
  don't know why they do it. It might be people
• 1:53:48
  can– well, the Android open source project exists. So it
• 1:53:52
  would stand to reason that you would want a way
• 1:53:54
  for someone– because what you want is people interacting with
• 1:53:56
  that code and red teaming it and making the code
• 1:53:59
  better and then offering bug bounties so that you can
• 1:54:03
  tell Android like, hey, you've got a critical flaw in
• 1:54:06
  your system architecture here. And then they'll pay you $ 20, 000
• 1:54:08
  for that. I've got friends who do that.
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: You and I talked about Eric Prince's phone.
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: So the narrative is that that is an unhackable phone.
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just by virtue. And look, Eric's a wonderful guy.
• 1:54:26
  And the principles that he used for the first instantiation
• 1:54:33
  of that phone are the correct principles, which is we
• 1:54:35
  need to get it. If you're security-focused at all, you
• 1:54:38
  should get away from these big, large conglomerates because none
• 1:54:42
  of your data is private. That's a correct principle. An
• 1:54:45
  incorrect principle, and I'm going to get shit about this,
• 1:54:47
  but I told you in the beginning I care about
• 1:54:50
  the truth, and I do care about the truth, is
• 1:54:52
  that when you're using a PKI subsystem that relies on Microsoft,
• 1:54:58
  then you're not in control of the PKI certificate signing,
• 1:55:01
  and Microsoft could cause a bunch of problems, and they
• 1:55:03
  were using that. Um, so the other thing being, if
• 1:55:07
  you're building on the Android open source project, that means
• 1:55:10
  the code that you're using as the engine, let's just
• 1:55:13
  call it that of your phone is examinable by the public.
• 1:55:16
  So you're relying on Android to publish these, you know,
• 1:55:21
  updates to the phone and you're relying on those things
• 1:55:24
  to be as good as possible. Now you might harden
• 1:55:25
  it some more, but as long as the code is
• 1:55:28
  out there, it can always be mucked with as long
• 1:55:30
  as people have to interact with the device and type
• 1:55:33
  and you have to see what you're typing. A phone
• 1:55:35
  is going to be– it's going to have Swiss cheese.
• 1:55:38
  So when people say something is unhackable, as you said,
• 1:55:41
  that's just not true.
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it didn't make sense to me. It's just not true.
• 1:55:46
  That's why you and I talked about it.
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we talked about it quite a bit. Like I said,
• 1:55:51
  great guy, done lots of great things for the country.
• 1:55:53
  And it's just– if they had just said something along
• 1:55:57
  the lines of it's hackable as any phone is hackable
• 1:55:59
  because by virtue of you having to interact with it,
• 1:56:02
  it's hackable. Just like if I came up with an
• 1:56:06
  app that had a– look at the TikTok terms of
• 1:56:09
  service on the first TikTok.
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's bonkers.
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 2: With those terms of services, I will own your phone.
• 1:56:14
  And I'm not saying you can install TikTok on his phone.
• 1:56:16
  But what I'm saying is by virtue that you have
• 1:56:18
  to interact with the phone and see what you're doing
• 1:56:21
  and type passwords and you've got those kinds of terms
• 1:56:23
  of service, I could easily put a keylogger in that.
• 1:56:26
  And now I know your signal password or your signal pin. Or,
• 1:56:30
  you know, I get you, you know, you're going to China,
• 1:56:32
  so I stop you in secondary. And while you're in secondary,
• 1:56:35
  I've got a CCTV on you and you unlock your phone.
• 1:56:38
  Now I know how to unlock your phone. And now
• 1:56:40
  I'm going to lock you up in secondary at customs
• 1:56:43
  in China or in Canada. And I'm going to separate
• 1:56:47
  you from your phone. And I've seen you unlock it. Well,
• 1:56:49
  now I'm going to get in there with NCASE or
• 1:56:51
  I'm going to get in there with FTK or I'm
• 1:56:52
  going to get in there with Celebrite. And I'm going
• 1:56:55
  to dump your phone. And just by virtue of it
• 1:57:00
  being built on the Android open source project, that's a
• 1:57:02
  great thing. It's a good thing. Just don't call it
• 1:57:05
  totally unhackable. Because a guy like me, I don't need
• 1:57:09
  but a week or two to tell you on this
• 1:57:11
  current build, like here's the hole in this Swiss cheese. Now,
• 1:57:15
  is it far better than having a Google phone with
• 1:57:19
  standard firmware and standard OS or an Apple phone? I
• 1:57:23
  don't know about Apple because again, you asked me about
• 1:57:25
  Apple and I said, I don't know Apple. I don't
• 1:57:27
  know what's happening at the top of that company, but
• 1:57:29
  I know that they like to monetize people and that's
• 1:57:32
  pervasive in my mind. And using data that people don't
• 1:57:35
  know is getting used, even though it's in a 40
• 1:57:37
  page terms of services document is pervasive. So I just
• 1:57:40
  don't know what that highest level of analysis. And that's
• 1:57:43
  why I said to answer your question about the safest phone,
• 1:57:46
  I would ask you what you're using it for, who
• 1:57:48
  you are and what are you doing in the world
• 1:57:51
  is the best way to answer that question.
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: So me, what would you recommend I use?
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 2: I mean, I wouldn't want to– I mean, okay, I'll
• 1:57:59
  tell you generally what I would say because you might
• 1:58:01
  ask me that question one day because we go back
• 1:58:03
  and forth about a lot of tech. I know specifically
• 1:58:06
  what I would recommend for you to do, and I'd
• 1:58:08
  even tell you to hire someone else to do it.
• 1:58:10
  not me, because that just that checks and balances is
• 1:58:14
  what I would want. But for you, I would say
• 1:58:17
  you should take something like a Raspberry Pi and you
• 1:58:21
  should run WireGuard on your phone and you should route
• 1:58:24
  all of your Internet traffic through something like a home
• 1:58:27
  terminal at your house through a Raspberry Pi. using something
• 1:58:30
  like WireGuard, which is a VPN that I use that's
• 1:58:33
  very good. And everything should be routed through that. And
• 1:58:40
  if you trust Apple, continue using Apple. If you don't
• 1:58:43
  trust Apple, then use Android. And you could use a
• 1:58:49
  pixel and do graphene, and you could use Signal on
• 1:58:51
  there and those other things, and you're going to be
• 1:58:52
  relatively safe. But again, if I'm a nation state actor,
• 1:58:56
  I can create circumstances where I'm going to get access
• 1:58:58
  to your shit and I'm going to lock you down.
• 1:59:02
  And some of them are more expensive than other methods
• 1:59:05
  to do it. But I'm a pragmatist and you can
• 1:59:07
  always come up with a method to get a hold
• 1:59:08
  of somebody's shit. You can always create the circumstances, especially
• 1:59:11
  if you're a nation state actor, to get a hold
• 1:59:14
  of somebody's stuff. That would be the very high level
• 1:59:17
  of things that I would recommend to you just out
• 1:59:21
  the gate.
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's very concerning because it seems like these
• 1:59:27
  things keep getting stronger and more capable. Yes. Like the
• 1:59:30
  Pegasus 2 being a non-click exploit. Yes. So all they
• 1:59:35
  have to do essentially is just know your number.
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 2: Yep. Just make yourself a difficult target would be my
• 1:59:44
  best recommendation. When you're going to answer questions about password reset,
• 1:59:48
  don't answer them honestly. Write down in a physical journal
• 1:59:51
  or something how you answered those questions. Don't answer them honestly.
• 1:59:55
  You know, all of these things we think are added
• 1:59:57
  for layers of protection. For instance, you used to get
• 2:00:00
  that pop-up on your phone where it said, you know,
• 2:00:02
  there would be like blocks of pictures. And it would
• 2:00:05
  say click all of the pictures with a– With a
• 2:00:09
  traffic light in it. I was just going to say that,
• 2:00:10
  a traffic light in it. Part of that might be
• 2:00:13
  for security. The other part of it is they're using
• 2:00:15
  the information of what you're clicking to train neural networks.
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 2: You're a product at that point.
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 2:00:20
  Speaker 2: You think you're getting security out of it. but you're
• 2:00:22
  a product at that point because you're helping to educate
• 2:00:25
  a neural network on what traffic lights look like and
• 2:00:27
  how they can look and all those different instantiations of
• 2:00:30
  traffic lights. So, and again, like we have to separate
• 2:00:34
  causality and intention and outcomes and that the companies might
• 2:00:38
  do this because they want to create the greatest AI ever.
• 2:00:42
  But when you're issuing someone a 40 page terms of
• 2:00:44
  service document on everything they can do with your thing
• 2:00:48
  that you paid $ 2, 000 for, it's just, you know, We
• 2:00:52
  need more ethical people. At least what Eric Prince was
• 2:00:54
  trying to do was right, which was we need to
• 2:00:57
  off-ramp from some of these big things because the way
• 2:01:00
  that this government is going, I'm very worried about the
• 2:01:03
  rights of the individual now and going forward because we
• 2:01:08
  have an uneducated class of people for all of the
• 2:01:12
  reasons in the world. Like if you want to just
• 2:01:13
  focus on your family and you're not thinking about these things,
• 2:01:15
  I don't hate that for you. But the idea of
• 2:01:18
  individual autonomy and rights has been so shit on in
• 2:01:23
  recent years that when we get more uneducated and we
• 2:01:27
  rely– large language models are great. But they're not a
• 2:01:31
  foundation of learning. In other words, we have a lot
• 2:01:34
  of people with access to information but no wisdom. It's
• 2:01:37
  like when your parents would say, learn how to do
• 2:01:40
  addition and subtraction on paper before you use a calculator.
• 2:01:44
  Like understand how to do research and cite sources and
• 2:01:47
  understand– you know, how to conduct really good analysis before
• 2:01:51
  you just use a neural network for everything. Because as
• 2:01:54
  we lose focus of our civics and, and, and what
• 2:01:57
  our founders are trying to do and the uniqueness of it,
• 2:01:59
  which is truly unique, which is, you know, when I
• 2:02:02
  joined the army, I joined the army to get out
• 2:02:03
  of North Dakota. When I reenlisted in the army, it's
• 2:02:05
  because I believed in the experiment. And that's another five
• 2:02:08
  hour podcast. But, um, The foundation of the experiment is
• 2:02:13
  good but we've eroded it in so many ways over
• 2:02:16
  the years and given up so many individual rights in
• 2:02:19
  the name of security. I'm sure it's been said on
• 2:02:21
  here before but Franklin said anybody who gives up their
• 2:02:24
  individual rights in the name of security deserves neither. Your
• 2:02:28
  freedoms in the name of security deserve neither. And it's–
• 2:02:32
  some of the ways that they've done it have been
• 2:02:34
  really above the surface and it frankly– It blows my
• 2:02:38
  mind that we let the government get away with some
• 2:02:40
  of these things that we let them get away with,
• 2:02:43
  where you even explain it to people and like, I
• 2:02:45
  don't see it. Like, I don't see how that was
• 2:02:46
  a big deal. And I'm like, it was a total
• 2:02:49
  recalibration of the system that allowed the Democratic Party and
• 2:02:53
  the Republican Party to usurp your rights in a way
• 2:02:57
  that if you knew any better, you'd probably be protesting.
• 2:03:00
  Like some of the ways that they've done this, you know,
• 2:03:02
  we can go with the easy stuff like the Patriot Act, right?
• 2:03:06
  In the name of security, we're going to start collecting
• 2:03:08
  on Americans. And the Biden and Obama administration, I will
• 2:03:12
  say this at risk of getting in trouble because I
• 2:03:16
  used to have a clearance. They had a massive vacuum
• 2:03:20
  cleaner and they knew what it was vacuuming up. And
• 2:03:23
  they kept vacuuming it up anyway in the name of security.
• 2:03:26
  I'm not saying they were going after American citizens, but
• 2:03:29
  they certainly knew they were. And they just vacuumed shit up.
• 2:03:34
  and collected it and stored it in a database.
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: In case they needed it.
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 2: In case at some point we needed to come up
• 2:03:40
  with a narrative or get rid of somebody who's inconvenient
• 2:03:43
  or whatever else that just flies in the face of
• 2:03:46
  individual American rights and American autonomy and is really, in
• 2:03:50
  my mind, the anti-pattern to freedom. It's just really, really bad.
• 2:03:56
  I mean, I'll give you one that people always crap
• 2:03:58
  on me whenever I talk to them about it, but
• 2:03:59
  there's two that really bother me, one of them being
• 2:04:02
  like the 17th Amendment. Do you know the 17th Amendment
• 2:04:05
  of the Constitution? I don't. So when the founders– when
• 2:04:09
  you read the Federalist Papers and the Federalist Papers, I
• 2:04:12
  really love reading the Federalist Papers. I love reading how
• 2:04:14
  they informed the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration even.
• 2:04:19
  John Jay, James Madison wrote these documents explaining the framework
• 2:04:23
  and the 17th Amendment, essentially how the Senate– the Senate, right?
• 2:04:27
  The 50 people there that are supposed to be representing
• 2:04:30
  us was originally constructed was a state would have legislatures.
• 2:04:34
  And the state legislatures and the governor would appoint the senator.
• 2:04:37
  The reason that the founders did that was because the
• 2:04:40
  state governments had to give power to the federal government
• 2:04:44
  to exist. Back with the Articles of Confederation. Confederation, is
• 2:04:51
  that right? Articles of– I think it's Articles of Confederation.
• 2:04:54
  I'm blowing up. Sorry, I'm going nuts. Back before there
• 2:04:57
  was a strong centralized American government, we had problems with money.
• 2:05:01
  We had problems with interstate commerce and those types of things.
• 2:05:04
  And those articles eventually turned into what is the Constitution.
• 2:05:07
  But the states had to grant that power. And the
• 2:05:10
  signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution knew
• 2:05:13
  that the states needed to be those small projects that
• 2:05:16
  we talked about before where if California wanted to go nuts,
• 2:05:19
  let them go nuts. But it shouldn't impact what's happening
• 2:05:22
  in Texas. It shouldn't impact what's happening over in New England.
• 2:05:24
  It shouldn't impact what's happening in the Midwest. But if
• 2:05:27
  that goes nuts and it fails, it needs to fail.
• 2:05:30
  So the state senators– I'm sorry, the state legislatures– would
• 2:05:34
  come together and they would vote for a senator. They
• 2:05:36
  would elect a senator. And that senator's job was to
• 2:05:39
  go to the federal government and protect the rights of
• 2:05:42
  the state, not to protect the rights of individuals per se,
• 2:05:46
  and certainly not to embolden the federal government. But with
• 2:05:49
  the 17th Amendment, what happened was the House of Representatives
• 2:05:53
  function was to be the petulant children of government. So
• 2:05:58
  their job was to come up with crazy ideas, crazy laws,
• 2:06:01
  all of those things. The more liberal version of government
• 2:06:04
  jurisprudence would be the house of representatives or crazy ideas.
• 2:06:08
  And then you had state senators who were supposed to
• 2:06:10
  be between the house and the president who would say, well,
• 2:06:13
  here's a good idea, but the rest of this is
• 2:06:15
  retarded AOC. Like we're not doing all this. That's crazy.
• 2:06:18
  Or whoever else, name your Republican who's an asshat as well.
• 2:06:23
  We're not doing these things. And that's because it would
• 2:06:25
  erode the state's rights and the state's constitution and what
• 2:06:28
  made this state great. Because what the legislatures would do
• 2:06:31
  is say, hey, Joe Rogan, you've made a lot of
• 2:06:34
  money and you've got a big podcast and a big
• 2:06:36
  voice and you've learned some lessons around the way and
• 2:06:38
  you were able to do that in Texas and you
• 2:06:40
  decided to come to Texas because we had all of
• 2:06:42
  these things that California didn't have. We need you to
• 2:06:45
  go to the Senate for three years or six years
• 2:06:48
  or seven years, whatever it was back then, and represent
• 2:06:51
  those same principles. So when Obamacare comes through, you can
• 2:06:54
  say not only no, but fuck no, like I'm not
• 2:06:56
  voting for this thing. And it was to protect the state.
• 2:07:00
  But what the 17th Amendment did was It was redundant
• 2:07:04
  with the House of Representatives, which was in the founders'
• 2:07:07
  eyes the only popular vote part of the American government
• 2:07:12
  was the popular vote. And then you had the way
• 2:07:15
  the president gets elected through electors, but you had the
• 2:07:18
  state senate, which was appointed by the states. So the
• 2:07:20
  legislatures– and I'll use North Dakota where I'm from. You'll
• 2:07:24
  have one big city– two big cities, Fargo and Grand Forks,
• 2:07:27
  North Dakota– It's where the universities are. It's where your
• 2:07:31
  crazy kids are. Crazy thought exists. Hyper crazy ideas. But
• 2:07:36
  some of them are useful. The rest of the state's agriculture, right?
• 2:07:39
  So all of those legislators from all of those counties
• 2:07:42
  or those legislative districts would get together and say, we're
• 2:07:45
  going to put Bill Thompson– that would never happen– but
• 2:07:48
  in charge of– he's going to be at the Senate
• 2:07:49
  representing North Dakota. But he has to represent the whole state.
• 2:07:54
  In other words, you can't do things that will help
• 2:07:56
  Grand Forks or Fargo because that's where the universities are.
• 2:07:59
  That's where all the... crazy politics are. You also need
• 2:08:01
  to be thinking about the guys out in the western counties,
• 2:08:03
  Lamar County in North Dakota or way out west. You
• 2:08:06
  have to protect agriculture. You have to protect small businesses.
• 2:08:09
  You have to protect families. What the 17th Amendment under
• 2:08:13
  Wendell Wilson and how they really usurped the Constitution and
• 2:08:16
  made the Senate a redundant place They made it a
• 2:08:19
  redundant house of representatives and using the popular vote. So
• 2:08:22
  now we use popular vote for that. But if you
• 2:08:25
  want the popular vote in North Dakota, 85 percent of
• 2:08:28
  the population is in Fargo and Grand Forks. So now
• 2:08:31
  you've got if I want to run for Senate in
• 2:08:33
  North Dakota, I'm just going to spend all of my
• 2:08:34
  time in Fargo and Grand Forks. Because if I can
• 2:08:37
  repeat back to those people all the ideas that they
• 2:08:40
  want to hear, I'm going to win that vote. And
• 2:08:42
  I don't have to represent those people out in the
• 2:08:44
  rest of the state in anything.
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 2: So they created a redundant house of representatives. But another
• 2:08:48
  reason why it happened was they wanted popular vote because
• 2:08:52
  there is no amount of money that you could stick
• 2:08:54
  into a legislature out in the western part of North Dakota.
• 2:08:57
  You can't bribe these people. But the DNC and RNC
• 2:08:59
  now can say, look, these two senators are running. We
• 2:09:02
  like this guy. So we're going to– this guy will
• 2:09:04
  do whatever we tell him to do. And it has
• 2:09:07
  nothing to do with the state or representing the state's
• 2:09:09
  rights or the rest of those legislative districts. We're going
• 2:09:11
  to pick this senator and he's getting $ 300 million for
• 2:09:13
  his election bid And this other guy who's a slower-moving
• 2:09:18
  constitutional conservative who might be a free market absolutist and
• 2:09:22
  a classical liberal, he's not being funded. But under the
• 2:09:28
  state architecture, you might have been a better representation of
• 2:09:31
  the state. And that's why the legislators had to vote
• 2:09:34
  for you to put you in as a senator. You
• 2:09:36
  had to represent the whole state. But now all that
• 2:09:40
  someone who wants to be a senator needs to do
• 2:09:41
  is go to the Republican National Committee or the– the
• 2:09:45
  Democrat National Committee and say, I'll do all the things
• 2:09:47
  you tell me to do, fund my campaign, and I'm
• 2:09:50
  going to go stump in Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota,
• 2:09:53
  and the hell with the rest of the state. It's
• 2:09:55
  very important. There's a very important sleight of hand. And
• 2:09:58
  when that happened, you made a redundant House of Representatives,
• 2:10:01
  and the state no longer was protected at the federal level.
• 2:10:06
  And what happened was all of the power from all
• 2:10:08
  of these states and these legislatures and these individuals got
• 2:10:11
  sucked up into the federal government. And then after that,
• 2:10:13
  you see all of these things that would never have
• 2:10:15
  been passed by a state getting passed, things like Obamacare,
• 2:10:18
  things like the Patriot Act, certain war resolutions, all kinds
• 2:10:23
  of things where it just further erodes the power of
• 2:10:26
  the state. And federal government wants that because it puts
• 2:10:30
  all of the power up in the federal government. And
• 2:10:32
  people always say we need to get money out of politics. No,
• 2:10:34
  we need to get power out of politics. That power
• 2:10:37
  that they've taken over the last 130 years or so
• 2:10:42
  used to exist at the state and local levels because
• 2:10:44
  they wanted these thought experiments happening where we could pluck
• 2:10:47
  the best things out of them and forget the rest.
• 2:10:49
  But all of that power has now gone up to
• 2:10:50
  the federal government and the federal government won't ever release
• 2:10:55
  that power and they only want more budget and more
• 2:10:58
  spending to execute that power. And that's also because the
• 2:11:01
  interest groups that want to go, they don't want to
• 2:11:03
  have to go and convince the whole state of whether
• 2:11:05
  or not something is good that people are going to
• 2:11:06
  vote on. They just want to go take a lobby
• 2:11:08
  and and go up to the federal government because they
• 2:11:10
  want all of the power up there as well. And
• 2:11:13
  the federal government wants all the power up there as
• 2:11:15
  well because they make $ 300, 000 a year before they become
• 2:11:17
  a politician and they're worth $ 30 million when they're done
• 2:11:20
  being a politician because all of the money has to
• 2:11:22
  go to the federal government because they're in charge of
• 2:11:25
  light bulbs we can use, computers we can use, flush
• 2:11:27
  toilets we can have, how our roads are going to look,
• 2:11:30
  what our medical care looks like. None of those powers
• 2:11:34
  are explicitly written in the Constitution of the United States
• 2:11:37
  and And they use things like the commerce law and
• 2:11:39
  other things in order to create things like Obamacare, where
• 2:11:42
  really we want competing states. If Texas comes up with
• 2:11:45
  a great way to do healthcare and North Dakota's isn't
• 2:11:49
  so great, they can look at that experiment and they
• 2:11:52
  can adopt the principles and they can have it at
• 2:11:54
  that level. But it's much easier to get change at
• 2:11:57
  the local level when the power is derived from the
• 2:11:59
  state and the individual. Because if I want to change
• 2:12:01
  the way that my state does healthcare, I have one
• 2:12:03
  of two options or three options. I can run for office.
• 2:12:06
  I can support someone who It's going to go into
• 2:12:08
  office and do what I want or I can move.
• 2:12:11
  But when everything's centralized at the federal government and everything
• 2:12:13
  flows from the federal government, all of the money, power,
• 2:12:16
  and gravity is up there. And the individual, the 300
• 2:12:19
  million of us or so, have really no power now
• 2:12:23
  to exercise either states' rights or individual rights at the
• 2:12:26
  higher level. I hope I'm elucidating this correctly. You are.
• 2:12:28
  But it's a real usurpation of individual and state autonomy
• 2:12:32
  that really got rid of state power. Which was– if
• 2:12:35
  you read the federal's papers, it was so important to
• 2:12:37
  the founders that there was this state– that the state's
• 2:12:40
  needs were organized because the state was where the founders
• 2:12:43
  wanted these thought experiments. You read Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or
• 2:12:47
  John Locke or Montesquieu. All of them talked about this
• 2:12:51
  great experiment that was being set up and how it
• 2:12:53
  was built on all of this western politics and everything
• 2:12:55
  that had came before it on how we could have
• 2:12:57
  a government that was forced to respect the rights of
• 2:13:00
  individuals and allowed for these competing think tanks of ideas–
• 2:13:04
  and that the power would never rest at the federal government.
• 2:13:06
  But the 17th Amendment was a way that a lot
• 2:13:09
  of that power went from the state level and the
• 2:13:12
  state legislatures. And now to become the president, they want
• 2:13:16
  to do a popular vote. And under a popular vote,
• 2:13:18
  you would just have to campaign in New York and LA.
• 2:13:21
  You would get the popular vote out of the likely
• 2:13:23
  voting people. And now the rest of the country is not.
• 2:13:27
  And that would be another, you hear all these people saying,
• 2:13:29
  we need a popular vote. We can't have the electoral college.
• 2:13:32
  We can't have All of these things. Everything needs to
• 2:13:35
  be– pure democracy allows 51 percent to rule 49 percent.
• 2:13:41
  And that was another thing the founders were working fervently
• 2:13:44
  to get away from. And that's why we had an
• 2:13:47
  electoral college. And it's actually quite beautiful when you actually
• 2:13:50
  read about it and examine it. It's why we had
• 2:13:51
  the state senate and state legislatures and this is why
• 2:13:54
  we had the house. You had all levels of the
• 2:13:57
  things of government that the founders cared about being represented
• 2:13:59
  in this body politic and it was a beautiful thing.
• 2:14:02
  And I could go on for 15 more things about that.
• 2:14:04
  I won't do it for the sake of your listeners
• 2:14:06
  because I doubt this is what they wanted to do.
• 2:14:08
  But similar things happened with the Supreme Court Marbury v.
• 2:14:11
  Madison and allowing the Supreme Court to have judicial review.
• 2:14:15
  That was never a thing that was in the Constitution
• 2:14:17
  in the Supreme Court. If you like the Supreme Court,
• 2:14:19
  being able to have the power to describe everything as
• 2:14:21
  being either constitutional or unconstitutional, then you're not ruled by
• 2:14:24
  a democracy. You're ruled by an oligarchy. You've got eight
• 2:14:27
  people in robes that are going to tell you whether
• 2:14:29
  or not laws are good or bad. And that's not
• 2:14:31
  the founding of this country. It's not how it was
• 2:14:32
  intended to work. And that all started back in Marbury v.
• 2:14:36
  Madison with Thomas Jefferson and these writs of mandamus that
• 2:14:40
  were the Supreme Court, long story short, essentially granted itself
• 2:14:44
  the power to conduct judicial review under the old system
• 2:14:47
  or the– old system. The system that was ratified and
• 2:14:50
  that the founders approved was if a law was deemed unconstitutional,
• 2:14:56
  it would go before the Supreme Court and they just
• 2:14:57
  wouldn't rule– they would rule in favor of the person.
• 2:15:00
  And then eventually the government would figure out, oh, this
• 2:15:02
  law doesn't work. But it was never on the Supreme
• 2:15:04
  Court to say constitutional, unconstitutional. You would get arrested for
• 2:15:08
  some law and it would get appealed to the Supreme Court.
• 2:15:11
  The Supreme Court would say, we're not punishing this person.
• 2:15:13
  This is against the Constitution. But the government would have
• 2:15:16
  to keep arresting people. It would have to keep going
• 2:15:19
  in front of the federal government. So what I'm saying
• 2:15:21
  is– and I'm sorry to go off on this. We
• 2:15:22
  can go back to tech. But all I'm saying is
• 2:15:24
  the core of the– American experiment in individual rights and
• 2:15:28
  what makes this country so great and why I was
• 2:15:31
  willing to die for it after my initial enlistment and
• 2:15:34
  why I have such love for this is because it
• 2:15:36
  was the only experiment where the value of the individual
• 2:15:38
  was held at the top of the hierarchy and that
• 2:15:41
  people could truly be allowed to flourish. And in 250 years,
• 2:15:45
  we did more than any society could have hoped to
• 2:15:47
  have achieved in tens of thousands of years, or not
• 2:15:50
  that it's been around that long, but in thousands of years,
• 2:15:52
  everything tends towards, um, disorder and everything, power always gets centralized.
• 2:15:59
  And we had a framework to do that, but we
• 2:16:00
  were willing participants in our own demise. And now we're
• 2:16:03
  scratching our heads and wondering why there's no individual and
• 2:16:06
  why there's no individual autonomy, why a guy can't smoke
• 2:16:08
  weed on the weekend, or why a guy can't do X, Y,
• 2:16:11
  or Z, because we have centralized the authority and the
• 2:16:14
  power and the decision-making structure. And we're allowing them to be,
• 2:16:18
  there would be no problem with money in politics if
• 2:16:20
  the federal government had only the powers that were outlined
• 2:16:23
  to it in the constitution.
• 2:16:25
  Speaker 1: I think that's very well said, and I could have
• 2:16:28
  never said it the way you said it. I think
• 2:16:30
  there's a lot to absorb here. I'm sorry. No, no,
• 2:16:33
  it was great, dude. It was great. This is one
• 2:16:36
  of the things that I love about you. You're very thorough.
• 2:16:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thorough is one thing. My friends always say Bill's
• 2:16:41
  tism is starting to show.
• 2:16:43
  Speaker 1: You got a touch of the tism, but I think
• 2:16:44
  that's good. Like I said, just like ADHD, I think
• 2:16:47
  it's a superpower. A lot to absorb. So I think
• 2:16:50
  we'll wrap it up right here. But thank you. This
• 2:16:52
  was an awesome conversation. I really appreciate it. It was
• 2:16:54
  really great. Yeah. We could do this again, too. I'm
• 2:16:57
  sure we could probably have 30 or 40 of these.
• 2:16:59
  Speaker 2: We didn't even get to AI. I wanted to get
• 2:17:01
  to AI because I think I have a very anti-pattern
• 2:17:03
  to AI and how you understand it. But if you want,
• 2:17:06
  we can save that for another time.
• 2:17:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll do that for our next one because I
• 2:17:09
  think that's another four hours.
• 2:17:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, probably.
• 2:17:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And by then, who knows where it's
• 2:17:14
  going to be. Jensen Huang from NVIDIA recently declared that
• 2:17:18
  we've reached AGI.
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I would, yeah, I could. yeah, I just
• 2:17:25
  couldn't disagree more. And I think I could, in the
• 2:17:27
  same way, I just.
• 2:17:28
  Speaker 1: You're not the only one.
• 2:17:29
  Speaker 2: There's quite a few people.
• 2:17:30
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 2:17:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, it's consciousness projection and I'll sum it
• 2:17:33
  up in a minute. At the end of the day, um,
• 2:17:36
  neural networks are mathematical functions. They rest in, you know,
• 2:17:40
  waiting neurons based on training data and applying power to
• 2:17:43
  train models. It's all mathematic. There's no sense of knowing
• 2:17:48
  there in that, you know, Penrose, I've read a lot
• 2:17:51
  of on his ORC, O-R, if people want to read
• 2:17:54
  about that, I won't explain it, orchestrated objective reduction and
• 2:18:00
  how the mind works in these fleets of consciousness that
• 2:18:02
  we have, these shimmers of consciousness that we have based
• 2:18:05
  around what, you know, he describes in the microtubule. We
• 2:18:08
  get conscious thought And that conscious thought we project into things.
• 2:18:12
  AI is very good conscious projection, but it will never
• 2:18:16
  have consciousness or knowing because it has no system of values.
• 2:18:19
  And if we were to instill values in it, it
• 2:18:20
  would still be consciousness projection. You saw my dad's cabin.
• 2:18:25
  My dad died when I was five, but I bought
• 2:18:26
  it back and was working on it. And inside of
• 2:18:28
  his cabin, I got to learn a lot about my
• 2:18:31
  father by working on the cabin that he built. He
• 2:18:34
  would measure things and cut things right on walls and
• 2:18:36
  that type of stuff. That's all consciousness projection that allowed
• 2:18:39
  me to get to know him away. I might not
• 2:18:41
  have even known him if he were alive. But I
• 2:18:43
  got to re-experience and understand my father and his thoroughness
• 2:18:46
  through that cabin. AI is consciousness projection. It's projected consciousness.
• 2:18:50
  It's getting very good. But on a calculator, you could
• 2:18:54
  get the same thing that you get out of a
• 2:18:56
  neural network if you had sufficient time. I could present
• 2:18:59
  you a question just like you did on propensity. I
• 2:19:01
  could sit here with a rule book and I could
• 2:19:03
  type in a calculator. It might take me a million years.
• 2:19:08
  but I could do it and I could give you
• 2:19:09
  the same answer that a neural network would give you.
• 2:19:12
  That doesn't mean consciousness or knowing or AGI is present.
• 2:19:16
  It relies on its training data. It can only give
• 2:19:19
  you what the training data gives it. It needs human
• 2:19:22
  consciousness projection like we talked about with the CAPTCHAs or
• 2:19:25
  we talked about with uploading photos to Google Drive. It
• 2:19:28
  needs that training data. And to me, it's just really fancy,
• 2:19:32
  clever math. And having trained these networks for a dozen
• 2:19:36
  years now, And working with them, they're just really clever
• 2:19:41
  consciousness projection. And so, yeah, that is four hours and
• 2:19:45
  we can do that next time.
• 2:19:46
  Speaker 1: We'll do that next time. Definitely.
• 2:19:48
  Speaker 2: But if people– you mentioned the app.
• 2:19:49
  Speaker 1: By the time we do it next time, who knows
• 2:19:51
  what the fuck is going to be going on with
• 2:19:52
  AI too.
• 2:19:53
  Speaker 2: But if people want to learn more about me or
• 2:19:56
  my company, if I can say that.
• 2:19:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, please.
• 2:19:58
  Speaker 2: It's SpartanForge.ai. We're built under the rubric of individual freedom.
• 2:20:02
  I want people outdoors. I want people hunting. I want
• 2:20:04
  people experiencing nature. I want people– providing for their families.
• 2:20:09
  The best part of my day is when my kids
• 2:20:11
  are eating a backstrap of an animal that I took.
• 2:20:14
  And I want to enable people to go out and
• 2:20:16
  do that. And even though it's paradoxical through an app,
• 2:20:18
  you can get lost. You've got to conserve time. You've
• 2:20:20
  got to e-scout. You've got to learn things before you
• 2:20:21
  go out there. So we built this company under that.
• 2:20:24
  It's one of my, I've got three other companies that
• 2:20:26
  I'm doing, but Spartan Forge is the one that I'm
• 2:20:29
  really working on. Well, I really appreciate that. We've put
• 2:20:31
  a lot of work into it and we've got a
• 2:20:32
  lot more coming over the summer. So If people want
• 2:20:35
  to support us or want to get out there and
• 2:20:37
  get some hunting done, please check it out. And I
• 2:20:39
  answer all the Instagram DMs. So if you want to
• 2:20:41
  have a question for me.
• 2:20:42
  Speaker 1: Good luck with that now.
• 2:20:43
  Speaker 2: Well, I try to. I spend about two hours every
• 2:20:45
  morning doing it. But good luck.
• 2:20:48
  Speaker 1: Thank you, Joe, for having me. Thanks, brother. Appreciate you
• 2:20:50
  very much.
• 2:20:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I get that.
• 2:20:51
  Speaker 4: All right.
• 2:20:51
  Speaker 1: You too. Bye, everybody.