Latest / NO FILTER / Joe Rogan Experience _2473 - Bill Thompson
Transcript
- 0:04Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast
- 0:08Speaker 1: by night, all day. What's up, Bill?
- 0:12Speaker 2: How you doing, Jeff?
- 0:13Speaker 1: Good to see you, bro. Good to see you. This
- 0:15Speaker 1: might be one of the coolest things anybody's ever given me. So,
- 0:19Speaker 1: you gave me this knife. Explain all this.
- 0:22Speaker 3: All right, so, I mean, there's a larger explanatory reason
- 0:26Speaker 3: behind this. My brother and I grew up... My father
- 0:28Speaker 3: died when I was five. My brother and I grew
- 0:31Speaker 3: up doing... These things called rendezvous. Have you ever heard
- 0:34Speaker 3: of them?
- 0:36Speaker 1: In what way? What is a rendezvous?
- 0:37Speaker 3: So there you go. So what a rendezvous is, is
- 0:39Speaker 3: it's not, you know, you go to those like, I
- 0:41Speaker 3: don't even know what they're called, but people do like reenactments.
- 0:46Speaker 1: Oh, okay. Like Civil War reenactments? It's not like that.
- 0:49Speaker 3: So that's the closest thing, approximation to probably what it is.
- 0:53Speaker 3: You get invited to them or these days are easier
- 0:55Speaker 3: to get to. But my stepfather, the guy my mother remarried,
- 0:59Speaker 3: brought us to him. All you do is camp. But
- 1:01Speaker 3: you're only allowed to camp and no one comes to
- 1:03Speaker 3: the camp or sometimes they might have people at the end.
- 1:05Speaker 3: But while you're in the camp, everything in the camp
- 1:07Speaker 3: has to be 1840 or prior. So there can be
- 1:10Speaker 3: no modern appurtenances, nothing like a refrigerator or nothing like that.
- 1:14Speaker 1: 1840, why that year?
- 1:16Speaker 3: At the end of the fur trapping. That was considered
- 1:19Speaker 3: like Jeremiah Johnson time, like peak fur trapping. So there's people,
- 1:24Speaker 3: you know, they dress like either... you know, revolutionary, like
- 1:27Speaker 3: American revolutionaries, or they dress like mountain men, or they
- 1:29Speaker 3: dress like Indians.
- 1:30Speaker 1: How'd you guys dress?
- 1:31Speaker 3: Mountain men. So while we're there, you learn all kinds
- 1:35Speaker 3: of stuff while you're reenacting. Like I learned how to
- 1:37Speaker 3: brain tan hides. I learned how to traditionally art or
- 1:41Speaker 3: do traditional archery, stuff like that. So anyway, this knife
- 1:44Speaker 3: was a knife I had actually started working on with
- 1:46Speaker 3: my brother a while ago. I do more of like
- 1:49Speaker 3: the brain tanning Tomahawk.
- 1:51Speaker 1: And when you're saying brain tanning, you talk about using
- 1:53Speaker 1: brains to tan animal hides, right? Using animal brains. What
- 1:57Speaker 1: does brains do? Why does brains work?
- 1:59Speaker 3: It softens the leather in a natural way. And what's
- 2:01Speaker 3: cool about it is every animal, no matter what animal
- 2:04Speaker 3: you kill, has the exact amount of brain needed in
- 2:07Speaker 3: order to tan the hide. So you don't need any additional,
- 2:10Speaker 3: like people use egg yolks or mayonnaise or something like that.
- 2:13Speaker 3: All you do is you take the brain out of
- 2:14Speaker 3: the cavity, you grind it up, you mix it into
- 2:17Speaker 3: some water. And then after you've, after you've cleaned the leather,
- 2:20Speaker 3: And you scraped it clean. You stretch it. I usually
- 2:23Speaker 3: use like a dull shovel. You stretch it over the
- 2:25Speaker 3: dull shovel. And then you soak it in the brain
- 2:28Speaker 3: water mixture. And then you just keep repeating that pattern.
- 2:33Speaker 3: And the leather gets like a really nice soft feel
- 2:36Speaker 3: to it.
- 2:37Speaker 1: What is it about the brain? Is it the fat?
- 2:39Speaker 3: It breaks down the leather. I'm not sure if it's
- 2:42Speaker 3: the fat or not. I haven't gotten that deep into it.
- 2:44Speaker 3: But it breaks down the leather and just makes it
- 2:46Speaker 3: feel really soft, really nice. So anyway, this knife here.
- 2:49Speaker 3: I started, I killed that bear. So the jaw is
- 2:52Speaker 3: made out of two bear jaws or out of one
- 2:55Speaker 3: bear jaw split in half. So that was a bear
- 2:59Speaker 3: I killed in Canada in 2017. It was my biggest
- 3:02Speaker 3: black bear. And so we split the jaw, put that together.
- 3:08Speaker 3: It's Irish linen threading. Then that's a knife that my
- 3:11Speaker 3: brother picked up. That was from 1860. It was totally rusted.
- 3:14Speaker 3: We had to grind it back or he had to
- 3:16Speaker 3: grind it back down. And then the sheath, is traditional.
- 3:22Speaker 3: The cool thing about doing rendezvous and the cool thing
- 3:24Speaker 3: about this is you could have a DeLorean and drop
- 3:27Speaker 3: that in 1840 and somebody would pick it up and
- 3:29Speaker 3: think it was made yesterday. And so everything on there
- 3:33Speaker 3: has been done traditionally from the quilling on the beadwork
- 3:36Speaker 3: is made from porcupine quills. The backing is buffalo brain tan.
- 3:42Speaker 3: And then the front is beaver hide or beaver tail.
- 3:45Speaker 3: I'm sorry. And then... The sides are horse and turkey
- 3:49Speaker 3: hair hanging off of it.
- 3:51Speaker 1: And these are bear teeth?
- 3:53Speaker 3: And those are bear teeth, yep, from the same bear.
- 3:56Speaker 3: So when I was thinking about what I was– because
- 3:58Speaker 3: I wanted to give you something for inviting me on
- 3:59Speaker 3: because it's still a shock to me that you did it.
- 4:02Speaker 3: Even though we've been talking for so long, I just
- 4:04Speaker 3: never imagined a scenario where you'd want to have me
- 4:06Speaker 3: on here.
- 4:07Speaker 1: Well, you're an interesting dude.
- 4:08Speaker 3: I thought, what could I give this guy that money
- 4:11Speaker 3: or people or whatever couldn't get you? And so I
- 4:14Speaker 3: thought this is the right thing to do. So it
- 4:16Speaker 3: went from a me project to a you project. And, uh,
- 4:19Speaker 3: my brother, Aaron, uh, helped me out with it tremendously.
- 4:23Speaker 1: So how'd you find this knife from the 1860s?
- 4:25Speaker 3: Well, he found it. My brother is, um, even more
- 4:28Speaker 3: esoteric and odd than I am, believe it or not. And, uh,
- 4:32Speaker 3: he collects this kind of stuff. Um, they, I mean,
- 4:34Speaker 3: the guy who dated it said 1860 to 1890 is
- 4:35Speaker 3: what they figured. And, uh, And you can tell by
- 4:42Speaker 3: the way that like around the hilt and the way
- 4:44Speaker 3: that it's... The pitting on it and stuff like that
- 4:47Speaker 3: and the way that it was made that it fits
- 4:48Speaker 3: that era. I mean, it could have been somebody redid
- 4:51Speaker 3: it in 1900, but it's definitely that old. The type
- 4:55Speaker 3: of steel and the way that it was worked and
- 4:57Speaker 3: the way that it is around the hilt or on
- 4:58Speaker 3: the bottom there.
- 4:59Speaker 1: Wow.
- 5:00Speaker 3: And so it's at least, you know, 130, 140, but
- 5:02Speaker 3: most likely 160, 170. It actually fits my hand perfect. Yeah, so.
- 5:09Speaker 3: That's also something my brother and I talked about, about
- 5:11Speaker 3: how long it was going to be. And we made
- 5:14Speaker 3: some educated guesses and put it all together. So, yeah,
- 5:17Speaker 3: I mean, like I said, not something you can just
- 5:19Speaker 3: go pick up somewhere or something that will, you know,
- 5:21Speaker 3: hopefully mean something. Not saying it's practical, like it's not
- 5:25Speaker 3: something you'd be gutting an elk out with.
- 5:28Speaker 1: Well, if we get attacked by zombies in the studio,
- 5:31Speaker 1: it's a good thing to have on the desk.
- 5:32Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, if you're going to make a last stand.
- 5:34Speaker 3: You know, that's a pretty good knife to make your
- 5:37Speaker 3: last stand with.
- 5:38Speaker 1: That's a good way to go out.
- 5:39Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
- 5:40Speaker 1: That's awesome, man.
- 5:41Speaker 3: Yeah, so the rendezvous, we did those from— How long
- 5:45Speaker 3: do they last? They vary from a week, and then
- 5:48Speaker 3: some go up to three weeks.
- 5:49Speaker 1: And what do you do for food while you're out there?
- 5:52Speaker 3: So inside of your lodge— so there's two types of rendezvous.
- 5:55Speaker 3: At most rendezvous inside of your lodge, you can have
- 5:58Speaker 3: a cooler as long as it doesn't leave the lodge.
- 6:01Speaker 3: So I have like a 20-foot teepee that I take
- 6:03Speaker 3: to these things. And inside of my teepee, you can
- 6:07Speaker 3: have a cooler and some modern appurtenances.
- 6:10Speaker 1: Did they have any kind of coolers in the 1800s?
- 6:12Speaker 3: I mean, they had ice boxes and like steel ice
- 6:15Speaker 3: boxes and that type of thing, but nothing like we
- 6:17Speaker 3: have today. You know, stuff was getting dug out, buried
- 6:21Speaker 3: in the ground or put into the ground, like cool
- 6:23Speaker 3: areas of the ground or digouts. And they dried everything.
- 6:26Speaker 3: So pemmican would have been the, you know, everyday thing
- 6:29Speaker 3: to eat. That's just dried.
- 6:31Speaker 1: So did you bring your own food or did you
- 6:32Speaker 1: have to hunt for food?
- 6:34Speaker 3: So you bring your own food, but there are other
- 6:36Speaker 3: rendezvous that are kind of invite only. And I don't
- 6:38Speaker 3: even think a lot of people who do rendezvous knew
- 6:40Speaker 3: about these. But there's ones that I think they're called.
- 6:43Speaker 3: I think I might be speaking out of school. Somebody
- 6:45Speaker 3: might send me an email after this, but I'm going
- 6:46Speaker 3: to talk about it anyway because I never got read
- 6:47Speaker 3: the right act. They're called juried. I think they called
- 6:50Speaker 3: them juried Southerns. And I've only been to one of those.
- 6:53Speaker 3: And that's where everything in the camp has to be pre-1840.
- 6:56Speaker 3: You meet down in a parking lot. You put everything
- 6:58Speaker 3: on the back of a mule. When I did mine,
- 7:01Speaker 3: it was up in the, I think it was the Bighorns. So,
- 7:04Speaker 3: you know, you talk to a rancher, get everything packed up.
- 7:08Speaker 3: You go into the back of the Bighorns, and everything
- 7:10Speaker 3: in camp has to be pre-1840, as close as it
- 7:13Speaker 3: can get. They'll even look at your stitching and say, oh,
- 7:16Speaker 3: that was sewn with a sewing machine. You've got to
- 7:18Speaker 3: take that off. And it's always these weird, like, eccentric
- 7:22Speaker 3: history teachers that run them, like guys who, you know,
- 7:25Speaker 3: teaches history at Berkeley or something like that or other places.
- 7:29Speaker 3: They just really enjoy living like this. And at those ones,
- 7:31Speaker 3: if they're in season, you can hunt whatever's in season there.
- 7:34Speaker 3: You're hunting with traditional archery. It's really good for kids.
- 7:38Speaker 3: The internet wasn't a problem as much when I was
- 7:39Speaker 3: a kid. I was certainly into computers. I have been
- 7:41Speaker 3: since I was a child. But you could just detach.
- 7:45Speaker 3: Everyone's running around crazy, sitting around the campfire at night.
- 7:49Speaker 3: People are singing songs on the guitar. You're learning how
- 7:52Speaker 3: to do things like this. You're learning how to brain tan.
- 7:54Speaker 3: You're learning how to live traditionally. And it's an eccentric
- 7:58Speaker 3: cult kind of. It's not a cult. It's an eccentric
- 8:00Speaker 3: group of people. It's a lot of fun. People take
- 8:03Speaker 3: it very seriously. Community. People take it very seriously. There's
- 8:07Speaker 3: more advertising surrounding it now than there used to be
- 8:09Speaker 3: because numbers are kind of dwindling. But I did my
- 8:13Speaker 3: last one last year with my brother. So if you
- 8:15Speaker 3: go on my Instagram, there's a picture of my brother,
- 8:17Speaker 3: my son, and I doing, I think, our second rendezvous together.
- 8:21Speaker 3: And we're just dressed like, you know. I've actually got
- 8:23Speaker 3: an awesome war shirt. I can show you the picture.
- 8:26Speaker 3: I've got an awesome war shirt that a friend of
- 8:28Speaker 3: mine went to war with. He was half Native American.
- 8:31Speaker 3: His grandfather was.
- 8:34Speaker 3: Ojibwe or something, Chippewa, something like that. And he was,
- 8:38Speaker 3: I don't remember what his role was, but anyway, I went,
- 8:42Speaker 3: we deployed to Iraq together and his grandpa made me
- 8:44Speaker 3: this war shirt. Oh, there, you found it, Jamie. He
- 8:48Speaker 3: pulled it up. That's my lodge.
- 8:51Speaker 1: How much do you enjoy a shower after you get
- 8:54Speaker 1: out of here?
- 8:55Speaker 3: I mean, as long as you keep, you know, they
- 8:58Speaker 3: have showers in camp. They've got a showering area where
- 9:02Speaker 3: it's just like pallets. That's the inside of my lodge. Um,
- 9:05Speaker 3: so there's a cooler at this one. This is not
- 9:07Speaker 3: a jury rendezvous. Um, and, uh, so you can shower
- 9:12Speaker 3: while you're there. Some of them, they call them hooters.
- 9:14Speaker 3: There'll be like a latrine and a shower area in camp,
- 9:17Speaker 3: but also like some of them, I don't, I don't
- 9:19Speaker 3: do it at all.
- 9:19Speaker 1: This is wild.
- 9:21Speaker 3: And so there's no reenactment. Like there's not like civilians
- 9:23Speaker 3: walking around.
- 9:24Speaker 1: It's not like Renaissance.
- 9:25Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. It's just more like, I want to act
- 9:28Speaker 3: like it's 1840 for a couple of weeks and not
- 9:30Speaker 3: look at my phone one time and not worry about
- 9:32Speaker 3: the news. it's amazing after a week here, you really
- 9:36Speaker 3: forget about the world and you're like, don't even know
- 9:38Speaker 3: you're supposed to be stressed out about things. You're just
- 9:41Speaker 3: out there doing your thing for a couple of weeks.
- 9:43Speaker 1: And you just cook over open fire.
- 9:45Speaker 3: Everything gets done traditionally that way. Yeah.
- 9:47Speaker 1: And did you bring your own meat?
- 9:48Speaker 3: Yeah. You bring your own meat and stuff in the cooler. Um,
- 9:51Speaker 3: and then, uh, there's also cooking classes where they teach
- 9:54Speaker 3: you like all the recipes to do with like a
- 9:56Speaker 3: Dutch oven, like an old cast iron oven. And, uh,
- 10:00Speaker 3: they do gambling at nights. So you'll walk into like
- 10:03Speaker 3: a huge, they call them marquees, but it's like a
- 10:05Speaker 3: huge hundred foot square lodge. There'll be three gambling tables
- 10:08Speaker 3: and there are girls in like the low cut shirts
- 10:10Speaker 3: and dealing cards and smoking cigars and just having an
- 10:13Speaker 3: amazing time. And there are people, you go by camp
- 10:16Speaker 3: names while you're in there. Nobody uses their real name. Well,
- 10:18Speaker 3: some people use their real name. I'd say 60% of
- 10:21Speaker 3: people don't use their real name.
- 10:23Speaker 1: What was your camp name?
- 10:25Speaker 3: This is embarrassing.
- 10:27Speaker 1: It should be.
- 10:28Speaker 3: Yeah. So, uh, I got my camp name. I got
- 10:31Speaker 3: christened with my camp name in the big horns when
- 10:33Speaker 3: I was 14 or 13 and it was talks a lot.
- 10:38Speaker 1: Talks a lot.
- 10:39Speaker 3: Yeah. And Sue, it was pronounced Iota. And, uh, just
- 10:42Speaker 3: cause you talk a lot or when I was a kid,
- 10:44Speaker 3: I talked a lot. Actually as an adult, I don't
- 10:46Speaker 3: talk that much unless I know you. Um, But as
- 10:50Speaker 3: a kid, I would never shut up. I had really
- 10:52Speaker 3: bad ADHD. They kind of diagnosed me with having some
- 10:54Speaker 3: low level version of Asperger's. And, uh, I was a
- 10:59Speaker 3: rapscallion in class, just never shut up, never listened, never
- 11:03Speaker 3: did anything.
- 11:04Speaker 1: And, uh, those are the people that are the most fun.
- 11:07Speaker 3: Well, they didn't enjoy me in high school or in
- 11:09Speaker 3: grade school. But, uh, yeah, they, they can't call me out. Uh, uh,
- 11:15Speaker 3: and you know, we got christened and, uh, it was a,
- 11:18Speaker 3: you know, it's a, One of the things we're kind
- 11:20Speaker 3: of missing in culture today or something that I'm trying
- 11:22Speaker 3: to reinvigorate, especially with my son and with other young
- 11:26Speaker 3: men that I run into is kind of like coming
- 11:28Speaker 3: of age rights.
- 11:29Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 11:29Speaker 3: Something to say, you're a man and I'm going to
- 11:32Speaker 3: start treating like a man from this moment forward. Like,
- 11:35Speaker 3: you know, what does that there should be structure to that?
- 11:37Speaker 3: You know, we're tribal and it's important to me.
- 11:41Speaker 1: So I think that is really something that's missing from society.
- 11:45Speaker 1: I think that. I used to think it was silly
- 11:47Speaker 1: when I was young. And then as I got older,
- 11:49Speaker 1: I realized, oh, I went through that. I became a
- 11:51Speaker 1: black belt and I started fighting.
- 11:54Speaker 3: And you had a group of men telling you, you're
- 11:56Speaker 3: at this level, we're going to treat you like that.
- 11:57Speaker 3: And if you fall from grace, we're going to remind
- 11:59Speaker 3: you right away. And we just don't do that with
- 12:03Speaker 3: young men. And we have a society now where young
- 12:05Speaker 3: men act like young men until they're 45 or 50
- 12:07Speaker 3: or 60.
- 12:08Speaker 1: And sometimes never stop. Yeah.
- 12:10Speaker 3: And, you know, women, nature imposes itself on women. They
- 12:14Speaker 3: become fertile. They're able to have babies. And they've got
- 12:19Speaker 3: to seek security or find a husband or a really
- 12:21Speaker 3: good job that will supplement whatever a husband would provide.
- 12:24Speaker 3: And they've got to start acting like a woman. Whereas
- 12:26Speaker 3: men can sit in a basement, you know, and it
- 12:28Speaker 3: becomes very dangerous.
- 12:29Speaker 1: Especially men that never have children.
- 12:31Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 12:33Speaker 1: They're perpetual children. Yeah.
- 12:34Speaker 3: And if you don't impose nature on yourself by undergoing
- 12:37Speaker 3: those types of rights and understanding what it means to
- 12:39Speaker 3: become a man. Nature will impose itself on you by
- 12:41Speaker 3: either A, you're never going to have children and therefore
- 12:43Speaker 3: you're dead forever. Or B, it will kill you because
- 12:47Speaker 3: you're fat and in your mom's basement, you get diabetes,
- 12:49Speaker 3: the foot chopped off and you're 35. And, you know,
- 12:53Speaker 3: we just don't tell men we don't have a the
- 12:55Speaker 3: military did it for me. I had really put off
- 12:59Speaker 3: responsibility or seeking meaning or any of those things. Until
- 13:03Speaker 3: I was in the military. And like I said, my
- 13:05Speaker 3: father died when I was five. So I really had
- 13:07Speaker 3: no central male authority until I was about 13 or
- 13:10Speaker 3: 14 when I met this guy, Steve. And he kind
- 13:14Speaker 3: of initiated some of those rights for me and held
- 13:17Speaker 3: me to account. But it was really the military, which
- 13:19Speaker 3: was a turning point for me where there was a
- 13:23Speaker 3: standard and I was expected to hold it.
- 13:26Speaker 1: I think there's a reason why most ancient cultures and
- 13:28Speaker 1: a lot of ancient religions have these rites of passages
- 13:31Speaker 1: where you are like now officially, officially a man.
- 13:35Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 13:36Speaker 1: Officially, you know, you're responsible. You have to think of
- 13:39Speaker 1: yourself as a different thing now. Whereas if you leave
- 13:42Speaker 1: it up to your own decision, men sort of dwindle
- 13:47Speaker 1: into this perpetual state of childhood. Yep.
- 13:50Speaker 3: And it's not about you anymore. It's about other people.
- 13:52Speaker 3: Like that for me, having children, I've got four kids. really,
- 13:57Speaker 3: you know, the military was kind of the first inkling
- 14:00Speaker 3: of responsibility, but then having children and realizing this isn't
- 14:03Speaker 3: about me at all, and I need to be willing
- 14:05Speaker 3: to break my back for these people who depend on me.
- 14:07Speaker 1: There's this weird primal feeling that you're responsible for these
- 14:12Speaker 1: very vulnerable little people that you love more than life itself.
- 14:17Speaker 1: It just changes everything. It just kicks you into gear.
- 14:20Speaker 1: But for some people, it doesn't. Some people that are
- 14:23Speaker 1: so stuck in that perpetual childhood thing They just wind
- 14:26Speaker 1: up deciding it's too much of a drag and they
- 14:28Speaker 1: get divorced.
- 14:29Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 14:29Speaker 1: And then they fuck up the kids.
- 14:31Speaker 3: Yeah. God, we have so many rabbit holes we could
- 14:35Speaker 3: go down on this. But I mean, it was, you know,
- 14:38Speaker 3: growing up in the 80s and the early 90s, it
- 14:42Speaker 3: was really like a divorce culture. And I obviously understand
- 14:46Speaker 3: that if you're in a bad relationship or an abusive
- 14:48Speaker 3: relationship or, you know, there's certainly there's a threshold where
- 14:51Speaker 3: marriage should dissolve. No question. But I kind of feel
- 14:55Speaker 3: like it. The central thrust of a lot of culture
- 14:57Speaker 3: at that time was about like divorce or not getting
- 15:00Speaker 3: married or, you know, discovering yourself and that type of thing,
- 15:03Speaker 3: which in some ways is good. There's goodness there. But
- 15:06Speaker 3: when it becomes a central thrust or a central narrative
- 15:08Speaker 3: and divorce becomes very easy or it's happening everywhere.
- 15:11Speaker 1: It's super normalized.
- 15:13Speaker 3: And it's normalized. It's super destructive. Children are the ones
- 15:15Speaker 3: who suffer the most on it. And I think the
- 15:17Speaker 3: data is clear on that. Mm-hmm. When you look at,
- 15:19Speaker 3: you know, single parent homes or no parent homes or
- 15:21Speaker 3: being raised, you know, without an authority.
- 15:24Speaker 1: Or an abusive step person.
- 15:26Speaker 3: And that is, you know, when you look up the
- 15:28Speaker 3: stats on that, like remarriage and having a new family
- 15:31Speaker 3: like that, that becomes the single most likely vector of
- 15:34Speaker 3: abuse in a young child's life is that new person.
- 15:37Speaker 1: Right.
- 15:38Speaker 3: Because now they're raising someone else's kid or whatever.
- 15:40Speaker 1: I mean, it's a that's in every old movie. The
- 15:44Speaker 1: evil stepmother.
- 15:45Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 15:45Speaker 1: You know.
- 15:46Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 15:46Speaker 1: Or evil stepfather, but in the old movies, it's always
- 15:49Speaker 1: the stepmother that abuses the girl. Yes.
- 15:52Speaker 3: And, and, and so, you know, I kind of, uh,
- 15:56Speaker 3: I kind of resented that part of that time. That
- 15:58Speaker 3: culture was, um, I shouldn't say when I was a child,
- 16:02Speaker 3: I should say as I got older, cause I wasn't
- 16:03Speaker 3: a single mom home. And, uh, the guy that my
- 16:05Speaker 3: mother remarried right after my father died was abusive. And, um,
- 16:10Speaker 3: you know, he really got hard on my younger brother and,
- 16:13Speaker 3: you know, my mother moved us out almost immediately. But, uh,
- 16:17Speaker 3: when I reexamined that time, it really was, uh, you know,
- 16:21Speaker 3: I don't know how to describe it, but you know,
- 16:23Speaker 3: there are no rules when it comes to relationships and
- 16:27Speaker 3: family and every family special in particular in its own way.
- 16:30Speaker 3: And they all need to be venerated. And there's of course,
- 16:33Speaker 3: some truth to that. We shouldn't deride someone because they
- 16:35Speaker 3: come from a broken family, but we shouldn't elevate it.
- 16:38Speaker 3: Like it's at the same level as a unified family. Um,
- 16:42Speaker 3: and that's a tricky line to to walk. But also
- 16:44Speaker 3: the people who are making those movies in that culture
- 16:47Speaker 3: came from the fifties and sixties where divorce was just
- 16:50Speaker 3: not in the cards. And so that was a, you know,
- 16:53Speaker 3: Hook's law, as you bend any object, it wants to
- 16:56Speaker 3: return back to its natural state. And Hook's law kind
- 16:59Speaker 3: of played there where nobody could get divorced in the forties, thirties, forties, fifties,
- 17:03Speaker 3: and sixties. And then you had the baby boomers who
- 17:05Speaker 3: kind of culturally said, you know, actually there's, it's not
- 17:08Speaker 3: as bad as we think, but then it over-corrected and
- 17:11Speaker 3: it became kind of part of that cultural zeitgeist.
- 17:14Speaker 1: That's kind of what humans do, right? We always overcorrect.
- 17:18Speaker 3: Yeah, we do.
- 17:19Speaker 1: We go in one direction until we realize it's destructive,
- 17:23Speaker 1: and then we overcorrect until we realize that's destructive. Yeah.
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- 18:38Speaker 3: And I would say that's the, and not, this isn't
- 18:41Speaker 3: a political thing, this is just the reality of it.
- 18:43Speaker 3: That's mostly what makes me conservative in nature. is I
- 18:47Speaker 3: agree systems need to change, but they need to change
- 18:49Speaker 3: slowly and pragmatically. So we, because, you know, any social,
- 18:54Speaker 3: any social scientists worth their salt will know a social
- 18:57Speaker 3: experiment almost never has the outcome that we thought it
- 19:00Speaker 3: was going to have. In other words, we thought doing
- 19:03Speaker 3: something to society would form society this way, but it
- 19:05Speaker 3: almost has the, the inverse, the anti-pattern, like we talked
- 19:08Speaker 3: about before, and it almost ends up propagating itself. And
- 19:12Speaker 3: so that makes me, I'm, I'm still a, proponent for change,
- 19:16Speaker 3: but it should be slow and thought out and done
- 19:20Speaker 3: in pockets first.
- 19:21Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 19:22Speaker 3: Kind of, you know, federalism. Let's do little changes here.
- 19:25Speaker 3: Let's let California be crazy for a while and see
- 19:27Speaker 3: how that works out for them. But let's not nationalize
- 19:30Speaker 3: the craziness. Let's learn from what they learned there. And
- 19:33Speaker 3: there'll be goodness, you know, hot baristas that make great
- 19:36Speaker 3: coffee and cool art. And let's take those parts. But
- 19:40Speaker 3: how about the Rampant homeless. Let's find out what caused
- 19:43Speaker 3: that and solve for that. And, you know, that was
- 19:47Speaker 3: kind of the founder's intent with federalism. They're really federalists. state-minded.
- 19:51Speaker 3: And there's, you know, even for that being 250 years ago,
- 19:54Speaker 3: there's a profound amount of profanity in that. Like, let's
- 19:58Speaker 3: change things slowly and let social experiments take place and
- 20:02Speaker 3: adopt the best parts of those things and then integrate
- 20:04Speaker 3: them to the culture overall as we move along. But,
- 20:07Speaker 3: you know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yeah.
- 20:09Speaker 1: I think in this country, one of the primary problems
- 20:13Speaker 1: that people have is a profound lack of respect for
- 20:16Speaker 1: discipline and how important discipline is for your life. And
- 20:20Speaker 1: discipline is associated with conservatism. And because of that, like
- 20:25Speaker 1: a lot of people think that I'm, I don't think
- 20:28Speaker 1: I'm anything. I think I have politically or ideologically, I
- 20:33Speaker 1: have a lot of everything in me. I don't think
- 20:35Speaker 1: I identify with one side or another. But if one
- 20:37Speaker 1: thing that I agree with conservative people on, conservative people
- 20:41Speaker 1: lend more towards the importance of discipline. Hard work, discipline,
- 20:46Speaker 1: don't complain, get things done, deal with the hand that
- 20:50Speaker 1: you've been dealt with and just sort it out and
- 20:53Speaker 1: get to work. Don't cry. Don't look for other people
- 20:56Speaker 1: to save you. They're not going to. And this is
- 20:59Speaker 1: not something that's celebrated in society. It's thought of as
- 21:03Speaker 1: a cruelty thing. That if you say that you need discipline,
- 21:07Speaker 1: that you're not treating these people that are victims of
- 21:10Speaker 1: circumstance with the proper respect or with the proper empathy.
- 21:14Speaker 1: And I think a certain amount of empathy is probably
- 21:17Speaker 1: not so good for you at a certain point in time.
- 21:19Speaker 1: There comes a point in time where you're letting people
- 21:21Speaker 1: wallow in their bullshit and just make excuses for why
- 21:24Speaker 1: they're not getting anything done. And in that sense, I
- 21:26Speaker 1: think California is– that is a giant part of what's
- 21:30Speaker 1: wrong with California. What's wrong with California when it comes
- 21:33Speaker 1: to crime? What's wrong with California? The way they address
- 21:38Speaker 1: crime and the way they address homelessness and all these
- 21:40Speaker 1: issues that they have, they don't put their foot down.
- 21:42Speaker 1: At a certain point in time, you've got to realize
- 21:45Speaker 1: what Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy. Society can suffer from
- 21:49Speaker 1: suicidal empathy. At a certain point in time, you've got
- 21:52Speaker 1: to enforce rules and you've got to make it so
- 21:53Speaker 1: that people have to get their shit together.
- 21:56Speaker 3: Yeah, and that suicidal empathy... becomes a way for the
- 21:58Speaker 3: person who's imposing it on someone else to feel good
- 22:00Speaker 3: about themselves, which makes it even trickier and even more
- 22:04Speaker 3: insidious because they're feeling good from the weaponization of other
- 22:09Speaker 3: people's lot in life. And the thing about that is
- 22:16Speaker 3: none of the rules that you're going to impose, especially
- 22:18Speaker 3: as a legislator or as somebody in a think tank,
- 22:21Speaker 3: you'll never feel the repercussions of them. You'll never have
- 22:24Speaker 3: to actually deal with it day to day. You're just
- 22:26Speaker 3: imposing it on someone else and saying, I better understand
- 22:29Speaker 3: the structure of reality and the fabric of the world.
- 22:33Speaker 3: And you can't help but be this way. It's the
- 22:35Speaker 3: system that's done this to you. So let me give
- 22:37Speaker 3: you pittance that I'm going to take from someone else.
- 22:40Speaker 3: And that makes me benevolent. I get to feel good
- 22:43Speaker 3: about that.
- 22:44Speaker 1: That's a giant part of government for sure. That's a
- 22:46Speaker 1: giant part of what's the problem with like liberal governments.
- 22:49Speaker 1: Liberal governments should, they should get paid based on whether
- 22:55Speaker 1: or not the city does better or worse financially than
- 23:00Speaker 1: when they were in office. If their policies lead to
- 23:04Speaker 1: greater domestic production of goods and services and GDP does
- 23:09Speaker 1: better and everything does better, then you should get paid more.
- 23:12Speaker 1: If more real estate sales, more people are making more money,
- 23:16Speaker 1: medium income raises, less homeless people, you should get paid more.
- 23:19Speaker 1: And you should get paid less if homelessness goes up,
- 23:22Speaker 1: if crime goes up, if there's more destruction, if there's
- 23:25Speaker 1: more assaults and home invasions, you should get paid less.
- 23:30Speaker 1: You're doing a shitty job. And if you did that,
- 23:33Speaker 1: I think they would impose laws that made it safer
- 23:36Speaker 1: and healthier and made it better for society.
- 23:40Speaker 3: Yeah, and then they would just inevitably change the ways
- 23:42Speaker 3: that we track and measure those things and pay themselves more.
- 23:45Speaker 1: Well, they shouldn't have the opportunity to do that. Then
- 23:48Speaker 1: you need some sort of an oversight. I'm being cynical.
- 23:50Speaker 1: You're right, though. You're right to be cynical because that's
- 23:53Speaker 1: what they do about everything. Someone was explaining to me
- 23:55Speaker 1: yesterday that One of the problems with cleaning up fraud
- 24:01Speaker 1: is that fraud is responsible for a giant percentage of GDP.
- 24:05Speaker 1: And if you have hundreds of billions of dollars of
- 24:08Speaker 1: fraud in this country and you eliminated that, you actually
- 24:12Speaker 1: lower GDP because you actually lower the amount of money
- 24:18Speaker 1: that's in circulation.
- 24:19Speaker 3: That's interesting. I've never thought about that before.
- 24:21Speaker 1: He was explaining to me and I was like, oh,
- 24:22Speaker 1: my God, that is crazy. that a giant percentage of
- 24:26Speaker 1: our GDP is fraud. And if that was somehow or
- 24:29Speaker 1: another eliminated, it'd be like one of the things that
- 24:32Speaker 1: they do when they raise jobs, like they increase GDP.
- 24:36Speaker 1: We've added, you know, 200,000 jobs to the market. Well,
- 24:41Speaker 1: what are those jobs? Like, what are those jobs? Are
- 24:44Speaker 1: these government jobs? Because the government is a giant percentage
- 24:47Speaker 1: of our GDP. Government jobs.
- 24:49Speaker 3: It's way bigger than it should be.
- 24:51Speaker 1: Way bigger. And those jobs, a lot of them are
- 24:53Speaker 1: bullshit and waste. A lot of them.
- 24:55Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 24:56Speaker 1: And that was some of the stuff that was uncovered
- 24:58Speaker 1: during Doge. The limited amount of access that Doge had
- 25:01Speaker 1: to it. Just the beginning of it where you got
- 25:05Speaker 1: to see the curtain pulled back and get to see
- 25:07Speaker 1: exposure of so many of these fraudulent, supposedly... Charitable organizations
- 25:13Speaker 1: that were really just money laundering. They're really just funneling
- 25:16Speaker 1: money into these People's hands like like the homeless thing
- 25:20Speaker 1: in California.
- 25:21Speaker 3: Oh my goodness.
- 25:22Speaker 1: It's about bonkers Situation where they've spent 24 billion dollars.
- 25:27Speaker 1: They cannot track it. They've tried to audit it the
- 25:30Speaker 1: government has vetoed these audits and And they have no
- 25:34Speaker 1: idea where that $ 24 billion went, and yet homelessness went up.
- 25:39Speaker 1: But you've got a giant machine that is this homeless establishment,
- 25:44Speaker 1: this homeless industrial complex that is being funneled money into that,
- 25:49Speaker 1: and that actually aids the GDP, which is kind of crazy.
- 25:53Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it was one of the things, my
- 25:55Speaker 3: last three years in the military, I was advising a
- 25:59Speaker 3: colonel and a two-star general. and they were in charge
- 26:02Speaker 3: of all of the offensive cyber development, ethical hacking, offensive
- 26:07Speaker 3: cyber development. I was their technical advisor. And one of
- 26:12Speaker 3: the things I kind of learned about government at that
- 26:13Speaker 3: point was these systems have their own incentive, and the
- 26:19Speaker 3: incentive is not the output of their purported mission. The
- 26:22Speaker 3: incentive is the growing of the organization and the execution
- 26:26Speaker 3: of budget. So while they're in there, you know, I've
- 26:29Speaker 3: never seen a field grade officer get dressed down more
- 26:32Speaker 3: than when he didn't spend all of the money that
- 26:34Speaker 3: he was budgeted for for that year.
- 26:35Speaker 1: Isn't that crazy?
- 26:36Speaker 3: He would go to the Pentagon and they'd be like, well,
- 26:38Speaker 3: you didn't execute $ 300 million of OCO, of Overseas Contingent
- 26:42Speaker 3: Operations funds here. And they would dress him down for
- 26:45Speaker 3: an hour.
- 26:46Speaker 1: And what people don't understand is if you don't spend
- 26:49Speaker 1: that money. your budget for the next year will be
- 26:51Speaker 1: lower because there's no need to have a higher budget.
- 26:54Speaker 3: Instead of tying it to mission to say, did you
- 26:57Speaker 3: achieve your mission objectives? We started the year agreeing from
- 27:01Speaker 3: the president's framework, the NIPF, the National Intelligence Priority Framework.
- 27:05Speaker 3: We wanted to achieve these effects. What you would want
- 27:08Speaker 3: to hear is, we achieved them and we saved 25%.
- 27:10Speaker 3: But instead it's, we achieved them, but we didn't execute
- 27:13Speaker 3: all of this money. Well, you're fired. And I literally
- 27:16Speaker 3: have seen that happen. I've literally seen that happen. And
- 27:19Speaker 3: that kind of.
- 27:20Speaker 1: What a sick society.
- 27:21Speaker 3: Yeah, and that kind of shifted my thinking in that
- 27:25Speaker 3: these systems have their own incentive to exist and to
- 27:28Speaker 3: grow because those guys that were holding that general officer,
- 27:31Speaker 3: that 06s, that colonel's feet to the fire, they also
- 27:35Speaker 3: have an incentive to, because they were part of that
- 27:37Speaker 3: trickle down and they've got bureaucracy that surrounds them. And
- 27:41Speaker 3: if they didn't execute it, that means they didn't execute it.
- 27:43Speaker 3: And that means they have to go to whomever This
- 27:45Speaker 3: was during the Biden administration. I believe Hegseth, for everything
- 27:49Speaker 3: we could say, has actually tightened this up quite a bit.
- 27:51Speaker 3: And he's kind of rehauled the way development works, especially
- 27:54Speaker 3: on the offensive cyber side. But they have bureaucracies and
- 27:58Speaker 3: the incentive of the bureaucracy is to make sure that
- 27:59Speaker 3: we grow. And that's it. And then you think about
- 28:03Speaker 3: that for a minute and you're like, well, it's no
- 28:04Speaker 3: longer a question why we have $ 30 trillion of debt.
- 28:08Speaker 1: $ 39 trillion.
- 28:09Speaker 3: And then what, like $ 150 trillion of unfunded liability? In
- 28:14Speaker 3: other words, we've promised people money for the next 30 years. And,
- 28:18Speaker 3: and it's debt that, you know, I don't see how
- 28:21Speaker 3: we'll ever escape that debt. Um, and it's the thing
- 28:24Speaker 3: about it is, is, and I don't want to be
- 28:26Speaker 3: pigeonholed because I'm actually quite liberal when it comes to
- 28:30Speaker 3: my politics are, are like yours in that I'm kind
- 28:33Speaker 3: of a man without a home, but they also change
- 28:35Speaker 3: at different levels of analysis. I'm very liberal with my
- 28:38Speaker 3: family and I'm very like communist. I protect them. I
- 28:42Speaker 3: give them everything they need. I'm trying to give them structure.
- 28:45Speaker 3: And even in my community, I'll help someone out out
- 28:48Speaker 3: of pocket or do something for them that's a strain
- 28:51Speaker 3: on my time or might hurt something else because there
- 28:53Speaker 3: are really no solutions. There's just trade-offs.
- 28:55Speaker 1: That's supportive for the community, though. That's how people are
- 28:58Speaker 1: supposed to do charity.
- 29:00Speaker 3: And I'm also very nonjudgmental in someone how they care.
- 29:02Speaker 3: I don't care what they do in their house. I
- 29:03Speaker 3: don't care if it's a Roman orgy on the weekends. Like,
- 29:06Speaker 3: be a predictable, productive person Monday through Friday and go
- 29:10Speaker 3: do your Roman orgy on the weekend. I don't care.
- 29:12Speaker 3: I won't judge you. Like, I don't. I really have
- 29:15Speaker 3: enough crap in my own life.
- 29:17Speaker 1: As long as someone's not getting hurt.
- 29:18Speaker 3: Yeah, as long as no one's getting hurt, consenting adults.
- 29:20Speaker 3: Like I have enough problems and I screw up enough
- 29:22Speaker 3: and people have, there's a laundry list of things that
- 29:25Speaker 3: people can say about me, how I've screwed up in
- 29:26Speaker 3: my life. But then as I graduate and get higher
- 29:29Speaker 3: and higher, more conservatism takes place. And that's a result
- 29:35Speaker 3: of just, having an engineering mindset when I'm looking at
- 29:39Speaker 3: life and understanding that it's just not Republican or Democrat
- 29:44Speaker 3: or leftist or rightist or liberal or classically liberal. All
- 29:50Speaker 3: of these monikers don't work for me because they break
- 29:53Speaker 3: down at some level of analysis.
- 29:56Speaker 1: Right. I think that's the problem. I think the problem
- 29:58Speaker 1: is these ideologies that people subscribe to, where you have
- 30:01Speaker 1: a predetermined pattern of thinking that you're supposed to adopt.
- 30:04Speaker 2: Yes.
- 30:05Speaker 1: You're supposed to adopt these opinions. And some of them
- 30:08Speaker 1: just don't fit. And that's how people get pigeonholed. That's
- 30:10Speaker 1: like people on the left. They get pigeonholed into weird
- 30:13Speaker 1: stuff that you can't really justify, like trans women in sports. Like,
- 30:17Speaker 1: what the fuck are you doing? We're being inclusive. Like, no,
- 30:20Speaker 1: you're not.
- 30:21Speaker 3: We're loving the borders of Ukraine while hating our own border. Yeah.
- 30:25Speaker 1: Fucking bonkers. Yeah. There's so many crazy things. There's so
- 30:28Speaker 1: many crazy things that people just adopt that don't make
- 30:31Speaker 1: any sense. And, you know, when you subscribe to an ideology,
- 30:35Speaker 1: the problem is if like you define yourself as this person,
- 30:39Speaker 1: I am this. I am a hardcore right-wing blah, blah,
- 30:42Speaker 1: whatever it is. You immediately close the door to all
- 30:46Speaker 1: the very productive and interesting things that the other side thinks. Yeah.
- 30:49Speaker 3: And you're also making yourself into a tool of propaganda.
- 30:52Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
- 30:52Speaker 3: Because if I meet someone and they just say, I'm this,
- 30:56Speaker 3: it's like, well, I could reasonably predict everything that's going
- 30:59Speaker 3: to come out of your mouth. That's not entertaining. I
- 31:02Speaker 3: don't want to have a conversation with that person. I
- 31:04Speaker 3: can't seek to learn from them because I could just
- 31:05Speaker 3: pick up the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf and have
- 31:09Speaker 3: a pretty good understanding of who I'm dealing with. And therefore,
- 31:11Speaker 3: a conversation is not. It's not relevant. It's not needed.
- 31:14Speaker 1: A lot of people are afraid of social ostracization too.
- 31:17Speaker 1: So they're afraid of straying outside of the narrative, whatever
- 31:21Speaker 1: side they're supposed to be on. And, you know, some
- 31:25Speaker 1: groups are really good at making you feel like dog
- 31:27Speaker 1: shit if you don't agree entirely with even things that
- 31:31Speaker 1: don't even make any sense.
- 31:32Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 31:32Speaker 1: So that's why people go along with stuff that's illogical,
- 31:35Speaker 1: like open borders or whatever it is.
- 31:37Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 31:37Speaker 1: They go along with things that's not in their best
- 31:40Speaker 1: interest because they're scared. They're scared of being ostracized. They're
- 31:43Speaker 1: scared of being cast out of the kingdom. There's, you know,
- 31:45Speaker 1: they're scared of being excommunicated.
- 31:47Speaker 3: Yeah. I dealt with a lot of people first when
- 31:50Speaker 3: I retired from the military. And then more recently, um,
- 31:54Speaker 3: leading up to the last election where, you know, I
- 31:56Speaker 3: was entertaining the deal of doing some work for government, um,
- 32:00Speaker 3: believe it or not. And cause I'm, as we talk more,
- 32:03Speaker 3: you'll figure out I'm pretty anti institutions. I'm really, uh,
- 32:09Speaker 3: against those types of things. But I really felt, if
- 32:11Speaker 3: you would have asked me three years ago how I
- 32:13Speaker 3: felt about the Trump election and all of that stuff,
- 32:15Speaker 3: I was very excited because he was saying a lot
- 32:17Speaker 3: of things that I wanted someone to say. Trump fits
- 32:20Speaker 3: a pattern, and this is what people, I think, kind
- 32:23Speaker 3: of lack when they.
- 32:25Speaker 3: My whole life is built around pattern analysis. I really
- 32:27Speaker 3: enjoy patterns and exhuming and looking into patterns. And there's
- 32:33Speaker 3: a pattern of like a.
- 32:36Speaker 3: You'll laugh when I say this first part of the pattern,
- 32:38Speaker 3: but then I'll make it make more sense later. But
- 32:41Speaker 3: he fits the pattern. Well, first, he's a Jacksonian and
- 32:46Speaker 3: in that he's a pragmatic person, the way that he governs,
- 32:48Speaker 3: which I liked, or at least I did. And, you know,
- 32:51Speaker 3: there's some things he's done recently that I don't enjoy.
- 32:53Speaker 3: And but he's also a an outsider or a savior
- 32:59Speaker 3: type all, you know. I don't remember the movie, but
- 33:04Speaker 3: The Magnificent Seven back in the day. I don't remember
- 33:06Speaker 3: the actor's name. There's this group of, you know, there's
- 33:09Speaker 3: this Western town. Everything's going to shit. These seven guys
- 33:12Speaker 3: walk in. I think Chris Pratt remade it with Denzel
- 33:15Speaker 3: Washington or someone else.
- 33:16Speaker 1: Oh, really?
- 33:17Speaker 3: I think so. I can't remember. But there's an old
- 33:19Speaker 3: one that I used to watch with my grandpa.
- 33:20Speaker 1: God, there's too many movies.
- 33:21Speaker 3: Yeah. And there's this pattern where you wouldn't invite these
- 33:25Speaker 3: guys to a dinner party. You wouldn't want them in
- 33:27Speaker 3: church on Sunday. But when a system is so corrupt
- 33:30Speaker 3: and so horrible... You have to rely on these types
- 33:34Speaker 3: of people to come in and be a check to
- 33:35Speaker 3: the system. But then also you don't want them to
- 33:38Speaker 3: stick around when the system is reset. So there's a
- 33:41Speaker 3: scene in the movie where he says, you know, man,
- 33:43Speaker 3: these seven guys are talking. They said, man, these people
- 33:46Speaker 3: must have really wanted us. Like, it's crazy. They must
- 33:49Speaker 3: be happy we're here. And I think it's Gary Cooper
- 33:51Speaker 3: or someone or one of these guys looks at him
- 33:53Speaker 3: and says, they're going to be even happier when we leave.
- 33:55Speaker 3: And Trump kind of fits that narrative. Wolverine from the
- 33:58Speaker 3: X-Men would be another one who fits this narrative. Like,
- 34:01Speaker 3: Is he going to be at the X-Men Christmas party?
- 34:04Speaker 1: No, right?
- 34:05Speaker 3: Is he trying to hit on Scott Gray's wife, Cyclops?
- 34:07Speaker 3: I'm a comic nerd, so I'm sorry. Is he trying
- 34:11Speaker 3: to sleep with Cyclops' wife?
- 34:12Speaker 1: Yes.
- 34:13Speaker 3: Did he chop a guy's head off and throw it
- 34:15Speaker 3: at a car? Yes. But we're about to go face Galactus,
- 34:19Speaker 3: and we're going to need him. And so we have
- 34:21Speaker 3: to put up with all of this other stuff because
- 34:24Speaker 3: we understand that when the system is corrupt at every level,
- 34:27Speaker 3: you need someone who's outside of the system to come
- 34:29Speaker 3: in and set the system right. It's a Western pattern
- 34:33Speaker 3: as well. Other people who fit this would be like Patton, right?
- 34:36Speaker 3: Married his cousin, slapped soldiers.
- 34:39Speaker 1: Did he really? He married his cousin?
- 34:40Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it was his third cousin.
- 34:42Speaker 1: How many cousins removed does it become okay?
- 34:46Speaker 3: I don't know.
- 34:46Speaker 1: Is it third, fourth?
- 34:48Speaker 3: If there's blood.
- 34:49Speaker 1: Have you never met them?
- 34:50Speaker 3: I'm Icelandic, so I really can't say anything, right? They
- 34:52Speaker 3: literally have apps in Iceland. Like my grandparents and my
- 34:55Speaker 3: great grandparents are all from Iceland. They settled in Manitoba, Gimli, Manitoba,
- 34:59Speaker 3: which is this Icelandic community. And they literally have apps
- 35:02Speaker 3: in Iceland to make sure you're not dating your cousin.
- 35:05Speaker 1: Because it's such a small community.
- 35:08Speaker 3: Less than a million people on one island. So you're
- 35:12Speaker 3: trying to prevent that stuff. But anyway, Patton, yeah, slapped
- 35:15Speaker 3: soldiers who had tuberculosis. One of them probably had shell shock.
- 35:19Speaker 3: It got in the newspaper. They wanted his head. And thankfully,
- 35:23Speaker 3: the generals were like, no, he's the guy that we
- 35:24Speaker 3: need for the moment, right? He had the ivory pistols
- 35:27Speaker 3: and He dressed not like a general. He didn't talk
- 35:29Speaker 3: like a general. He wasn't like a Eisenhower where he
- 35:32Speaker 3: had the veneer of a general. But we knew he
- 35:36Speaker 3: was the only guy we could have at the Battle
- 35:38Speaker 3: of the Bulge. The Germans talked about him like he
- 35:41Speaker 3: was already a mythic legend in his lifetime. But part
- 35:46Speaker 3: of this pattern that people should understand or when they
- 35:49Speaker 3: examine this pattern is it never ends well for these antiheroes.
- 35:52Speaker 3: They're always killed or defamed in the final analysis. So
- 35:56Speaker 3: when the Magnificent Seven come in, they'll go to another
- 35:58Speaker 3: town and all get killed. When Patton retired, he died
- 36:01Speaker 3: in some weird Jeep accident. Wolverine, he's the only guy
- 36:05Speaker 3: left on this desolate world where the Hulk's in charge,
- 36:10Speaker 3: and it's a horrible existence. Patton, or not Patton, Petraeus
- 36:14Speaker 3: is another one. I briefed Petraeus. I worked for, not
- 36:18Speaker 3: for him, but for people who worked for him in Iraq.
- 36:21Speaker 3: And he was the guy that got us through with
- 36:24Speaker 3: the surge. But he was really a weird guy when
- 36:28Speaker 3: you would talk to him. You knew that he knew
- 36:31Speaker 3: something you didn't and that he was seeing things that
- 36:34Speaker 3: you weren't. But even for myself, as being a chief
- 36:37Speaker 3: warrant officer at that time, a low-level technician, he would
- 36:40Speaker 3: ask questions like he got it. He didn't act like
- 36:42Speaker 3: other generals. Like other generals would have their three things
- 36:44Speaker 3: they want to talk about, then they'd want to get
- 36:46Speaker 3: out of Dodge. He would ask questions that really had implications.
- 36:49Speaker 3: And he is another one of these outsiders who came
- 36:53Speaker 3: in to write a system that was not working well.
- 36:55Speaker 3: vis-a-vis Iraq in 2006. And then what happens to him
- 36:59Speaker 3: when he leaves? They put him in charge of the CIA.
- 37:02Speaker 3: They knew he had been screwing around with this woman.
- 37:04Speaker 3: And they're like, okay, he served his function. Now he
- 37:07Speaker 3: needs to get out of Dodge. And now he's got
- 37:11Speaker 3: tried for all these things and sleeping with someone while
- 37:14Speaker 3: he wasn't married. It's not a ceremonious end for these types.
- 37:18Speaker 3: Is that really what happened to Petraeus?
- 37:20Speaker 1: That's how he ended?
- 37:22Speaker 3: Yeah, he was sleeping with some girl that was writing
- 37:24Speaker 3: his book or something along those lines.
- 37:26Speaker 1: That's it?
- 37:27Speaker 3: While he was married? Yeah, I'm not saying that's the
- 37:29Speaker 3: end of him. All I'm saying is that history will
- 37:33Speaker 3: remember the pattern as ending unfavorably. You know what I'm saying?
- 37:37Speaker 3: And so when I examined Trump, I said, yeah, I
- 37:40Speaker 3: don't like what he says. I wouldn't want him around
- 37:42Speaker 3: my daughters. I wouldn't want him at a dinner party.
- 37:46Speaker 3: But he seems to be saying these things like he's
- 37:48Speaker 3: going to reset this system. you know, I think it
- 37:51Speaker 3: was Chappelle was on your show or another show or
- 37:53Speaker 3: someone like that, where he talked about Hillary saying, uh,
- 37:56Speaker 3: you know, something about the tax loopholes or whatever. And
- 37:59Speaker 3: he just hit right back at her and said, well,
- 38:00Speaker 3: you're the people who are funding your campaign, take advantage
- 38:03Speaker 3: of those same loopholes. And if they're there, I'm going
- 38:05Speaker 3: to take advantage of them. I wouldn't be a pragmatist
- 38:07Speaker 3: if I didn't. When he started saying stuff like that,
- 38:09Speaker 3: it seemed to me like he was going to upend
- 38:11Speaker 3: this system. Uh, the jury's out on that because I
- 38:14Speaker 3: don't know how I feel these days. We can get
- 38:15Speaker 3: into that if you need to, or if we want to, but, um,
- 38:19Speaker 3: he's an outsider personality and I thought he was going
- 38:21Speaker 3: to really reset the system. And there are, you know,
- 38:24Speaker 3: good things that are happening. You know, if I were
- 38:26Speaker 3: to grade him, I would probably give him a C
- 38:28Speaker 3: plus or a B minus. He's certainly better than, you know,
- 38:31Speaker 3: what was happening under Biden. I was still in the
- 38:33Speaker 3: military when Biden was in charge and it was awful
- 38:36Speaker 3: to say the least.
- 38:38Speaker 1: What were the problems?
- 38:39Speaker 3: Oh my goodness. Books that general officers were being told
- 38:43Speaker 3: to read and that I as an advisor were being
- 38:45Speaker 3: told to read. Books like White Rage. like understanding why
- 38:50Speaker 3: you're a problem. You as a white man are a
- 38:53Speaker 3: problem in the modern day military because this whole thing's
- 38:57Speaker 3: built on systemic racism. You have built implicit bias that
- 39:01Speaker 3: you can't escape even if you wanted to or you
- 39:03Speaker 3: recognized it.
- 39:04Speaker 1: It's woke politics.
- 39:05Speaker 3: Yeah, it was woke politics. And it was, you know,
- 39:10Speaker 3: I would sit there and say, you know, all of
- 39:13Speaker 3: the people that I know who've died during this war,
- 39:15Speaker 3: not all of them, but 80% of them, And the
- 39:17Speaker 3: numbers bear this out when you look at them. They're
- 39:19Speaker 3: all white guys from the middle of the country who
- 39:22Speaker 3: were on their farms or, you know, not all of them,
- 39:25Speaker 3: 80% of them. I think the numbers bear out about
- 39:27Speaker 3: 80% of them were these guys from the Midwest. or
- 39:30Speaker 3: these places where they didn't really have a lot going.
- 39:32Speaker 3: And they went off to fight a war that we
- 39:34Speaker 3: probably shouldn't have been fighting in the first place, especially
- 39:37Speaker 3: in Iraq. And they died for their cause. And now
- 39:41Speaker 3: you're saying that those people who make up the majority
- 39:43Speaker 3: of the combat deaths are somehow part of this problem
- 39:46Speaker 3: and that other people aren't benefiting from it. Um, I
- 39:50Speaker 3: don't believe race to me is disgusting. Even to talk
- 39:53Speaker 3: about someone's race, even, you know, on both sides of
- 39:56Speaker 3: the spectrum, when they were, you know, electing that Supreme
- 40:00Speaker 3: court justice, I can't remember her name right now at
- 40:02Speaker 3: the top of my head, just cause I'm a little
- 40:03Speaker 3: nervous still. Um, she was black and they were.
- 40:06Speaker 1: Talking to Brown. Yeah.
- 40:07Speaker 3: They're talking about how it's historic because she's black and
- 40:10Speaker 3: Biden had said he's going to hire a black woman
- 40:12Speaker 3: to do this job. If I had worked my whole
- 40:15Speaker 3: life to do something, but now I'm only being elevated
- 40:18Speaker 3: to this next position because of my gender and the
- 40:20Speaker 3: color of my skin, I would turn that job down
- 40:23Speaker 3: so fast because that's not what I want to be
- 40:25Speaker 3: known for. These are immutable characteristics that I'm not in
- 40:28Speaker 3: control of. I didn't choose to be born white or
- 40:31Speaker 3: with blue eyes. I didn't choose to be born in
- 40:33Speaker 3: a trailer park in the middle of nowhere without a
- 40:35Speaker 3: dad at five. I didn't choose any of those things.
- 40:38Speaker 3: I don't see how I benefit from these things at
- 40:40Speaker 3: the individual level. And, you know, the individual level of
- 40:43Speaker 3: analysis for me is really the only way to evaluate
- 40:46Speaker 3: someone for their pluses and their minuses. And anything beyond
- 40:49Speaker 3: that to me is discriminatory on its face.
- 40:52Speaker 1: Of course. It's just a great way to control people
- 40:54Speaker 1: because you pit people against each other that way. And
- 40:57Speaker 1: it's just an awesome way that they can stay in
- 41:00Speaker 1: control and make everybody walk on eggshells and think that
- 41:03Speaker 1: You know, they've victimized people in order to get to
- 41:06Speaker 1: their position, and they have to be shameful of who
- 41:10Speaker 1: they are that they had no control over.
- 41:12Speaker 3: It also gives people an easy rubric to judge other people.
- 41:15Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 41:16Speaker 3: Because nothing's easy, really. And it gives them, like, white
- 41:19Speaker 3: guy bad, you know, black guy good, Chinese guy, as
- 41:23Speaker 3: long as he's not applying to the college I want
- 41:25Speaker 3: to get into, he's good. Right. And it gives people— people
- 41:29Speaker 3: want easy answers, right? Really, at the end of the day,
- 41:32Speaker 3: they want to be told the easy rubric to navigate
- 41:34Speaker 3: life because really none of it's easy and it requires discipline,
- 41:36Speaker 3: like you said before, and thought. And so it was
- 41:41Speaker 3: that stuff in the military. I remember getting told in
- 41:45Speaker 3: an equal opportunity briefing we were getting, it doesn't matter
- 41:50Speaker 3: what you meant when you said what you were saying.
- 41:53Speaker 3: It only matters what the person felt when you said it.
- 41:56Speaker 1: They said that in a military briefing?
- 41:58Speaker 3: It was a military equal opportunity briefing. And the example
- 42:02Speaker 3: they gave was if a woman walks into the... We
- 42:04Speaker 3: worked with a lot of civilians at this military organization
- 42:09Speaker 3: where we were developing these offensive cyber capabilities. A lot
- 42:13Speaker 3: of civilians in there. And so if a woman X
- 42:17Speaker 3: walks in today and she's got a dress on and
- 42:19Speaker 3: the thought in your head is, I'd like to get
- 42:21Speaker 3: my wife that dress or something like it or find
- 42:23Speaker 3: out where she bought it. And you just say, that's
- 42:25Speaker 3: a nice dress. Anyway, here's the TPS reports. If she
- 42:29Speaker 3: heard something sexual or didn't like the connotation or whatever,
- 42:34Speaker 3: there's going to be an investigation. You're going to be
- 42:36Speaker 3: pulled out of that office. This is all going to
- 42:39Speaker 3: happen despite what you meant. So the idea probably was good.
- 42:43Speaker 3: We want to prevent sexual harassment inside of the office. Um,
- 42:47Speaker 3: but it was weaponized, but it was weaponized and it
- 42:50Speaker 3: was carried out in a way where it's only about
- 42:51Speaker 3: how people feel and not what a reasonable person standard
- 42:54Speaker 3: would be in a particular situation. And from the time
- 42:57Speaker 3: I joined the military, um, Until that time, we'd been
- 43:00Speaker 3: at war. My entire time in the military, we were
- 43:02Speaker 3: at war. I deployed throughout my career. And I wouldn't
- 43:06Speaker 3: say that I was a war horse. I was not
- 43:08Speaker 3: a long tabber. I was not a cool guy kicking
- 43:10Speaker 3: in doors. It was my job as the guy with
- 43:13Speaker 3: tape over his glasses to point out the door for
- 43:16Speaker 3: someone else and say, bad guys in there. So I
- 43:19Speaker 3: was not a super badass in that regard. I was
- 43:22Speaker 3: a nerd for super badasses. But we also all engaged
- 43:26Speaker 3: in gallows humor.
- 43:28Speaker 1: And we would.
- 43:30Speaker 3: The jokes and stuff, even someone who had recently died,
- 43:33Speaker 3: we'd make a joke about. It's because you have this
- 43:35Speaker 3: tremendous pressure and comedy is the relief valve for that
- 43:41Speaker 3: in a lot of ways.
- 43:42Speaker 1: Yeah, of course.
- 43:43Speaker 3: But then someone would overhear that joke or something. And
- 43:45Speaker 3: now you're looking down the barrel of a 15-6, which
- 43:48Speaker 3: is a military investigation. And all of these things that
- 43:53Speaker 3: could permanently impact your life in a way and give
- 43:55Speaker 3: you a scarlet letter. to where you could never be
- 43:58Speaker 3: employed again or do anything ever again because you were
- 44:00Speaker 3: simply trying to relieve some pressure or you were trying
- 44:03Speaker 3: to find out where to buy your wife the next
- 44:06Speaker 3: dress and now your life's being ruined. And I know
- 44:08Speaker 3: guys who suffered under that sword. Like I wouldn't name them,
- 44:11Speaker 3: but I know guys who, you know, their career met
- 44:15Speaker 3: a terminal end because of a dumb joke or something.
- 44:18Speaker 3: It's like you can't be expected to go out and
- 44:20Speaker 3: shoot people in the face and then be sensitive to
- 44:22Speaker 3: someone's feelings an hour later. Right. It's just it doesn't
- 44:26Speaker 3: it does not work. Now, should you talk to that
- 44:28Speaker 3: guy and say, hey, you know, you made woman X
- 44:30Speaker 3: feel so and so. Be more cognizant of that whenever
- 44:33Speaker 3: you're around her in the future.
- 44:34Speaker 1: We should also have a rational discussion with the woman.
- 44:37Speaker 3: Yes.
- 44:37Speaker 1: And what did he ask you? He said, where did
- 44:40Speaker 1: you get that dress? It's very lovely. I'd like to
- 44:42Speaker 1: get one for my wife. Why were you upset at that? Like,
- 44:46Speaker 1: what does this is this rational? Like how you can't
- 44:49Speaker 1: be in an office if you're that sensitive. Like, it's
- 44:52Speaker 1: one thing if the guy said, I'd like to get
- 44:54Speaker 1: you out of that dress. Well, for sure. Okay, now
- 44:56Speaker 1: you're in a different world.
- 44:57Speaker 3: 100%. 100%. Right. Yeah.
- 44:59Speaker 1: But if someone says, you look great, you know, have
- 45:02Speaker 1: you lost weight? You look fantastic. That's a compliment.
- 45:06Speaker 2: Yes.
- 45:06Speaker 1: And if someone gets upset, I felt sexually objectified. I
- 45:09Speaker 1: felt harassed. Like, okay, he just said you look great.
- 45:12Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 45:13Speaker 1: That's it.
- 45:13Speaker 3: Healthy.
- 45:14Speaker 1: It's not, you look great. I'd like to get you naked.
- 45:16Speaker 3: Right.
- 45:16Speaker 1: Now we've crossed the Rubicon, right?
- 45:18Speaker 2: Yes.
- 45:18Speaker 1: Now we're into it.
- 45:18Speaker 2: For sure.
- 45:19Speaker 1: For sure.
- 45:19Speaker 3: Right.
- 45:20Speaker 1: Just you look great or I like your dress. That's like,
- 45:24Speaker 1: if you said that to a man, like, hey, great suit.
- 45:27Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 45:27Speaker 1: And he's like, I need to file a complaint. Yeah.
- 45:29Speaker 1: I need to file a complaint.
- 45:30Speaker 3: Yeah. You've trimmed up, Joe. You're looking good.
- 45:32Speaker 1: Looking great, Bill. Like, oh my God, I'm being harassed.
- 45:35Speaker 1: I need to like complain.
- 45:36Speaker 3: That would have worked during the Biden administration.
- 45:38Speaker 1: That is fucking crazy.
- 45:39Speaker 3: That would have worked.
- 45:40Speaker 1: That's so crazy.
- 45:41Speaker 3: And the other thing that they were doing in this briefing,
- 45:43Speaker 3: which is where I kind of, you know, the last
- 45:45Speaker 3: couple of years of my military career, I got in
- 45:47Speaker 3: trouble a couple of times, or I should say called down.
- 45:49Speaker 3: I was a senior... I was a CW4. I was
- 45:52Speaker 3: one rank from the top. I was advising two-star generals,
- 45:55Speaker 3: colonels on very important matters. I wasn't high in the
- 46:00Speaker 3: dominance hierarchy, but I was adjacent to people who were
- 46:04Speaker 3: as an advisor. And the amount of, in this briefing
- 46:11Speaker 3: in particular, they had gotten into, you know, it's bad
- 46:16Speaker 3: that there are so many white people I'm doing high
- 46:20Speaker 3: points here, but we need more diversity. I was part
- 46:23Speaker 3: of an accepted career program that they were starting to
- 46:26Speaker 3: call like the old white boys network because most of
- 46:28Speaker 3: the people, so the requirements for this network were you
- 46:32Speaker 3: had to speak a couple languages. You needed an engineering
- 46:35Speaker 3: degree or some kind of demonstrated engineering background. You had
- 46:39Speaker 3: to have deployed. They wanted you to speak the language
- 46:43Speaker 3: very well. They wanted you to be able to go
- 46:45Speaker 3: through these engineering courses, these other things. And what happens
- 46:50Speaker 3: naturally is you now need people who are interested in engineering.
- 46:54Speaker 3: All right. So you've got somebody who's maybe more constrained
- 46:57Speaker 3: in their thinking. You need somebody who speaks languages. Well,
- 47:00Speaker 3: now they also need to be kind of, you know,
- 47:03Speaker 3: speak French, speak Russian, whatever it was. So they had
- 47:07Speaker 3: to have studied or lived in an area and done this.
- 47:09Speaker 3: And they need to be able to go through these
- 47:10Speaker 3: crazy tactical and strategic types of courses. By virtue of
- 47:15Speaker 3: those things, you're going to get men. And there were
- 47:19Speaker 3: lots of women, but then there'll be more white men.
- 47:21Speaker 3: And it's not because the pool presented itself that way.
- 47:25Speaker 3: Now you have to extract from that pool. And so
- 47:29Speaker 3: in this briefing, when they were talking about like the
- 47:31Speaker 3: old white boys network or how we need to change things,
- 47:33Speaker 3: I said, you know, do you realize that most men
- 47:37Speaker 3: have more in common than most women? Or like if
- 47:42Speaker 3: I say I need more diversity in a particular room,
- 47:45Speaker 3: if you said diversity of thought, I'd be fine with that.
- 47:48Speaker 3: But Joe and random black guy in the same program,
- 47:53Speaker 3: in the same office, have far more in common than
- 47:56Speaker 3: the white woman. But what you're saying is these people
- 48:00Speaker 3: need to have all separate different colors and different– like
- 48:04Speaker 3: all of this needs to be this way. It's going
- 48:06Speaker 3: to naturally present itself that way because men in the
- 48:09Speaker 3: military generally are disagreeable. Men in the military who like
- 48:12Speaker 3: engineering are generally hyper-disagreeable. Yeah. And the only difference between
- 48:18Speaker 3: these two people is the pigment of their skin. So
- 48:20Speaker 3: this fake diversity quota that they're putting on top of
- 48:23Speaker 3: us doesn't achieve anything other than giving some officer a
- 48:27Speaker 3: bullet on their OER. And, you know, I got pulled
- 48:30Speaker 3: into the office afterward. I said way more than that.
- 48:32Speaker 3: But essentially afterwards, they're like, hey, chief, you can't say
- 48:35Speaker 3: that in those briefings. Like the way that you were
- 48:37Speaker 3: getting animated in there and what you're saying, what you're doing, like, yeah,
- 48:41Speaker 3: this is not going to fly. And this was like
- 48:44Speaker 3: 2018 or 2019 or something.
- 48:45Speaker 1: Just being rational.
- 48:47Speaker 3: Yeah, just trying to be rational and say that there's
- 48:49Speaker 3: more difference in groups than there is between groups. And
- 48:53Speaker 3: that the similarities and the way that things stack up,
- 48:56Speaker 3: you recruit from a pool of volunteers and candidates. If
- 48:59Speaker 3: I'm recruiting from a pool of volunteers and candidates who
- 49:01Speaker 3: are 80% male and white, I have to expect that
- 49:04Speaker 3: the selected individuals are going to be male and white.
- 49:08Speaker 3: The majority of people who join the military, I don't
- 49:11Speaker 3: control this. I'm just As an engineer, I'm looking at statistics.
- 49:15Speaker 1: Also, if you want a highly functional, productive group, it's
- 49:17Speaker 1: got to be based on meritocracy.
- 49:19Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure.
- 49:20Speaker 2: Sure.
- 49:21Speaker 1: Anything other than that is literally a threat to national security.
- 49:24Speaker 3: Yeah, you're denigrating lethality. The role of the army is
- 49:28Speaker 3: to deter war through exuding superior military fighting and technology.
- 49:34Speaker 3: And when deterrence fails to win, that's it. Those are
- 49:38Speaker 3: the two things that we need to do with our military.
- 49:41Speaker 3: It needs to look like the guy in the playground
- 49:42Speaker 3: who you would not muck about with. And if you
- 49:44Speaker 3: were to muck with him, he will beat you senseless.
- 49:48Speaker 3: That's it. Now, whether or not we should be using
- 49:50Speaker 3: that all the time or how we use it, that's
- 49:51Speaker 3: a separate question. But the entity itself needs to comport itself.
- 49:56Speaker 1: In this way.
- 49:56Speaker 3: Otherwise, you are endangering this truly special experiment, which at
- 50:02Speaker 3: least in its beginnings valued the individual. It valued individual
- 50:07Speaker 3: rights and states' rights. And the founders, and this was
- 50:11Speaker 3: another thing I said in that briefing, was the founders knew, yes,
- 50:15Speaker 3: they were all slaveholders, but they knew that the Constitution
- 50:18Speaker 3: and the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence
- 50:21Speaker 3: would eventually lead to a system where we had to
- 50:24Speaker 3: acknowledge these people as people. And we fought a civil
- 50:27Speaker 3: war where a million white dudes died to see this
- 50:32Speaker 3: experiment through. The scaffolding was there. You have to look
- 50:36Speaker 3: at the things, the zeitgeist of the time. If they
- 50:38Speaker 3: had just said, nope, everyone's going to be free, there
- 50:41Speaker 3: will be no slaves, you would have never gotten ratification
- 50:44Speaker 3: through the southern states. But they knew that there are,
- 50:46Speaker 3: and when you read the Federalist Papers, they knew that
- 50:48Speaker 3: they were erecting this system. When you look at Thomas
- 50:52Speaker 3: Jefferson and some of these other great thinkers, yes, he
- 50:54Speaker 3: owned slaves, I get it. They knew what they were
- 50:57Speaker 3: building and they knew what it would ultimately terminate in.
- 51:00Speaker 3: And then we had a civil war where we destroyed
- 51:03Speaker 3: our country from the inside out. to see this dream
- 51:06Speaker 3: come about. And now we're just going to all go
- 51:08Speaker 3: back and say they're all slave owners. Like, I know
- 51:11Speaker 3: this has all been said here a million times, but
- 51:13Speaker 3: this stuff animates me because it's built with blood and treasure.
- 51:15Speaker 1: Well, it's also, you can't judge people from the past
- 51:19Speaker 1: based on the standards of the present.
- 51:21Speaker 3: For sure.
- 51:21Speaker 1: Because culture changes, people understand things better. We have a
- 51:27Speaker 1: much greater recognition of what was wrong with things a
- 51:32Speaker 1: hundred years ago, 200 years ago. And I'm sure in
- 51:35Speaker 1: the future, we're going to look back on today with
- 51:38Speaker 1: the same lens. There's, it's just always works that way.
- 51:41Speaker 3: Did you know Joe had a gas powered car?
- 51:43Speaker 1: Exactly. That kind of stuff. Yeah.
- 51:45Speaker 3: Did you know that?
- 51:46Speaker 1: You consumed more, you flew more, you ate more meat,
- 51:49Speaker 1: you did whatever you did. You were a problem.
- 51:52Speaker 3: He was a problem.
- 51:53Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 51:53Speaker 3: And now why would we ever, like I'm voting to
- 51:56Speaker 3: get rid of the Joe Rogan experience from the National
- 51:58Speaker 3: Archives because he drove a gas car. You know what
- 52:01Speaker 3: I mean? Like someone stores your stuff for profundity's sake
- 52:04Speaker 3: for the future to hear about this. I've always loved
- 52:09Speaker 3: your podcast, Joe, and it was because you're a genuinely
- 52:12Speaker 3: curious person, and I'm not kissing your ass right now.
- 52:15Speaker 3: You're a genuinely curious person that was saying things that
- 52:18Speaker 3: were not in the current zeitgeist at the time, and
- 52:20Speaker 3: you refused to apologize for it. And it led to
- 52:24Speaker 3: a lot of great things. But it led to an
- 52:27Speaker 3: updating of the system. And you did it with dialogue,
- 52:29Speaker 3: with the dialogos, with, you know, two people trying to
- 52:33Speaker 3: learn things about each other. And it led to an
- 52:35Speaker 3: updating of a system. I think it's very important for
- 52:37Speaker 3: culture to have free and open dialogue so we can
- 52:40Speaker 3: update our system. So bad ideas can die so we
- 52:42Speaker 3: don't have to die instead of our bad ideas. Yeah.
- 52:45Speaker 3: Because if I can't express a bad idea, I have
- 52:47Speaker 3: to act it out. And if I act out the
- 52:49Speaker 3: bad idea, it could kill me.
- 52:51Speaker 1: And the celebration of good ideas.
- 52:53Speaker 3: And the celebration of good ideas. Yeah.
- 52:55Speaker 2: And.
- 52:56Speaker 3: It's just really, there's just been such a weird inversion
- 52:59Speaker 3: in politics where the free hippie loving liberals of yesteryear
- 53:05Speaker 3: are now the ones telling you what words you can use.
- 53:08Speaker 3: There are no borders, all of these crazy things. And
- 53:12Speaker 3: I always say to people, I said it to Andy,
- 53:14Speaker 3: so I'm following my last podcast with him. I'm like
- 53:16Speaker 3: a 1996 Bill Clinton Democrat. If you go watch his
- 53:19Speaker 3: State of the Union, he talks about lowering debt. Getting
- 53:23Speaker 3: out of debt actually, working with Newt Gingrich to get
- 53:26Speaker 3: out of debt, securing the borders, making work and education
- 53:31Speaker 3: freely accessible. I'm voting for that guy.
- 53:34Speaker 1: I know. Isn't it crazy? I mean that's why the
- 53:37Speaker 1: problem of labels doesn't work, ideological labels. Because if you
- 53:42Speaker 1: go back far enough and look at Clinton, for example,
- 53:45Speaker 1: he's one of the best ones. And by the way,
- 53:46Speaker 1: did balance the budget.
- 53:47Speaker 3: Yeah, he did.
- 53:48Speaker 1: He actually did.
- 53:48Speaker 3: We had a surplus when he left the office.
- 53:50Speaker 1: Yeah. Amazing. Did a fucking amazing job. So he got
- 53:53Speaker 1: his dick sucked.
- 53:53Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 53:55Speaker 1: Who didn't? Back then, that's the other thing. Judging people
- 53:57Speaker 1: by the standards of the past, you know, JFK doesn't
- 54:01Speaker 1: look so good in the Me Too movement, you know?
- 54:03Speaker 2: Right.
- 54:03Speaker 1: Exactly. I mean, he would have got canceled. Yeah. It's
- 54:06Speaker 1: like you have to recognize that those– this ideological bubble
- 54:11Speaker 1: that we find ourselves in left versus right, Bill Clinton
- 54:14Speaker 1: does not fit in that. Bill Clinton is securely on
- 54:17Speaker 1: the right in terms of 1996 standards applied to today.
- 54:22Speaker 3: He would never want to hear that.
- 54:23Speaker 1: No, he would never want to hear that because he's
- 54:25Speaker 1: kind of shifted– with the zeitgeist because that's what you
- 54:27Speaker 1: kind of have to do if you want to stay
- 54:29Speaker 1: in your party and be protected by your party. But
- 54:32Speaker 1: he's essentially, he had a lot of the, we've talked
- 54:36Speaker 1: about this before, we've played clips of Hillary Clinton from 2008,
- 54:41Speaker 1: She's more MAGA than MAGA. I know. Her take on
- 54:44Speaker 1: the border was like hardcore, was hardcore. If you've been
- 54:48Speaker 1: convicted of a crime, get out. If you stay here,
- 54:52Speaker 1: pay a stiff penalty and you have to get in
- 54:53Speaker 1: line and you have to learn English and everybody cheers.
- 54:57Speaker 1: That is a hardcore right-wing 2026 perspective.
- 55:00Speaker 3: Obama did it too in 2012.
- 55:01Speaker 2: Yes.
- 55:02Speaker 1: Absolutely. And Obama deported more people than Trump did.
- 55:05Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
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- 55:56Speaker 3: And it's just, I'm not saying, like my thought is
- 56:00Speaker 3: I'm always updating. I'm always updating my systems. I'm always
- 56:03Speaker 3: getting told things. I always have a pre-prescribed way of
- 56:07Speaker 3: looking at the world that I'll have a good conversation
- 56:10Speaker 3: with someone and I'll update my systems. But generally, my
- 56:12Speaker 3: principles are in place. And when you watch these people
- 56:16Speaker 3: who get into their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, and
- 56:18Speaker 3: their core foundational principles are changing, that really should give
- 56:22Speaker 3: you cause for concern. Because, like, you were saying this
- 56:26Speaker 3: at this time, and now you're saying this at that time.
- 56:28Speaker 3: It's like, generally, my rubric that I don't think will
- 56:31Speaker 3: change about myself is I'm fervently for the individual, and
- 56:35Speaker 3: I'm fervently for truth. And that we can, that the
- 56:39Speaker 3: worldview You should measure it and look at not what
- 56:42Speaker 3: your intentions are but what the outcomes are and then
- 56:46Speaker 3: evaluate the system and how it scales based on those outcomes.
- 56:50Speaker 3: That's principally if you– I try to live that standard
- 56:53Speaker 3: up to myself. I fall short of that standard all
- 56:56Speaker 3: the time. It's part of being a human. I try
- 56:57Speaker 3: to live by that standard. And I feel like that
- 56:59Speaker 3: will always be me even into my 90s.
- 57:02Speaker 1: Unless something goes horribly wrong, right?
- 57:04Speaker 3: Right, right. And I've pretty much been here since the
- 57:08Speaker 3: past seven or eight years or so. Even into my 30s,
- 57:11Speaker 3: I wasn't quite sure who I was as a human.
- 57:16Speaker 3: But I'm pretty steadfast in that. And the amount of
- 57:20Speaker 3: opportunities and the amount of goodness in my life and
- 57:24Speaker 3: my children and my home and the things I've been
- 57:27Speaker 3: able to do have really been born out of that
- 57:30Speaker 3: last seven years of The truth is going to be
- 57:32Speaker 3: the top of the decision matrix for me, the top
- 57:35Speaker 3: of the hierarchy for me. I'm going to try not
- 57:38Speaker 3: to cut corners whenever I can and help good people
- 57:42Speaker 3: around me. And the truth is the way that I'll
- 57:44Speaker 3: organize and function myself in life and that I will
- 57:48Speaker 3: try to only judge people as individuals. And the world,
- 57:52Speaker 3: you know, these are Christ's teachings from 2000 years ago.
- 57:55Speaker 3: And but the world for me has just opened up
- 57:59Speaker 3: in a way that I could have never predicted. using
- 58:01Speaker 3: a very simple rubric. It's not easy, but it's simple.
- 58:05Speaker 3: And if more people just took those, and this isn't me,
- 58:08Speaker 3: I didn't come up with this. This is the result of,
- 58:11Speaker 3: you know, watching a bunch of experiments go bad. But
- 58:14Speaker 3: if people just adopted that very simple thing and just
- 58:16Speaker 3: tried it for three months, you'll feel better about yourself.
- 58:19Speaker 3: You'll feel better about the world. You feel better about
- 58:21Speaker 3: the people approximately around you. It might make you hate
- 58:24Speaker 3: the government more.
- 58:25Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 58:26Speaker 3: But, uh, I don't.
- 58:27Speaker 1: Think if you don't hate the government, I think you're
- 58:30Speaker 1: not paying attention.
- 58:31Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
- 58:32Speaker 1: I mean, when you were working in cyber defense, like
- 58:36Speaker 1: what- Cyber offense. Cyber offense. What was the primary function? Like,
- 58:41Speaker 1: what did you do?
- 58:43Speaker 3: So in the beginning, I have no short answers and
- 58:47Speaker 3: I apologize. In the beginning- I don't like short answers. Yeah,
- 58:50Speaker 3: I just, I always feel like I'm- I like a
- 58:52Speaker 3: good long answer.
- 58:53Speaker 1: Don't worry about that. Okay.
- 58:55Speaker 3: When I joined the military, I was in signals intelligence
- 58:59Speaker 3: and essentially learning the ins and outs of radars. how
- 59:02Speaker 3: radars work, what they do, how they function. Did you
- 59:05Speaker 3: guys ever see any weird shit, like UFO shit? I
- 59:08Speaker 3: wish I had.
- 59:10Speaker 1: I really do. I wish you had too.
- 59:11Speaker 3: Yeah, I really do. I was more in the signals
- 59:15Speaker 3: intelligence side of the house, focusing first on electronic signals
- 59:18Speaker 3: or emanations from radars, mapping them so that, you know,
- 59:22Speaker 3: if we were going to go do the ground invasion
- 59:24Speaker 3: and there was going to be some air support going
- 59:26Speaker 3: in first and blowing shit up, we would tell them, hey,
- 59:28Speaker 3: there's a, man-packable SA-7 here, there's a SA-10 here, there's
- 59:32Speaker 3: this here, there's there, and then telling these pilots so
- 59:34Speaker 3: they didn't get shot out of the sky. Quickly, when
- 59:37Speaker 3: the war kicked off, that became irrelevant because there was
- 59:40Speaker 3: no surface-to-air missiles, surface-to-surface missiles in Iraq. We had knocked
- 59:45Speaker 3: them all out in the first few weeks. So then
- 59:47Speaker 3: it shifted to communications intelligence. So I kind of retrained
- 59:51Speaker 3: on communications intelligence, and that was at that time off
- 59:54Speaker 3: of cell phones, off of push-to-talk radios, repeaters, long-haul networks,
- 1:00:00Speaker 3: terrestrial networks, extraterrestrial networks, and what I mean by that
- 1:00:03Speaker 3: is satellites in the sky, and doing analysis on those
- 1:00:07Speaker 3: to try to inform what we call the common operating
- 1:00:11Speaker 3: picture of the battlefield for a combatant commander. So a
- 1:00:14Speaker 3: combatant commander wants to know where the bad guys are,
- 1:00:16Speaker 3: what they're doing, what they're saying. To the amount that
- 1:00:18Speaker 3: we could, my job was to come up with solutions
- 1:00:22Speaker 3: and conduct passive and active signals analysis on these things
- 1:00:28Speaker 3: And then inform the commander so that we could, you know,
- 1:00:31Speaker 3: mitigate risk. It was all about mitigation of risk. This
- 1:00:36Speaker 3: is 2008 or so. I'd been doing this for about
- 1:00:37Speaker 3: seven years, eight years. And from there it shifted to
- 1:00:42Speaker 3: the phone's getting smart. And essentially it went from you
- 1:00:45Speaker 3: walking around with a 2G phone or a 3G phone
- 1:00:48Speaker 3: that had limited compute capability to now there's robust compute
- 1:00:52Speaker 3: capability with the advent of like the iPhone. And now
- 1:00:55Speaker 3: it's like, well, now we've got to get after guys
- 1:00:57Speaker 3: who are, you know, essentially walking on with a computer
- 1:01:00Speaker 3: we could never have envisioned 20 years ago in their
- 1:01:02Speaker 3: pocket with all this capability. Because the military and our
- 1:01:06Speaker 3: forces that we're fighting against, it all comes down to
- 1:01:09Speaker 3: our ability to shoot, move, and communicate, communication being the
- 1:01:12Speaker 3: part that I was focused on. So as the advent
- 1:01:14Speaker 3: of the iPhone and those things came out, the Army
- 1:01:17Speaker 3: realized we didn't have a computer network operations MOS. We
- 1:01:20Speaker 3: didn't have an offensive cyber component. We didn't have a
- 1:01:23Speaker 3: defensive cyber component. So we kind of, I was there
- 1:01:26Speaker 3: at the ground floor when we were building out these
- 1:01:28Speaker 3: new MOSs now that are all over the military. But
- 1:01:31Speaker 3: at that time, there was a thought going into, you know,
- 1:01:34Speaker 3: we need to have people who know how to be
- 1:01:36Speaker 3: on-net operators. Ethical hacking, as paradoxical as that sounds. That's
- 1:01:41Speaker 3: how the lawyers called it that. So it's hacking at
- 1:01:43Speaker 3: the end of the day, but ethical hacking because you've
- 1:01:45Speaker 3: got the backing of the U.S. government. And so we
- 1:01:48Speaker 3: set up that framework and really started launching into operations,
- 1:01:52Speaker 3: you know, 2006, 7, 8. all the way into my
- 1:01:55Speaker 3: last deployment in 2017 or 2017, it was all focused
- 1:02:01Speaker 3: on computer network operations and how they lash up with
- 1:02:03Speaker 3: terrestrial networks. How do we exploit all of that was
- 1:02:07Speaker 3: one facet of my job. And your question was, how
- 1:02:11Speaker 3: did I get into all of that? And that was the...
- 1:02:15Speaker 3: How do you.
- 1:02:15Speaker 1: Get into it? What was the operational aspect of it?
- 1:02:20Speaker 1: How did you actually... What did you do?
- 1:02:22Speaker 3: So, you know, there's, there's, I'll stick to terms that
- 1:02:26Speaker 3: are more, um, generally understood by the public, but learning
- 1:02:30Speaker 3: how to do things like war driving, um, collecting on networks, wifi,
- 1:02:34Speaker 3: you know, endpoints, um, cell phones, uh, understanding the ins
- 1:02:39Speaker 3: and outs of them, understanding how to do forensic analysis
- 1:02:41Speaker 3: of them. So after there was an operation and a
- 1:02:44Speaker 3: bunch of gorillas had been sent in to kill the
- 1:02:46Speaker 3: bad guy, um, we could derive maximum intelligence value from
- 1:02:50Speaker 3: the hand, from the handset to plan other operations. Um,
- 1:02:54Speaker 3: And so, you know, it would be passive monitoring of
- 1:03:00Speaker 3: networks to inform the intelligence picture, which would lead to
- 1:03:03Speaker 3: either combat operations or active computer network operations where now
- 1:03:08Speaker 3: it's like, well, there's, you know, a, I don't know,
- 1:03:13Speaker 3: an Iraqi or an Afghani router that hasn't been patched
- 1:03:17Speaker 3: in three years. And we think we can either write
- 1:03:20Speaker 3: or find a zero day, which is just an exploit
- 1:03:22Speaker 3: of those routers. Where we can muck with their router
- 1:03:28Speaker 3: in a way where they think they're getting good information
- 1:03:30Speaker 3: and they're not or they're or erecting other things to
- 1:03:37Speaker 3: mitigate risk for the commander. And so that really, you know,
- 1:03:41Speaker 3: exploded at that point. And between that and human intelligence,
- 1:03:45Speaker 3: which is kind of the the actual gathering of intelligence
- 1:03:48Speaker 3: from other people, you know, you would call it spy or,
- 1:03:51Speaker 3: you know, James Bond. But that's James Bond was a
- 1:03:53Speaker 3: horrible spy. Um, I mean, yeah, you know, your job's
- 1:03:57Speaker 3: to remain anonymous and you're walking into a casino and
- 1:04:01Speaker 3: there's gold fingers calling you by your first and last name.
- 1:04:03Speaker 3: It's not a great look. Um, you know, generally you
- 1:04:08Speaker 3: don't want to be sleeping with your sources or, uh, um,
- 1:04:11Speaker 3: you know, using a real name or whatever. So human intelligence.
- 1:04:15Speaker 3: And then my focus for the last 10 years was
- 1:04:17Speaker 3: how does signals intelligence computer network operations, um, become a
- 1:04:21Speaker 3: force multiplier for people conducting, um, overt and clandestine operations
- 1:04:27Speaker 3: throughout the theater at that time. My deployments and my
- 1:04:30Speaker 3: time was spent in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Northern Africa. And
- 1:04:36Speaker 3: then a lot of people don't know it, but we
- 1:04:37Speaker 3: were in active combat operations in the Southern Philippines as
- 1:04:40Speaker 3: well for a fair amount of time. I want to
- 1:04:43Speaker 3: maybe say seven or 10 years, we were doing combat operations.
- 1:04:46Speaker 1: When was this?
- 1:04:46Speaker 3: In the Southern Philippines. My first deployment to the Southern
- 1:04:50Speaker 3: Philippines was 2007.
- 1:04:54Speaker 1: Who were we doing operations against?
- 1:04:56Speaker 3: So there were terrorist elements down there that were traveling
- 1:05:00Speaker 3: back and forth from Pakistan and Afghanistan. And there was
- 1:05:04Speaker 3: a terrorist organization down there called the Abu Sayyaf Group.
- 1:05:08Speaker 3: And there were other ones as well. Jamaah Islamiyah, I think,
- 1:05:11Speaker 3: was the name of the other one. And they were
- 1:05:14Speaker 3: conducting their own terrorist anti-Christian operations in the southern part
- 1:05:17Speaker 3: of the Philippines. In the southern part of the Philippines,
- 1:05:20Speaker 3: I don't... Can I say it? Can I say the word?
- 1:05:22Speaker 1: What do you mean?
- 1:05:22Speaker 3: Jamie, can you pull up a map of the Philippines? Yes.
- 1:05:24Speaker 3: Can you pull it up?
- 1:05:25Speaker 1: Oh, say that?
- 1:05:26Speaker 3: Say that term?
- 1:05:27Speaker 1: Yeah, pull it up, Jamie.
- 1:05:27Speaker 3: I've been listening to it forever. So there's what's called
- 1:05:30Speaker 3: the autonomous region of Muslim Mindanao, which is the southern
- 1:05:34Speaker 3: part from like a place called Zamboanga down to Hulu
- 1:05:37Speaker 3: or Holo Island. And there's a, it's a funny joke
- 1:05:41Speaker 3: because if you zoom into Zamboanga, which is... God, look
- 1:05:45Speaker 3: how many islands there are in the Philippines. I know.
- 1:05:46Speaker 3: Go down to the south there. Go down right there.
- 1:05:50Speaker 3: Zoom right there on that island. Now move to, sorry,
- 1:05:52Speaker 3: now move to the southwest. See that penis? Mm-hmm. At
- 1:05:58Speaker 3: the tip of that penis is called Zamboanga. Mm-hmm. All
- 1:06:01Speaker 3: of our combat operations, now if you zoom out a
- 1:06:03Speaker 3: little bit more and pan more south and zoom out
- 1:06:07Speaker 3: just a little bit more so the joke hits, all
- 1:06:10Speaker 3: that sperm south of the tip of the Zamboanga city,
- 1:06:15Speaker 3: there are terrorist operations in here. Now, if you go
- 1:06:17Speaker 3: to that main island called Sulu, there's Holo Island. That's
- 1:06:21Speaker 3: where I was. on this tiny island out in the
- 1:06:24Speaker 3: middle of nowhere, and on that, there's a mountain.
- 1:06:27Speaker 1: That's all the Philippines?
- 1:06:28Speaker 3: Well, no, I mean, this is all the Philippines down here, yeah.
- 1:06:30Speaker 1: Wow.
- 1:06:30Speaker 3: So this is called, there's a mountain in there, I
- 1:06:32Speaker 3: think it was called Mount Tumatoc or something like that,
- 1:06:36Speaker 3: on the eastern part of the island called Luke. It's
- 1:06:38Speaker 3: called Luke? Yeah, so there's mountains. There's a mountainous region there.
- 1:06:41Speaker 3: There are a bunch of terrorists up there. They were
- 1:06:43Speaker 3: killing people in the area, conducting bombings. They were getting trained.
- 1:06:47Speaker 3: In fact, there was a guy, and I believe, I'm
- 1:06:49Speaker 3: going to get his name wrong, perhaps, But I believe
- 1:06:52Speaker 3: his name was either Insulon Haplon or, oh, it's Jamar Patek.
- 1:06:57Speaker 3: Jamar Patek. He was actually arrested outside of Osama bin
- 1:07:01Speaker 3: Laden's compound the day after he was killed. We were
- 1:07:03Speaker 3: trying to kill him on that island. Or in and
- 1:07:06Speaker 3: around that island is where we were trying to find
- 1:07:07Speaker 3: him and kill him. So they're terrorist facilitators. They did
- 1:07:11Speaker 3: the USS Cole bombing.
- 1:07:13Speaker 1: Zoom back out. I want to see the Philippines one
- 1:07:15Speaker 1: more time, like all the islands. When you zoom all
- 1:07:18Speaker 1: the way out. It's so nuts how many islands there are.
- 1:07:22Speaker 3: It's so big. Yeah, so up north in Manila is
- 1:07:24Speaker 3: mostly the Christian population. And as you get down south,
- 1:07:28Speaker 3: it's the autonomous region of Muslim Minna now. And that
- 1:07:31Speaker 3: is all of where these terrorist operations were happening. And
- 1:07:35Speaker 3: I believe that mostly pulled out of there, there might
- 1:07:37Speaker 3: be still some people in Zamboanga. I'm not sure anymore
- 1:07:40Speaker 3: because it's been five years, four years since I retired.
- 1:07:44Speaker 3: But yeah, we were doing counterinsurgency operations down there and
- 1:07:47Speaker 3: guys died down there and they're combat operations. And, uh,
- 1:07:51Speaker 3: I was out there. Um, I was in a tactical
- 1:07:53Speaker 3: military intelligence battalion and I was attached to the first
- 1:07:56Speaker 3: special forces group. And we were down there a couple
- 1:07:58Speaker 3: of times and, a lot of people don't even know
- 1:08:01Speaker 3: about it.
- 1:08:01Speaker 1: So, yeah, I never heard about it.
- 1:08:03Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:08:03Speaker 1: So, uh, anyway, um, I'm sorry. No, no sidebar, but
- 1:08:07Speaker 1: I'm so stunned at how many islands are in the Philippines.
- 1:08:10Speaker 1: It'll spread out of this. Yeah.
- 1:08:11Speaker 3: It's, it's insane. And the, the, the thing about it is,
- 1:08:15Speaker 3: is I go to all of these little outposts and
- 1:08:17Speaker 3: these out islands and, We were always debriefing these guys.
- 1:08:20Speaker 3: And I'm going to get these terms wrong, so I'm
- 1:08:21Speaker 3: sure there'll be people in the comments. But I think
- 1:08:23Speaker 3: they were called bongerize or something like that. But they
- 1:08:26Speaker 3: were like these mayors of each one of these little islands.
- 1:08:29Speaker 3: And there would be terrorists in and around those areas.
- 1:08:31Speaker 3: And we'd try to make friends with these guys so
- 1:08:33Speaker 3: they'd give us some information. And every one of those
- 1:08:37Speaker 3: places was absolutely beautiful. Like you'd go there and be like, man,
- 1:08:40Speaker 3: Hilton could turn this into something in a short order. Right.
- 1:08:43Speaker 3: You know, when you're out of these places. Beautiful beach,
- 1:08:45Speaker 3: beautiful lush jungles. The best swimming water.
- 1:08:48Speaker 1: Nicest people, too.
- 1:08:49Speaker 3: Oh, the Filipino people are some of my favorite people, man. Like,
- 1:08:53Speaker 3: you want to talk... The guys that we work with
- 1:08:55Speaker 3: out there they're uh scout i think they're called scout
- 1:08:57Speaker 3: sniper scout rangers and they were special i think they
- 1:09:00Speaker 3: were like their special forces we go to the range
- 1:09:02Speaker 3: with these guys and show them stuff and they're the
- 1:09:05Speaker 3: most um ride or die type of guys you'll ever
- 1:09:08Speaker 3: meet in your life like you know so-and-so said this
- 1:09:11Speaker 3: about you last week and i could kill him it's
- 1:09:12Speaker 3: like no dude it's cool it's like Don't worry about it.
- 1:09:15Speaker 1: Fun fact, they're some of the best pool players on earth, too. Oh, really?
- 1:09:18Speaker 1: Some of the greatest pool players of all time came
- 1:09:20Speaker 1: out of the Philippines.
- 1:09:20Speaker 3: They're just great people. I mean, the people down there
- 1:09:23Speaker 3: were fantastic. And it was awful because those guys would
- 1:09:25Speaker 3: be bombing churches, Christian churches and stuff like that. And
- 1:09:29Speaker 3: they're doing counter-intelligence operations out there, doing intelligence operations collection
- 1:09:36Speaker 3: to inform that battle picture. But those guys had direct
- 1:09:39Speaker 3: links with Osama bin Laden and other people. Wow.
- 1:09:41Speaker 1: I had no idea.
- 1:09:42Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 1:09:43Speaker 3: Right after we, like I said, I think it was,
- 1:09:45Speaker 3: I think if you look it up, I think his
- 1:09:46Speaker 3: name is Patek, P-A-T-E-K. And he was arrested outside of
- 1:09:52Speaker 3: Osama bin Laden's compound. And we had been chasing him
- 1:09:54Speaker 3: in the Philippines.
- 1:09:55Speaker 1: Wow.
- 1:09:56Speaker 3: Because we thought he was still down there. There was
- 1:09:58Speaker 3: another guy that we, I believe we killed him. His
- 1:10:00Speaker 3: name was Al-Bader Parad. But yeah, my job was not,
- 1:10:04Speaker 3: I always say this on podcasts because the veteran community
- 1:10:07Speaker 3: is wild right now. They love to cut each other
- 1:10:09Speaker 3: down right now. there's something weird going on where like
- 1:10:12Speaker 3: obviously lying. Yeah. Call the people out. I prefer to
- 1:10:16Speaker 3: call people out face to face. Um, but, uh, I
- 1:10:19Speaker 3: always make sure people know I was not a cool guy.
- 1:10:22Speaker 3: Like sometimes I got to dress like one, you know,
- 1:10:24Speaker 3: for a few years I didn't wear any uniforms and
- 1:10:26Speaker 3: I got to grow my beard out and act like
- 1:10:27Speaker 3: a cool guy. But I was really a nerd for
- 1:10:29Speaker 3: cool guys. I've literally got pictures of myself down in the,
- 1:10:33Speaker 3: in the holo or in Afghanistan or anywhere else and
- 1:10:36Speaker 3: tape around my glasses and, You know, Pez dispenser and
- 1:10:40Speaker 3: my radio and collection equipment looking like a true blue
- 1:10:43Speaker 3: American nerd. But I was not the guy who kicked
- 1:10:46Speaker 3: the door in. I was always the guy who pointed
- 1:10:47Speaker 3: the door out. So I'd be safe in the Humvee
- 1:10:49Speaker 3: in the back, you know, eat an MRE and somebody
- 1:10:51Speaker 3: that looked like another gorilla, you know, like Andy Stumpf
- 1:10:54Speaker 3: or Tim Kennedy or someone like that. I'd be like,
- 1:10:56Speaker 3: is that the house? I'd be like, pretty sure that's
- 1:10:58Speaker 3: the house. You guys might want to be safe, but
- 1:11:00Speaker 3: go ahead. I'll be in the Humvee. I'll be out
- 1:11:02Speaker 3: here or I'll be in an airplane above, you know.
- 1:11:05Speaker 3: And yeah, it was it was. Being born in North
- 1:11:09Speaker 3: Dakota and, you know, my mother, single mother, after she
- 1:11:14Speaker 3: left that first guy, trailer house in the middle of
- 1:11:18Speaker 3: this little town called Cavalier, North Dakota. I had no options.
- 1:11:21Speaker 3: I was a horrible student.
- 1:11:23Speaker 1: That's crazy that you're so smart, but you were a
- 1:11:26Speaker 1: horrible student.
- 1:11:26Speaker 3: I wouldn't. Yeah, I call myself curious before I'd call
- 1:11:29Speaker 3: myself smart. But, you know, my mother, you know, I
- 1:11:34Speaker 3: don't know if you remember, you would remember this, but
- 1:11:36Speaker 3: maybe other people my age. You'd get these scholastic book
- 1:11:40Speaker 3: order forms that you'd bring home from school, and you
- 1:11:42Speaker 3: could order books. They'd always be on the back page,
- 1:11:45Speaker 3: or it'd always be little cool stuff. You could get
- 1:11:48Speaker 3: a pair of gloves or a hat or something. Anyway,
- 1:11:51Speaker 3: one time there was a coil radio that you could
- 1:11:54Speaker 3: order with an earpiece, and you put this coil radio together.
- 1:11:58Speaker 3: With an earpiece, no battery. It was just the electromagnetic
- 1:12:01Speaker 3: radiation would activate the coil, and you could listen to
- 1:12:07Speaker 3: radio chatter.
- 1:12:08Speaker 1: Really? With no battery?
- 1:12:09Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. Just a tiny little radio.
- 1:12:11Speaker 1: How did it, what was the power?
- 1:12:13Speaker 3: The electromagnetic radiation. And you would just, kind of like
- 1:12:16Speaker 3: a record, like, you know, how you hit a record.
- 1:12:20Speaker 3: Electromagnetic radiation would hit the coil and the coil would
- 1:12:23Speaker 3: feed up to an amplifier or up to an earpiece.
- 1:12:26Speaker 3: And the earpiece, you could hear chatter and you could
- 1:12:27Speaker 3: tune it. Did the earpiece have a battery? I don't
- 1:12:29Speaker 3: think anything had a battery on it. I think it
- 1:12:32Speaker 3: was just a. I could be mistaken, but I don't
- 1:12:35Speaker 3: believe it was.
- 1:12:35Speaker 1: Powered by electromagnetic radiation. Yeah.
- 1:12:38Speaker 3: I mean, you can look it up, Jamie, if you want.
- 1:12:40Speaker 3: Sorry to say that again.
- 1:12:41Speaker 1: Tighten that thing down. That thing's driving me crazy.
- 1:12:43Speaker 3: Yeah, sorry.
- 1:12:44Speaker 1: This thing.
- 1:12:45Speaker 3: Like here or here?
- 1:12:46Speaker 1: Right here. Look at my finger. Yeah, I've been meaning
- 1:12:49Speaker 1: to do that, like literally when everybody uses this fucking thing.
- 1:12:52Speaker 1: It's wobbling around, ready to fall off.
- 1:12:53Speaker 3: Yeah, but if you look up coil radio with small earpiece,
- 1:12:57Speaker 3: I could be wrong. I don't remember there being a
- 1:12:59Speaker 3: battery on it.
- 1:12:59Speaker 1: Electromagnetic radiation powered it. That's bananas.
- 1:13:03Speaker 3: Yeah. So kind of like a, same thing with like,
- 1:13:05Speaker 3: you know, not the same wattage, but a microwave, right. Um,
- 1:13:08Speaker 3: sends power through the air. Right.
- 1:13:09Speaker 1: But it uses DC, but it uses power.
- 1:13:12Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:13:12Speaker 1: Send it. Yeah.
- 1:13:13Speaker 3: But I could be wrong, but, um, at any rate,
- 1:13:16Speaker 3: that was the first time I got a radio and
- 1:13:18Speaker 3: I was hearing things and I'd put it together and
- 1:13:21Speaker 3: I'm listening to things and like, what kind of things, uh,
- 1:13:24Speaker 3: HF radio, VHF radio, people talking, that type of stuff. And, um,
- 1:13:29Speaker 3: It was just, and then I found out how to
- 1:13:31Speaker 3: get an antenna to make the antenna larger and started
- 1:13:34Speaker 3: ordering auxiliary pieces for it. And then what really changed
- 1:13:37Speaker 3: me was my mother let me get a, my mother
- 1:13:39Speaker 3: and I would clean houses. She was a waitress, but
- 1:13:42Speaker 3: we also would go around and clean houses. And there
- 1:13:43Speaker 3: was a lawyer that we worked for. His name was
- 1:13:45Speaker 3: Phil Culp. And, um, he had a old two 86
- 1:13:49Speaker 3: SX IBM, and, uh, it was just sitting in his basement.
- 1:13:53Speaker 3: And I told my mom, I was like, Hey, if
- 1:13:55Speaker 3: I clean for like a month, can I have that computer?
- 1:13:57Speaker 3: Like he doesn't use it. He's got a new 486
- 1:13:59Speaker 3: up in his place here. And he instantly said I
- 1:14:01Speaker 3: could have it. And then that started me down the
- 1:14:03Speaker 3: computer networking realm. And like, look, how could I get
- 1:14:06Speaker 3: this 286 to act like a 386? Or how could
- 1:14:08Speaker 3: I force it to run Windows? Or how do I
- 1:14:10Speaker 3: update the memory? How do I do these things? In
- 1:14:12Speaker 3: this little town, Edinburgh, North Dakota, there was a guy
- 1:14:14Speaker 3: who had a computer store in a basement of an
- 1:14:17Speaker 3: old general store. And his name was Jeff Munsobraten. And
- 1:14:20Speaker 3: I would go there and ask him questions about computers
- 1:14:22Speaker 3: and just start learning like ins and outs on how
- 1:14:25Speaker 3: do I update the RAM? How do I get memory better?
- 1:14:28Speaker 3: How do I augment the storage? How can I force
- 1:14:31Speaker 3: this thing to run Windows 3.1 so I can have
- 1:14:33Speaker 3: a GUI instead of using a command line?
- 1:14:36Speaker 1: GUI mean graphic user interface.
- 1:14:38Speaker 3: Yeah, sorry. And so that kind of started me on that.
- 1:14:43Speaker 3: And that, for me, like I said, I had all
- 1:14:47Speaker 3: kinds of problems with attention deficit disorder and not being
- 1:14:50Speaker 3: able to pay attention. That was the only time I
- 1:14:53Speaker 3: would go for it.
- 1:14:54Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't believe in ADHD. I might be wrong.
- 1:14:59Speaker 1: I think it's a superpower.
- 1:15:01Speaker 3: I mean, it's certainly, I remember I would spend two
- 1:15:03Speaker 3: days working on a problem and not sleeping.
- 1:15:05Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. I think it's a superpower. I
- 1:15:07Speaker 1: think it just keeps you from being interested in things
- 1:15:10Speaker 1: you're not interested in. Yeah.
- 1:15:12Speaker 3: I have a theory on that too that I can
- 1:15:14Speaker 3: get into after, but that started me down that road.
- 1:15:17Speaker 3: But in school, I couldn't pay attention.
- 1:15:18Speaker 1: Me neither.
- 1:15:19Speaker 3: There was this teacher. I always tell this story. It's
- 1:15:21Speaker 3: a great teacher. She's still around. Her name is Connie Trenbeth,
- 1:15:26Speaker 3: and she was my English teacher or literature teacher or
- 1:15:28Speaker 3: something like that. She might not even remember the story,
- 1:15:30Speaker 3: but here I am telling it on your podcast. I
- 1:15:32Speaker 3: remember it. She kept me after class once, and she goes,
- 1:15:36Speaker 3: you know, I knew your dad, Bill, and, you know,
- 1:15:39Speaker 3: your uncles were all smart, and my great-uncle has an
- 1:15:44Speaker 3: engineering wing of a school named after him out in
- 1:15:47Speaker 3: western North Dakota, and she goes, all these guys were thinkers,
- 1:15:50Speaker 3: and your dad did all this great stuff and built
- 1:15:52Speaker 3: all this stuff, and essentially what she was telling me
- 1:15:55Speaker 3: is you're a waste of life. Like all you do
- 1:16:00Speaker 3: is you come in here and you disrupt the class.
- 1:16:02Speaker 3: You upset people. No one can talk.
- 1:16:04Speaker 1: Sounds like me.
- 1:16:05Speaker 3: You're trying to dominate every conversation. But when, you know,
- 1:16:08Speaker 3: you had written one paper on something that interested you
- 1:16:11Speaker 3: and I don't remember what it was. And she's like,
- 1:16:13Speaker 3: that was a wonderful paper. She's like, if you could
- 1:16:16Speaker 3: just do that every time. And I was not hearing it.
- 1:16:21Speaker 3: Like I remember the conversation because I actually remember, I
- 1:16:24Speaker 3: think she said waste of life. I think she actually
- 1:16:26Speaker 3: said that. Like you're wasting, like you're obviously, my CPU
- 1:16:31Speaker 3: clocks high. I'm always thinking even when I'm not thinking
- 1:16:34Speaker 3: and even as we're sitting here talking, I'm thinking about
- 1:16:36Speaker 3: other things or stuff I want to do when I
- 1:16:38Speaker 3: get back to my computer or stuff I want to
- 1:16:40Speaker 3: do for my business. And so I joined the military
- 1:16:44Speaker 3: and the absurdity of life is this. I joined to
- 1:16:48Speaker 3: be a military policeman, which I absolutely would have hated
- 1:16:51Speaker 3: if Um, all of them got turned into infantry people
- 1:16:54Speaker 3: or stand gate guard, which is a needed function in
- 1:16:57Speaker 3: the military, but it doesn't apply to my personality. But
- 1:17:00Speaker 3: when I went to the recruiter station out in Minneapolis,
- 1:17:02Speaker 3: I think it was, I was a bonehead and I
- 1:17:05Speaker 3: forgot my driver's license. And they're like, well, and I
- 1:17:07Speaker 3: was supposed to leave. And at this time I had
- 1:17:09Speaker 3: dumped my girlfriend, told everyone goodbye. I'd wiped the dust
- 1:17:13Speaker 3: off my boots, like left Cavalier, North Dakota. And, um,
- 1:17:18Speaker 3: I w I was like, Hey, uh, I'm not going back.
- 1:17:21Speaker 2: So.
- 1:17:22Speaker 3: Whatever we got to do right now. And he's like, well,
- 1:17:25Speaker 3: we can, you can go home, get your license. Cause
- 1:17:28Speaker 3: the MEPS station was in Minneapolis. Was it Fargo? It
- 1:17:32Speaker 3: doesn't matter. It was five, six, seven hours away. And
- 1:17:34Speaker 3: they're like, well, you're not leaving today without a driver's license.
- 1:17:39Speaker 3: So I looked at my recruiter and I was like,
- 1:17:40Speaker 3: I don't know what job you need to get me into,
- 1:17:42Speaker 3: but it needs to be a different job. And they're like, well,
- 1:17:44Speaker 3: you scored, you know, exceptionally high in your general technical
- 1:17:48Speaker 3: part of your ASVAB, which is like understanding machines and
- 1:17:51Speaker 3: objects and stuff. so we could get you into this
- 1:17:54Speaker 3: like Intel job where you'd learn about radars and stuff.
- 1:17:57Speaker 3: And that immediately clicked for me. And then he's like, well,
- 1:18:00Speaker 3: we got to go brief you in this skiff room.
- 1:18:02Speaker 3: There's a, you know, secure compartmented information facility. There's only
- 1:18:06Speaker 3: one guy who's got a clearance and he can brief
- 1:18:07Speaker 3: you on the job. And if you want that job,
- 1:18:09Speaker 3: then you can leave tomorrow. I instantly started hearing like
- 1:18:12Speaker 3: the James Bond music, you know, and so they walked
- 1:18:18Speaker 3: me in this back place and you know, nothing super crazy. And,
- 1:18:22Speaker 3: briefed me up on the job and I went back
- 1:18:23Speaker 3: out and I said, yeah, this is actually the job
- 1:18:25Speaker 3: for me. So the absurdity of life is me forgetting
- 1:18:28Speaker 3: my driver's license. When I was 16, I was 16
- 1:18:30Speaker 3: when I signed up, um, maybe 17. No, I was
- 1:18:33Speaker 3: turning 17 that December when I signed up for the military. Um,
- 1:18:39Speaker 3: I can connect with a string to forgetting my driver's
- 1:18:41Speaker 3: license to being here with you today.
- 1:18:42Speaker 1: You can, you can sign up when you're 16. I
- 1:18:44Speaker 1: think I.
- 1:18:45Speaker 3: Was turning 17. You can sign up when I didn't.
- 1:18:47Speaker 1: Even know you could sign up. when you're 17.
- 1:18:49Speaker 3: Yeah, I had signed my delayed entry program thing, and
- 1:18:52Speaker 3: I left a little bit before my 18th birthday, so
- 1:18:55Speaker 3: I just graduated from high school. But, yeah, you can
- 1:18:59Speaker 3: sign up when you're 16, I believe, as long as
- 1:19:00Speaker 3: your parents sign the waiver. My mother signed the waiver.
- 1:19:02Speaker 3: She was happy to get me out of the trailer. So, yeah,
- 1:19:07Speaker 3: I was 17... almost 18 when I left. You can
- 1:19:09Speaker 3: make a radio out of that? Yeah, right there. So
- 1:19:11Speaker 3: that's all the pieces.
- 1:19:12Speaker 2: They call it a crystal radio.
- 1:19:13Speaker 3: Yeah, I was going to say crystal controlled.
- 1:19:15Speaker 1: That's a radio?
- 1:19:16Speaker 3: There it is.
- 1:19:16Speaker 1: What?
- 1:19:17Speaker 3: That's actually the exact thing. That looks almost, that is
- 1:19:20Speaker 3: almost exactly what it looked like.
- 1:19:22Speaker 1: Slinky made it?
- 1:19:23Speaker 2: Well, they bought the brand, they just lent the Slinky
- 1:19:25Speaker 2: brand now. What? Bought this toy, but there's a bunch
- 1:19:27Speaker 2: of these all over the internet, yeah.
- 1:19:28Speaker 1: Wow. Make your own working radio without batteries.
- 1:19:32Speaker 3: Yeah, and it uses a, I was going to say
- 1:19:34Speaker 3: crystal controlled radio because it uses a crystal diode on it.
- 1:19:38Speaker 1: Would you say Tesla coil, Jamie?
- 1:19:39Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a Tesla coil. This guy's explaining it. So
- 1:19:43Speaker 2: this thing has a kind of cool tool. Let me
- 1:19:44Speaker 2: find this thing. A rocket radio, they called, which is
- 1:19:48Speaker 2: like further development, this thing. It attached to a phone.
- 1:19:53Speaker 1: Oh.
- 1:19:54Speaker 2: So you plug that onto a phone cable. There's a
- 1:19:56Speaker 2: picture of it somewhere on here, but it explains like
- 1:20:00Speaker 2: you're picking up. There you go.
- 1:20:02Speaker 3: Wow.
- 1:20:02Speaker 1: No power. No battery or current needed, hence no operating
- 1:20:07Speaker 1: expense and long life. Yeah, this is almost. It's on
- 1:20:10Speaker 1: to a phone. What year was this?
- 1:20:12Speaker 2: Man, this is old. Yeah. It also shows here, this
- 1:20:16Speaker 2: is like you're picking up power from a radio tower.
- 1:20:19Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:20:19Speaker 2: Wow. And they're powerful, the signal. This is more like
- 1:20:22Speaker 2: what they're paying for at the FCC. The more powerful
- 1:20:24Speaker 2: your radio tower, the longer and more people you can reach.
- 1:20:28Speaker 1: Crazy. That has no batteries.
- 1:20:31Speaker 2: And that's also why some radio signals come in very
- 1:20:34Speaker 2: well on your radio and some don't. They sound like
- 1:20:36Speaker 2: dog shit.
- 1:20:36Speaker 1: Yeah. You've got weak power.
- 1:20:38Speaker 3: Yeah. And then the frequency modulation, like amplitude modulation isn't
- 1:20:43Speaker 3: as efficient as frequency modulation when it comes to for
- 1:20:46Speaker 3: the voc order to produce sound. Amplitude modulation travels farther,
- 1:20:52Speaker 3: but it doesn't have the amount of information. It's not modulated.
- 1:20:57Speaker 3: The carrier wave can't be modulated with as much information
- 1:20:59Speaker 3: as you need. Whereas frequency modulation is much quicker, megahertz,
- 1:21:03Speaker 3: and you can amplitude and add more sound or more information,
- 1:21:07Speaker 3: which is why it sounds better. So FM sounds better,
- 1:21:09Speaker 3: but it doesn't travel as far. AM sounds worse. When
- 1:21:13Speaker 3: I was training people in the military on this, I
- 1:21:15Speaker 3: always used the analogy of if a party is happening
- 1:21:17Speaker 3: next door, you can hear the bass music, but you
- 1:21:20Speaker 3: can't hear the treble. You can hear the bass music
- 1:21:22Speaker 3: because that frequency travels farther because it's lower in their
- 1:21:25Speaker 3: frequency band. But you can hear the treble better. because,
- 1:21:29Speaker 3: or you can't hear the treble, I'm sorry, because it's
- 1:21:31Speaker 3: higher frequency and there's more modulation. And so it disperses
- 1:21:36Speaker 3: quicker and you can't hear it as well. And it's
- 1:21:38Speaker 3: the same thing with like VLF comms coming off of
- 1:21:40Speaker 3: like a submarine can travel underwater for a very long ways,
- 1:21:44Speaker 3: but you can't put as much information in them as
- 1:21:46Speaker 3: you could if you were doing, you know, VHF or
- 1:21:49Speaker 3: UHF comms where there's lots of modulation. So it's the dispersal. And,
- 1:21:54Speaker 3: you know, a lot of my, you know, mid part
- 1:21:57Speaker 3: of my career was explaining this stuff to, you know,
- 1:21:59Speaker 3: military guys who were trying to understand like, here's how
- 1:22:02Speaker 3: a cell phone works and this is how frequency works
- 1:22:04Speaker 3: and this is how we send information and just kind
- 1:22:06Speaker 3: of demystifying, you know, how, you know, a GSM network works.
- 1:22:12Speaker 1: One of the things that I wanted to ask you
- 1:22:13Speaker 1: about that is when new technology is emerging, how, how
- 1:22:20Speaker 1: do you, how do you stay ahead of the ability
- 1:22:26Speaker 1: to extract information from this technology, hack into networks before
- 1:22:33Speaker 1: people understand the capability.
- 1:22:35Speaker 3: You really can't.
- 1:22:36Speaker 1: You really can't.
- 1:22:37Speaker 3: And that's the beauty of the free market is that
- 1:22:39Speaker 3: the innovation to perform the function that you want someone
- 1:22:43Speaker 3: to pay for will always move faster than your ability
- 1:22:46Speaker 3: to exploit the technology.
- 1:22:48Speaker 1: Then how do you explain things like Pegasus?
- 1:22:51Speaker 3: Well, I mean, something like Pegasus, Well, first.
- 1:22:55Speaker 1: Off— Explain Pegasus to people that don't know.
- 1:22:57Speaker 3: It was a persistent implant on cell phones for people.
- 1:23:02Speaker 1: Initially, it was— you had to click it. It was a
- 1:23:04Speaker 1: clickable exploit.
- 1:23:05Speaker 3: Initially, it was a click, and then it became a
- 1:23:07Speaker 3: non-click exploit. So in other words, you had to interact
- 1:23:09Speaker 3: with something on the phone in order to initialize and
- 1:23:12Speaker 3: install the implant. But the reason why it was so
- 1:23:16Speaker 3: good is because it wasn't stored in the— it wasn't
- 1:23:21Speaker 3: stored in the usual areas that you would want a
- 1:23:24Speaker 3: persistent implant or where you would have a persistent implant.
- 1:23:27Speaker 3: For instance, uh, you know, you might want to put
- 1:23:29Speaker 3: it in the application layer of an app or something
- 1:23:32Speaker 3: like that, where there's a binary that can run and
- 1:23:34Speaker 3: execute commands or functions. Um, and so they, I won't
- 1:23:40Speaker 3: get into the very specifics of where and how they
- 1:23:42Speaker 3: did this, because I'm not sure if I got this
- 1:23:44Speaker 3: information from the government or not, so I won't say it,
- 1:23:47Speaker 3: but they stored it in a place where it wasn't normal.
- 1:23:50Speaker 3: And you can read papers on your own and look
- 1:23:53Speaker 3: at the forensics of it and how the actual implant
- 1:23:55Speaker 3: was executed. But it essentially allowed people to own your
- 1:23:59Speaker 3: phone and was the kind of implant I only dreamed
- 1:24:06Speaker 3: of when I was helping develop my own implants in
- 1:24:08Speaker 3: the military. Mostly what we would rely on is zero-day
- 1:24:13Speaker 3: architecture and looking for something in a phone that either
- 1:24:16Speaker 3: they hadn't patched or that the phone that you were
- 1:24:18Speaker 3: looking at hadn't been patched. So phones, as they have
- 1:24:22Speaker 3: their own red teams, are going through the phone for
- 1:24:24Speaker 3: their own, because they want to sell a product that
- 1:24:26Speaker 3: people will use and people won't use stuff that can
- 1:24:28Speaker 3: get hacked. So they'll do their own red teaming and
- 1:24:31Speaker 3: they'll discover like, oh, you know, we, we, on this
- 1:24:34Speaker 3: router we developed, we left this port open and it
- 1:24:36Speaker 3: shouldn't have been open. So now we're going to write
- 1:24:38Speaker 3: a patch that will close that port so that this
- 1:24:40Speaker 3: port is no longer accessible by a guy like me.
- 1:24:42Speaker 3: So I can't go in there and and do something
- 1:24:44Speaker 3: to this particular type of router. Another great thing, I'll
- 1:24:47Speaker 3: say something good about the administration. They're doing some stuff
- 1:24:49Speaker 3: right now to make sure that we're getting rid of
- 1:24:52Speaker 3: Chinese technology and Chinese routers. And there's a widespread network of,
- 1:25:01Speaker 3: the PLA has a, and I can't remember the name
- 1:25:03Speaker 3: of the botnet, but they essentially implanted a bunch of
- 1:25:06Speaker 3: old unpatched routers to get access to government and business
- 1:25:12Speaker 3: proximal people And it was widespread and huge. And you know,
- 1:25:16Speaker 3: they looked like to me, I haven't read this anywhere,
- 1:25:20Speaker 3: but if I were looking at this implant and how
- 1:25:21Speaker 3: it was done, they were trying to really cause some trouble. Um,
- 1:25:26Speaker 3: it was being placed at critical places. Think power, think energy,
- 1:25:29Speaker 3: think banking, like they really wanted to cause some ruckus.
- 1:25:34Speaker 3: And I have not been part of this administration, so
- 1:25:36Speaker 3: I'm not saying anything classified for those of you who
- 1:25:38Speaker 3: are listening. And so but there was a decision to say, hey,
- 1:25:42Speaker 3: we need to make sure that these things get patched
- 1:25:44Speaker 3: and also that we're not bringing in architecture from the
- 1:25:47Speaker 3: overseas because they don't play by the same rules that
- 1:25:50Speaker 3: we at least say we play by.
- 1:25:51Speaker 1: That's why they banned Huawei devices.
- 1:25:53Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. And ZTE. Yeah.
- 1:25:55Speaker 1: Huawei had a phone that I was really interested in
- 1:25:58Speaker 1: back in the day. They had a Porsche design, had
- 1:26:01Speaker 1: partnered with Huawei and made this insane Android phone with
- 1:26:05Speaker 1: like the best camera, the best battery. It was like
- 1:26:08Speaker 1: really high level. And I was like, going to buy it.
- 1:26:11Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden they banned all the
- 1:26:12Speaker 1: Huawei phones. And I was like, what's going on? And then,
- 1:26:16Speaker 1: you know, I had heard some people say, oh, they're
- 1:26:17Speaker 1: just trying to stop competition. It's like American companies are
- 1:26:21Speaker 1: trying to stop it. And then I went into it
- 1:26:23Speaker 1: deeper and I said, no, it seems like there's third-party
- 1:26:27Speaker 1: input on some of the routers and some of their
- 1:26:31Speaker 1: network devices that they had engineered in order to be
- 1:26:35Speaker 1: able to access them by third party. And this– Because
- 1:26:40Speaker 1: of whatever, lack of understanding, lack of knowledge of how
- 1:26:45Speaker 1: these things are constructed, the people that purchased them weren't
- 1:26:48Speaker 1: aware of them. And these things had gotten into place.
- 1:26:51Speaker 1: And they had gotten into place in universities. They got
- 1:26:53Speaker 1: into place in military establishments. They were using them in
- 1:26:57Speaker 1: cell phone towers that people had inadvertently bought from China.
- 1:27:03Speaker 3: I can tell you firsthand from having done some other
- 1:27:06Speaker 3: forensic exploitation on this stuff. Another large part of my
- 1:27:09Speaker 3: career I didn't talk about was just on mobile forensics
- 1:27:11Speaker 3: and media forensics, which is essentially you think of like
- 1:27:15Speaker 3: CSI Miami or CSI whatever the city was. There's a crime.
- 1:27:19Speaker 3: Someone was killed. You have forensics that are doing forensics
- 1:27:22Speaker 3: on like blood and fingerprints and blood splatter and all
- 1:27:24Speaker 3: that stuff. There's a whole another part of that same
- 1:27:27Speaker 3: forensics branch that focuses on media forensics. What was deleted
- 1:27:31Speaker 3: off this phone at one point? What remains on this phone?
- 1:27:34Speaker 3: What was it being used for? I would do this
- 1:27:36Speaker 3: in the military so that when we did do an
- 1:27:37Speaker 3: operation and I was part of some of the largest
- 1:27:40Speaker 3: ones ever done out in Afghanistan, there would be treasure
- 1:27:44Speaker 3: troves of phones and all of these computers and stuff
- 1:27:47Speaker 3: like that. And it was my job. And I had
- 1:27:49Speaker 3: a great team that worked for me in 20, my
- 1:27:52Speaker 3: deployment in 2015. We would go in afterwards, gather up
- 1:27:56Speaker 3: all of this stuff. And, you know, the task force
- 1:27:59Speaker 3: commander would literally be standing by. And we'd say, you know,
- 1:28:02Speaker 3: here's the intelligence that we've derived. Here's the multi-point analysis here.
- 1:28:06Speaker 3: You know, it was on this hard drive. It was here,
- 1:28:08Speaker 3: it was here. You know, there's a bad guy place
- 1:28:10Speaker 3: out here. And those guys would be rolling like within
- 1:28:12Speaker 3: moments after the last operation, like some operations we do
- 1:28:15Speaker 3: where we'd be rolling one after another target because we
- 1:28:17Speaker 3: were getting really good at media forensics and the intelligence
- 1:28:21Speaker 3: that was there. And then getting into active media forensics,
- 1:28:24Speaker 3: which is a different discipline, but essentially I'll get it.
- 1:28:27Speaker 3: I can get into that later if you want to, but, um,
- 1:28:30Speaker 3: launching and doing these follow-on operations off, you know, dumping
- 1:28:35Speaker 3: the binary from a phone and examining it at the
- 1:28:37Speaker 3: ones and zeros level to say everything that was going
- 1:28:40Speaker 3: on with this thing, or if it was a really high,
- 1:28:42Speaker 3: like the organization that I worked for at that time, uh,
- 1:28:45Speaker 3: did the analysis of the Osama bin Laden media. And,
- 1:28:48Speaker 3: you know, at the, on that media, we're doing far
- 1:28:50Speaker 3: more than we would for another piece of media. And
- 1:28:53Speaker 3: that we're, you know, x-raying it and we're looking at
- 1:28:56Speaker 3: maybe what the disc looked like before or what was
- 1:28:59Speaker 3: destroyed or reconstructing things, spending millions of dollars on that
- 1:29:02Speaker 3: intelligence analysis because we wanted to fully understand everything that
- 1:29:06Speaker 3: this guy was involved in and what he was doing
- 1:29:07Speaker 3: and where he was and who he was talking to.
- 1:29:10Speaker 3: And so that was another part of my career that
- 1:29:12Speaker 3: I did for about five years or so.
- 1:29:14Speaker 1: What was going on with the Huawei phones? Like, what
- 1:29:16Speaker 1: were they doing with them?
- 1:29:18Speaker 2: I mean....
- 1:29:20Speaker 3: Some of them were coming out implanted. In other words,
- 1:29:22Speaker 3: there was access built in for a foreign actor. And
- 1:29:25Speaker 3: then in other terms, other places with routers, with the
- 1:29:28Speaker 3: ZTE stuff, there were just things that you would patch
- 1:29:32Speaker 3: or that you would fix as a company who was
- 1:29:34Speaker 3: trying to protect the consumer and create a product that
- 1:29:37Speaker 3: people would use, and they weren't doing it. So they
- 1:29:40Speaker 3: were creating persistent backdoors either by actively placing code on
- 1:29:44Speaker 3: there that would allow root access Or they were leaving
- 1:29:48Speaker 3: things open, especially in Africa, like the work that, you know,
- 1:29:51Speaker 3: when I was working in Africa, the Chinese were just
- 1:29:53Speaker 3: owning Africa. They were just giving them communications infrastructure. And
- 1:29:58Speaker 3: they were doing that because they wanted their resources and
- 1:30:01Speaker 3: they wanted to know what these people were saying and
- 1:30:03Speaker 3: what they were doing. And so I'm a free market,
- 1:30:07Speaker 3: like I'm as free market as a guy can get.
- 1:30:09Speaker 3: I want the best people building the best products and
- 1:30:11Speaker 3: I want everyone to be able to compete. But in
- 1:30:13Speaker 3: that case, I would never own a Huawei or a
- 1:30:16Speaker 3: ZTE or anything else.
- 1:30:18Speaker 1: On a consumer level, what were they doing with those phones?
- 1:30:21Speaker 1: If they had imported them to the United States, if
- 1:30:24Speaker 1: they didn't have that ban, what would have been the issue?
- 1:30:27Speaker 3: Getting access to any number of people. The Chinese really
- 1:30:32Speaker 3: want access to everybody. But you could start at the
- 1:30:35Speaker 3: topical level of just saying getting Joe Rogan to use
- 1:30:39Speaker 3: a ZTE would be That would be my wet dream
- 1:30:42Speaker 3: as a guy who used to do this work back
- 1:30:43Speaker 3: in the day because you're talking to the president or
- 1:30:45Speaker 3: you're talking to this guy or that guy. And I
- 1:30:47Speaker 3: can build out a network of understanding who you're in
- 1:30:50Speaker 3: contact with, who you're talking to, what's being talked about,
- 1:30:53Speaker 3: but then also finding out this person's phone number and
- 1:30:56Speaker 3: now doing a deep dive on there. So it's really
- 1:30:58Speaker 3: about getting all of that data and constructing an analyst notebook,
- 1:31:03Speaker 3: essentially outline of who's talking to who, who do we
- 1:31:06Speaker 3: need to implant. But it's for business as well. They
- 1:31:10Speaker 3: would want this in the hands of somebody who's in
- 1:31:12Speaker 3: charge of a business because they want their IP. They
- 1:31:14Speaker 3: would want this in soldiers' hands so they would know
- 1:31:16Speaker 3: deployment dates or who's going where and who's doing what.
- 1:31:19Speaker 3: They want this in routers because routers are usually the
- 1:31:22Speaker 3: most unpatched piece of technology. These days, they're more automated patching.
- 1:31:28Speaker 3: But back in the day, you had to manually update
- 1:31:31Speaker 3: a router. If you didn't, well, then you had potential
- 1:31:33Speaker 3: exploits that were sitting on that router where I could
- 1:31:35Speaker 3: gain access to the router in your home, or I
- 1:31:38Speaker 3: could gain access to a BGP router, which is like
- 1:31:41Speaker 3: a border gateway, which is moving all of the internet data,
- 1:31:44Speaker 3: or I could get access to a microwave terminal. You know,
- 1:31:47Speaker 3: if you look at a cell phone, they've got the
- 1:31:48Speaker 3: microwave terminals on there that are sending information in between them.
- 1:31:52Speaker 3: If those are Chinese parts that are either being used
- 1:31:55Speaker 3: for the processing, the CPU, or the physical infrastructure of that,
- 1:32:00Speaker 3: the products that they were putting out would give me
- 1:32:02Speaker 3: direct access to the information that's being passed on those terminals.
- 1:32:05Speaker 3: So you're getting system-level, root-level access through machinery, through communication devices,
- 1:32:12Speaker 3: and through things like routers where you can know everything
- 1:32:15Speaker 3: you want to know about your enemy. Wow.
- 1:32:18Speaker 1: And so as far as today's technology, I see you
- 1:32:21Speaker 1: use an Android phone. Is there a phone that is
- 1:32:25Speaker 1: more secure or a platform that is more secure?
- 1:32:29Speaker 3: It all depends. I always take this from Thomas Sowell.
- 1:32:33Speaker 3: There are no answers. There are only trade-offs. So there's
- 1:32:36Speaker 3: like the way to answer that question would be is
- 1:32:38Speaker 3: like who are you? What are you trying to do
- 1:32:40Speaker 3: with your life? What are you talking about on your phone?
- 1:32:42Speaker 3: What are you doing on your phone? Most of these phones,
- 1:32:45Speaker 3: if you're just an average everyday citizen who's just going
- 1:32:48Speaker 3: about your job, the phones today are pretty secure, especially
- 1:32:52Speaker 3: versus a few years ago. If you're a reporter, now
- 1:32:57Speaker 3: the nexus is do you trust the government and do
- 1:32:59Speaker 3: you trust Apple? If you trust the government, you trust Apple,
- 1:33:03Speaker 3: then Apple is probably your best bet. For using, you know,
- 1:33:06Speaker 3: there's lockdown mode on an Apple phone or they used
- 1:33:10Speaker 3: to call it back in the day. I think it
- 1:33:11Speaker 3: was called reporter mode, but there was way to ways
- 1:33:13Speaker 3: to encrypt the devices and to encrypt the chatter and
- 1:33:17Speaker 3: the tunnel coming out of the phone, the RF coming out.
- 1:33:21Speaker 1: Of the phone. And what is lockdown mode?
- 1:33:24Speaker 3: I don't know if that's exactly what it was called
- 1:33:26Speaker 3: or not, because I've never really used Apple just for
- 1:33:28Speaker 3: my own personal reasons.
- 1:33:30Speaker 1: What personal reasons?
- 1:33:31Speaker 3: I don't trust Apple.
- 1:33:32Speaker 1: How so?
- 1:33:34Speaker 3: They are more interested in monetizing people's data than they
- 1:33:37Speaker 3: are providing them capability. So every time you take a photo,
- 1:33:41Speaker 3: every time you upload a document, every time you talk
- 1:33:43Speaker 3: to it, every time it asks you about your, you know,
- 1:33:46Speaker 3: you'll get these questions where it says, if your password's lost,
- 1:33:51Speaker 3: you can back up your password in these ways. Tell
- 1:33:53Speaker 3: us where you were born. Tell us your mom's maiden's name.
- 1:33:56Speaker 3: Tell us your mom's this, your mom's that.
- 1:33:57Speaker 1: Lockdown mode is an extreme optional protection. It can only
- 1:33:59Speaker 1: be used if you believe you may be personally targeted
- 1:34:01Speaker 1: by a highly sophisticated cyber attack. Most people are never
- 1:34:05Speaker 1: targeted by attacks of this nature. When iPhone is in
- 1:34:07Speaker 1: lockdown mode, it will not function as it typically does. Apps, websites,
- 1:34:10Speaker 1: and features will be strictly limited for security, and some
- 1:34:13Speaker 1: experiences will be completely unavailable.
- 1:34:16Speaker 3: Yeah, so when I was advising guys back in the
- 1:34:18Speaker 3: day on going out and doing like a high-risk source meet,
- 1:34:22Speaker 3: so they're going to go meet, you know, a spy
- 1:34:24Speaker 3: for another country and you're a military guy and you're
- 1:34:27Speaker 3: debriefing someone or doing something, I would always tell them
- 1:34:29Speaker 3: to use lockdown mode. I knew that it did those things.
- 1:34:31Speaker 3: I didn't know if that was the term or if
- 1:34:33Speaker 3: I thought that out.
- 1:34:33Speaker 1: So can you still send iMessages?
- 1:34:36Speaker 3: You can still text and call.
- 1:34:37Speaker 1: Text and call, that's it.
- 1:34:38Speaker 3: Yeah, but there's other things that you can't do.
- 1:34:40Speaker 1: Well, like Meta just recently announced they're no longer encrypting
- 1:34:44Speaker 1: your DMs.
- 1:34:46Speaker 3: Why would they do that?
- 1:34:47Speaker 1: Well, they said that it's for protection or whatever to
- 1:34:50Speaker 1: make sure that people aren't doing bad things. I don't
- 1:34:52Speaker 1: know what. See what their explanation for it was.
- 1:34:56Speaker 2: Sorry, I'm worried about this reporter.
- 1:34:58Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Meta recently announced that they're no longer encrypting
- 1:35:06Speaker 1: your DMs on Instagram. And a lot of people are
- 1:35:09Speaker 1: up in arms and they're stopping using any DMs on
- 1:35:13Speaker 1: Instagram and any of that stuff. And the idea is
- 1:35:16Speaker 1: that other people can read your stuff now. Now, whether
- 1:35:19Speaker 1: it's Meta can read your stuff or who.
- 1:35:22Speaker 3: That's what I mean. When I said, why don't you
- 1:35:24Speaker 3: trust Apple? It's the same reason I don't trust Meta.
- 1:35:26Speaker 3: They're not interested.
- 1:35:27Speaker 1: The dangers behind Meta killing end-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs.
- 1:35:31Speaker 1: Meta blamed users for not opting into the privacy-protecting feature.
- 1:35:34Speaker 1: Experts fear the move could be the first major domino
- 1:35:37Speaker 1: to fall for end-to-end encryption tech worldwide.
- 1:35:40Speaker 3: That's a horrible narrative.
- 1:35:42Speaker 1: Yeah. It seems squirrely.
- 1:35:44Speaker 2: So....
- 1:35:48Speaker 1: Oh, you've read your last free article.
- 1:35:50Speaker 3: Oh, my God.
- 1:35:51Speaker 1: Give me money, motherfucker.
- 1:35:52Speaker 3: But what Apple and Meta want to do is like
- 1:35:55Speaker 3: they're trying to build these new neural networks. They're trying to,
- 1:35:58Speaker 3: you know, humans and we can get into this too
- 1:36:01Speaker 3: later if you want. Humans are the only thing, in
- 1:36:03Speaker 3: my opinion, and I'm happy to have you disagree with
- 1:36:06Speaker 3: me and I love to have this conversation. In my opinion,
- 1:36:08Speaker 3: we're the only ones that are.
- 1:36:10Speaker 1: After May 8, 2026. Announce plans discontinue support for end-to-end
- 1:36:15Speaker 1: encryption for chats on Instagram. If you have chats that
- 1:36:17Speaker 1: are impacted by this change, you will see instructions on
- 1:36:19Speaker 1: how you can download any media or messages you may
- 1:36:22Speaker 1: want to keep. Social media giant said in a help document,
- 1:36:25Speaker 1: if you're on an older version of Instagram, you may
- 1:36:28Speaker 1: also need to update the app before you can download
- 1:36:30Speaker 1: your affected chats. When reach for comment, this is what
- 1:36:33Speaker 1: Meta had to say, very few people are opting for
- 1:36:35Speaker 1: end-to-end encrypted messages and DMs, so we're removing this option
- 1:36:38Speaker 1: from Instagram in the coming months. Anyone who wants to
- 1:36:41Speaker 1: keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp.
- 1:36:44Speaker 1: But WhatsApp is a little squirrely, right?
- 1:36:46Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, they're all squirrely. And that's the problem.
- 1:36:51Speaker 3: And so you asked me why I don't trust them.
- 1:36:53Speaker 3: It's because they want to use... So humans, in my opinion,
- 1:36:57Speaker 3: and some animals, are the only things that have the
- 1:37:02Speaker 3: ability to project consciousness. And projecting consciousness is how you
- 1:37:06Speaker 3: train a neural network. And it's how you train... All
- 1:37:08Speaker 3: of these large networks. A lot of my time also
- 1:37:11Speaker 3: in the military was spent in art. I was doing
- 1:37:12Speaker 3: artificial intelligence in 2012, 2011. Before it was even a
- 1:37:16Speaker 3: catch term, we were using artificial intelligence to map dynamic
- 1:37:19Speaker 3: networks and to do other things. More pragmatic uses of
- 1:37:23Speaker 3: it than how it's being used today with large language
- 1:37:24Speaker 3: models or convolutional neural networks. But they need consciousness to
- 1:37:29Speaker 3: train their models. So when Google offers you meta or
- 1:37:33Speaker 3: Instagram or whoever else offers you photo storage, it's because
- 1:37:35Speaker 3: they want your face to train neural networks. If they're
- 1:37:39Speaker 3: going to pay for the compute, if they're going to
- 1:37:41Speaker 3: pay for the storage for these things, they're doing it
- 1:37:44Speaker 3: because they're going to use the data. If you're getting
- 1:37:47Speaker 3: a free app, in essence, any free app, if the
- 1:37:50Speaker 3: product's free, then you're the product. So when Google is
- 1:37:53Speaker 3: allowing you to use a Google Drive and get a
- 1:37:55Speaker 3: gig of storage, they're going to use those photos to
- 1:37:58Speaker 3: train neural networks to do better facial recognition.
- 1:38:00Speaker 1: What if you're paying for Google Drive?
- 1:38:02Speaker 3: I don't know about their terms of service now. That
- 1:38:04Speaker 3: is one of the best things that I use with
- 1:38:07Speaker 3: large language models is, Any product I download, I have
- 1:38:10Speaker 3: the neural network examine the terms of service. And then
- 1:38:14Speaker 3: you can pretty much understand, like, here's my focus. Here's
- 1:38:17Speaker 3: the 40-page terms of services document. When you click that
- 1:38:20Speaker 3: link that you got, what are they able to do
- 1:38:22Speaker 3: with my data? So that's how I sign up for apps.
- 1:38:24Speaker 3: And that's one of the great uses of a large
- 1:38:26Speaker 3: language model, in my opinion, is to quickly understand how
- 1:38:29Speaker 3: these things are being used. And that's why I say
- 1:38:32Speaker 3: with Apple, with Meta, with all of these large information,
- 1:38:35Speaker 3: you are more the product than the products the product.
- 1:38:38Speaker 3: And that is because they're trying to build the most powerful,
- 1:38:40Speaker 3: capable artificial intelligences, which I think is a misnomer. And again,
- 1:38:45Speaker 3: we can get into it later. But they're trying to
- 1:38:47Speaker 3: build these hyper-competent artificial intelligences And you need two things
- 1:38:51Speaker 3: for that, really, is training data and you need compute.
- 1:38:55Speaker 3: And that's why you start seeing them coming out with
- 1:38:56Speaker 3: like Meta's building its own nuclear engineering facility or nuclear
- 1:39:00Speaker 3: facility or something like that. And they need more training data.
- 1:39:04Speaker 3: So if I want to build a replica of Joe
- 1:39:07Speaker 3: Rogan that I can make hyper-realistic AI videos for, I
- 1:39:10Speaker 3: need every picture of your face from every angle. I
- 1:39:13Speaker 3: need every wince, every squint, everything you've ever done so
- 1:39:17Speaker 3: I can introduce more training data to better train that
- 1:39:20Speaker 3: neural network in order to generate more hyper-realistic versions of yourself.
- 1:39:25Speaker 3: And so when a company's offering you something for free,
- 1:39:28Speaker 3: and it's fine, like if people are fine with that idea,
- 1:39:31Speaker 3: then by all means, download all the free apps that
- 1:39:33Speaker 3: you want. But if you're downloading a free app, it's
- 1:39:36Speaker 3: because you are the product. They either want to see
- 1:39:38Speaker 3: how you type, they want to see what you're saying,
- 1:39:40Speaker 3: they want to see how you're thinking about things, they
- 1:39:43Speaker 3: want to understand your political biases, they want to look
- 1:39:45Speaker 3: at your photos. And this isn't because they're a deep-seated
- 1:39:48Speaker 3: nation-state actor. They can become that. But it's because they're
- 1:39:51Speaker 3: trying to build the best products because the big money
- 1:39:54Speaker 3: is in AI. That's where the biggest money is. So
- 1:39:57Speaker 3: anytime you're doing any of these things, it's just been
- 1:39:59Speaker 3: obvious to me from the– not from the onset but
- 1:40:01Speaker 3: pretty close to the onset that.
- 1:40:04Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a good example, right? Pokemon Go players
- 1:40:07Speaker 1: built a 30 billion photo map. That's how training robots
- 1:40:11Speaker 1: deliver your pizza.
- 1:40:12Speaker 3: There you go. So, you know, they view and they
- 1:40:17Speaker 3: can say they don't. And maybe if someone from there
- 1:40:19Speaker 3: catches this podcast, which they well could, they might put
- 1:40:23Speaker 3: out a statement saying that's not what they're doing. But
- 1:40:25Speaker 3: I'm telling you as a person who has done media forensics,
- 1:40:28Speaker 3: who has done computer network operations, and who has trained
- 1:40:31Speaker 3: artificial intelligence models, that is precisely what they are doing.
- 1:40:35Speaker 1: And what is the difference between using Apple and using Android?
- 1:40:41Speaker 3: Well, Android will do the same things and Google will
- 1:40:43Speaker 3: do the same things. It's just that I can root
- 1:40:45Speaker 3: my phone or I can install a custom operating system
- 1:40:48Speaker 3: like Graphene or something like that, which I'm not doing
- 1:40:50Speaker 3: right now. I had to make a sacrifice when I
- 1:40:54Speaker 3: started my company, Spartan Forge. And the sacrifice was I
- 1:40:58Speaker 3: had to be the face of this product. And so
- 1:41:00Speaker 3: I never had a social media until I started the company.
- 1:41:03Speaker 3: And I didn't upload things to the cloud until I
- 1:41:05Speaker 3: started this company. And it became just like, I have
- 1:41:08Speaker 3: to sell a product. I have to, you know, and
- 1:41:11Speaker 3: I'm actually selling a product, not people's data or people's photos.
- 1:41:14Speaker 3: I have to sell this product. I have to let people,
- 1:41:16Speaker 3: people often don't know who is the company or who
- 1:41:19Speaker 3: is the organizing principle and what do they care about
- 1:41:21Speaker 3: in the company. And I just made that trade and said,
- 1:41:25Speaker 3: I'm going to have to become a public person and
- 1:41:27Speaker 3: start putting things out there. And, uh, so, you know,
- 1:41:30Speaker 3: when I started a company, we started our first Instagram
- 1:41:32Speaker 3: and I started my, my marketing team started my first
- 1:41:35Speaker 3: Instagram and And I had to start uploading things and
- 1:41:38Speaker 3: talking about how I felt about things because I wanted
- 1:41:42Speaker 3: people to know that this company was not going to
- 1:41:44Speaker 3: be like the other companies that are out there. We
- 1:41:46Speaker 3: don't sell their data. We don't sell emails. I can
- 1:41:48Speaker 3: make a half million dollars off my email list tomorrow.
- 1:41:51Speaker 3: And I've been offered that money. We've got millions of
- 1:41:53Speaker 3: emails from people who have signed up for our apps.
- 1:41:55Speaker 3: Other companies who are starting companies, they want to go
- 1:41:59Speaker 3: out and reach marketing people. So if you're starting another
- 1:42:02Speaker 3: hunting app, maybe for cameras or for a call or
- 1:42:05Speaker 3: a tricky call or an out call or something. And
- 1:42:08Speaker 3: you found Spartan Forge and you said, man, they've got
- 1:42:12Speaker 3: 2 million emails. I could pay them a half million
- 1:42:15Speaker 3: dollars for that $ 2 million and start some top of mark,
- 1:42:17Speaker 3: top of line marketing, top of funnel marketing and go
- 1:42:21Speaker 3: blast them. So they'd pay me a lot of money
- 1:42:22Speaker 3: for those emails. I will never do that. I'll never
- 1:42:25Speaker 3: sell my company's emails, the people's emails. I'll never do
- 1:42:28Speaker 3: any of those things because the product is the product
- 1:42:31Speaker 3: for my company. It's not the people.
- 1:42:33Speaker 1: So the reason why you use Android over Apple is
- 1:42:37Speaker 1: the ability to root it and install things like Graphene?
- 1:42:40Speaker 3: Yeah, custom OSs.
- 1:42:42Speaker 1: But yet you don't use it.
- 1:42:44Speaker 3: Not now, but what I still can use and what
- 1:42:45Speaker 3: I still do use is Android also publishes their framework
- 1:42:50Speaker 3: in an open source fashion where you can look at
- 1:42:53Speaker 3: the– it's called AOSP, Android Open Source Project– So the
- 1:42:57Speaker 3: basis of Android, think of it as the nuts and bolts.
- 1:43:01Speaker 3: I'll try not to talk in too technical terms here.
- 1:43:04Speaker 3: But the basic framework, think about it like a car.
- 1:43:07Speaker 3: The frame and the engine makeup is published so you
- 1:43:10Speaker 3: can look at how things work on the inside. Apple
- 1:43:13Speaker 3: goes the opposite way and they don't publish any of that.
- 1:43:15Speaker 3: You can't see any of that stuff. I'm for the
- 1:43:17Speaker 3: free and open version because... At least if I'm worried
- 1:43:22Speaker 3: about my phone having a problem, I can actually dump
- 1:43:24Speaker 3: binary or I can create an EO1 file and exhume.
- 1:43:27Speaker 3: I can look at the binary and say, is my
- 1:43:29Speaker 3: phone acting like it should or doing what it should?
- 1:43:31Speaker 3: Or is there some kind of persistent implant? I wouldn't
- 1:43:33Speaker 3: be able to do that. I would have to trust
- 1:43:36Speaker 3: Apple and Apple's ecosystem and whoever they're McAfee or whatever
- 1:43:40Speaker 3: they're using. I would have to trust them, which I don't.
- 1:43:43Speaker 3: So I like the Android platform.
- 1:43:45Speaker 1: Is that option available for the average consumer that's not
- 1:43:49Speaker 1: that learned in computers?
- 1:43:51Speaker 3: Well, the great part about large language models now is
- 1:43:54Speaker 3: if you wanted to dump your own phone today, you
- 1:43:56Speaker 3: could follow along with a large language model and do it,
- 1:43:59Speaker 3: your own Android.
- 1:44:00Speaker 1: And how would you do that?
- 1:44:02Speaker 3: Well, you would have to buy some expensive– there is
- 1:44:06Speaker 3: something– you'd either have to pay a firm to do
- 1:44:08Speaker 3: it or you could download things like Celebrite. You could
- 1:44:12Speaker 3: get a Celebrite. or there's other things called forensic toolkit,
- 1:44:16Speaker 3: other things like that, that allow you to examine your
- 1:44:19Speaker 3: phone at a deeper level.
- 1:44:21Speaker 1: And is this an app, forensic?
- 1:44:23Speaker 3: They're products.
- 1:44:24Speaker 1: Products.
- 1:44:24Speaker 3: They're products.
- 1:44:25Speaker 1: So it's a physical product that you dump your phone into?
- 1:44:27Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's software. And there's connecting and all that
- 1:44:31Speaker 3: type of stuff. Tools I used throughout my military career,
- 1:44:34Speaker 3: Celebrite was one of them, but they're Israeli owned. I've
- 1:44:38Speaker 3: got nothing against Israel. I've just got everything against foreign actors.
- 1:44:41Speaker 3: Just if they're not an American company, that automatically kicks
- 1:44:44Speaker 3: them down a level for me. So anyway, there's all
- 1:44:49Speaker 3: kinds of– Android just makes it much easier to examine
- 1:44:52Speaker 3: your phone or to understand if you've got something going
- 1:44:56Speaker 3: on that's funky than it is on Apple.
- 1:44:58Speaker 1: So for the average person, like for me, like if
- 1:45:00Speaker 1: I– You're not the average person. Well, let's pretend I am.
- 1:45:03Speaker 1: If I got an Android phone and I wanted to
- 1:45:06Speaker 1: examine my phone, what would be the process?
- 1:45:09Speaker 3: You would download some of the software that I talked about.
- 1:45:11Speaker 3: You would jack your phone into it. You would open
- 1:45:13Speaker 3: your phone, and then it would start carving the binary
- 1:45:17Speaker 3: of everything in your phone. You could create a one-to-one
- 1:45:22Speaker 3: emulation of your phone if you wanted to, and then
- 1:45:24Speaker 3: you would be able to get under the hood and
- 1:45:26Speaker 3: examine the apps. You would be able to examine the binary.
- 1:45:29Speaker 3: What's the executable code? You'd be able to look at
- 1:45:31Speaker 3: all of those things and then determine, because Android open
- 1:45:35Speaker 3: source project is published, you could do a one-for-one and say, Well,
- 1:45:39Speaker 3: you know, at the kernel level, there's this weird code
- 1:45:42Speaker 3: that's not in the Android build. So what is this code?
- 1:45:47Speaker 3: And then with a neural network, you could probably, I've
- 1:45:50Speaker 3: never done it, but I'm sure you could figure out
- 1:45:52Speaker 3: what the intent is of that code, even for a layperson.
- 1:45:55Speaker 1: So I could take that information, I could put it
- 1:45:57Speaker 1: into perplexity, and perplexity would lay out what's going on
- 1:46:01Speaker 1: with it?
- 1:46:01Speaker 3: Ostensibly, it would be able to, yes, unless it was
- 1:46:03Speaker 3: some type of weird code. I haven't used Perplexity, so
- 1:46:07Speaker 3: I don't know if they have something like ChatGPT's Codex.
- 1:46:10Speaker 2: I sort of just tried just to be like, can
- 1:46:12Speaker 2: you help me examine what my Android phone is doing,
- 1:46:14Speaker 2: looking for any malicious actors?
- 1:46:16Speaker 1: Yes, I can walk you through structured non-destructive check for
- 1:46:18Speaker 1: malware or other shady activity on your Android phone. A, first,
- 1:46:22Speaker 1: what are you noticing? For tools, commands, quickly check for
- 1:46:25Speaker 1: common warning signs, sudden big battery drain, you're not using
- 1:46:28Speaker 1: the phone, unusual data usage. particularly in the background, apps
- 1:46:32Speaker 1: you don't remember installing, or icons briefly appearing and then disappearing.
- 1:46:36Speaker 1: Lots of pop-ups, redirects in browser, or new default search launcher,
- 1:46:41Speaker 1: strange calls, SMS messages you didn't send yourself. If any
- 1:46:45Speaker 1: of those ring a bell, we'll focus on them in
- 1:46:47Speaker 1: later steps. So this is just something that you could
- 1:46:50Speaker 1: do with an Android phone that you just can't do
- 1:46:52Speaker 1: with Apple.
- 1:46:52Speaker 3: Yeah, Apple's not open.
- 1:46:54Speaker 1: What are the reasons you don't trust Apple?
- 1:46:55Speaker 3: Well, could I ask, can I do one thing before we,
- 1:46:58Speaker 3: remember that question because I don't want to forget it.
- 1:46:59Speaker 3: Could I give you a prompt?
- 1:47:00Speaker 2: Sure.
- 1:47:02Speaker 3: Because I want to answer your first question that we've
- 1:47:03Speaker 3: already gone past. Can you bring perplexity.
- 1:47:06Speaker 1: Back up, please?
- 1:47:07Speaker 2: Do you want to go in addition to that or
- 1:47:08Speaker 2: start a new one?
- 1:47:08Speaker 3: No, this is fine. Just say, my friend helped me
- 1:47:13Speaker 3: carve an EO1 file, Echo Oscar EO1 file. And he
- 1:47:23Speaker 3: says that there is code in there That doesn't comport
- 1:47:30Speaker 3: with the rest of the Android system. Yeah, P-O-R-T. The
- 1:47:36Speaker 3: rest of the system. Could I dump that code here
- 1:47:41Speaker 3: and could you tell me what it means? I'm sure
- 1:47:43Speaker 3: the answer is yes, but I just didn't want to
- 1:47:45Speaker 3: answer it because I've never done it.
- 1:47:49Speaker 1: Could you tell me? Could you tell me, Jeremy?
- 1:47:52Speaker 3: Could you tell me what it means?
- 1:47:57Speaker 1: Get the U out. Get the you. Tell me you.
- 1:48:01Speaker 3: Could I have some of your coffee, please?
- 1:48:03Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. It's for you. Okay, let's see what it says. Yes,
- 1:48:10Speaker 1: you can paste suspicious code here, and I can help
- 1:48:12Speaker 1: explain what it appears to do line by line and
- 1:48:15Speaker 1: whether anything looks malicious before you paste a few important notes. Remove.
- 1:48:20Speaker 1: or redact anything that looks like private data using like
- 1:48:23Speaker 1: that's keys tokens IPs email addresses phone perplexity is our sponsor.
- 1:48:28Speaker 3: I love that because you'd never get that from chat GPT.
- 1:48:31Speaker 3: You'd want all that information.
- 1:48:32Speaker 1: Is the shit and So you're not sharing personal or
- 1:48:37Speaker 1: case-sensitive information.
- 1:48:38Speaker 3: Wonderful perplexity.
- 1:48:40Speaker 1: If it's very long, send in chunks and tell me
- 1:48:43Speaker 1: chunk 1-3, chunk 2-3, et cetera, so we can help
- 1:48:47Speaker 1: keep track. I can do static analysis here, read and
- 1:48:50Speaker 1: reason about the code, but I cannot actually execute it
- 1:48:53Speaker 1: in a sandbox. So this is more like a careful
- 1:48:56Speaker 1: forensic read-through than a full dynamic malware analysis. Go ahead
- 1:49:00Speaker 1: and paste the code snippet your friend flagged is not
- 1:49:02Speaker 1: fitting with the rest of the system. And tell me
- 1:49:05Speaker 1: in a sentence or two where in the EO1 it
- 1:49:08Speaker 1: came from. Example, app folder, system partition, random file path.
- 1:49:13Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I thought that would be the answer.
- 1:49:16Speaker 3: I've just never done it. And so you can do
- 1:49:18Speaker 3: a forensic examination of an Apple, by the way. I'm
- 1:49:22Speaker 3: sorry if I misspoke there. But you can't do it
- 1:49:24Speaker 3: to the level that you can with Because the Android
- 1:49:27Speaker 3: open source project publishes all of the code, I can
- 1:49:30Speaker 3: get an understanding of the very inner working. So if
- 1:49:32Speaker 3: something's being done, for instance, at the kernel, or you
- 1:49:35Speaker 3: could think about it as the lowest level of the phone,
- 1:49:38Speaker 3: something that wouldn't normally get caught in a forensic examination,
- 1:49:43Speaker 3: I wouldn't be able to do that with Apple. And
- 1:49:46Speaker 3: the nation state actors are doing things at very low
- 1:49:49Speaker 3: levels in the code framework for that exact reason, because
- 1:49:53Speaker 3: most people who aren't very deep into forensics would miss that.
- 1:49:58Speaker 3: It would be like the fingerprint under the couch cushion
- 1:50:00Speaker 3: or something like that.
- 1:50:01Speaker 1: And what is the difference between what someone can do
- 1:50:05Speaker 1: with an Android phone with the standard Android operating system
- 1:50:09Speaker 1: versus graphene?
- 1:50:12Speaker 3: So that gets into, you know, if you wanted to
- 1:50:14Speaker 3: war drive or sample Wi-Fi networks in an area or
- 1:50:18Speaker 3: if you wanted to run a barrage attack on a
- 1:50:22Speaker 3: Wi-Fi end point, you could work that in there to
- 1:50:25Speaker 3: do things with the phone that you couldn't otherwise do
- 1:50:27Speaker 3: with a standard app, with a standard Android operating kit.
- 1:50:31Speaker 1: But as far as on a consumer level, like what
- 1:50:34Speaker 1: protections do you have by running Graphene that you don't
- 1:50:37Speaker 1: have by running Android?
- 1:50:40Speaker 3: You're much more in control of the ecosystem. You have
- 1:50:44Speaker 3: a firmer understanding. And again, you could use a large
- 1:50:46Speaker 3: language model to do this, to understand exactly what's being
- 1:50:49Speaker 3: run on the phone. You control the background services that
- 1:50:52Speaker 3: can be run on the phone. So if you're getting
- 1:50:54Speaker 3: hot mic'd or if your camera's taking pictures of you
- 1:50:56Speaker 3: when you're not looking or it's listening to you for
- 1:50:57Speaker 3: advertising content, stuff like that, you would be in control
- 1:51:01Speaker 3: of all of that in a way that you're not
- 1:51:02Speaker 3: in control of on a native Android app.
- 1:51:04Speaker 1: In control, like how so? Would it alert you that
- 1:51:06Speaker 1: this is happening?
- 1:51:07Speaker 3: Or just the functionality wouldn't be there for it to
- 1:51:09Speaker 3: take place.
- 1:51:10Speaker 1: Right, because the functionality is only designed for the standard
- 1:51:14Speaker 1: Android operating system.
- 1:51:15Speaker 3: And I haven't installed Graphene in a while. So all
- 1:51:19Speaker 3: of this updates, and I could be saying things that
- 1:51:21Speaker 3: are incorrect. I stopped doing this about three years ago.
- 1:51:24Speaker 1: I know that there was, I forget what country it was,
- 1:51:27Speaker 1: but they were focusing on people who use Google Pixel phones,
- 1:51:31Speaker 1: for example. Yeah, because that's one of the phones that
- 1:51:33Speaker 1: are more commonly rooted.
- 1:51:35Speaker 3: Yeah, it's easy to do. And you could do it
- 1:51:37Speaker 3: with a large language model. You could sit there and
- 1:51:39Speaker 3: be walked through on how to do it, which is
- 1:51:40Speaker 3: a great.
- 1:51:41Speaker 1: Part of that. Is it complicated for a person like
- 1:51:44Speaker 1: me that's not that astute?
- 1:51:46Speaker 3: No, it's not something I would do with a phone
- 1:51:48Speaker 3: that you care about the first few times because you're
- 1:51:50Speaker 3: going to jack things up. You have to get the
- 1:51:52Speaker 3: bootloader and essentially the starting mechanisms of the phone that
- 1:51:57Speaker 3: launches all of the other things. You have to get
- 1:51:59Speaker 3: down to a level and unlock that so that you can.
- 1:52:02Speaker 1: Is that available for all Android phones?
- 1:52:04Speaker 3: No, not all Android phones. Lots of them lock it down,
- 1:52:07Speaker 3: so you can't do that.
- 1:52:08Speaker 1: Is that available for Samsung phones?
- 1:52:10Speaker 3: No, not this one. So the question has to become
- 1:52:13Speaker 3: can you unlock the bootloader? And that is the starting,
- 1:52:16Speaker 3: think of it as the starting engine of the rest
- 1:52:18Speaker 3: of the phones.
- 1:52:18Speaker 1: Why is it only available on Google Pixel phones?
- 1:52:21Speaker 3: I'm not sure why they do it that way. I
- 1:52:22Speaker 3: haven't looked into that. It's just Pixels and the older
- 1:52:25Speaker 3: Samsung's made it available. Older Galaxy S7s, S10s, you could
- 1:52:31Speaker 3: do more than you can with like, and I've got
- 1:52:34Speaker 3: the Galaxy Fold here and you can do almost none
- 1:52:36Speaker 3: of that on here.
- 1:52:37Speaker 1: That is fucking sweet though.
- 1:52:39Speaker 3: Yeah, I love this phone. But like I said, I
- 1:52:41Speaker 3: went away from doing all that, A, because it was work. B,
- 1:52:44Speaker 3: because I'm not working in national security anymore, and I
- 1:52:48Speaker 3: haven't written an exploit in years. I don't do this
- 1:52:52Speaker 3: type of work anymore, and I need to sell a product.
- 1:52:54Speaker 3: And just working with other employees that run my Instagram
- 1:52:58Speaker 3: or assistant going through my email and all those other
- 1:53:01Speaker 3: types of things, it just wasn't pragmatic anymore for me
- 1:53:04Speaker 3: to keep doing that, and I had to give up
- 1:53:05Speaker 3: that part of myself.
- 1:53:06Speaker 1: Does Spartan Forge, your app, run on graphene?
- 1:53:09Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it could. Yeah, it would. You have to
- 1:53:11Speaker 3: sideload the app. But again, a large language model could
- 1:53:14Speaker 3: walk you through doing that. So we haven't gotten to
- 1:53:17Speaker 3: that level of.
- 1:53:18Speaker 2: Does it make sense here that this says it's easier
- 1:53:20Speaker 2: because Google makes it easier?
- 1:53:22Speaker 3: Yeah. He was just asking me why they make it easier.
- 1:53:24Speaker 3: I don't know that answer.
- 1:53:26Speaker 1: So the process is officially supported in the Android settings
- 1:53:30Speaker 1: under developer options, allowing users to toggle OEM locking, simple
- 1:53:34Speaker 1: fast boot method. Pixels use standard fast boot commands that work...
- 1:53:39Speaker 1: consistently across all models to unlock the bootloader accessibility. Yeah,
- 1:53:44Speaker 1: that's what I was talking about.
- 1:53:45Speaker 3: So, yeah, I don't know why they do it. It
- 1:53:47Speaker 3: might be people can... Well, the Android open source project exists.
- 1:53:52Speaker 3: So it would stand to reason that you would want
- 1:53:54Speaker 3: a way for someone... Because what you want is people
- 1:53:56Speaker 3: interacting with that code and red teaming it and making
- 1:53:59Speaker 3: the code better and then offering bug bounties so that
- 1:54:03Speaker 3: you can tell Android, like, hey, you've got a critical
- 1:54:05Speaker 3: flaw in your system architecture here. And then they'll pay
- 1:54:08Speaker 3: you 20 grand for that. I've got friends who do that.
- 1:54:12Speaker 1: You and I talked about Eric Prince's phone. Yes. So
- 1:54:19Speaker 1: the narrative is that that is an unhackable phone.
- 1:54:23Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just by virtue. And look, Eric's a wonderful guy.
- 1:54:26Speaker 3: And the principles that he used for the first instantiation
- 1:54:33Speaker 3: of that phone are the correct principles, which is we
- 1:54:35Speaker 3: need to get it If you're security-focused at all, you
- 1:54:38Speaker 3: should get away from these big, large conglomerates because none
- 1:54:42Speaker 3: of your data is private. That's a correct principle. An
- 1:54:45Speaker 3: incorrect principle, and I'm going to get shit about this,
- 1:54:47Speaker 3: but I told you in the beginning I care about
- 1:54:50Speaker 3: the truth, and I do care about the truth, is
- 1:54:52Speaker 3: that when you're using a PKI subsystem that relies on Microsoft,
- 1:54:58Speaker 3: then you're not in control of the PKI certificate signing,
- 1:55:01Speaker 3: and Microsoft could cause a bunch of problems, and they
- 1:55:03Speaker 3: were using that. Um, so the other thing being, if
- 1:55:07Speaker 3: you're building on the Android open source project, that means
- 1:55:10Speaker 3: the code that you're using as the engine, let's just
- 1:55:13Speaker 3: call it that of your phone is examinable by the public.
- 1:55:16Speaker 3: So you're relying on Android to publish these, you know,
- 1:55:21Speaker 3: updates to the phone and you're relying on those things
- 1:55:24Speaker 3: to be as good as possible. Now you might harden
- 1:55:26Speaker 3: it some more, but as long as the code is
- 1:55:28Speaker 3: out there, it can always be mucked with. As long
- 1:55:30Speaker 3: as people have to interact with the device and type,
- 1:55:33Speaker 3: and you have to see what you're typing, a phone's
- 1:55:35Speaker 3: going to be, it's going to have Swiss cheese. So
- 1:55:39Speaker 3: when people say something is unhackable, as you said, that's
- 1:55:42Speaker 3: just not true.
- 1:55:44Speaker 1: Yeah, it didn't make sense to me, which is why
- 1:55:46Speaker 1: you and I talked about it.
- 1:55:47Speaker 3: Yeah, we talked about it quite a bit. Like I said,
- 1:55:51Speaker 3: great guy, done lots of great things for the country.
- 1:55:53Speaker 3: And it's just, if they had just said something along
- 1:55:57Speaker 3: the lines of it's hackable as any phone is hackable,
- 1:55:59Speaker 3: because by virtue of you having to interact with it,
- 1:56:02Speaker 3: it's hackable. Just like if I came up with an
- 1:56:06Speaker 3: app that had a, you know, look at the TikTok
- 1:56:09Speaker 3: terms of service on the first TikTok.
- 1:56:10Speaker 1: Oh, it's bonkers.
- 1:56:11Speaker 3: With those terms of services, I will own your phone.
- 1:56:14Speaker 3: And I'm not saying you can install TikTok on his phone.
- 1:56:16Speaker 3: But what I'm saying is by virtue that you have
- 1:56:18Speaker 3: to interact with the phone and see what you're doing
- 1:56:21Speaker 3: and type passwords. And you've got those kinds of terms
- 1:56:23Speaker 3: of service. I could easily put a key logger in that.
- 1:56:26Speaker 3: And now I know your signal password or your signal pin. Or,
- 1:56:30Speaker 3: you know, you're going to China, so I stop you
- 1:56:33Speaker 3: in secondary. And while you're in secondary, I've got a
- 1:56:35Speaker 3: CCTV on you, and you unlock your phone. Now I
- 1:56:38Speaker 3: know how to unlock your phone. Now I'm going to
- 1:56:40Speaker 3: lock you up in secondary at customs in China or
- 1:56:44Speaker 3: in Canada, and I'm going to separate you from your phone.
- 1:56:48Speaker 3: And I've seen you unlock it. Well, now I'm going
- 1:56:49Speaker 3: to get in there with NCASE, or I'm going to
- 1:56:51Speaker 3: get in there with FTK, or I'm going to get
- 1:56:53Speaker 3: in there with Celebrite, and I'm going to dump your phone.
- 1:56:57Speaker 3: And just by virtue of it being built on the
- 1:57:00Speaker 3: Android open source project, that's a great thing. It's a
- 1:57:03Speaker 3: good thing. Just don't call it totally unhackable. Because a
- 1:57:06Speaker 3: guy like me, I don't need but a week or
- 1:57:09Speaker 3: two to tell you on this current build, like, here's
- 1:57:13Speaker 3: the hole in this Swiss cheese. Now, is it far
- 1:57:15Speaker 3: better than having a Google phone with standard firmware and
- 1:57:20Speaker 3: standard OS or an Apple phone? I don't know about
- 1:57:24Speaker 3: Apple because again, you asked me about Apple and I said,
- 1:57:26Speaker 3: I don't know Apple. I don't know what's happening at
- 1:57:28Speaker 3: the top of that company, but I know that they
- 1:57:30Speaker 3: like to monetize people and that's pervasive in my mind.
- 1:57:34Speaker 3: And using data that people don't know is getting used,
- 1:57:36Speaker 3: even though it's in a 40 page terms of services
- 1:57:39Speaker 3: document is pervasive. So I just don't know what that
- 1:57:41Speaker 3: highest level of analysis. And that's why I said to
- 1:57:44Speaker 3: answer your question about the safest phone, I would ask
- 1:57:46Speaker 3: you what you're using it for, who you are and
- 1:57:48Speaker 3: what are you doing in the world? is the best
- 1:57:51Speaker 3: way to answer that question.
- 1:57:52Speaker 1: So me, like what would you recommend I use?
- 1:57:56Speaker 3: I mean, I wouldn't want to, I mean, okay, I'll
- 1:57:59Speaker 3: tell you generally what I would say because you might
- 1:58:01Speaker 3: ask me that question one day because we go back
- 1:58:03Speaker 3: and forth about a lot of tech. I know specifically
- 1:58:06Speaker 3: what I would recommend for you to do and I'd
- 1:58:08Speaker 3: even tell you to hire someone else to do it
- 1:58:09Speaker 3: and not me because that just, that checks and balances
- 1:58:14Speaker 3: is what I would want. But for you, I would
- 1:58:17Speaker 3: say you should take something like a Raspberry Pi and
- 1:58:21Speaker 3: you should run WireGuard on your phone and you should
- 1:58:24Speaker 3: route all of your internet traffic through something like a
- 1:58:27Speaker 3: home terminal at your house through a Raspberry Pi. using
- 1:58:30Speaker 3: something like WireGuard, which is a VPN that I use
- 1:58:33Speaker 3: that's very good. And everything should be routed through that.
- 1:58:39Speaker 3: And if you trust Apple, continue using Apple. If you
- 1:58:43Speaker 3: don't trust Apple, then use Android. And you could use
- 1:58:49Speaker 3: a pixel and do graphene, and you could use Signal
- 1:58:51Speaker 3: on there and those other things, and you're going to
- 1:58:52Speaker 3: be relatively safe. But again, if I'm a nation state actor,
- 1:58:56Speaker 3: I can create circumstances where I'm going to get access
- 1:58:59Speaker 3: to your shit and I'm going to lock you down. Um,
- 1:59:02Speaker 3: and there, some of them are more expensive than other
- 1:59:05Speaker 3: methods to do it, but I'm a pragmatist and you
- 1:59:07Speaker 3: can always come up with a method to get ahold
- 1:59:08Speaker 3: of somebody's shit. You can always create the circumstances, especially
- 1:59:11Speaker 3: if you're a nation state actor to get ahold of
- 1:59:14Speaker 3: somebody's stuff. That would be the very high level of
- 1:59:17Speaker 3: things that I would recommend to you. Um, uh, just
- 1:59:21Speaker 3: out the gate.
- 1:59:23Speaker 2: Hmm.
- 1:59:24Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very concerning because it seems like these things
- 1:59:27Speaker 1: keep getting stronger and more capable. Yes. Like the Pegasus
- 1:59:31Speaker 1: 2 being a non-click exploit. Yes. So all they have
- 1:59:35Speaker 1: to do essentially is just know your number. Yep.
- 1:59:39Speaker 3: And that's, you know, just make yourself a difficult target
- 1:59:44Speaker 3: would be my best recommendation. When you're going to answer
- 1:59:47Speaker 3: questions about password reset, don't answer them honestly. Write down
- 1:59:50Speaker 3: in a physical journal or something how you answered those questions.
- 1:59:53Speaker 3: Don't answer them honestly. Um, you know, all of these
- 1:59:56Speaker 3: things we think are added for layers of protection. For instance,
- 1:59:59Speaker 3: you used to get that pop-up on your phone where
- 2:00:01Speaker 3: it said, you know, there'd be like blocks of pictures
- 2:00:04Speaker 3: and it would say, click all of the pictures with a, uh,
- 2:00:09Speaker 3: with a traffic light. And I was just going to
- 2:00:10Speaker 3: say that a traffic light in it. Yeah. Part of
- 2:00:12Speaker 3: that might be for security. The other part of it
- 2:00:14Speaker 3: is they're using the information of what you're clicking to
- 2:00:16Speaker 3: train neural networks.
- 2:00:18Speaker 2: Right.
- 2:00:18Speaker 3: You're a product at that point.
- 2:00:19Speaker 1: Right.
- 2:00:20Speaker 3: You think you're getting security out of it. but you're
- 2:00:22Speaker 3: a product at that point because you're helping to educate
- 2:00:25Speaker 3: a neural network on what traffic lights look like and
- 2:00:27Speaker 3: how they can look and all those different instantiations of
- 2:00:30Speaker 3: traffic lights. So, and again, like we have to separate
- 2:00:34Speaker 3: causality and intention and outcomes in that the companies might
- 2:00:38Speaker 3: do this because they want to create the greatest AI ever.
- 2:00:42Speaker 3: But when you're issuing someone a 40 page terms of
- 2:00:44Speaker 3: service document on everything they can do with your thing
- 2:00:48Speaker 3: that you paid $ 2, 000 for, it's just, you know, We
- 2:00:52Speaker 3: need more ethical people. At least what Eric Prince was
- 2:00:54Speaker 3: trying to do was right, which was we need to
- 2:00:57Speaker 3: off-ramp from some of these big things because the way
- 2:01:00Speaker 3: that this government is going, I'm very worried about the
- 2:01:03Speaker 3: rights of the individual now and going forward because we
- 2:01:08Speaker 3: have an uneducated class of people for all of the
- 2:01:12Speaker 3: reasons in the world. If you want to just focus
- 2:01:14Speaker 3: on your family and you're not thinking about these things,
- 2:01:15Speaker 3: I don't hate that for you. But the idea of
- 2:01:18Speaker 3: individual autonomy and rights has been so shit on in
- 2:01:23Speaker 3: recent years that when we get more uneducated and we rely,
- 2:01:28Speaker 3: large language models are great, but they're not a foundation
- 2:01:31Speaker 3: of learning. In other words, we have a lot of
- 2:01:34Speaker 3: people with access to information, but no wisdom. It's like
- 2:01:38Speaker 3: when your parents would say, learn how to do addition
- 2:01:40Speaker 3: and subtraction on paper before you use a calculator. Like
- 2:01:44Speaker 3: understand how to do research and cite sources and understand
- 2:01:48Speaker 3: you know, how to conduct really good analysis before you
- 2:01:51Speaker 3: just use a neural network for everything. Because as we
- 2:01:54Speaker 3: lose focus of our civics and, and, and what our
- 2:01:57Speaker 3: founders are trying to do and the uniqueness of it,
- 2:01:59Speaker 3: which is truly unique, which is, you know, when I
- 2:02:02Speaker 3: joined the army, I joined the army to get out
- 2:02:03Speaker 3: of North Dakota. When I re-enlisted in the army, it's
- 2:02:05Speaker 3: because I believed in the experiment and that's another five
- 2:02:08Speaker 3: hour podcast. But, um, The foundation of the experiment is
- 2:02:13Speaker 3: as good, but we've eroded it in so many ways
- 2:02:16Speaker 3: over the years and given up so many individual rights
- 2:02:19Speaker 3: in the name of security. And I'm sure it's been
- 2:02:21Speaker 3: said on here before, but Franklin said, anybody who gives
- 2:02:24Speaker 3: up their individual rights in the name of security deserves neither.
- 2:02:28Speaker 3: Your freedoms in the name of security deserve neither. And
- 2:02:31Speaker 3: it's some of the ways that they've done it have
- 2:02:33Speaker 3: been really above the surface. And it, it frankly is.
- 2:02:37Speaker 3: blows my mind that we let the government get away
- 2:02:40Speaker 3: with some of these things that we let them get
- 2:02:42Speaker 3: away with, where you even explain it to people and like,
- 2:02:45Speaker 3: I don't see it. Like, I don't see how that
- 2:02:46Speaker 3: was a big deal. And I'm like, it was a
- 2:02:49Speaker 3: total recalibration of the system that allowed the Democratic Party
- 2:02:53Speaker 3: and the Republican Party to usurp your rights in a
- 2:02:56Speaker 3: way that if you knew any better, you'd probably be protesting.
- 2:03:00Speaker 3: Like some of the ways that they've done this, you know,
- 2:03:02Speaker 3: we can go with the easy stuff like the Patriot Act, right?
- 2:03:06Speaker 3: In the name of security, we're going to start collecting
- 2:03:08Speaker 3: on Americans. And the Biden and Obama administration, I will
- 2:03:12Speaker 3: say this, at risk of getting in trouble because I
- 2:03:16Speaker 3: used to have a clearance. They had a massive vacuum
- 2:03:20Speaker 3: cleaner and they knew what it was vacuuming up. And
- 2:03:23Speaker 3: they kept vacuuming it up anyway in the name of security.
- 2:03:26Speaker 3: I'm not saying they were going after American citizens, but
- 2:03:29Speaker 3: they certainly knew they were. And they just vacuumed shit up.
- 2:03:34Speaker 3: and collected it and stored it in a database.
- 2:03:36Speaker 1: In case they needed it.
- 2:03:37Speaker 3: In case at some point we needed to, you know,
- 2:03:40Speaker 3: come up with a narrative or get rid of somebody
- 2:03:42Speaker 3: who's inconvenient or whatever else that just flies in the
- 2:03:45Speaker 3: face of individual American rights and American autonomy and is really,
- 2:03:50Speaker 3: in my mind, the anti-pattern to freedom. It's just really,
- 2:03:55Speaker 3: really bad. I mean, I'll give you one that people
- 2:03:57Speaker 3: always crap on me whenever I talk to them about it,
- 2:03:59Speaker 3: but there's two that really bother me. One of them
- 2:04:02Speaker 3: being like the 17th Amendment. Do you know the 17th
- 2:04:04Speaker 3: Amendment of the Constitution? I don't. So when the founders,
- 2:04:08Speaker 3: when you read the Federalist Papers and the Federalist Papers,
- 2:04:11Speaker 3: I really love reading the Federalist Papers. I love reading
- 2:04:14Speaker 3: how they informed the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the
- 2:04:17Speaker 3: Declaration even. John Jay, James Madison wrote these documents explaining
- 2:04:22Speaker 3: the framework and the 17th Amendment, essentially how the Senate,
- 2:04:26Speaker 3: the Senate, right, the 50 people there that are supposed
- 2:04:29Speaker 3: to be representing us, was originally constructed was a state
- 2:04:32Speaker 3: would have legislatures. And the state legislatures and the governor
- 2:04:35Speaker 3: would appoint the senator. The reason that the founders did
- 2:04:38Speaker 3: that was because the state governments had to give power
- 2:04:43Speaker 3: to the federal government to exist. Back with the Articles
- 2:04:46Speaker 3: of Confederation. Confederation, is that right? Articles of, I think
- 2:04:53Speaker 3: it's Articles of Confederation. I'm blowing up. Sorry, I'm going nuts.
- 2:04:57Speaker 3: Back before there was a strong centralized American government, we
- 2:05:00Speaker 3: had problems with money. We had problems with interstate commerce
- 2:05:02Speaker 3: and those types of things. And those articles eventually turned
- 2:05:06Speaker 3: into what is the Constitution. But the states had to
- 2:05:08Speaker 3: grant that power. And the signers of the Declaration of
- 2:05:11Speaker 3: Independence and the Constitution knew that the states needed to
- 2:05:14Speaker 3: be those small projects that we talked about before where
- 2:05:17Speaker 3: if California wanted to go nuts, let them go nuts.
- 2:05:20Speaker 3: But it shouldn't impact what's happening in Texas. It shouldn't
- 2:05:23Speaker 3: impact what's happening over in New England. It shouldn't impact
- 2:05:25Speaker 3: what's happening in the Midwest. But if that goes nuts
- 2:05:28Speaker 3: and it fails, it needs to fail. So the state senators,
- 2:05:31Speaker 3: I'm sorry, the state legislatures would come together and they
- 2:05:35Speaker 3: would vote for a senator. They would elect a senator.
- 2:05:37Speaker 3: And that senator's job was to go to the federal
- 2:05:40Speaker 3: government and protect the rights of the state, not to
- 2:05:43Speaker 3: protect the rights of individuals per se, and certainly not
- 2:05:47Speaker 3: to embolden the federal government. But with the 17th Amendment,
- 2:05:50Speaker 3: what happened was the House of Representatives function was to
- 2:05:55Speaker 3: be the petulant children of government. So their job was
- 2:05:59Speaker 3: to come up with crazy ideas, crazy laws, all of
- 2:06:01Speaker 3: those things. The more liberal version of government jurisprudence would
- 2:06:06Speaker 3: be the house of representatives, your crazy ideas. And then
- 2:06:08Speaker 3: you had state senators who were supposed to be between
- 2:06:11Speaker 3: the house and the president who would say, well, here's
- 2:06:14Speaker 3: a good idea, but the rest of this is retarded AOC.
- 2:06:16Speaker 3: Like we're not doing all this. That's crazy. Or whoever else,
- 2:06:20Speaker 3: name your Republican who's an asshat as well. We're not
- 2:06:23Speaker 3: doing these things. And that's because it would erode the
- 2:06:26Speaker 3: state's rights and the state's constitution and what made this
- 2:06:28Speaker 3: state great. Because what the legislatures would do is say, hey,
- 2:06:32Speaker 3: Joe Rogan, you've made a lot of money and you've
- 2:06:35Speaker 3: got a big podcast and a big voice and you've
- 2:06:36Speaker 3: learned some lessons around the way and you were able
- 2:06:38Speaker 3: to do that in Texas and you decided to come
- 2:06:40Speaker 3: to Texas because we had all of these things that
- 2:06:42Speaker 3: California didn't have. We need you to go to the
- 2:06:45Speaker 3: Senate for three years or six years or seven years,
- 2:06:49Speaker 3: whatever it was back then, and represent those same principles.
- 2:06:52Speaker 3: So when Obamacare comes through, you can say not only no,
- 2:06:55Speaker 3: but fuck no, like I'm not voting for this thing.
- 2:06:58Speaker 3: And it was to protect the state. But what the
- 2:07:00Speaker 3: 17th Amendment did was It was redundant with the House
- 2:07:05Speaker 3: of Representatives, which was, in the founders' eyes, the only
- 2:07:08Speaker 3: popular vote part of the American government was the popular vote.
- 2:07:14Speaker 3: And then you had the way the president gets elected
- 2:07:16Speaker 3: through electors, but you had the state senate, which was
- 2:07:19Speaker 3: appointed by the states. So the legislatures, and I'll use
- 2:07:22Speaker 3: North Dakota where I'm from, you'll have two big cities,
- 2:07:26Speaker 3: Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota. It's where the universities are.
- 2:07:31Speaker 3: It's where your crazy kids are. Crazy thought exists. Hyper
- 2:07:34Speaker 3: crazy ideas. But some of them are useful. The rest
- 2:07:37Speaker 3: of the state's.
- 2:07:38Speaker 1: Agriculture, right?
- 2:07:39Speaker 3: So all of those legislators from all of those counties
- 2:07:42Speaker 3: or those legislative districts would get together and say, we're
- 2:07:45Speaker 3: going to put Bill Thompson, that would never happen, but
- 2:07:48Speaker 3: in charge. He's going to be at the Senate representing
- 2:07:50Speaker 3: North Dakota. But he has to represent the whole state.
- 2:07:54Speaker 3: In other words, you can't do things that will help
- 2:07:56Speaker 3: Grand Forks or Fargo because that's where the universities are,
- 2:07:59Speaker 3: that's where all the crazy politics are. You also need
- 2:08:01Speaker 3: to be thinking about the guys out in the western counties,
- 2:08:03Speaker 3: Lamar County in North Dakota or way out west. You
- 2:08:06Speaker 3: have to protect agriculture. You have to protect small businesses.
- 2:08:09Speaker 3: You have to protect families. What the 17th Amendment under
- 2:08:13Speaker 3: Wendell Wilson and how they really usurped the Constitution and
- 2:08:16Speaker 3: made the Senate a redundant place They made it a
- 2:08:19Speaker 3: redundant house of representatives and using the popular vote. So
- 2:08:22Speaker 3: now we use popular vote for that. But if you
- 2:08:25Speaker 3: want the popular vote in North Dakota, 85% of the
- 2:08:28Speaker 3: population is in Fargo and Grand Forks. So now you've got,
- 2:08:31Speaker 3: if I want to run for Senate in North Dakota,
- 2:08:33Speaker 3: I'm just going to spend all of my time in
- 2:08:35Speaker 3: Fargo and Grand Forks. Because if I can repeat back
- 2:08:38Speaker 3: to those people, all the ideas that they want to hear,
- 2:08:41Speaker 3: I'm going to win that vote. And I don't have
- 2:08:43Speaker 3: to represent those people out in the rest of the
- 2:08:44Speaker 3: state in anything.
- 2:08:45Speaker 2: Right.
- 2:08:45Speaker 3: So they created a redundant house of representatives. But another
- 2:08:48Speaker 3: reason why it happened was they wanted popular vote because
- 2:08:52Speaker 3: there is no amount of money that you could stick
- 2:08:54Speaker 3: into a legislature out in the western part of North Dakota.
- 2:08:57Speaker 3: You can't bribe these people. But the DNC and RNC
- 2:09:00Speaker 3: now can say, look, these two senators are running. We
- 2:09:02Speaker 3: like this guy. So we're going to this guy will
- 2:09:04Speaker 3: do whatever we tell him to do. And it has
- 2:09:07Speaker 3: nothing to do with the state or representing the state's
- 2:09:09Speaker 3: rights or the rest of those legislative districts. We're going
- 2:09:11Speaker 3: to pick this senator and he's getting $ 300 million for
- 2:09:13Speaker 3: his election bid. And this other guy who's a slower-moving
- 2:09:18Speaker 3: constitutional conservative who might be a free market absolutist and
- 2:09:22Speaker 3: a classical liberal, he's not being funded. But under the
- 2:09:28Speaker 3: state architecture, you might have been a better representation of
- 2:09:31Speaker 3: the state. And that's why the legislators had to vote
- 2:09:34Speaker 3: for you to put you in as a senator. You
- 2:09:36Speaker 3: had to represent the whole state. But now, all that
- 2:09:40Speaker 3: someone who wants to be a senator needs to do
- 2:09:41Speaker 3: is go to the Republican National Committee or the Democratic
- 2:09:44Speaker 3: the Democrat National Committee and say, I'll do all the
- 2:09:47Speaker 3: things you tell me to do, fund my campaign, and
- 2:09:50Speaker 3: I'm gonna go stumping Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota,
- 2:09:53Speaker 3: and the hell with the rest of the state. It's
- 2:09:55Speaker 3: very important. It's a very important sleight of hand. And
- 2:09:58Speaker 3: when that happened, you made a redundant House of Representatives,
- 2:10:01Speaker 3: and the state no longer was protected at the federal level.
- 2:10:06Speaker 3: And what happened was all of the power from all
- 2:10:08Speaker 3: of these states and these legislatures and these individuals got
- 2:10:11Speaker 3: sucked up into the federal government. And then after that,
- 2:10:13Speaker 3: you see all of these things that would never have
- 2:10:15Speaker 3: been passed by a state getting passed, things like Obamacare,
- 2:10:18Speaker 3: things like the Patriot Act, certain war resolutions, all kinds
- 2:10:23Speaker 3: of things where it just further erodes the power of
- 2:10:26Speaker 3: the state. And federal government wants that because it puts
- 2:10:30Speaker 3: all of the power up in the federal government. And
- 2:10:32Speaker 3: people always say we need to get money out of politics. No,
- 2:10:34Speaker 3: we need to get power out of politics. That power
- 2:10:37Speaker 3: that they've taken over the last 130 years or so
- 2:10:42Speaker 3: used to exist at the state and local levels because
- 2:10:44Speaker 3: they wanted these thought experiments happening where we could pluck
- 2:10:47Speaker 3: the best things out of them and forget the rest.
- 2:10:49Speaker 3: But all of that power has now gone up to
- 2:10:51Speaker 3: the federal government and the federal government won't ever release
- 2:10:55Speaker 3: that power and they only want more budget and more
- 2:10:58Speaker 3: spending to execute that power. And that's also because the
- 2:11:01Speaker 3: interest groups that want to go, they don't want to
- 2:11:03Speaker 3: have to go and convince the whole state of whether
- 2:11:05Speaker 3: or not something is good that people are going to
- 2:11:06Speaker 3: vote on. They just want to go take a lobby
- 2:11:08Speaker 3: and and go up to the federal government because they
- 2:11:11Speaker 3: want all of the power up there as well. And
- 2:11:13Speaker 3: the federal government wants all the power up there as
- 2:11:15Speaker 3: well because they make $ 300, 000 a year before they become
- 2:11:17Speaker 3: a politician and they're worth $ 30 million when they're done
- 2:11:20Speaker 3: being a politician because all of the money has to
- 2:11:22Speaker 3: go to the federal government because they're in charge of
- 2:11:25Speaker 3: light bulbs we can use, computers we can use, flush
- 2:11:27Speaker 3: toilets we can have, how our roads are going to look,
- 2:11:30Speaker 3: what our medical care looks like. None of those powers
- 2:11:34Speaker 3: are explicitly written in the Constitution of the United States.
- 2:11:37Speaker 3: And they use things like the commerce law and other
- 2:11:39Speaker 3: things in order to create things like Obamacare, where really
- 2:11:43Speaker 3: we want competing states. If Texas comes up with a
- 2:11:46Speaker 3: great way to do healthcare and North Dakota's isn't so great,
- 2:11:50Speaker 3: they can look at that experiment and they can adopt
- 2:11:52Speaker 3: the principles and they can have it at that level.
- 2:11:54Speaker 3: But it's much easier to get change at the local
- 2:11:57Speaker 3: level when the power is derived from the state and
- 2:12:00Speaker 3: the individual. Because if I want to change the way
- 2:12:01Speaker 3: that my state does healthcare, I have one of two
- 2:12:03Speaker 3: options or three options. I can run for office. I
- 2:12:06Speaker 3: can support someone who It's going to go into office
- 2:12:08Speaker 3: and do what I want or I can move. But
- 2:12:11Speaker 3: when everything's centralized at the federal government and everything flows
- 2:12:13Speaker 3: from the federal government, all of the money, power, and
- 2:12:16Speaker 3: gravity is up there. And the individual, the 300 million
- 2:12:19Speaker 3: of us or so, have really no power now to
- 2:12:23Speaker 3: exercise either states' rights or individual rights at the higher level.
- 2:12:26Speaker 3: I hope I'm elucidating this correctly.
- 2:12:28Speaker 1: You are.
- 2:12:28Speaker 3: But it's a real usurpation of individual and state autonomy
- 2:12:32Speaker 3: that really got rid of state power. which was, if
- 2:12:35Speaker 3: you read the federalist papers, was so important to the
- 2:12:37Speaker 3: founders that there was this state, that the state's needs
- 2:12:40Speaker 3: were organized because the state was where the founders wanted
- 2:12:43Speaker 3: these thought experiments. You read Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or John Locke,
- 2:12:48Speaker 3: or Montesquieu. All of them talked about this great experiment
- 2:12:52Speaker 3: that was being set up and how it was built
- 2:12:53Speaker 3: on all of this Western politics and everything that had
- 2:12:55Speaker 3: came before it on how we could have a government
- 2:12:58Speaker 3: that was forced to respect the rights of individuals and
- 2:13:01Speaker 3: allowed for these competing think tanks of ideas to and
- 2:13:04Speaker 3: that the power would never rest at the federal government.
- 2:13:06Speaker 3: But the 17th Amendment was a way that a lot
- 2:13:09Speaker 3: of that power went from the state level and the
- 2:13:12Speaker 3: state legislatures. And now to become the president, they want
- 2:13:16Speaker 3: to do a popular vote. And under a popular vote,
- 2:13:18Speaker 3: you would just have to campaign in New York and LA.
- 2:13:21Speaker 3: You would get the popular vote out of the likely
- 2:13:23Speaker 3: voting people. And now the rest of the country is not.
- 2:13:27Speaker 3: And that would be another, you hear all these people saying,
- 2:13:29Speaker 3: we need a popular vote. We can't have the electoral college.
- 2:13:32Speaker 3: We can't have All of these things, everything needs to be,
- 2:13:36Speaker 3: pure democracy allows 51% to rule 49%. And that was
- 2:13:41Speaker 3: another thing the founders were working fervently to get away from.
- 2:13:45Speaker 3: And that's why we had an electoral college. And it's
- 2:13:48Speaker 3: actually quite beautiful when you actually read about it and
- 2:13:50Speaker 3: examine it. It's why we had the state Senate and
- 2:13:53Speaker 3: state legislatures. And this is why we had the house.
- 2:13:55Speaker 3: You had all levels of the things of government that
- 2:13:58Speaker 3: the founders cared about being represented in this body politic.
- 2:14:01Speaker 3: And it was a beautiful thing. And I could go
- 2:14:03Speaker 3: on for 15 more things about that. I won't do
- 2:14:05Speaker 3: it for the sake of your listeners because I doubt
- 2:14:07Speaker 3: this is what they wanted to do. But similar things
- 2:14:09Speaker 3: happened with the Supreme Court, Marbury v. Madison, and allowing
- 2:14:13Speaker 3: the Supreme Court to have judicial review. That was never
- 2:14:15Speaker 3: a thing that was in the Constitution. In the Supreme Court,
- 2:14:18Speaker 3: if you like the Supreme Court, being able to have
- 2:14:20Speaker 3: the power to describe everything as being either constitutional or unconstitutional,
- 2:14:24Speaker 3: then you're not ruled by a democracy. You're ruled by
- 2:14:25Speaker 3: an oligarchy. You've got eight people in robes that are
- 2:14:28Speaker 3: going to tell you whether or not laws are good
- 2:14:30Speaker 3: or bad. And that's not the founding of this country.
- 2:14:32Speaker 3: It's not how it was intended to work. And that
- 2:14:34Speaker 3: all started back in Marbury v. Madison with Thomas Jefferson
- 2:14:38Speaker 3: and these writs of mandamus that were the Supreme Court,
- 2:14:42Speaker 3: long story short, essentially granted itself the power to conduct
- 2:14:45Speaker 3: judicial review under the old system or the old system.
- 2:14:49Speaker 3: The system that was ratified and that the founders approved
- 2:14:51Speaker 3: was if a law was deemed unconstitutional, it would go
- 2:14:56Speaker 3: before the Supreme Court and they would rule in favor
- 2:14:59Speaker 3: of the persons. And then eventually the government would figure out, oh,
- 2:15:02Speaker 3: this law doesn't work. But it was never on the
- 2:15:04Speaker 3: Supreme Court to say constitutional, unconstitutional. You would get arrested
- 2:15:08Speaker 3: for some law and it would get appealed to the
- 2:15:10Speaker 3: Supreme Court. The Supreme Court would say, we're not punishing
- 2:15:12Speaker 3: this person. This is against the Constitution. But the government
- 2:15:16Speaker 3: would have to keep arresting people. They'd have to keep
- 2:15:18Speaker 3: going in front of the federal government. So what I'm
- 2:15:20Speaker 3: saying is, and I'm sorry to go off on this,
- 2:15:22Speaker 3: we can go back to tech. But all I'm saying
- 2:15:24Speaker 3: is the core of the American experiment in individual rights
- 2:15:28Speaker 3: and what makes this country so great and why I
- 2:15:31Speaker 3: was willing to die for it after my initial enlistment
- 2:15:34Speaker 3: and why I have such love for this is because
- 2:15:36Speaker 3: it was the only experiment where the value of the
- 2:15:38Speaker 3: individual was held at the top of the hierarchy and
- 2:15:41Speaker 3: that people could truly be allowed to flourish. And in
- 2:15:44Speaker 3: 250 years, we did more than any society could have
- 2:15:46Speaker 3: hoped to have achieved in tens of thousands of years,
- 2:15:49Speaker 3: or not that it's been around that long, but in
- 2:15:51Speaker 3: thousands of years, everything tends towards, um, disorder and everything
- 2:15:57Speaker 3: power always gets centralized. And we had a framework to
- 2:16:00Speaker 3: do that, but we were willing participants in our own demise.
- 2:16:03Speaker 3: And now we're scratching our heads and wondering why there's
- 2:16:05Speaker 3: no individual and why there's no individual autonomy. Why a
- 2:16:08Speaker 3: guy can't smoke weed on the weekend or why a
- 2:16:10Speaker 3: guy can't do X, Y, or Z because we have
- 2:16:12Speaker 3: centralized the authority and the power and the decision-making structure.
- 2:16:16Speaker 3: And we're allowing them to be, there would be no
- 2:16:19Speaker 3: problem with money in politics if the federal government had
- 2:16:21Speaker 3: only the powers that were outlined to it in the constitution.
- 2:16:25Speaker 1: I think that's very well said. And I could have
- 2:16:28Speaker 1: never said it the way you said it. And I
- 2:16:30Speaker 1: think there's a lot to absorb here.
- 2:16:32Speaker 3: I'm sorry.
- 2:16:32Speaker 1: No, no, it was great, dude. It was great. This
- 2:16:35Speaker 1: is one of the things that I love about you.
- 2:16:37Speaker 1: You're very thorough.
- 2:16:37Speaker 3: Yeah, thorough is one thing. My friends always say Bill's
- 2:16:41Speaker 3: tism is starting to show.
- 2:16:43Speaker 1: You got a touch of the tism, but I think
- 2:16:44Speaker 1: that's good. Like I said, just like ADHD, I think
- 2:16:47Speaker 1: it's a superpower. A lot to absorb. So I think
- 2:16:51Speaker 1: we'll wrap it up right here. But thank you. This
- 2:16:52Speaker 1: was an awesome conversation. I really appreciate it. It was
- 2:16:54Speaker 1: really great.
- 2:16:55Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 2:16:56Speaker 1: We could do this again, too. I'm sure we could
- 2:16:58Speaker 1: probably have 30 or 40 of these.
- 2:16:59Speaker 3: We didn't even get to AI. I wanted to get
- 2:17:01Speaker 3: to AI because I think I have a very anti-pattern
- 2:17:03Speaker 3: to AI and how you understand it. But if you want,
- 2:17:06Speaker 3: we can save that for another time.
- 2:17:08Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll do that for our next one because I
- 2:17:09Speaker 1: think that's another four hours.
- 2:17:10Speaker 3: Yeah, probably.
- 2:17:11Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And by then, who knows where it's
- 2:17:14Speaker 1: going to be. Jensen Huang from NVIDIA recently declared that
- 2:17:18Speaker 1: we've reached AGI.
- 2:17:20Speaker 3: Yeah, so I would, yeah, I could. yeah, I just
- 2:17:25Speaker 3: couldn't disagree more. And I think I could, in the
- 2:17:27Speaker 3: same way, I just.
- 2:17:28Speaker 1: You're not the only one.
- 2:17:29Speaker 3: There's quite a few people.
- 2:17:30Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 2:17:30Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, it's consciousness projection and I'll sum it
- 2:17:33Speaker 3: up in a minute. At the end of the day, um,
- 2:17:36Speaker 3: neural networks are mathematical functions. They rest in, you know,
- 2:17:40Speaker 3: waiting neurons based on training data and applying power to
- 2:17:43Speaker 3: train models. It's all mathematic. There's no sense of knowing
- 2:17:48Speaker 3: there in that, you know, Penrose, I've read a lot of,
- 2:17:52Speaker 3: is ORC, O-R, if people want to read about that,
- 2:17:55Speaker 3: I won't explain it, orchestrated objective reduction and how the
- 2:18:00Speaker 3: mind works in these fleets of consciousness that we have,
- 2:18:03Speaker 3: these shimmers of consciousness that we have based around what,
- 2:18:05Speaker 3: you know, he describes in the microtubule. We get conscious
- 2:18:09Speaker 3: thought And that conscious thought we project into things. AI
- 2:18:12Speaker 3: is very good conscious projection, but it will never have
- 2:18:16Speaker 3: consciousness or knowing because it has no system of values.
- 2:18:19Speaker 3: And if we were to instill values in it, it
- 2:18:20Speaker 3: would still be consciousness projection. You saw my dad's cabin.
- 2:18:25Speaker 3: My dad died when I was five, but I bought
- 2:18:26Speaker 3: it back and was working on it. And inside of
- 2:18:28Speaker 3: his cabin, I got to learn a lot about my
- 2:18:31Speaker 3: father by working on the cabin that he built. He
- 2:18:34Speaker 3: would measure things and cut things right on walls and
- 2:18:36Speaker 3: that type of stuff. That's all consciousness projection that allowed
- 2:18:39Speaker 3: me to get to know him away. I might not
- 2:18:41Speaker 3: have even known him if he were alive, but I
- 2:18:43Speaker 3: got to re-experience and understand my father and his thoroughness
- 2:18:46Speaker 3: through that cabin. AI is consciousness projection. It's projected consciousness.
- 2:18:50Speaker 3: It's getting very good, but on a calculator, you could
- 2:18:54Speaker 3: get the same thing that you get out of a
- 2:18:56Speaker 3: neural network if you had sufficient time. I could present
- 2:18:59Speaker 3: you a question just like you did on propensity. I
- 2:19:01Speaker 3: could sit here with a rule book and I could
- 2:19:03Speaker 3: type in a calculator. It might take me a million years.
- 2:19:08Speaker 3: but I could do it and I could give you
- 2:19:09Speaker 3: the same answer that a neural network would give you.
- 2:19:12Speaker 3: That doesn't mean consciousness or knowing or AGI is present.
- 2:19:16Speaker 3: It relies on its training data. It can only give
- 2:19:19Speaker 3: you what the training data gives it. It needs human
- 2:19:22Speaker 3: consciousness projection like we talked about with the CAPTCHAs or
- 2:19:25Speaker 3: we talked about with uploading photos to Google Drive. It
- 2:19:28Speaker 3: needs that training data. And to me, it's just really fancy,
- 2:19:32Speaker 3: clever math. And having trained these networks for a dozen
- 2:19:36Speaker 3: years now, and working with them, they're just really clever
- 2:19:41Speaker 3: consciousness projection. And so, yeah, that is four hours and
- 2:19:45Speaker 3: we can do that next time.
- 2:19:46Speaker 1: We'll do that next time. Definitely.
- 2:19:48Speaker 3: But if people, you mentioned the app.
- 2:19:49Speaker 1: By the time we do it next time, who knows
- 2:19:51Speaker 1: what the fuck is going to be going on with
- 2:19:52Speaker 1: AI too.
- 2:19:53Speaker 3: But if people want to learn more about me or
- 2:19:56Speaker 3: my company, if I can say that. Yeah, please. It's spartanforge.ai.
- 2:20:00Speaker 3: We're built under the rubric of individual freedom. I want
- 2:20:02Speaker 3: people outdoors. I want people hunting. I want people experiencing nature.
- 2:20:06Speaker 3: I want people... providing for their families. The best part
- 2:20:10Speaker 3: of my day is when my kids are eating a
- 2:20:11Speaker 3: backstrap of an animal that I took. And I want
- 2:20:14Speaker 3: to enable people to go out and do that. And
- 2:20:16Speaker 3: even though it's paradoxical through an app, you can get lost.
- 2:20:19Speaker 3: You've got to conserve time. You've got to e-scout. You've
- 2:20:21Speaker 3: got to learn things before you go out there. So
- 2:20:23Speaker 3: we built this company under that. It's one of my,
- 2:20:25Speaker 3: I've got three other companies that I'm doing, but Spartan
- 2:20:27Speaker 3: Forge is the one that I'm really working on. Well,
- 2:20:30Speaker 3: I really appreciate that. We've put a lot of work
- 2:20:31Speaker 3: into it and we've got a lot more coming over
- 2:20:33Speaker 3: the summer. So If people want to support us or
- 2:20:36Speaker 3: want to get out there and get some hunting done,
- 2:20:38Speaker 3: please check it out. And I answer all the Instagram DMs.
- 2:20:40Speaker 3: So if you want to have a question for me.
- 2:20:42Speaker 1: Good luck with that now.
- 2:20:43Speaker 3: Well, I try to. I spend about two hours every
- 2:20:45Speaker 3: morning doing it. But good luck.
- 2:20:48Speaker 1: Thank you, Joe, for having me. Thanks, brother. Appreciate you
- 2:20:50Speaker 1: very much.
- 2:20:50Speaker 3: Yeah, I get that.
- 2:20:51Speaker 1: All right, you too. Bye, everybody.