Ex-Military Hacker: The Secret World Of Government Surveillance - Bill Thompson - #1131

27:53And if you don't execute the whole budget, I've never seen a general get dressed down more than when I'd be sitting at the Pentagon behind them and they hadn't executed the full budget. There were these three guys, and I can't remember their names, but they sat in what was the G357, which is in charge of operations training and sustainment or something like that. But they were the ones who gave the money. So they would say to General so-and-so, here's your$100 billion for this year. If they executed only$99 billion and there was a billion left over, they were going to get fired. They hadn't spent every penny.

28:29So the president puts out what's called the National Intelligence Priority Framework, which is the NIPF covers, here are the effects that I want the U.S. military to have on the battlefield. They need to be able to do these things. And here are the peers and near peers in these areas. And here are the countries that we don't want to go after. So I would sit down with the general after he got hit. They would flow down to this general who's in charge of offensive cyber. Then we'd have these roundtables where we would say, you know, in this area, what can we go after? What product lines that we have that already support these efforts?

29:02Which one of these can we not do or should we tell them that we'll either need more funding or it's not a vector that we should pursue at this time? And we would go over all of those things and we would think that we got most of the budget program. That was the sole thing that drove everything. and this is the most frustrating part, it really opened my eyes to government. Budget and money drove everything. It didn't even really matter if we were meeting the president's requirements. As long as we got to say we, as long as we could lie to a threshold that they wouldn't be able to figure out that we were executing the budget.

29:32It just needed, the money needed to be spent. That was what it was all about. So there's not any espionage and subterfuge happening externally, it's also happening internally. Yes, and then when the money wouldn't get spent, you would like every, all the military guys would get, and there's only a few in the organization. It was mostly civilians. Um, I would say 85 % of it was civilians. They would get pulled in and say, look, we've still got a hundred million dollars and it's, it's July. The budget's up in September. Where can we spend money right now? And they'd just be like, whatever course you want to go to chief go, whatever thing you want to go to, you want to go do that, just spend it all.

30:07And then when you executed the budget, it was successful. Um, but it never really like, But in my mind, it was always if a general officer who's got a cadre of folks like myself who are experts in their fields say, look, we can achieve the effects the president's looking for for 70 % of the budget. That to me is a promotion. That, you know, we're getting the intended effects and we've done it with three quarters of the budget. What do you think was being insinuated by someone not hitting budget that they basically fallen short and not tried as hard as they should have done? Yeah. Or you didn't know what you needed.

30:39you thought you asked for way more than you needed. Because the request for the budget was also done by the person that didn't spend it. Yeah, yeah. It's not like, here is your budget. It's here's what I want. Well, here's what you asked for. And I got you that. Right. I went and stumped for you. And I got you that from the secretary of defense. And you didn't execute it. Now I got to go tell him we've got this money we can't spend. You might not believe me, but this is what peak sleep optimization looks like. I'm not talking about the nightgown. It's just for sex appeal. I'm talking about my 8sleep.

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31:41They have a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. If you don't like it, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to$350 off the Pod 5 by going to the link in the description below by heading to 8sleep.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. What's the role of AI in hacking now? Well, I mean, AI right now, the code generation piece is getting robust. I don't think it's as robust as everyone else thinks it is.

32:14I mean, it's very good. There's a lot of pluses to it. I'm obviously using it inside of our companies because the mundane code or the less elegant code that's been written a million times over, you can generate very quickly. It can be integrated. Someone can review it in your GitHub. The branch gets committed, and now you've got code that would have otherwise taken a week or two to develop. You get to develop in an hour. And in hacking, it's the same thing. Again, I've really been outside of hacking for probably three years now, four years. I was advising some friends on the side with like a small company where they were just, I'd be a good idea fairy.

32:51And they would tell me the targets and the networks that they were looking at. And then I'd recommend ideas or here's what you can do. Or, hey, that one uses HF comms. You could sit and intercept these HF comms from this area. go and do this. I would do that type of thing. But for the large part now, I'm running two and almost three companies now. I've largely gotten out of that space, but I would imagine it's the same thing. So what you would do is you would get a blob or a technical dump of a particular device that you're targeting and you would feed it to an AI. And it's probably being done in the Pentagon right now, Anthropic or OpenAI or whatever.

33:29There's probably a hacking version of this. i would imagine like i said i haven't been in there for a while and you basically say what are the here's a here's a router here's everything we know about it here's how it looks here's all the logic here's the hardware here's the firmware here's the software that runs on it tell me where the chinks in the arm falls the fuck out yeah and say it's a hey the ip tabling is messed up here um they haven't patched that yet or they'd say this buffer can be overflowed and it will give you access. You can go here or on this network diagram that you passed me.

34:01It looks like all of these are being provisioned by the same IT guy. And you have historical reporting that says he uses password, password for his passwords. All of these things would be looked at and gone through. And that target development cycle now would have been three to six months in the past, or even a year or two. We would get a phone and dump the phone. a phone would become popular in the middle east we dump the phone we get the el1 file which is just the you know every as much code as you can get on a phone and we comb through it and look for the vulnerabilities that can be a year processed you know three to three months to a year easily to do that unless there's parts of the code that you know unless that the you know apple 13 a lot of the same code exists in the 14 therefore the same exploits or it hasn't been patched a lot of that would be there but when you're talking new phone or new architecture or new ecosystem um easily you can spend a year and now i think there's probably a month most people would spend on these things and probably most of the work's getting done in the first three hours ai powered hacking i would have guessed you know with some of the some of the nightmares that we've seen over the last couple of years uh there was a few in retail in the uk i would have guessed the ai of fueled hacking would have just like exposed all of these vulnerabilities i'm sure it is i don't know i haven't heard many many massive stories about it i don't think you would hear a lot about it um maybe but i'm i'm 100 because a lot of models so this is a bit esoteric it basically comes down to training data and power a lot of the math and a lot of the algorithms that ai uses or or at least the initial instantiations of it used were around since the 70s and the 80s.

35:50Like we knew the math behind a convolutional neural network or a long short-term memory neural network, which is a derivative of a recurrent neural network. We knew a lot about how this stuff was going to work, but we lacked two things. We lacked the compute, which we got through like tensor processing units or GPUs, and we lacked training data, which we got through the internet. So there's more to it, But largely, those are the three things, part of the awesome sauce for training an AI model. So there are people out there, certainly, who are going to be able to train their own models and use their own code repositories that they've generated for different exploits over time and train their own internal network on their own GPU and their own server and their own basement.

36:32Without any guardrails on it. Yeah, they wouldn't. Yes, certainly it's being done by organized crime right now. There's no way it's not being done. What are the most common things that organized crime are using hacking for? Access to phones is a big one. Banking, stuff associated with Bitcoin, things associated with they're embedding. There's a lot of it embedding. What do intelligence operators understand about human behavior that most civilians don't, do you think? So I'm trained in human intelligence. My human intelligence operations that I ran were usually to enable a separate part of an operation, as I alluded to before.

37:16But that being said, I learned how to do car pickups, car drop-offs, bumps, initiate, debrief, handle a source, all of those things. But it was meant for a different aspect of the mission. I think that really when it comes to... When you ask the question what other people don't understand, I guess I would ask you back what kind of other people. Because I think when you talk about somebody who's really been around the block, Rogan has a very deep understanding of people. Sometimes he can quickly suss people out. Like, is this guy full of bullshit? Is this guy angling? Is this guy doing this? And I've seen it enough to where it's a pattern I've now seen over the past few years where he's very good at figuring out who good people are and who shitty people are.

38:02He just has that tick. It's an interesting skill. I think I kind of become fascinated by rich and powerful men distorting reality around them, especially when you walk into a room. But when you get to very, very, very - Yeah. That having spent some time around some pretty fucking powerful and influential people, when they walk into a room, the whole vibe of the room changes. People are unable to act normally around them. And then after a while, it would be like some weird version of Stockholm syndrome, where you go, well, this is just what the world is. everybody treats me in this sort of a way.

38:40Isn't that strange? And people can't hold it together when they're in the presence of somebody that they really admire. They've got loads of respect. Maybe they think that they can get something from them or they want them to like them. And, or this person is maybe the gateway between them and a thing that they think that they want. He's so powerful and rich and cool. And I want to be associated with him. Maybe we could be friends. And before you know it, you're the guy garbling his words to a hot girl, trying to hang with somebody in a comedy green room. Yes. And the reason I brought up Rogan was because, especially in the military, now when I was dealing with the CIA or I was dealing with the DIA who have their own source recruitment divisions, everyone can go to the farm or everyone can go to in the military, the Fort Huachuca is where they run the courses there and learn how to recruit a source.

39:33And the 30 % of people who can do it can do it to effect once they've learned the how. So the military breaks it down into a very rigored approach. And oftentimes the people that you're recruiting are people who have shown up to a base and said, hey, I think my brother's going to blow some car up, or I think this X, Y, or Z. And then they'll say, oh, that person is a lead. Let's go recruit that person. And so most people can do that. Now there's a separate class. There's categories of human intelligence sources. And those are derived from what their placement and access is. So, you know, a guy who is a gate guard at an IBM is like lower cat three cat four, very low source, but he can give you access or he could get you a security card or he could get you X, Y, or Z.

40:18So there's value. It's valuable. You just pay that guy off. And then there's cat three, cat two, cat one. Cat one sources would be like, I'm recruiting the secretary of defense for the, you know, British government or whatever you guys call him, defense secretary, defense prime minister, whatever that person's called, I'm recruiting that guy. That's a level one source. So that level one source requires an artisan, somebody who really knows his craft and someone who can really create circumstances and understand a target. But he also, the reason I brought up Rogan is because they also have that thing where they can quickly deduce a person and put them down and understand exactly what motivates this person, have a very good idea of what motivates this person, the tactics that they're going to use, how they're going to keep them interested.

41:02And they can do that with like a 15 minute conversation. Just an insanely strong theory of mind. Yes. And rigorous. It's one of those things where you have to have the anima and the animus. You have to have the structure to follow the cycle and you have to have the diligence and the patience and all of those virtues because deviating from the cycle that's been around for a thousand years will get you killed. But then he's also got to have the artistry or the anima to be able to navigate the chaos and get thrown all different types of punches, or this thing happens, or he gets rolled up at a checkpoint, or he is now getting recruited and this has turned into a CI operation.

41:41And to navigate all of those things, you need somebody who's got real command of their total self, who can deal with the rigor and apply all of that, but then play jazz when it's needed. And then have the wisdom to do all of those things I talked about. And most guys at that point are at 40 or 45 before they have that. But man, these guys, you know, you get three of these guys, you can take over a country. You know, you said about Cat 4, Cat 3, Cat 2, Cat 1. Cat 1 would be super, super high value target. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. According to my Whoop, I've tracked nearly 2 ,000 days of my life.

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43:23I was thinking about how serial killers seem to not have proliferated in the same way largely because of forensics, DNA, fingerprinting, digital tracking. Do you think it's likely now, do you think it is less likely that cat one people of interest are going to be turned for the same reason that it's less likely that there are long-standing serial killers that they are realizing i'm probably going to get caught there's more of a digital footprint it's hard you cook that up just now while we were talking yeah that's interesting uh you know the analogy so i'm trying to make that yeah i know i totally understand it it's just great uh like i would i've only been thinking about what's happening right here and i haven't my my cpu is limited so i'm not i can't go i've got i've got low processing power but very high ram very good um i i think so you would certainly handling cat one it has gotten more restricted but then what ends up happening or having to change is you have to handle your cover differently so all of these operations you're in cover when you're running these operations and so the cover now needs to become instead of a guy i met at a bar um you're going to set up a new company in this country adjacent to whatever sector this person's in become the ceo of that company and the government will spend a ton of money setting that setting that up okay so you're not you're not turning people that are already there you're creating people that are going to become it yes or or you're or you're say say you're in charge of a let's just run a thought experiment or a hypothetical.

45:07Say you're in charge of a new type of GPU development company in Abu Dhabi. And I want to recruit you. So in the past, it might've been, we became good friends from a bar and we, you know, we, your girlfriend knew my girlfriend and we went out and here's all this happened. And then when you're, you know, the Chinese are buying your GPUs, which is why I'm going after you. I want to cut off the head of the dragon here and not give the Chinese access to your GPUs. And I want you to sell them to the Americans. Let's say that's what's going on. The Chinese would come in and say, Hey, who the fuck's this Bill Thompson guy?

45:41How much do you know about him? Blah, blah, blah, blah. They'll be so proactive because they'll be watching you. If you're a critical supply choke point for them, they will have been watching you from day one before they even start selling for buying from you. They'll know your ins and outs. That's what happens when you deal with the Chinese. And so they'll know all of this. So they'll go to you and you'll get a meeting with someone. someone will show up at your office and be like, hey, I'm so-and-so from so-and-so. You deal with the government, the communist, you know, People's Republic of China.

46:11We've noticed you've been hanging out with this bill guy. You know, you need to shut that. Like, what is his story? He just showed up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So now how this changes is because we can't change the technical vectors and the collection capabilities and all of those things. So how this would change is instead of it happening and we're friends because of girlfriends, friends, I will go into that country and set up either competitive or adjacent technology, fully funded by the US government through cutouts and other things, and either be on the chief of staff or staff or whatever.

46:43And I'll make my product that you need slightly cheaper, maybe as a transistor or something like that. You'll come to me to say, hey, I've noticed that you're selling this microchip here for half the cost. I need some. I'll be like, oh, great. Yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now I've got what's called cover for action and cover for status. and so when the Chinese come to you, be like, well, yeah, I'm buying it from him. He runs this company and this company's got a cheaper one and that allows me to make it cheaper for you. So the Chinese are cool, you're cool and now I'm over here. It's a more sophisticated cover.

47:10Yeah, so far more backstopped is what it's called. More backstopped, right. Yes. Who do you think's the most surveilled human on the planet? Elon Musk, I'd probably say. At least. There's a laundry list of people that I would want to recruit. And he would be one of them. Who else would be on it?

47:35Some of them I know, so I don't want to say their names. Who else would I be going after? You mean an interesting list that you're going to give us of people who you don't know. Yeah, who I don't know. Let's see. Family of Trump would be another one I would be looking at. It's a big fucking family. Yes, big fucking family. I would be, you think anybody in the tech sector. It also depends on, you're asking me this, who am I recruiting for? You know, if I'm recruiting for the Chinese, that would be one set of people. If I'm recruiting for the Russian, that'd be another set of people. Original question was just like, of all humans on the planet, 7 billion, whatever it is now, 8 billion, who has got the most amount of eyeballs looking at them digitally?

48:19Yeah. So as you restate that, I actually realize I'm wrong. I'd probably want to recruit people who work for Elon. I wouldn't want to recruit Elon. I'd want to recruit someone close to him because I talked about accessibility being one of the vectors when you're doing a target profile. So inaccessible. Very inaccessible. Even if I'm friends with him, he's inaccessible. I would never be able to get him to show up for a meet, like to debrief him or to get any information from him. So you'd want to recruit someone around them. And that's the same thing. That's the thing that's always kind of made me scratch my head about Epstein.

48:48I would never... People brought up Clinton and saying, and Clinton's now associated with Epstein, I'm sure there were nefarious, crazy things going on over there. Clinton's not a person I'd ever want to recruit. Clinton would be a nightmare of a target to try to manage or a source to try to manage. He's not someone you recruit. He's also not someone you leverage. Maybe Epstein, being an idiot, wanted to set up all of these things and use them as leverage against them. That might be one play. But as far as saying Israel's involved and these things, possible. One of the most interesting ideas I've heard about Epstein was a friend who spoke to somebody in Israeli intelligence, and this guy said, do you know how fucking insulting it is that people say that we would have recruited that guy?

49:39Yes. After he was already popped. Yes. For soliciting sex from a minor. Horrible, yeah. And that was the most, I don't know, the Epstein rabbit hole goes so fucking deep. Oh, no, don't get me wrong. And so there's a lot going on. Very squirrely. And that would be great cover. The fact that he's so obvious as to not be a normal standard candidate for being an intelligence operative would maybe be great cover for why he might be. But it was like, how unsophisticated and ungraceful do you think we are that we would recruit that guy? This very flash, very lavish, very public facing dude. And what are you going to recruit him with?

50:22He's rich. anything that you would use the argument would be that the the money wasn't his that the money oh that's right that's right that's right um it's just still it's an interesting it's an interesting argument and it makes sense when um this guy's obviously a fed or this guy's glowing or whatever right the like how glowy somebody looks is probably proportionate to how visible they are too if somebody's very visible they're going to get more accusations of being controlled opposition or fed whatever would you really want that person? it's the best argument, I have no fucking idea whether Nick Fuentes is a fed or not but it's the best argument for why Nick would be a horrible candidate do you want someone that's being watched by hundreds of thousands of people a day is that, that's your guy although Anderson Cooper was that rolled up so this is the thing man for every example there's a counter example make fuck it nick fontes is a fed it all depends on what you can it all depends on what you get from them i think i mean if i had i'll put it this way if i had to place money he's getting money from israel i had to bet i would say he's getting money from israel why straw man this helps them in so many ways to have people like him running around that he might not know he's getting money from them but you need enemies.

51:45It's kind of like racism. Who was funded the most of the KKK and who shows up in the chat rooms when the KKK is having a meeting? I don't know. The federal government. Okay. Why? Because they need an enemy. They need a straw man. They prop up. There's no white supremacy is like real white supremacists. Yeah. There are some out in like rural Alabama or something like that. But as far as like tens of thousands, like they would lead us to believe and all of these things. Most times when you look into these things, there was Fed involvement. Like even, again, January 6th, very hot topic. There were Feds in that audience that were, you know, going back to that Gulf of Tonkin, anytime we needed motivation to use government money, taxpayer money, to launch an operation, to achieve an effect, the government's almost always involved in every part of the nexus when it comes to certain things.

52:36Just before you keep going, can you just pop that on for me, please? What is this for? It's when you're pushing out into the deeper recesses of theorizing. I mean, I would have imagined as an intelligence agency person that you would have understood what this is. It's a disguise, Bill. Go on. So lots of these things, when you really get down to the nitty gritty, the government's - This is so ridiculous. The government's so involved in most of these things. And lots of times - Here's the way the FBI will look at something. We've got a whole division that's focused on - I can't even think. All right, all right.

53:20We've got a whole division that's focused on threats to the homeland. and 25 % of this budget is for white supremacy. The Biden administration will throw$100 to$2 million, $100 to$200 million at countering white supremacy so that he gets to go out and have talking points. But then the FBI gets on the ground and they're like, there's really no white supremacy. So then the FBI will be like, hey, and I'm not saying this is happening now, but this certainly happened back in the day. I know it happened back in the day. There would be a KKK meeting either on the dark web or on the white web or open web or in an area or whatever, 60 % of the people showing up would be feds.

53:59Why? Because they have a whole division and all of these jobs are organized around defeating white supremacy. And if you can't find white supremacy, it's like Al Sharpton. Al Sharpton made his bones on helping black people back in the day. But once racism in the 90s washed up, he had to go searching for racism in order to keep his stick going. um that's the problem with government is that they create their self-linking ice cream cones and that they create the incentive structure but once they've won they can't go away none of these guys are getting none of these useful idiots will get rid of their jobs they're going to go out and create the thing they were developed to counter in order to keep the purse strings going a lot of people have this same issue with big pharma yes yeah yes yeah it's the same it's the same you fat it's the same dynamic yeah so big pharma wants you taking type 2 diabetes shots in your stomach or whatever you have to do for type 2 diabetes.

54:52They won't tell you to fast. They won't tell you to lose weight. You've got heart problems or cholesterol problems. They're not going to tell you to lose weight and go on a clean diet. They're going to give you statins. The interesting thing here is just changing the incentives or coming up with a better solution. This is why it's cool and noble. And I love when people want to kind of flip the entire system over. But I don't think that it's as realistic as just coming up with a better alternative that aligns the incentives toward what you want. For instance, Ozempic plays within the rules of big pharma, but gets the outcome that you want, which is preferable, right?

55:32It realizes that, hey, maybe we can try and take down these greedy corporations that are trying to capitalize on people's bad health so that they can keep them addicted or dependent on medications. Roger that. However, if you can just get a medication that gets the outcome that you want, that has minimal side effects through using innovation, you indoctrinate. Because Big Pharma doesn't care about what the outcome is, what they care about, presumably, using this. If this is true, they care about its profits. Okay, so just that's their rule set. how can you get them to continue to make profits whilst also making people healthier or helping people to lose weight you know yeah the long-term studies on all these glps and stuff aren't out yet but that to me seems like a much a much quicker way to do it but as you've said that this sort of intersecting fucking endless spiral of well this thing that you thought happened maybe didn't happen And for that reason, it happened to be an example to push back against so that it can keep people in a job, so that it can permit expansions of power, so that it can increase budgets, so that there is still the opportunity for people culturally to nudge society in one direction or another.

56:56This is why I think I'm not very conspiratorial. I'm very interested. I don't consider myself one either. Qui bono. The reason that I find it interesting to be around my friends, but also sometimes it's quite fatiguing to me, my more conspiratorially minded friends, is what I'm left with is not more certainty. It's just more like apathy. Yeah. I go, I don't know what the fuck to think, dude. I actually don't know what the fuck to think. For every incident that occurs, you can make an equal and opposite case for it being legitimate or not, or a fourth wave Trojan horse triple agent that actually started.

57:47I'm like, I have no idea what it came from. What do I do with this information? Yeah. And I think that even that could be the outcome. The desired outcome could be confusion and apathy. Yes. So even the meta of this entire situation is, look, we can't convince people of any one narrative because there's too much information out there. Flood the system with more information and make them so confused that they have no conviction as opposed to some conviction in a direction that we actually don't want. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to say they always design the means and I'm not conspiratorial. I'm not a cyclops.

58:20There's good and bad to everything. Just like you said, with the GLPs, obviously if you're 400 pounds and you've got all of these snoring problems, you can't sleep, your chest is caving in on you. You've got diabetes, you're going to lose your left foot. You've got all of these things going on. Obviously, get on a GLP one. If you can't beat the food addiction, like go and do it and then get healthy, but then learn how to deal with food after you do that. But for sure, that's good that you're getting thin again and that you can sleep at night or that you can make love to your wife or that you can play sports with your kids.

58:52All of those things are, the net good is there, right? Even if they said GLP-1 is less than your lifespan by five years. It's like, okay, if I'm 35 and 600 pounds, I've only got five years left. So obviously there's black and white to everything. There are good aspects of government, Don't get me wrong. It's just that the bad has far outgrown the good. Obviously, there's good things that government... We need roads. We need a military. We need interstate commerce. All of the things that the Articles of Confederation were designed and why we revamped it went with the Constitution, there's goodness there.

59:29But the founder's intent was always for the government to be constrained and for the individual rights would be paramount in these institutions, freedom of speech, all of those things. And the government has just way overstepped their bounds in every way. And so I could go down that whole thing and I won't do it to you unless you want to. But it's just, it's grown so much and it's become part of our lives where you can't buy a toilet in here or a light bulb without the federal government approving it. That's patently ridiculous. They're in everything and they tax everything. When you make your money, when you spend your money, when you save your money, when you die.

1:00:09Every aspect of your life is overtaxed. And I guess if I'm anything, I'm a constitutionalist and I think the founders would be revolting if they saw what this government was today. I think they would say, hey, you boys better grab your muskets. This is ridiculous. That is a guy who both him and his wife were incredibly embroiled in being close to the government for a very long time. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I joined the military to get out of North Dakota. Like I said, my father died when I was five. My mother was an alcoholic. She became a waitress. I lived in a trailer home. When I joined the military, my older, younger brother were in jail.

1:00:45Well, one was in Boy's Ranch, which was like jail. My older one was in jail. My two older sisters, one got addicted to drugs later and died, and one was addicted to drugs when I joined the military. And my mother was still battling alcoholism like she would vacillate between. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of North Dakota. I'm not a farmer, and the only people that can make it there are farmers. And otherwise you're addicted to meth. Methamphetamines are a huge problem there. Or you're working in the support industry for farmers. And I just knew that none of this was for me. So when I saw the military recruiter, I saw the girls looked at them.

1:01:17I saw purpose and meaning. When I don't have purpose and meaning, I have anxiety and depression. Those are the two things that fill the void. And I saw the military as my way out. And it's only in this country that my story is even approximately possible. Even getting close to this story being possible is only in this country, and we owe so much to it. But when I joined, it was to get out of North Dakota. When I re-enlisted, it was to preserve the American experiment and everything that undergirds it. I really re-listed and stayed in because I started reading Montesquieu and John Locke and Cicero and the Federalist Papers and the stories of our founding.

1:02:01And sorry to say we had to battle England, but you're an American citizen now, aren't you? No, no, I'm still on a visa, but I've also still got a plus four, four phone number. So you'll take my taxes, but not my area. Well, anyway, all of these things were bought with blood and treasure. And when I re-enlisted, it was to preserve the experiment and that I believed in the experiment. I believe it was the greatest experiment ever ran in history. And in 250 years, we had one of the greatest economies. we technology culture um what you know wisdom all of these things um is only popular and it's only possible in this kind of country and you know that's why i stayed in the military and i love it and that's why i'm trying to preserve these things now with the companies that i'm building now and what i'm doing going forward is because i i i bet on the individual i bet on families i bet on freedom of choice when people are left to their devices to make decisions they'll be engaged in far better work with more meaning than any government could bestow upon them in any other way.

1:02:59If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for two decades, and it wasn't until this last year that I had some of the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around the obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science back defective paths to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, the weights, everything. So all you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP Strength app could wipe your ass for you, probably would.

1:03:32And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. And if you're serious about your training, it'll do the same for you. Right now, you can follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to$50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below by heading to rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Can you take me through what your app does? Have you got it on your phone?

1:04:03Oh yeah, so my co-founders were like, hey, you were on Rogan, you didn't mention her app until the very end. And I was like, sorry, I don't think about those things until it's time. Yeah, I'm in a fucking fun conversation. So the app is called Spartan Forge. Again, there's many things. God, there's so much into this. I wanted people to get outdoors. And I did this work while I was in the military. So while I was in the military, I was, you know, essentially my job was variable analysis for commanders. The commanders have a goal to kill bad guy. Hunters have a goal, harvest meat, have an experience with their son.

1:04:43Initiation rights, I think, is something that this country is in desperate need of. Hunting is a useful vector for initiation rights between a father and a son. Like you've killed a deer now, today I treat you like a man. Baptism by the river, you're 16, now you're a dude. Hunters, people hunt for all kinds of reasons. And so when I was leading the military, I had anxiety and depression because I didn't know what I was gonna do when I got out. like I got paid to kill and break things or to break things so that other guys could kill bad guys who are trying to harm our country. And I, you know, got to, you know, had a blank check to just prosecute war.

1:05:16And I had a great amount of meaning and from it. And, you know, I did looking back on the Iraq war, I wish we were never there, but certainly Afghanistan, the work I did in Africa, the work I did in the Southern Philippines, we were killing bad guys and people that would have killed us if we didn't kill them in most cases. And I was getting all this anxiety and I said, what am I going to do when I get out? Like, how can I, I want to keep having this meaning. If I lose this, I'm going to die. Like I'm going to become an alcoholic. Like I said, I'm the only one in my family that wasn't addicted to drugs or alcohol.

1:05:48And I could feel the alcohol calling me like, hey, I got something for you. So I said, what am I going to do when I get out? And I was a hunter and I'd been bow hunting for a few years. And I thought, really, these are just target analysis problems. A hunter and military guys, they have variable analysis that they need to understand a target better so they can prosecute the target. Hunters are in the same way. So my company, Spartan Forge, that I started, the first product that we released was a neural network that did deer movement prediction, which sounds kind of cliche, but hunters only have so much time off.

1:06:23So the first thing we built in this area was just a neural network that used collar GPS data from deer. So biologists, universities, private people would collar deer and they would let them run and they'd learn things about fawn recruitment or how many were getting killed by wolves, how they move, where they move, why they move. We took that data and we started building neural networks to predict movement. And out of that, we got a few thousand users. And then I started looking to mapping program or mapping platforms after we had a few thousand users. and I really just wanted to focus on machine learning because there's so much I can do in machine learning in the hunting space.

1:06:57I'd never really wanted to get into mapping. But then there are these huge, you know, a couple of multi-hundred million dollar corporations that are in the hunting and mapping space and I met with them and they were really offering me like, sounds like a lot of money, but like a half million dollars for like six or eight years of work. And I was like, look, I could go to work for Accenture next week and make that in a year. Like that's not what I'm trying to do here. A, I'm trying to demystify the woods and B, I want to get people into the woods and C, I think neural networks, machine learning, artificial intelligence, mapping, geospatial intelligence is going to be a huge player in this space.

1:07:31So all of them kind of just said, this was 2015. So they were like hearing AI and they had no idea what AI was. so um anyway we we said i said look the hard part's the machine learning the hard part's the neural networks the hard part is the geospatial intelligence building a map box map and putting it in an app is not the hard part which is what all these guys really are at the end of the day is there a map box map inside of a so we built this spartan forge um we've got like lidar high resolution imagery like the imagery is five centimeter imagery jesus fucking trice so you can see that's better than google maps oh it's far better a hundred times better than google maps um you can see down in the ground is that that's as far as you can go can you go further i can go further and then i go back in time too i can go back to where have you taken this data from so we contracted with um an airplane a company that runs airplanes and uh we go in with a couple of other companies that are in like soil and mineral rights real estate other places um there's a solar company they need high resolution imagery of the tops of houses so they can measure it for solar like people knock on their door, try selling you solar.

1:08:37Anyway, we would throw in a bunch of money with them and they collect this highly, highly, um, like, uh, high resolution imagery that we have that goes back in time. So we do all of that. And then we have LIDAR data. I'll make this really short, but LIDAR data and other things. So you can get a visual understanding of the ground where it rips away the trees. So what you can do is this is mapped using light data, similar to how a radar works. Um, and you can throw it into like a 3d and my service is kind of weak right now, but once the service gets up, you, you can, um, see paths under the ground.

1:09:14Like during the hurricane in North Carolina, we gave a bunch of accounts to the first responders and they were trying to get to houses that had been washed out and the roads were washed out, but they were able to use our app to find paths that were used for logging trails in order to get to the back of these people places, these people's houses and deliver them like diabetes medication, um, oxygen, if they were on like a, uh, emphysema machine. And then we had this, we have this capability called blue force tracker where you can set up pins. So when there are roads washed out, they were using it.

1:09:44And so hunters can use it the same way when they're organizing hunts, they can drop pins and everyone sees them. They get the high resolution imagery. They get the LIDAR, they get the historical imagery, they get the neural networks. Then we have our own neural network that we call cyber scout. So if you had never shot that bow that I gave you before, You could sit down with CyberScout and say, hey, I need to tune this bow. Here's the type of bow. How do I do it? And it walks you through all of those things far better than like a chat GPT would or other ones would because all of our training data is solely focused on hunting and best in class information on hunting.

1:10:14Neural networks often regress to the mean by giving you the broad spectrum of the internet. So you'll get some bad and some good data. We are retrieval documents that we use are all sourced from the highest caliber of hunting information. so um cyber scout and soon it'll be interacting with your maps so it'll tell you how to hunt an area how to do all of those things um but yeah we started this company in like uh 2017 we got our first mobile app in 2021 and then we uh um uh you know in the app store right now i think we're like number 14 in mapping around outdoor or something like that you know hundreds of thousands of users and really all of it was born out of just really just kind of my first principles as a human, which are the tribe's important, friends are important, get out into the wilderness, disconnect and get things.

1:11:04Paradoxically, I'm using an app to do that. But the reason I'm using an app to do that is because people have so little vacation, so little time. They want to hunt public land in Pennsylvania and they live in Texas. Like they can go up, they can scout through my app. They can understand things. They can drill down. They can use a high resolution imagery. They can do all that stuff and at least have an idea of what the ground looks like before they get there so that they can download an offline map and get disconnected and go out there and create some, you know, my favorite time as a CEO is on our social media, a father and a son will message me and say, we'd been targeting this buck for like three years.

1:11:38We'd never saw it, this whitetail buck. And my son and I were using your app. We use the neural network. We use the prediction. We use a high quality mapping and we figured out a spot. We got in there and we killed a deer. And there's a father and a son holding a buck together that they're going to eat dinner over or, you know, put on a wall and make a permanent memory. That is my favorite part of running this one company is that experience right there. It's just people going out and reconnecting with nature and being in it, but also buying down risk. And like I said, paradoxically through an app, but you can drop pins and tell your wife where you're going to hunt.

1:12:11And if you're offline if you fall from a tree stand or whatever break your legs they'll know where to send the people to go and help you out or and all of that type of stuff um so you know jesus fucking christ you're kind of a terrifying human i'm very glad you were on our side what do you mean just this like five centimeter map data oh by the way also i'm able to basically be q from james bond for a bunch of like that was also by the way i can probably download your phone data and work out whether there's some vulnerability. Oh, also, by the way, I'm glad you're on our side. Well, thank you. Whenever people ask me for the 30-second job of who I am or what I did in the military, I would often use the Q thing.

1:12:50I'm not James Bond, but I built cool shit for people like James Bond. And that's a very accurate summation of my military career. I never kicked the door. I was never intentionally in a gunfight. I was never the guy at the tip of the spear. I was the girthy part of the staff that was supporting the head of the spirit. I mean, if I was the girthy part of the staff is not the way to end this episode. I don't know what is. Paul Thompson, you fucking rule, man. Where should people go to check out? Spartanforge.ai is our website. You can sign up there or you can download us through the app store. We're on Instagram.

1:13:26I said this on Rogan's podcast and I did regret it, but I'll say it here too. When you have questions about the app or complaints or gripes, I as the product owner, I see that as my bigger role than CEO. I answer all of the social media every morning. I spend about two hours. So when people say, I wish the app did this, or it didn't do this, or I didn't like this, or, Hey, we did this hunt. You're dealing with me. Now, if you have a problem that needs a technical solution, I'll usually farm that off to our QA team, but otherwise you're dealing with me. So you got questions about the app. You don't know how to get into bow hunting and you want to get into it.

1:13:59You want to learn through our cyber scout or through our app, how to be a better hunter. Jared, can you quickly grab the gift that I got today from outside? just while we're winding. Yeah, so they can find me there and I'm happy to interact with people. After I did Rogan, I think I had 3 ,500 messages of people and it took me about a month. You're a fucking glutton for punishment. Took me about a month and a half. You should work for Zendesk. You know, that could be your new, you know, I could go and work for Accenture and do the whatever, whatever. I got to say thank you as well, man. Like this gift that you got me is so fucking amazing.

1:14:31Hoyt and Archery Country and Dialed Archery made that possible. They're all friends of mine. The guys at Hoyt, Tom from Hoyt's amazing. My buddy, Tyler, I think you've met Tyler from Archery Country and Dialed Archery. My friends, Taylor and Jordan run that, you know, American made and great companies. And I work with all of them. And I was so upset because I thought, oh, he doesn't look like he has a bow. And then so I got all ordered all this stuff, got it all put together. And we're going to go tune you up with this at Archery Country. And then like three days ago, I saw a post where you had a bow.

1:15:06Got a bow. But this is, you can never have too many bows as I've been reliably told by Cam Haynes. Dude, you're awesome. I appreciate you very much. Thank you for having me on. I look forward to firing this sucker with you soon. Awesome. All right. Goodbye, everyone. Dude. Yes. Lovely. Good.