Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 411 - Bill Thompson - Special Mission Units and Human Targeting

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Bill Thompson served 21 years in the U.S. Army, retiring as a Chief Warrant Officer Four, specializing in Special Missions and technology development for the Department of Defense. He founded Spartan Forge, an AI-driven hunting tool that applies military intelligence methods to enhance hunting effectiveness. Bill is a lifelong hunter dedicated to conservation and ethical practices, as well as an active supporter of the Boot Campaign, which aids veterans through health and wellness initiatives. https://spartanforge.ai/   Today's Sponsors:   Montana Knife Company: https://www.montanaknifecompany.com   Better Help: Get 10% off your first month at https://www.betterhelp.com/clearedhot  

Okay, got to red smoke. Oh, west of the smoke. Okay, Kathy, whiz to the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Why would you do that to yourself? There's all kinds of science about how good it is for you. I fast every day for a few hours when I'm sleeping. That's a fast.

Intermittently. Intermittent. What does it do for you? Hold on. Hit fucking record it. Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Thompson.

No. No. At a cellular level, what is this 72-hour fast do for? for you. When did it begin? At the cellular level, you, uh, I am not a doctor or anything, so people should all go look this up for themselves. There's a, there's a process in your body called autophagy. Yeah. And autophagy is when you're short on food, your body will start eating itself. Yep. So what the body and I could mess all this up. Here's how I understand it. The bot the first thing the body will do is target cells that are, uh, damage probably misaligned.

damaged, you know, and those cells can be like cancer cells. Those cells can be obviously fat cells. It goes for right away. Your testosterone generally goes up when you're fasted. And for me personally, the reason I, well, I do it A because whenever I'm doing things where I need to be quick on my feet, I always think better when I'm in a fasted state, especially if my body's in ketosis. It's night and day with how quickly I can process information.

and think and act on my feet. It's totally a different experience. And there's a really good science backing that. And then I've got a lot of type 2 diabetics in my family. And there's really good science starting in Japan, but now they're doing it over here, I think. You can fast away type 2 diabetes. You just don't eat for a week and your type 2 diabetes will go away.

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Now is the time. Back to the show. Maybe longer than a week. Well, as long as you don't get back to a, a stay, well, again, people, I'm not a doctor. I feel like I have to qualify all of this stuff. As long as you keep fasting until you get to a healthy body weight or you may say in something like ketosis through, you know, low carbohydrate eating after the fast. Yeah. You can repair the, you know, effects of type of you diabetes. And I also know a woman close to my family,

she fasted away her breast cancer. And so, lots of, Lots of signs on this. It's emerging. A lot of it was started in Japan. They have like clinics out there where you can go and just not eat for a week. And yeah. So I'll- God, my inner voice is tempted to come out on that.

Just do it. Go. Go. A clinic where you can go and not eat. Yeah, yeah, right. So I feel like you're paying somebody to just don't eat. Lock you in a room to start eating. Some people might need that.

Self-control and willpower is a real thing. Oh, go to Sears School. Yeah, right. What do you think they fed us in that stew? So they killed, did you go to Sears School in San Diego? I went to, oops, excuse me, I went, the one I went to where I was probably fasted the most was in Spokane. Okay.

So the, the, you guys go to that one too, right? Yes, that was a different experience. Yeah, that was a totally different. That was more interview-centric. The traditional Sears school, it was, I think the schoolhouse, yeah, was on neighbor. station, North Island, and they bus you up into the hills in California. But that's where you do like the E&E problem. The one in Spokane, they put us all in the back of a moving truck.

Yeah. We're going to insert you. There was no, like, you just got rolled up. Yeah. Yeah, that was a very different one. You probably didn't do the whole, because at least from in my experience, this could be outdated. When I was there, it was like eight or nine weeks. Oh, God, no.

It was two or three weeks of doing like traditional. Sear stuff. Yeah. And then it was two or three weeks of resistance training. Yep. And then it was, and I might get the order here wrong too. But then they were teaching like, here's how you pick handcuffs. Here's a get out of a trunk.

Here's how you defeat restraint. And then there's a whole other part you can't talk about. No, we didn't go to that at all. This was at the tail end of selection for the East Coast. I want to say we were there for, God, this is 20 years in the rearview mirror. Yeah, this was like 2010 for me or something like that. Yeah. one or two weeks.

But before that, and I think a lot of air crews go through this because I was partnered up with an F-18 pilot. It's just basic serious school. And from people listening who are like, what are you guys talking about? Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion. And I think it was the Admiral Stockdale School, actually, or the building at North Island. He is a – did he get the Medal of Honor? I feel like – I think so. I think he did.

Yeah. You want to talk about an ability to maintain a positive attitude despite your circumstances? Yeah. And for people, it's – my wife. My wife Leo was hit me with this the other day, the Stockdale Paradox, the ability to be be positive but realistic. It was fascinating. But it was some classroom stuff, you know, the tap code that they invented in Vietnam.

Can you imagine? This is what fascinates me. They would teach the unknown tap code to other people in there by just tapping. Yeah. I would say, well, you shot the fuck up. I'm trying to say. I'm not going to get this. I'm like, why?

Is there a rat problem in here? I enjoy the quiet. leave me alone. But so nav problems kind of like it was probably three or four days out in the field. They killed a rabbit I think on like the third day split it up between the class

but you were building shelters. Yeah, very basic stuff too. Then they put you into Camp Slappy which looking back on it was hilarious, you know. But halfway through Camp Slappy they gave you a little bit of food and I just was always

fascinated what was in there. I know there was some tuna fish in there because that was part. I mean, it was almost not palatable. I don't think I actually ate mine because it smelled so bad, but it was very soupy water, I think, undercooked rice and tuna fish. I don't even remember getting food in mine, like, at least during like the heightened optumple parts. Yeah. Yeah, I don't remember getting food like, because there was like an instruction part of the course. Yeah. And then there was a part where it turned into. a non-instruction part, but it wasn't clear what was happening when it happened. I think they said something along a lot.

Like the guy stopped in the car and said, like, you're now leaving an academic situation. And we were all like, what the hell does that mean? Yeah. And then all of a sudden, people with like AK-47s are beating the car down and the driver's not there anymore. And it just went, you know, crazy from there. But yeah, they did like the whole like cement cell thing. Oh, yeah. Like, you know, 50 hours or whatever that was.

That was the camp slappy for the traditional sear. When I went to the other one, it was, I remember it was wooden. It wasn't concrete. It was all indoors, whereas the camp sloppy one was outdoors. It was more psychological. Yeah. Again, there are sections of that where you're not supposed to talk about much. But it's also where they captured a lot of our biometrics and stuff like that in case, you know.

But yeah, you get rolled up. I'll give away a little portion of the school. You get rolled up. I'm sure it's changed. It's mostly dudes. Yeah. And you're standing there and they take your hood off and there's a dude on each side and there's a woman standing across from you. And they're like, take all.

And she says take all your clothes off. And you're like, okay. She's got the best job right there. Right. Then they say turn around, bend over and grab your butt cheeks. Sounds like MEPs now. Yeah. Michael is already Googling like, where does this go down?

Do I sign up? I don't want to slide up for this school. I, you know, because the course ends at some point. And I remember asking one of the instructors, how could you ever recruit somebody for this job? Because no woman wants to spend their job looking at dudes assholes. And he was saying, he said, honestly, most of the time, by the time they turn around, she's already headed out the room.

She wants no part of it. I thought he was going to be like, it's a particular type of woman. We're looking for a particular skill set. Yeah. No, he was like, yeah, nobody enjoys that to include the participant. but it's psychological. I think people are going to freak out. And at that point, I mean, I was working with absolute savages.

And they're just like, hey, hey. You belong in a fucking cell. Oh, Sears School. Did they play like the crazy music while you're in the cell too? Oh, it's awful. Yeah. But again, you know, at the traditional Sears School, they were talking about how one of the ways of many

that people maintain their sanity was ignoring the music. that they learned how to relatively tell time by the cadence. So they wouldn't necessarily listen to the music, but they had figured out how long, because they strip you, of course, of you have no watch, no cell phone, any of that stuff. Obviously, the sun goes up and down, but if you're inside, they could leave the lights on it all the time.

And they talked about people, what things can make people lose their mind, but other ones, people would figure out that cadence. So like a minute and 30 seconds has gone by. And they would count their days by 90 seconds at a time. Never. I'd never been able to.

do that. Have you ever heard the stories about people who designed like intricate homes while they were in like the Hanoi Hilton and then they got out and actually like we're talking brick by brick board by board and then they went and built it? I've heard of that before. Yeah. That's some Stockholm sounding stuff right there like how long would you last if they pulled out just the car battery and the nipple clamps? Would you let the voltage? What do they say? I might enjoy it. What do they say it's the amps that kill you not the volts? Yeah. That's the car battery. Yeah. That's right. I don't know enough about electricity to feel safe.

I don't think, I mean, I'd like to think I would last a long time. But I don't even let him hook him up. I don't. What do you want to know? Yeah. I'm hoping at that point that anything I have that's intelligence, that's worth value, has been changed. Or they're changing it or fixing it or whatever because. Well, see, your job is different.

You might actually know some stuff. I wouldn't go that far, but. I mean, you were involved in some stuff. Yeah, yeah. They didn't tell us shit. they'd be like, hey, here's a 10-digit grid, go do your best. Yeah. So if they would have rolled me up and asked me, I mean, I would have just made stuff up,

like, okay, do you have a pen and paper? Because here's the nuclear launch codes. Yeah. It's 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, ABCD. Yeah. I wish it was as cool as people saw it on TV where you're read into everything and you know all this super secret stuff. I honestly can't think of a single piece of information.

There were some programs I was read into, but they exist. If you know what to look for, you can find them open source. Yep, pretty much all of them are like that. I can't think of a piece of information that I had that had any level of strategic value at any time. I mean, I probably had some,

but, I mean, you can just choose not to say those. I don't even remember exactly what the resistance posture was that I was trained on because there's a few different ways depending on what your job is. Stay in the circle, always. But there was, you know, they would say, if it's two weeks in and this has happened and this has happened, like, you know, these two dudes are dead now, part of your team,

and you know you're up, and you just have to give them something. Like, here's some stuff you could give or talk about. Yeah. But I really don't, I've forgotten a lot of that. Because I don't know if you had the same thing or not, but you'd stay in practice on it. I had to stay in practice on a lot of my stuff. I can't say much more than that, but it was.

I did my best, too, forget everything they taught me the day after I left. I kept the handcuffs and did the handcuff stuff for a while. I'm pretty good at that still. The picking? Yeah, the picking, like with the, you know. It's a relatively simple lock, right? Depends. There's ones that are more difficult than other ones.

Like, if they're Smith and Westons, that's pretty simple. You're not the kind of dude who has, like, a cuff link pick and all. No. No. You know they're out there. No, I know they're out there, but then they weren't trained. If they're carrying that. You just need the gear.

You don't have to use it. Yeah, well, then, you know, we get into what's your cover for action for carrying this pick if you're just so-and-so innocuous service member. You get a stuff in my teeth. You have to think on your 89 dollar handcuff picture You gotta be able to think on your feet Yeah

That would be another good drill we could do for you Michael What? Picking handcuffs Yeah, I'll put you in like a tank That's slowly filling up of water And if you don't he just dies Yeah Defeat restraints

Yeah sounds great Yeah let's do it We can start with rope You could Houdini it And then we'll go We'll upgrade to like a shitty handcuff I don't like this idea As much as the other ones

His mom was at the coffee shop the other day. She heard us talking about how I want to take in base jumping. She was not a fan. She had feedback on the episode. But you're doing it, right? 100%. Oh, I would 100%.

I would 100% do that. I don't even care about the base jump. I just want him to climb over the rail so I can have a chat with him about what he's thinking about as we're both hanging on the other side of a bridge. The urine will tell you all. Sometimes there's a little peering. Sometimes a few little drops come out.

I would be disappointed if there wasn't. We're dark clothing. That's the secret to base drum. I think Michael is a psycho if you just got up there first time. I was like, let's go. I've actually seen it. And you do wonder. And you're just not like, no hesitancy whatsoever.

They're just like, let's go. People have really weird and bizarre reactions to stress. Some people become autonomous robots. I've seen other people shaking like a dog shit and a razor blade. Yeah. And probably everything in between. Yeah. So did you do like any of the high risk officer courses or high risk threat or any of those types of things?

like the... Why would I go through an high-risk officer course? I was a fake officer. Well, no, but I mean, you know, like... No. Oh, okay. Have you heard of that course?

Probably won't be very useful to talk about it if you haven't heard of it. But it's just like... No, but I feel like the guys who went over and were doing ASO type stuff were probably the ones who would do that. Yeah, they would be the ones who would do that. Yeah. I'd never touch that world. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, those were interesting courses, too. It's just like a hyperbolic version of Sear where the expectation is you're going to get caught or you're going to get pulled into something. secondary in an airport or you're going to be under scrutiny while you're in a, you know, a theater. Is there a benefit in the civilian world to those courses when from maybe just a job interview perspective or communication skills?

Or is it very specific to somebody trying to elicit information from you? I mean, it's specific to really hammering home the tenets of resistance, which you know some things about. Yeah. But then they kind of up the ante and up the stakes. and then, you know, you do like a much longer, like evasion portion is far longer. Like, you know, I think I did like 20-some miles. Really?

Yeah. And you're under a timeline. And I, again, I think I said this last time I was here. I never got like the briefing from the military where you were like, they were like, here's the stuff you can talk about. Here's the stuff you can talk about. I always just go broad just to stay safe. Yeah.

So it was just all of the things that you learned there. but the pressure cooker was turned up. Yeah. And then, you know. Do you think it helps you in the civilian world? Those courses, though, when it comes to, again, just sitting down and talking with people or being able to hold a conversation? Yeah, I think it helps.

I think it helps you recognize when you're detracting during, when you're having a conversation where you're obviously trying to withhold something and you're identifying that yourself. So like your telltale time. Yes. Your telltale signs or. when you get caught up on your own words or you're trying to think about what to say, it helps with prep.

I think that thing out of all of those, like, and again, I said this last time, but I feel in a special amount of pressure now to say it. I was never a long tabber. I was never a ranger. I was never the cool guy. I was a nerd for cool guys. And I was a nerd for, you know, regular guys for a long time. And I would say, like any course, you'll get told you're going to do something.

crazy or in one case you're you're not told when it's ending you're just told you've got to go this way for a long time and you think like I'm never going to make it through this and then you make it through those things and you're like like any tough course right like yeah it's tough when they don't tell you the end state though that's an easier way to break people it is and but I think what it did for me at least was and again like I would I would say this is this is like compared to the other courses of military officers offers being, you know, something like, you know, Delta selection or something like that, which is probably like on that, or the A plus of this is going to suck.

I would say those courses are probably like a C plus, but or a B minus, but they're different though. Like what you're talking about is more physiological or psychological than physiological. Yeah, but it definitely, I think, I don't remember who said it, but someone said something long lines of it's a shame when a guy goes through life and he never really pushes himself or finds out what his what his limits are. You definitely get to get near some limits or, you know, it's not a limit if you exceed it, but you know what I'm saying. Like you can push yourself, you find out that you can push yourself a lot farther than you thought you could and still

maintain some mental composition while you're doing it because, you know, right after you get swallowed up and then now you're being interrogated and you haven't eaten in a few days and you're and you're really hazy about everything and you really, then it becomes actually like, I need to rely on the training because it's all I've got right now. So that type of stuff probably taught me that more than anything out of it and just, you know,

I'd like to say there's some crazy pearl of wisdom I could give you other than that and just really not. I call it bending yourself before the world bends you. You find out you're pretty resilient. Yeah, yeah. I remember at that course, you know, you're, There's kind of two paths. You can just tell the truth up front or you can just lie about everything and like,

this is who I am and so and so. And this is what I'm doing here. They brought another member. I think I went the second path where I was just making shit up. And I mean, you know, they gave us some backstory, which I can't even begin to remember before we got in the back of the U-Haul truck, which should have been a massive ticker-tape parade of red flags. It's something about to happen. And so I think I had stuck with this story.

and I'm just bullshitting my ass off and making stuff up. And they bring in another member of my class. I remember the guy saying to me, he goes, don't say a fucking word. So they bring the other guy in. They're like, who is this? And they're like, that's Andy's Thumb. He's part of my class. I'm like, God damn.

Right away. What the fuck, man? I thought we were in this together. Yeah, it was hilarious. I mean, they just completely parsed apart anything that I was saying. And then the cool thing is there was a lot of classroom stuff where they would do, I'll call them interviews. But you're in this fish bowl.

Yeah, the fish bowling. Yeah. And you're trying to take it serious, but like your entire class is laughing at you. Well, they're laughing at you because you're such an idiot and you're deviating from what they are teaching you. So you're just getting pegged into a corner. Yeah. And it's like it's really hard to take anything serious when you can hear through the glass your classmates fucking laughing. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We did that too. And the other thing, too, was for the fish bowling. And maybe they added this later, but they locked you up for a significant amount of time before the fish bowling. Oh, they did not do. So you were, you were pretty tired, pretty hungry, and then you got

fishbowled. And then, you know, then everybody gets to play Monday morning quarterback, which is fun. What do you think the most valuable course you went to while you were in the military that helped you in civilian life thus far? Oh, man, I've never been asked that question. I haven't thought about it that much either. The most valuable course that I went to in the military that prepared me for like maybe the broadest Venn diagram. overlap where it helped you with your military skills, but surprisingly or not surprisingly, has also transcended that role and has helped you in the civilian world? I mean, definitely that high-risk officers course would be one of them, again, just from the

perspective of understanding some limits about yourself, understanding what kind of person you are when you're tired and down and out. But I would say this isn't going to be the answer. want to hear, but we have in the Army, like, what's called, well, I don't know what it's called now. It's changed name like three or four times, but they had like PLDC, primary leadership development course. That was when you became an E5. You went to that course.

I was a really, I think I said this last time, so I'll brush over it quickly, but I was a really poor enlisted soldier in that I had no tact. And I did learn a lot in that course because it's, I think it was a month long, which like most military courses, it probably needed to be 11 days or 12 days to get everything in. But I had some pretty good small group leaders in that one. Like, one guy I actually stayed in contact with that, you know, taught me a lot about leadership and kind of helped me. That school actually prepared me for becoming an NCO.

But I think it was, you know, I think most guys would say I went to that course and it was BS or I didn't learn anything. But I had a pretty good small group leader. A guy stayed in contact with an NCO who I thought was really squared away. and really kind of helped me understand tact and what leadership means. Even when I was an NCO, I was a crappy leader in that, like, I just, especially when I was younger, I was really disagreeable, didn't have a lot of time for other people's problems. I thought the military was super simple, and I had a rubric for everything, and I pounded people over the head with it.

It just wasn't good, it wasn't well received by anyone ever. I've got some pretty funny stories about that, actually. Well, I'll tell one. Here's a good illustration. Here's a good illustration of this. And I'm sure somebody that I served with will watch this podcast and be like, yeah, I was there when this happened. So I was waiting for my clearance. I had to get an extra level of clearance that I didn't have when I got to this job.

And while I was waiting for the investigation, like they had to fly people out, do the investigation, all that stuff. But it was another level on top of the clearance that I already had. And I couldn't work in the job that was supposed to be in until there was no interim status. They weren't going to let me sit in there. Yeah, it was just like you have to be fully clear. in order to do this job. So I was doing correspondence, what we call the S-1 shop in the Army.

Admin. And I got into being the awards guy. So I processed all the 638s, all the awards. I was like 20 or something like that or 21. And it was my job when we were doing the award ceremonies to get everyone lined up, get all the little like binder clips on the award. so they could put stuff on the, you know, get everything.

Yeah, tell the colonel, like, here's what so-and-so did. Oh, boy. You know, all of that type of stuff. So he had something to say when he went on stage. And at this time, I was that guy. Like, you're messed up, you're fat, your boots look like crap. Your uniform's not pressed. You're late all the time.

You're a piece of shit. Strong. And just always, I was so bad, dude. I can't tell you how bad I was. And, and so. we were doing this award ceremony and I was getting, I was being told that I was getting my clearance, I was going to be leaving this place.

And that they're putting me in for an award for my time that I was spending, doing the paperwork, BS. So this all checks out so far. One thing I knew was when someone's going to get an award who's like on the adjutant's staff or who had worked in the S1 shop, they wouldn't tell that guy like so-and-so is getting an award. So we're going to keep it from them. Colonel will call them up,

talk about great things, and it'll be a surprise. So I'm sitting in the theater and I'm sitting next to my buddy Coral who was, you know, pretty much in the same place I was at that point. Like on paper we were great soldiers. We went to boards. Yes, sir, no, sir. Three bags full. Everyone hated us. And I thought I heard the adjutant say my name.

And we're in a post theater and it's a battalion. So there's probably a thousand or so people in there or maybe 400. It was actually a provisional battalion. So I think he's a little smaller. But, and I was like, hey, dude, did he just say my name? And he's like, I don't know. And I was like, I think he said my name. He's like, well, you better run up there.

Oh, boy. Because if they said your name and you're not up there, like they're going to fuck you up. Sorry. I'm cool to swear, right? Of course, right? Last I checked. I know. I just feel weird swearing on podcasts.

Why? I don't know. So I run up there and I'm like, yeah, I'm getting my award. I'm going to my job or whatever. I'm super excited. And everyone's in the crowd. 70% of them don't like me. They don't like having to deal with me.

They don't like seeing me because in a military intelligence unit, a lot of people are overweight. A lot of people are not what you would call your premier-looking soldiers. Meal Team Six? Greenpeace. Yeah. Yes. And so I'm sending up there.

They're going down the line. And the battalion commander and the Sergeant Major are miced up. And they get to me. Okay. So at least you're not standing up there alone. No, there's a whole line of people. and I was the last guy. Okay.

So I'm like standing up there at a position of attention, like waiting for my award, beaming face, like so excited. I had no ribbons or medals to speak of it this time. And over the, like the microphone, you can hear the Sergeant Major like, did you call Thompson? And the battalion commander's like, I didn't call Thompson. And then the guy, the agent's name was Sam. He's like, Sam, did you call Thompson?

And I'm sweating. Like, I feel the sweat now. He's like, I didn't call Thompson. And then Sarat Major was like, okay. asshole is this kid. It looks at me. He's like, why are you up here? And I'm like, I thought I was getting a war. And the whole place broke out and laughter. Yes. And laughed for probably 10 minutes. Like it didn't stop. Like I was a core memory. Yeah, this is a comeuppance for me is what it was. And I just, I think I actually went home and like sobbed. I was so upset, right? Like I was just

young impressionable soldier, joined at 17, didn't know crap about the world. And, And like for all the times people, I'd poke people in the eyes. Like I was getting it back in spades. Yep. And anyway, shortly after that, I went to PLDC. And I knew I needed to grow. I knew if there was one thing I knew, I knew that I needed to become a better soldier in order to become an NCO. Or at least be an effective NCO or a good one.

And I actually learned like what proper leadership looks like, what accountability looks like, protecting your guys. you know, if somebody in your squad has a success, it's their success. If someone in your squad fails, it's your failure. If I point a finger at you, I got three pointing back at myself. Just all of those, like, kind of core tenets of leadership. So, and that was pretty early in my career. But also was eye-opening for me because then I realized it's kind of like you ever sing a song lyric wrong a lot of times, then you hear or read the lyrics and you're like,

that's what that lyric says? Yeah. that was kind of my also like, that's what leadership is. Like I finally figured it out. So the scales kind of fell away. And then my, I would say my military career at that point oriented in a much better direction. Yeah.

Than it was before that. Because I wasn't going anywhere before that. So that's good. Yeah, it was good. Isn't it amazing how things can hurt that much from so long ago? Oh, man. It's still,

I still get like kind of anxious talking about it today because it was so funny. Core memories. Oh, I would laugh. I mean, I would laugh at myself so hard. I was just talking my son about the morning, the morning when you were driving. I was going to go drop him off. And I was telling him about, like, if I could go back and, like, I just need you to listen

to like 15% of what I say, 20% of what I say. If you can take 20% of what I'm telling you right now, you will be so dangerous and so capable in five years. And he's just kind of, he doesn't say it. But he's like, you're an idiot, dad. Like, I know. I know the same thing if we were in that spot. I agree with you.

I try so hard to put. the lessons learned from my mistakes into my kids. I think it's our biggest responsibility as fathers. I think they've invented a Teflon umbrella. Yeah. And they just are fucking about through life. Yeah. And I,

now I'm of the thought of, I can do the best I can to probably keep him out of jail. And then anything beyond that, I guess you have to hit the guardrails from time to time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you're not going to listen to dad, right?

I mean, it's just we are. Uncool. Pearls though. I have galactically messed up in every aspect of my life. Why not learn from me? Yeah. And that's what I tell them all the time.

Like, I've, if name an aspect of interpersonal relationship dynamics, I have messed it up in spades. And I've only in the past maybe seven years or so, I wouldn't say figured it out, but I've reduced entropy to a level to where my life is tolerable. Because I was really,

even through my military, even through the first 10 years in my military career, constantly cutting corners. Not cutting corners in like a shitbag way, but cutting corners and like, I'm just trying to get home. I'm trying to do this, trying to do that. Like just, you know. Minimum amount of effort. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So just if I could just get my son, you know, 15, 20% of it. My daughters are all perfect, which is, and I don't say, I think most guys say that, like their daughters are pretty good because women mature or faster, or at least I think they're pretty good. It could be subjective. I have an 18-year-old.

I have a 14-year-old and a 7-year-old. They're just all pretty good kids. They listen in school. They get good grades. If I tell them to do something, they do it. My son is just like a chip off the old block. Yeah. It just doesn't listen.

More of a blunt object? Yeah. Yes. And he's smart. He's capable. He loves talking about like deep subjects. And when I can get him on those tangents, I really enjoy spending time with them. but 95% of the time, dad's an idiot, like anything I can learn, you know, my biggest mistake

with him was probably giving him a phone before 17 or 16. Well, he would have had access to one anyway. I have some friends who have tried to restrict all electronics from their kids. If they have a friend or social circle, they're on electronics. Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to do it with my other ones. I did it pretty successfully with my oldest, but, you know, it's just, again, I feel like I'm in a therapy session right now, but it's just.

However much I can help him avoid all of the pitfalls that either ruin relationships along the way, almost sacrificed my military career for cutting a corner or covering for a guy who sold some night vision goggles or all these dumb mistakes that I've made that have just put me in, you know, positions where if I had just, you know, stuck with the truth. But whilst not simultaneously burning other people down, I'd have been a lot better off. Do you think we'll ever be cool to them again? a natural bell curve? I think I'm getting there with my oldest. Your daughter? Yeah, my oldest is like starting to ask me things. And I think she's, again, I've talked to other dads who have daughters are a little bit older and they all seem to think it was like more like 22, 23, 24. The daughter starts to come back around. All right. She's a little bit earlier. But I think it's just more of a

testament to her maturity than it is my fathering. My oldest son turns 22 in October. My middle son is 20. I can't even get my middle son to return my phone call. Me neither. I could call mine right now. If there was a million dollars if I had to call someone who's not going to answer, I'm calling my son. Yeah. A hundred percent. But if he needs anything, I'll get 15 text messages. Why aren't you answering? 17 missed calls. Question mark. My daughter does that too. God help me if I don't answer the velocity with which she's able to redial. Oh, I know. And I share my location with her on Life 360. Yeah. She knows I'm at the studio. Yeah. And she knows what I do here.

I don't care. And she'll just burn it down. And then when I answer, she'll say, oh, what are you up to? It's awesome. Yeah. And then my oldest, man, my kids are so, it's so fascinating. They share the same mix of DNA between my ex and I. And what a wildly different expression of the same mix of DNA.

My oldest, fuck, man, I still have. and crack the nut to figure him out. Just quiet, you know, maybe a little bit more introverted. If you get him going on something he's excited about, he loves talking about it, but he could sit there. He's the dude who would be so comfortable just saying nothing to the point you wonder whether or not he has human skin as a cape, like in his closet. Yeah. I mean, those are good. Those are, I mean, I like those guys. I kind of do too. My wife is, her cup is just filled with excessive social interaction. My word's not hers. I would describe. any more than two people excessive social interaction?

Mine is not. So, yeah, we have, man, she wants to go do stuff that I don't, do not want to do. Michael's seen it happen. Yes. Yeah, my son's just super disagreeable and just, you know, dad's an idiot. Contrarian almost, whatever position you take. I mean, I kind of like it in a way. I hope he doesn't, he won't listen to this podcast.

Who am I kidding? I kind of like it in a way because, you know, if there's one thing my son won't be, at least, I can say he's never going to be like a sheep or like a... Yeah, that's true. And I say that in the negative. I don't mean sheep like his in like, you know. Yeah. But, you know, he's not going to be, you know, drinking the Kool-Aid or he disagrees with

most people. He thinks he has things figured out. There's elements of that that I'm fine with. Like, I'll see other kids where they're just like, you know, whatever I'm told is gospel. Yeah. And there's probably positives to that too. But my oldest is super dutiful.

She's always on time. She's, you know, in college right now. I called her on, like, Friday night. Or no, I was going to go get her on a Friday night. I'm like, what are you doing? She's like studying. Saturday night studying. But I also worry for her, right?

Because I'm like, hey, you know, get out there and do some stuff. Also not that crazy of stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Life's going to sort it all. Yeah, it will. For the ones who follow every direction in those that don't, like life's got something for you. Yeah.

That's one thing I realize that the wood chipper of life or another way that I put at the dildo of consequences is often arrives unlobed. It's coming for both of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff.

Yeah, man. What else is going on in the world? What's new with Spartan Forge? We dropped that massive UAV update. You know, are you guys, how do you, I was curious about this. The UAV stuff. Yeah. Do you directly contract out with UAV people or are there databases of that stuff that

you can kind of buy into? It's both. Yeah. I have a bunch of questions about LiDAR, too. I'm curious how you guys get that stuff. In one instance, you throw into a pot with other people who have similar information needs, and then they fly. And you can kind of direct that some.

Although we're one of the smaller contributors, so they don't direct it as much as some of the larger ones. There's other ones where they have a repository of data. Is it an actual UAV or do they just have cameras on those flying planes? So some people are flying UAVs, and we are working right now on getting that information hosted inside of the application. That's actually something we're working on currently. But these are actually, that's just a moniker, a marketing term. It's actually airplanes, like King Airs. Okay.

Is LIDAR the same thing? Different sensor, but it's kind of same platform. So LIDAR is two sources. LIDAR is we have a commercial relationship with companies that use it for like mining, use it for logging, deforestation stuff. And then the other source is state and federal like USGS type. of repositories where they host the data and you know for about two years it was me calling around and asking for it and sending them hard drives and then putting the data on

and sending it back and but it's captured in kind of the same way civilian aircraft yeah civilian aircraft light our sensor on it yeah and now the ones that are that we deal with one of the companies flies both at the same time do they just do a checkerboard up there or like a just back and forth flight plan yeah pretty much I mean they they go off of demand yeah so So obviously they'll start on populated places first, and then they'll go from there to like, oh, there's a logging operation, and this company needs five centimeter imagery for all of this area. Yeah. They want to know what types of trees are aware down to the stump and all that type of thing, or there's a mining operation. And then there's other ones where there's like a flood.

Yeah. And they want to have the lagar data taken post-flood and before flood to, you know, look at the delta and see what's changed. And we actually worked with some companies in North Carolina during the flooding that they had there where we were spinning them up free apps and hosting their data for them. And then they were able to, they didn't have it on mobile devices. There was like one guy who had ARC GIS program running on his laptop. And they would all go to him. And then he or someone in that organization found out about us and said, while they're like doing all this to the mobile. And so we made them all like tons of free accounts.

I think we made like $15,000 or $20,000 or free accounts during that thing. I've talked with some people who have responded to natural disasters in variety of capacities, just pulling up in a vehicle, how can I help? Private aviation people who pulled in kind of the same thing. Hey, how can I help? It's pretty shocking, but I guess not surprising. There is not a standard template that they work from. It's very ad hoc when people get together.

I was having the conversation. Shit, it was last week. aviation guy and he was asking, you know, the search and rescue guys up here, are they working in degrees, minute, seconds? Are they work in MGRS, which I know listeners,

those are just different coordinate, different types of coordinate, one being latitude, longitude, the other one. MGRS means military grid reference system. It's what we use down to, you know, a one meter accuracy.

But if you're on the radio talking to somebody who works lat long and you're spitting MGRS, they're going to look at you like you have a dick run out of your forehead. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing to me that in the, US, there isn't a standard template for catastrophic events and reactions like that. Yeah, they're still not.

How is that possible? I don't know. It was crazy to me that they didn't have this available to people on a mobile application that were first responders, like literally responding to pulling someone out of their house during a flood. And they have no. They're Google Earthing or they're using Google Maps or they're using Apple Maps or they're using Onix or like all the.

And it's all way too old. or it's not it doesn't um it doesn't line up it's it's cumbersome to get between different maps on there um so I mean that was really a feather in my hat when you talk you know doing business call um college courses on business you're always talked about like corporate social responsibility that to me was like actual corporate responsibility like we're actually helping people and we're not charging a dime yeah and it's saving people's lives or it's getting people out of a bad position I just I don't understand why at least at a federal level, at least put it out there, like, hey, if you're going to be involved in a federal level response, we're rolling MGRS or Latlong.

Yeah. Let's just start that basic. Yeah. Oh, no, by the way, here's that probably WGS 84. Like, here's the mapped atom we're going to go off of, not something obscure. Because otherwise, everybody's out there legitimately trying to do their best, but they're like blind people stumbling their way through a room. Yeah.

Or, I mean, if it would happen to us in the military, I don't know if it made me not with you guys. You guys probably had more regular pace plans than we did. But, you know, we'd get in there, we'd get into somewhere and be like, well, these guys are only up on SACOM. And it's like, well, we're doing line of sight. Or these guys have aridiums. And it's like, I don't have an iridium. You know, what's the fires net on? How are we doing this? So, I mean, it got better towards the end of the war, but it was, there was definitely, you know, some of the most elite units in the military were still having a problem coordinating battle space de-confliction. wear friendlies, you know.

Most technologically advanced military in the world. Hey, are those our guys or bad guys over there? Yeah, exactly. It's not a great feeling. And then you're listening. What does that sound like? Sounds like an AK. Yeah.

Meanwhile, Andy just picked up an AK. Oh, God. Yeah. Are people go out with the wrong crypto or the... Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Or they don't roll it when they're supposed to

or somebody rolls the crypto back and then you're forward with the previous crypto, so you're trying to talk on the right freak, but you can't get. It's awesome. Yeah. And then you're coordinating a military operation, which, by the way, is still going to go down. Yeah. No better what you do.

I think the closest ever got into a panic attack is when I thought that I had lost a kick 13. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's a sensitive item. Yeah. It's supposed to be around your neck with a piece of 550 cord, which let me tell you, beyond that evolution, it certainly was. Because I figured, why not put it in the rucksack? What could happen?

What could happen? Michael, pull up an image of a K-YK-13. This fucking thing will induce panic to anybody that had to work with it. Yeah. Or the ways that you checked it with a little light flashing or how you fill it. Oh, God. I hate that box. I've never experienced.

Oh, God. I'm actually having post-traumatic stress right now. And I've been largely able to. In the era that I joined, this was probably the fastest way to end your military career. lose one of these bad boys. Yep. The Z button. Yep.

Check and off. Oh, man. A lot of guys just turned off the podcast. That's fine. It still makes me sweat the day that I thought I had lost one of these things. Because you can carry enough crypto information in there. You've got six different versions. Yep.

You can zero this thing, all sorts of stuff. And there it is right on the right-hand side as we're looking at, the old 550-cord loop that needs to go around your neck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. putting that in a rucksack and thinking you had just lost the entire theater's worth of active crypto. Yeah.

Yeah. Making someone's day horrible when that happens too. And then I think it got worse. Michael, see if you can, I think it's the CYZ 10. Yeah, crazy 10.

Yeah. This did, what made this worse is I think it just held more crypto. Yeah, it was a lot more. And didn't it also keep a record of all your mistake? Like every button push? It logged or at least the ones that I remember.

Oh, God. Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. This is the second fastest way to lose your career. So this was the evolution, Michael. We started with the green box. And I was no longer a calm guy by the time.

These things came out. But yeah, I remember them saying, you need to know what you're doing because it keeps a record of every button push. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We even had even crazier ones after that because when I deployed, well, a couple of places that I deployed, we would take a whole C-band or K-U-band satellite dish with us. Really? Which was like, you know, a 10-foot. Yeah. And it had a, I'm trying to remember the encryption device, but it was a large box. And the large box allowed you comms on, you know, Redside, NSANet, J.Wix, all of the classified ones.

And this thing, you know, held everything. And it was for those, you know, out in the middle of nowhere, setting up a T-skiff on some island in the southern Philippines or on a mountain in, you know, Afghanistan or Iraq. And that thing had everything. So you had like thermite. Straped on it at all times. Yeah, just, well, it was in a case right next to it like a like a locked, what are you called? Pelican case. Just in case.

Yeah. And they're like, you know, you do the training. Like if the base gets overrun, your job's not to run with everyone else. Your job's to make sure that thermite gets on all of these things. And then you can run. Man. Yeah. ETACOM guy was awesome.

But the crypto, the response of that was not the best part. Yeah. Yeah. I still remember to this day that sense of absolute dread. It was, in fact, in the rucksack. It had worked its way under some clothing that I also had in there. The military had a way of instilling all kinds of, but those are pretty reasonable fears. Yeah.

They would make you, like, lose sleep over your blank firing adapter. You'd be like, I don't know where my BFA is. And you're like, we've got formation anymore. It was in my bag. It's not there anymore. You're screwed, dude. Like, you're done. What do you think those things cost?

It's like several cents? 17 cents, 14 cents, something like that. A little square adapter with a twist on piece. Yeah, just so you could fire your blanks during like Edry exercises or something like that. How many, God, we would hear about these all the time, though, people bringing live ammo to blank ranges. Just a single round working its way into a magazine. Yeah. We took it seriously, you'd have all your mags out, flashlights from the senior leadership looking at all your pouches.

Oh, yeah. Anytime we did a switch from blank to live. Yeah. No, man, that's... Yeah, that'll get you puckered. Yeah, that and a crippling fear of being late. That's what the military will give you for the rest of your life. For sure, being late.

Although I've escaped that fear. Really? Yeah, I mean, it doesn't bother me as much anymore. I just try to show up on time now. How'd you work your way through? If I wasn't 10 minutes... No, laziness. If I wasn't 10 minutes early at one point, I was like...

You're just sweating. Horrible, right? And now it's like, I was on a meeting. One of my lawyers in my company is an ex-Marine Corps guy, and I showed up right on time in a meeting and he was something along and I was like Chief, I'm surprised, like he's old military Marine guy, he's, you know,

he's 10 minutes early for every call we do. Once a Marine knowledge. He has not stopped that progression at all. And I showed up right on time and I was like, yeah, I was a warrant officer. I've been retired now for like four or five years. Yeah. I'm going to be on time. Do you like being out? I love it. I mean, I just

I mean, I kind of get a little bit like miss the guys, miss mission, miss the, you know, the, all the horrible stuff that became fun in the post hoc and the final analysis, kind of miss that stuff. But I just, I really looked out in my military career that I didn't like, you know, get kicked out earlier or something like that for something stupid. Not that I was like a horrible guy or anything like that, but when you are the person, that ostensibly has all the right answers, people are always looking to poke you in the eye when I was younger. And then as I got older, it got better. But, you know, I wouldn't have been able to,

I'll just say it this way. I wouldn't have been able to do 20 years in a Cold War Army or a post-war army. Yeah. Because I was watching that happen as I was getting out. And I was getting in trouble or people were talking to me like, hey, chief, you can't say that in a briefing or you can't do the X, Y, or Z and, you know, stuff that you just didn't care about. Like, you're getting ready for deployment. That's your sole focus. Like, these are the things you need to do to get out the door, and then you get out the door. And, you know, I'm talking to friends who are still in, guys I still talk with every once in a while.

And they're like, we're definitely returning to PowerPoints and the font was wrong on this op order. And, you know, that, you know, middleman. You have a force that's grown exponentially, right? Like adding fourth battalions or whatever it is. And now you're getting out of war and they haven't really constricted to the force yet. Or maybe there's a plan to or they really haven't yet. So now you've got a bunch of E7 to E9s, W2s to W4s and O3s to O6s that are looking for work.

And they can create OER bullets by making people do more. more stuff, like, you know, command inspections every morning or something like that. That's what I'm talking about. You know, just a lot more bureaucracy has gotten in. And I just know that I wouldn't have survived then. Like, I got away with a lot. Even when I was in positions where I wasn't wearing a uniform, like for the last 10 years in my military career, I didn't wear a uniform and didn't have to shave all of that type

of thing. And I still managed to piss people off, you know, every once in a while. And I just know if I had been in during the Cold War time, it wouldn't have boated well for me. You know, I was reliable because I was willing to deploy. I was willing to go out and do things. I didn't care really. I was pretty, I was fairly good at the job. And that worked for me.

And as the war tailed off, I was like, I have pretty much time this as well as I can. What do you think a couple people have asked me about this one recently, Hegssif. lop in some heads. Like head of the, I'm not sure where a naval special warfare, but I believe it was an admiral, or it might have been a captain getting ready to get their star was just chopped in NSW. But some higher ranking people are getting

lopped off. I mean, if it's, there's a lot of context on that question. Yeah, I don't actually know the reasons for each of them, but I do know that the military is very top heavy. I generally agree with reducing the size of the upper echelons of the military. Yeah. And that if you have too many chiefs, not enough

Indians work doesn't get done. Yeah. So I genuinely or generally agree with that, that thought that we need to reduce the size of the upper ranks. And, you know, I won't mention by name, but like I watched a lot of three and four star generals doing stuff first, you know, from basically 2010 to like 2021, where I was like, what are they talking about? Like, what are we doing right now?

Like just getting into all kinds of craziness with, you know, understanding white male rage was a talking point. I remember from an officer. Yeah, white male rage. And I was just like... Is this an issue that I'm not aware of? It was an issue when I was in, apparently. In the army?

In the army. Yeah. Or like people were... I'll put it this way. I remember people being prescribed, officers being prescribed to read books about the problem with like white males. And... Of which there are many.

Yeah. But I think that problem exists across, the entire male spectrum. Yeah, but also, again, I try to look at things with an engineering mindset. And I'm like, do you mean like the white males that are sustaining like 60% of the combat casualties? Are they the problem? Like if we're going to play this game where we're looking at skin, which I hate, I abhor the game. Yeah.

I think there's more difference within genders than there is between genders. In other words, if you give me four men of different skin, colors, tones, whatever you want to call it from different. places, they're going to have much more in common than four women on the opposite side of the spectrum. In other words, myself and another black dude are going to be able to gel and get along and see things a lot more similarly than some white female that grew up in North Dakota down the road for me. So why I say that is it's not a useful way to classify people by skin color or skin type. Not that if it were useful, then maybe you could do it. It's not generally useful because people are individuals. You can talk culturally

about how certain cultures value certain things but when you join the military you get culture stripped away. You're just a soldier now. So when that stuff started happening, I was like, we're still the middle of war here, boys. Yeah. Like let's save the white male rage thing for, you know, 1998. Well, it shouldn't be forgotten. It shouldn't be forgotten in about 30% of what the military does is not useful in general.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you have stripped that off. the top. Yeah, exactly. That does remind me a lot, though. I'm glad I got to see the pre-9-11 military because at some point I knew that's what it was going to return to. It doesn't surprise me that they're having some of those issues because absent an enemy, you're just going to fight yourself or each other, which sucks, but it is the reality of it. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, we either timed it really well or really poorly depending on the optic. Yeah, I mean, obviously there, yeah, I just, I knew I wouldn't have any place. And it's not because I'm an old war horse or whatever. It's just because

I worked with war horses. I supported them. I know what the one looks like. But I fit well in doing nerd work for those guys and excelled in that capacity and was given a lot of liberal posture otherwise in my military career that I quite enjoyed. Like I wanted to do a course. It didn't matter what esoteric course I wanted to do from like 2010 until I retired if I was like, hey, I'm going to go learn JavaScript. And I need it because X, Y, and Z, like, all right, go do it. And I go off to, you know, wherever Johns Hopkins or someplace like that. And I would go.

Yeah, we did. Well, I probably can't talk exactly about all the stuff that we did with them, but we did some cool stuff with like, we'd blow up a car. And we needed to be able to pull data from the onboard PC. So you guys would go and blow a car up or whatever. Not us. Somebody like you. Someone who looked a lot like you.

He looked like an idiot monkey with a machine gun. Yeah. Anyway, big guys would do bad damage. Yeah. And then it was time for the nerd to say, where has this car been for the last three months? Well, you could have told us, like, don't shoot the center console. If you can avoid it, that'd be nice.

That's not going to be. One in the block, please. Stay away from the dashboard if you can. Have you ever seen those videos of the doorgunners? just right across the front. I don't know if those are precise weapons. Yeah. Because the entire car disappears into dust.

I feel like it's hit more than just one in the block. Yeah, so I got to learn cool stuff about how to pull that data from those types of things. But then also when there was a bullet through a hard drive, I got to learn how to pull data from those things. When does it become truly irrecoverable? I can talk about that from a non-military aspect and say, if you place a really large powered magnet on a hard drive, you can do a variety of damage that will make it cost prohibitive to recover it but you can recover it

What about so absent a magnet I'm talking just basic damage Is it always drilling it? Really? Like taking a drill and just drilling this shit out of it Like everywhere I mean absent those two things though Is data almost always recoverable?

Data if you have the money Yeah And the time and the smart guys You can recover a lot from corrupted hard drives I've done it for my buddies a couple times Even guys who, let's just, I mean, this is my limit of knowledge, the control, alt, delete. Let's say you go in, well, that doesn't work on a Mac. I've been using a Mac forever.

Let's say you go in there and you want to, you hit the factory reset button. Are you guys still able, or is not you guys, but are people still able to recover data from that? Depending on the machine, depending on how long ago it happened, and what amount of data has been wiped over it or stored over it. Yes. Today's show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Many people, to including myself, probably didn't realize that October 10th is World Mental Health Day. I have in the past, and will consistently do so moving forward, continue to talk about the impact that counseling and therapy has had on my life. I make no bones about it.

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I still have it. dot com. Betterhelp.com slash cleared hot. Back to the show. Um, but again, it all comes down to, um, your, the willingness you are to put engineers and time and money against it because you're talking about, you know, I can think of a couple times where there's probably a half million dollar bill on getting data from a, from a device. Is that just man hours? Yeah, man hours. And, you know, the way that they do it with X, they, They actually do it with an x-ray. Really?

So you're talking about going through x-raying parts of the hard drive and then taking images and then reassembling the images and then recompiling the binary, putting the ones and zeros back together, and then recreating the hard drive and then reading that hard drive. What I'm getting out of this is magnets and drills. Yeah, magnets and drills.

Or blowing it up. But even then that doesn't always do it. And I'm not talking about anything classified. You could find this online. You could Google this and do it yourself. Magnus will destroy almost everything. One of my favorite things I used to do to my closest friends would be to take breacher magnets and run their credit cards by them. And then laugh my ass off as you see them losing their shit at the past station.

This was before the days of Apple Pay where you could use your phone. I mean, if you're out of breacher magnets, you could always use some C6 or something like that. That'll get rid of some stuff on a hard drive. Yeah. But I'm telling you, those ones that we used to hold that I've almost broken my fingers, those rare earth magnets. Just one, somebody leaves their. And it's like if, A, if you leave your cat card out, which is a military ID card, I'm drawing on it in permanent marker. Comes off with an alcohol swab, so take it easy.

But if you leave your wallet out, I'm swiping your credit cards. Yeah. Because I like the fact that you ran out of gas. Yeah, it's fun. It is fun. And it's like, is it going to happen to me? Yes. But it lets them know that you were thinking about them.

That's what they should take away of it. And he was thinking about me. Yeah. And we'll come back. We'll come back full circle. Yes. That's the cost of the tickets arrived. Yeah.

I've had buddies delete files. I work with, well, they're actually two really good friends. mine, but they run a really large hunting YouTube channel. Yeah. They're called Seek 1. Seek as in like S-E-E-E-K? Yeah, one, the number. And they're about like almost a million subscribers on YouTube, I think.

And he's like, hey, dude, I just recorded a podcast and I think it deleted it. Like, can you, you know, can you recover this? So I've done that type of stuff. I've reassembled audio for them, done that type of thing. So, yeah, it's always, it's largely possible with data, especially the way that we do it and build redundancy into products. With these things in our pockets, 24-7, I mean, are we basically just human and sagan? You're jacked into the Matrix.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any sufficiently talented person with money and time could deconstruct your life. I was watching a documentary. I'm trying to remember it was, I believe it was an Israeli program, but it was a no-click exploitation. I want to say it was Pegasus or something.

Yeah, it was Pegasus. Fuck, man. Who is thinking of that stuff? Do they just have a room of people who are, I mean, just about everybody is smarter than me for clarity, but just full-on scientists figuring out ways to do this stuff? Yeah. I mean, they got guys like ethical hackers they call them or people that sit around in labs all day and build work called zero days. So they'll find a fatal flaw in software or firmware. Yeah.

Software mostly. And they won't tell the company. They'll just build the exploits. The Abu bad guys ever carrying that type of. Oh, they just put it on the shelf. Put it on the shelf and hold it. And then once you need it, and that's why they call it a zero day.

Speaking of exploits, how dope was the pager bombs? I mean, chef's kiss. Yeah, chef's kiss. A masterclass. What do you think was the number that showed up when they looked at their pager?

What would you have gone with? 911? No. I would have thought of something a lot more. Local relevance there, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if it were me doing it, I would have put 9-11-1 on there. But I don't know.

I'd tell you what, I'd call you and ask you what number I should put on there because I feel like you could probably come up with a pretty good one. I need a few seconds to noodle on it, but I'm pretty certain. Yeah, yeah, for sure. What? I mean, you want to talk about a combined human, singeat operation? Yeah. Damn.

Because I am not aware of them smoking anybody that they didn't mean to. One of those pagers ending up in the wrong hands. No. There's layers to that. I mean, they had to figure out who was going to go where. Logistics. They had their hands on them. They had logistics, shell companies.

Yeah. Engineering placement access. You got to give it to them. It was amazing. It was great. I mean, I generally, and I think I talked about this last time I was on the podcast, I'm not really interested in anyone else's fight other than our own. Yeah.

But I appreciate the way that they do war. You got to give them props for that particular one. Yeah. Yeah. There's this weird retarded thing. going around the news where we talk about proportionality. Yeah. It's weird because it's weird because we'll say,

Ukraine shouldn't be proportional at all. Right? Because they need to elevate. Yeah. But Israel, they need to be proportional. And strip the country, strip the countries out. Anytime you're talking about war,

proportionality is not, there's no war that you should engage in where you talk about proportionality. It's like the Japan bombed this on Pearl Harbor. So now we're going to go bomb that exact, amount of ships in their harbors? Yeah. Like, no, you wipe them off the facel of earth.

I can understand it. The Japan example is a good one. You know, the dropping of the atomic bombs. There's people are going to get wrapped up in that. Yeah, oh, yeah. When fast forwarding to the, you know, the post-2000s, I can understand the conversation when you're fighting an insurgency that's in and amongst civilians.

Like, if they shoot at you with an AK, do you need a 2,000-pound J-DM on a village? Probably not. I understand that level of proportionality. I'm not saying, again, I stripped away countries. Yeah, that's true. I'm just talking about any time I'm going to go to war, and I said this on in your last podcast, my threshold for war is excruciatingly high.

Agreed. Like excruciatingly high. But once that's met, then everyone dies that I can get a hand on. But again, my threshold's very high. I just, the idea of proportionality to me, it's like, to me, that's how you get Stalingrad. That's how you get Verdun. Yeah.

You get trench warfare where people, moving a foot a day. Nothing's really happening. And when people, you know, people will die and not even know what was going on. And that's not a way, to me, it's not a way to prosecute war. And I'm not, again, speaking about Israel, Palestine. I'm just talking about the thought of war, you know, quick, fast, decisive, and disincentivize anybody from ever wanting to go to war with you again. Yeah. And in that, my hope is that you can prevent war. So. When an answer this as broadly as you want to. I look at this through when I exited. I never once thought about commercial off-the-shelf drones dropping ordinance. I never once had that thought. Yeah. And you were

at a place where you guys were nerded out on some stuff and thinking ahead. Had you guys started looking at that or is that an evolution even since you've been out? There were talks about it when I was getting out. Obviously the Russo or the Russian Ukraine, almost said Russo-Ukraine. And the Russian Ukraine war elevated that because, you know, for the amount of explosives that it took to execute the kind of effects that you could only get from a hellfire, you're now getting from a- They came out of the trucks. Yes. And again, you want to talk about another great operation? The truck drivers, apparently, from what I've been able to determine, had no idea that they were actually carrying that cargo.

I know. Do that would keep me up at night. Well done. Yeah. But again, I wouldn't want to have any part of that. Like, I don't want to go to, like, obviously. we're going to come over the ways to defeat that, right? Yeah.

It's a bell curve that you need to get in front of. And I'm sure that we're doing that. I know we are. And I'm not being told that. I'm just saying, you see a threat on the horizon. You're like, we've got to nail this down right now. The rational military forward thinkers are going to look at that and try to solve the problem. Yeah, and they will.

And there are people out there who do that. I knew some of the guys who do that type of stuff. But that is a terrifying. I just, I would not want to get anywhere near that. Just the sound. Again, maybe they're not targeting your trench today. Right. But have you seen those pictures of the fields of fiber optic cable?

Yeah. And you just constantly, because those drones have such a distinct noise too. Yeah. I can't even, and again, they're in trenches. So again, we're almost back to Stalingrad. Right. So we're in trenches fucking fighting each other with aerial robots. Yeah.

Which I feel like that would have been helpful in Stalingrad. Way to not think of head, guys. And their amount and their ability to deletrector. deliver the kinetic effects that used to cost us $100,000, $200,000. They're dropping single grenades down gun turrets and tanks from hundreds of feet. Yeah, I know. Just that way that they're figuring how to aim that stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, it's insane. But then also to deliver cyber effects and to counter cyber effects. You know, we used to worry about jammers. Look at that shit. Yeah. It's stressful. I'm so glad I'm not anywhere near or a part of any of this. But do you think that that type of warfare, now that the entire,

world has seen this? Do you think that there is a capable nation that is not developing that, or at least thinking about this? I mean, is this, do you think this is not a capable one? Do you think this is the new standard though? I think it's going to, it's going to even the playing field for people that don't have the money in a way that, you know, money almost becomes less of a force multiplier than it used to. So you're going to have asymmetric threats that are going to have a lot more core capability than they did 10 years ago because anybody, now. You can train anybody on those drones in a few minutes. Have you ever seen the drone shows they do in China? I have not seen that, but I can imagine. I just, so it's like 10,000 drones and

they're dragons flying through the air and fighting each other. I just imagine. Oh, those, yes. I've seen those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So let's just go ahead and strap some ordinance to that. And then how do you, how do you defend against that, whatever, they put it on a vessel. And then from my understanding, they're not doing swarm type stuff in Ukraine. Obviously, those trucks and they all kind of seemed like went to different targets because they were trying to target their strategic capability. How do you defend against 10,000 drones that if I was in charge,

I would make them look like a dragon or like a dolphin coming at your ship? What the fuck do you do? Brute force jamming. So somebody is going to have to be sampling. So I won't try to get too technical. Yeah. But there's a signal envelope that those drones operate off of.

Someone will have to sample that signal envelope and determine in what band of the RF spectrum they're operating. And then, you know, like we did with the warlocks back in the day, you know, the IED. Yeah. Same thing. Yeah. And, you know, pluck those things out of the sky or make them useless in the air. Or develop zero days to implant their technology so that before those drones ever get off the ground.

That's probably what I would be working on if I were still in right now is, hey, what is the UAV fleet look like in this country? and then have a firm understanding of the UAVs of the developing and then go pay somebody to go and go get me a couple and then take those back to Maryland somewhere and figure out how we can implant this thing and make it, you know, knock it off the battlefield. And I'm sure there are people doing that. Again, I don't have tacit knowledge of that.

But I know that's how it worked in the past, so I assume that's how it's working now. Again, thankfully there's people smarter than me. I'd be like, I'll just go to the gun store and get like some box and nine mill rounds, You know, and I'll just put that in the safe because I'm not so good against drones. I'll just save that from somebody tries to come to my house. Right.

It's frightening. And it's only going to get worse. Well, it seems like it's evolving at a velocity that is hard to actually kind of keep track of. Yeah, for sure. I'm interested. I wonder if those, you know, those autonomous like dogs and humanoid robots. I wonder how far away we are from that stuff. I mean, autonomous, I don't know.

But like the, I've seen videos of like, you know, infantry squads moving with, a like a dog like robot carrying a lot of their kit or their gear, their heavier stuff. They made movies about this that we watched when we were kids. Yeah, they warned us about all this. Sky Night become aware on August 29th at 1.30 p.m. It became fully aware. God. Team Model 101.

If he was eligible, I think he might be voted in his president. If you're eligible? I think he would have a shot. What epic of Arnold are we talking about? Like, are we talking like a... I would like to see Conan just used the gills on chicken breast and broccoli. Yeah. Because it's all natural.

Yeah. To see your enemy, living before you, to hear the lamentations of the women. I mean, how long was he governor for? Like eight years? Six or eight, yeah. Something like that. And he did a pretty good job, I think. I could see him rallying enough people.

Yeah, the only thing that sticks out for me that probably wouldn't bode well for guys like me is, I don't care about your freedoms during COVID. that went over like a fart in church for me. Yeah. A lot of Arnold posters came down that day for me. Yeah. People are imperfect. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

And you know what? I hyper overreacted to COVID in the early onset stages just because my wife has cystic fibrosis. Yeah. And I didn't want her to be patient zero for the lung killing virus. Oh, did you go lockdown? Orgid's. Oh, we went hard lockdown. Were you microwaving your mail?

No, I was putting, if I ordered food, it wouldn't, in the oven at like 460 degrees before we ate it. What were you trying to kill other than everything? Other viruses and bacteria that might be on from the pizza guy. This, now, again, this was about- Looking back, what's the craziest shit you did? I would go grocery shopping for my wife. I had a workout mat with like a pull-a-bar and a rowing machine.

I place all the food out there and I'd wipe it down before it went in the house. Yeah. This is very- Very early in it, right? And once the data started coming out about how actually people with CF. There's something about CF where there's a gene that actually makes them handle COVID better than other people did.

Don't quote me. I'm not 100% sure on that. But the sign started coming out that it wasn't a killer for people of CF. And then I just was like, I'm done, like walking around without a mask, acting like a total asshole. Because I wasn't worried about myself. I was worried about her. I just didn't want her to be patient zero.

I had a dear friend of mine whose dad had gotten it early and died in like two weeks. or like 10 days or something like that. And I was like, man, I do not want to go through this experiment with my wife. So that really motivated me to try to protect her as much as I could. And just at that point, I still trusted the government. I still trusted that scientists were doing the best by people. I trusted that. In 2021, you trusted the government?

At that point, I trusted. You worked for the government for 20 years. Yeah, I know. I trusted the scientific establishment to the point where I thought that we were, I didn't understand we were getting gene therapy done on. us. Like, I knew how to read studies. I was reading published studies as they're coming out. Yeah. And what I mean by that is I have a fair understanding of statistics. I understand how control groups work. Yeah. I understand, you know, I was reading all of the science. And I was just

thinking to myself, we're in a pandemic. This isn't screwing around to inflate the currency. This is a pandemic. And so I was loaning them a lot more credit than I should have. How do you view it now? We were like, how crazy can I sound? Like, as crazy as you've heard people get about COVID, I'm probably 80% of the way there. I believe it was made, I believe it was made in the lab. I believe it was released. Whether or not it was intentional, I don't know.

But once it was out there, they were trying to spread it. And they were like, well, if we got this thing, we might as well use it. To me, the Chinese looked at COVID like a rocket. It's there to be shot. So if it's out there now, send them all of the U.S. I remember being on a flight very, very early on before. Maybe people were mentioning that COVID was happening, or maybe people, I don't remember exactly,

I want to say it was February, and I don't remember the exact timeline. But everyone was flying, no one has worn masks right before it. Now I was flying back from Florida, and I was on a plane with a bunch of Chinese people. And I got so sick right afterwards for like 12 days. Like, I've never been this sick in my life. I did not know it was COVID. I just thought I had a really bad flu.

Yeah. It was likely COVID. And I was just down and out. And I do believe that people were being shipped over here and that there was one of those things where it was like, they're the Chinese Communist Party. They have a nail. They want to hit it with a hammer.

I like it. So you have a tinfoil hat and like a three-piece suit. Yeah, yeah. I like it. In that regard. Again, I can be proven wrong by all of this. But I do believe that. it was

purposely made and whether or not it was purposely let out once it was out, they decided they'd do as much damage with it as they could. Well, no personal belief.

I think there is probably some debate as to whether or not it was accidental or intentional. I think at this point it's pretty well documented that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a likely origin spot as opposed to the wet food market that was several blocks away.

It was definitely that. But whatever. Yeah, I do wonder, though, if it was accidental or intentional because there's some pretty good information out there about the lack of a, or is it the lack or basically missing safety protocols that were supposed to exist in that type of lab. It was interesting. It was a really telling exercise and fear. Yeah. I don't know if people had ever really been exosentially scared that much ever. But I feel like, you know, it doesn't seem as if it was designed to be a species ender.

No. But I think because of the way that the U.S., and I can only speak for the U.S. is handling of it, of the messaging changing every other, instead of people in charge just saying we don't actually know. Yeah. This is the concrete guidance for the day. And then this. And so now, and then it got to the place where I think they burned the vast majority of their capital when it came to trust. Sure did. Which I'm for.

Well, I don't trust the government. Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of reasons you can point out to not trust the government. Let's say whatever, not from Wuhan. Let's say there is a wet market somewhere where, you know, penguins and bats are having sexual relations and we have a bat galen or whatever it is and somebody eats it. If it actually had the let's say that they were estimating it. And let's say that happens again. But now people distrust our government so much because of how it was handled.

And they probably should be listening to them. But they say, ooh, I have something for you. Deuces because of what they did last time. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like I don't know where to go from there because they certainly earned the right to have trust be just completely liquidated. Yeah. I mean, we do a whole different podcast on this.

I have an addictive personality. I did it 100 of reading about this. I do believe that there was intentional misinformation. And I also believe, you know, I've heard it. I don't remember who the quotes attributed to you, but like never let a good crisis go to waste. Go to waste. And, you know, the inflating of the currency, the centralization. of power, all of the lobbying that happens with the, you know, Pfizer and all of these other people,

all of them getting no attribution for, you know, the way that this thing was rolled out. Essentially to hold harmless in perpetuity. Yeah, and then we fund all of their science and then they keep all the profits. And I still was just getting a prescription the other day and it had like make sure you get your COVID vaccine on the bottom of the prescription. I was like, what is this gobbly gook? Like, what are we doing here? I guess if you're an at-risk person, consider it.

Yeah, sure. But yeah, that is actually my worry that people have lost so much faith and trust that if something were to actually happen, we would cut off her own nose to spite our face. They'd be so pissed at the government for what they did last time that they'd have no faith in, and then it'd be too late. Yeah, I mean, I hope they're doing an after-action report here. What was supposed to happen? What would wrong?

What went right? Like, I hope the government's like, how can you pair? government with. I hope they're doing the right thing. I just said hope. I didn't say I think they are. You know 100% that they're not. No, I know. And if they did, that would be a document that would be shared only in the skiff of some kind. Yeah, and never seen by the other day. No, no. It's so frustrating. It's so frustrating. Good old COVID-19. Fun times. It was fun. This was a good place to weather it. I actually kind of enjoyed it. Once it, like, once people were all really lockdown and stuff, I've got to be honest. I kind of enjoyed not having to deal with people.

People think often that I'm like a social butterfly or whatever. Yeah. This type of stuff actually wears me out to the nth degree. And for me, it's like being in a tree stand or being alone somewhere or focusing on a task or doing something is where I recharge. And I liked it because I got to, I got to focus on Spartan Forge while I was still active duty military. Like we were doing like two or three meetings a day. Yeah. And then, you know, 2 p.m. there ain't nothing going on. So I shifted right into working on Spartan Forge while I was in the military. And, you know, that really hard part, I think, for a lot of investments or startups is, you know, developing a concept, getting a minimally viable product that's, you know, ready for some type of prime time, whether it's to get users

to prove a concept or to get investment. And I got to get subsidized by the U.S. government while I was doing that because I was still a soldier accountable. You know, I went and did my calls every day. And then after the calls were over, like nobody did calls after 2 p.m. And you just sit there through the call and I was doing other stuff. And I still did my job, but nobody was going into work. It is the best aviation app not designed in any way, shape, or form for aviation. Well, I appreciate that.

Like I said, there's industry standard stuff out there and most pilots would recognize for flight, which I think was purchased by Boeing some time ago. they purchased the underlying Jeppison Maps off, whatever. It's somehow associated with that. But as with almost any tool, it has its limits. And I've told you this offline many times. Or actually I've talked about it on the show too. The LIDAR feature for me, the ability to look at stuff without the vegetation on there.

And then being able to slide the bar where you can see the sun that helps me set up the direction. I'm going to come in for an approach. Like, here's the thought. Don't be staring into the sun when you're trying to leave an helicopter. You know who's an idiot? Who does that all the time still, not realizing I could just come in from the the other direction. Yeah, I wasn't selected for my intelligence.

No, it's cool. I'm going to build out some of those other use cases. They're working on it right now. And we'll be having a conversation with it here in probably the next few months. But, you know, my most important role in the company is a product owner to developing, you know, more than even more and more important than being a CEO, which really is not that important is the product owner. It's like, what is it going to be? What's it going to look like, the form and fashion, all that type of thing. And then from that is, all right, if I'm going to do a Spartan Forge, you know, aviation or Spartan Forge this or that.

I don't even know if you need to branch it off to aviation. I think the tools there. Well, what I was actually envisioning was, what I was actually envisioning was a skin. So like when you first launch the app, like, what are you going to be using this for? Yeah. And then maybe like the three line menu, you could toggle because there's some stuff that hunters will just never use that in aviation guy is bread and better. 100%. So if you have skins inside of there, I'm still thinking it through exactly how we're going to do it.

And on the inverse of that is true to, there's some hunting stuff that aviation guys would never use. We'll just never use it. They'll just cloud the screen for them. Or just making a fully customizable GUI, but then that involves training users, which is difficult. Like, especially when people are trained on certain ways of doing things. You more or less want to opinionate your approach and then have a good product owner helping you do that. So like you, like when I'm in a helicopter, I've got my right hand here and I can do this and here's what I'm looking for. Then you opinionate that development, the UI and the U.S.

Yeah. And that's been probably one of my biggest learning curves because when I was making stuff in the military that had any UI or UX. I just got to force it on the soldier and then call them stupid if they didn't understand it. That's a good model. Yeah, but I wouldn't scale that in a for-profit model. It never would work. But I kind of started that way. Yeah.

And like, well, I can do this better, not realizing that even if you have better, you have to connect the string from here and there. Yeah. And say, start where they understand and then iterate, you know, and move. it in that direction or incentivize them by having product offerings that other competitor apps don't have. So then they're forced to learn it because they know the value of the feature. Now they're going to take the time to learn it. Because most times people just don't want to learn. I don't either. Yeah. So that's, you know, been 50% of my day is design and thinking through all of the instantiations and how this can be interpreted and passing it off the buddies.

You know, we have an integration environment where we have on my phone like a test version of the app that's got a bunch of bells and whistles that people aren't seeing on the production version. Yeah. And giving that to my hunting buddies and saying like, here, go and use this or I go and use it. And then how does this work well or not? Like that's a whole version of the app development pipeline that I ought to have probably

thought about more. But I just kind of thought, I'll just build the best version. And that'll be it. It's like, no, it's like you might have an ideal, but you need to get there from what they understand or you need to have features that incentivize that learning. The pragmatic approach is to do both. Do you enjoy being an entrepreneur? Yeah.

Because you're still building stuff, right? I mean, I see you're building for a different sector, but do you enjoy it at least as much as the military or more or less? I enjoy aspects of it more, and there are aspects of the military. I enjoyed more. I'm better suited for this, I think, than I was for the military. But then also, I couldn't have gotten here without the military. So that's a bit of a paradox.

I love the culture of fashion. hunting in the background of hunting. And I love, you know, we said resilience before. I love doing things for yourself, getting out there alone and unafraid, get on the side of a mountain, find an animal that's trying not to be found. I love that. I love enabling that because then you're like the meta hunter. You're helping other people hunt. And it was really difficult because when we first started the application, it was, do I want to come to the market with hunting app 2.0 that just has all of the same stuff that everybody else has. Or do I want to start small with market differentiators

knowing that they're going to have to probably use something else as backup? But I've got some features in mind that nobody else has so that will bring them on so they might have to use something else. I always make the comparison of like a truck. Like I want a Tesla, right? But I need my F-150 that gets gas. My old tremor takes gas can go 700 miles on a tank. but I like the idea of my wife tooling around town

and a Tesla that can just recharge and she's a horrible driver. Not a cyber truck. But that she can, but I can't depend on that. But it's a good way to enter in a market like this car is self-driving or will be near self-driving.

It's got these cameras all around it. It's rechargeable. The gap, the price per kilowatts cheaper than when you do the energy consumption on a truck. So for a long time and probably for the foreseeable future, people that are spending a lot of time driving around the road and stuff might want a Tesla, but they're still going to have to subsidize it with a truck.

My app was kind of the same way. I said, no, I'm going to enter the market with features that no one else has, and it might need to be, you know, you might need something else for some other things. But in the last, you know, you asked what was going on, I would say in the last few months or so, and I see it in the reviews and the customer interactions. It's now an app that can stand alone and people can depend on. Yeah. And most of this year has been spent.

on reliability, you know, being out in the woods, no signal for a long period of time. It still performs. It still works. So a lot of the updates, with the exception of like UAV and LIDAR and some of the other updates that we've done were like game units and that type of thing have been under the hood where it's just reliability, reliability, reliability. I'm trying to think in my head if there's any, from a digital realm, if there's anything that I exclusively use for anything.

And I don't I actually think there always is a case to have more than one as an example we go down to Costa Rica for Jiu jitsu. Apple Maps horrible. So you have to fire up Google Maps and it has all the local stuff on there. Podcasting what we're doing right now. There is a different experience on Spotify and you can get video on Spotify, but most people you know what I mean? They use the app, the native Apple app. I'm trying to think of anything I do that requires electronics. I don't know if there is a standalone, even photos or cameras.

or icons on your phone. There's like the, it comes with, well, you wouldn't know because you use a communist device, but. That's funny because that one was made in China and this one was made in South Korea. So we're going to assign labels. I'm trying to, so it goes into the photo app, but then all the editing stuff if you want to edit photos is all aftermarket. And there's things that do some well.

And I'm trying, I don't, I can't think of a single. thing that is a standalone. You use just Apple products, right? Pretty much, or do you have different computers and that type of thing? Just Apple. Once you're in, you're in. Yeah. I understand that. It's a complete and full ecosystem. I've thought about having to get it. I have an Apple 12 that I just use a test of the app, but something like 80% of our market is Apple. Yeah. And so it makes me think as the product owner, I should probably be running an Apple exclusively. It just speaks more to the quality of the person, the character. Yeah. Makes sense. If anyone's You've been listening this whole podcast. I'll understand that comment.

No, I don't think you're ever going to, there's no perfect thing. I'm, I am drawing a blank on anything I do on my phone where there's not two, even news, different outlets. Maybe, no, because you can get music off of Spotify as well, too, if you want to do different playlists or different things are available. Yeah, it's not only like it's possible to have a perfect standalone. And I think it's totally reasonable to always expect people will bounce back and forth a little bit. Yeah, yeah, I get it. I mean, I like Android because, well, up until like two phones ago, I would root all of my phones and run a custom operating system that I could do other things with.

Are there English words for what you just said? I would take the software, even though it's not really, well, I would take the user interface and software off the phone and replace it with my own. Okay. Is that just because you want to be Bill and because you can? Yeah, but also, like I didn't like a lot of, now I'm in hookline and synchre now, but before it was like I didn't want them having access to all of my data. Yeah.

I didn't want them having access to my internet, my browsing history. So how do you protect yourself against that now? I mean, I still run VPNs, but there are ways around. They're not easy. Yeah. Like to get around VPNs and signal, you have to be somebody. Like in order for the government, in order for a government to do it. Yeah.

They're not going to hack our signal. You know what I'm saying? Unless it's actually government owned in the first place. Well, there's, after the podcast, we can talk about that. But even still, I thought we were putting our tinful hats on. Yeah. Well, even still, it costs a lot of money to get into like, if you're running a piece of software, it's breakable.

There are no full proof pieces of software. The question becomes, is there information that whoever Nation State Actor X says wants off of your phone, are they willing to pay the amount of money that they want to get it off of there? So if you're like a high profile reporter who's maybe meeting with Russia, probably going to hack your shit. Yeah. Probably going to assume your shit's hacked. I know I've told, well, I know, oh, God, high profile people who are interviewing people, guys, you know, at our circles, their shit's hacked.

And I've told them as much. And I would say. I have some dope pictures of my miniature doxon. And if people want to spend a lot of money to hack that, I recommend it because he's amazing. Yeah. Well, you know. The only thing you're going to find on my phone, though, is an entire phone reel of just dog pictures. The, the, though, even when I was getting out, the amount that they're able to keep a lot of that stuff furtive on the device and it would even stand up to like a forensic examiner work that I did in the past where you're, you know, dumping someone's phone.

There's still ways to hide stuff and figure out, you know, I've done it on the both offensive and defensive sides. So I'm going after someone's phone or a guy like you comes back from a place where you're sure that your shit got flipped through. Yeah. And then you bring your phone to me and then I tell you like, yeah, here's what happened to your phone. Does it lead breadcrumbs when people do that stuff? Yes. Okay. Yeah.

I mean, and there are ways to get rid of those breadcums. It's just like with the IED thing and with the drone thing, right? Like the art of technology catches up to itself. Yeah. Like, you know, someone develops a cool implant that does cool shit and someone does a countermeasure to it and someone counters the countermeasure. and it's just that back and forth. And that's just the state of technology. There's things that you can do to protect yourself.

But most people that are running a VPN signal on either device, or I think there's even on Apple, there's some modes that you can get into where your phone's pretty locked down. By and large, if you're not meeting with Putin on the weekend or you're not interviewing vice presidential or presidential candidates at a regular, you know. Probably going to be okay.

You're probably going to be all right. You're probably secure. Can you run a VPN through another VPN? Yeah, you can do, yes, there's tunneling, but it doesn't really add all that much to it. That's not what I saw in the movie I watched. What movie was that? I don't know, some sci-fi shit. Well, there's certain things you can do, but by and large, if you're just Joe Schmo like me or us now, and you're listening to, well, actually, you're probably reaching.

No. Well, we've had some conversations of the past about people that you've had opportunities. to interview, and we won't say names. Which I turned down. Had you done those interviews, which is why I love you. Had you done those interviews, I would say there's a 15% chance that your shit. Yeah, you're going to hit radar there for sure. You're going to just by virtue, because, you know, we talked about earlier before, you know, placement and access.

Yeah. So the key components to human intelligence operation, you've got placement and access. Yeah, because who knows maybe it never happened again, but then also maybe it would. and then they're, you know, whatever, an ear or eye in the room. Yeah. Yeah, even, again, and I got all this off a documentary, the Pegasus thing, they were able to reverse engineer that one. It took them a long time to do it,

but now I think there's actually a company in Canada that specializes in just that particular exploit, reverse engineering it and figuring out where it came from, which is usually, how did it was, at least one of them was a text message with a link from somebody that they knew, but it was mirrored as that, but they didn't even have to click on the link. No.

Which does that just mean if they have, if they wanted to, if they have your phone number, they have you? Yes, because while that particular exploit. It's a no click. Was done on the radio chip. Oh, really? Yeah. So just by virtue of you receiving the message allowed the implant to take place, as I understood it. Again, I've only read the forensic reports that were done in the open on it.

I was an active duty when that happened. I would have had a lot more information that I probably wouldn't be able to talk about. But what I read on the internet and from people that would know or looked at the binary, it was getting done on the chip, I believe. Damn. Yeah, for a while there, nobody could figure out what was going on, how it showed up. I swear I didn't click on it. They're like, yeah, you don't have to on this one.

Yeah. Yeah. But it's just, you know, it's part and parcel with the package. If you're going to carry these devices around, that's what it's going to be. And if you're not carrying them around, it's an indicator. Well, and I don't see our society going in a direction where the utilization or reliance is going to go the other direction. I kind of think that it will. Really?

Like back to flip phones? Or no tech at all? Not no tech at all. Here's a couple of things I think about. And we can go many directions on this. But one of the things I think about is I think in a few years, I hope, I hope that in a few years, taking out, like if you and I were seeing the coffee shop before having coffee, you taking out your phone will become a social faux.

Ooh, I like that. While we're discussing things. It annoys the hell out of me. It actually probably should be one now, but it's so common. But I think it's going to get there. And the reason why I say that is because there's a younger counterculture right now, like my son, that is very anti-establishment, all of his friends and everything.

They all love Trump when he was coming out, even though, well, there's several conversation. They were simply loving Trump because all the adults that they were around in school and other places didn't like them. And it was a countercultural revolution. And younger generations, no matter what the, you know, raison d'etre of the ruling class is, they're just going to counter it. So I think there's a pretty good chance that people will view flipping, take, I could be wrong, but I've been right about a couple of these things. I can tell you ones that I've been right about in the past and my wife can back me up on these. I've made a couple good calls on the past. But I think in a few years, if we're sitting here talking and I, yeah, yeah,

which is like the most common occurrence in almost every social reaction. And you'll see it all the time. Yeah. I think people are going to start getting really annoyed with that akin to like smoking in a restaurant. Okay. It was tolerated by everybody. And then, you know, everywhere you go, everyone smoked. And then all of a sudden people started to get educated on it or people started to understand what it does to the body. And I think there, you know, there's a great author. I've read a couple of his books, Jonathan Haidt. He's got a book called The Coddling of the American Mind. And he talks about this and the effects of social media and phones on children and their brains in the development stages. And I think as this generation grows up and they are feeling

more profoundly empty, rudderless, without meaning, they will start to realize the source of a lot of that is everyone posts the best moments from their lives. Everybody's looking for likes. Everyone's looking for instant gratification. I, and I'm not an Ostradamus here, but I foresee a cultural kind of flex back where either people are not taking them out in public or there's like a phone check area and it will be looked at as a faux pa when they do it

or like this guy's an asshole or people using non-traditional devices. I don't think the flip phone will come back, but I do think it's going to become more of a faux pa. I think they would have a net incredibly positive benefit on society. Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I could be wrong.

I've had other theories like this. Some of them have come true. Some of them haven't. I did make, I mean, this is going to sound stupid, but I remember telling my wife years ago, we're going to start normalizing things like pedophilia and gender. There are some people trying. I think the vast majority of sane human beings are not on board with that. Well, the other thing I said was mutilating children was one of the ones where she's like,

we're never going to get there. This is just like before we were dating. when we were friends. Yeah. I was like, I was just, you know, in Europe for a few years, and I heard the conversations that were going on over there, and they're at Canary in the coal mine for us. Yeah, in a lot of us.

And in some ways, in Canada as well, our greatest top hat. And they all have those conversations now. And, you know, there's, you know, we're chemically neutering children. And I'm not trying to get on that subject. All I'm saying is that's something that I called early on. Yeah. When I think no one was really talking about it. I always wonder, though, how mainstream it actually is or how much we are bombarded by an incredibly vocal minority.

Yeah, that, yes. All I'm saying is that is a conversation I think when we were growing up would get your ass beaten. I don't even think people would understand the conversation when I were growing up. Yeah, but I mean, if somebody was talking, if you heard, if parents heard, we're going to start giving my kid the same shit that they give to people who are rapists and we're going to chemically neuter them or we're going to chop her breasts off. You would be, I'm calling the cops on you. Or be chased with a pitchfork. Yeah. But now, like, movie stars are trying to do it because it's all of a sudden, like, if you look at the, I saw the, I don't remember where I saw the data, but you can find it.

The amount of Hollywood actors who have gender fluid children versus their population. Statistically anomalous. It's a fact. It's way higher in Hollywood. And because it's become a virtue. because if you're extremely rich and well off and you really don't have major problems to speak of, you can introduce virtue and introduce something that either garner sympathy or admiration because you're now doing this thing with your kid where you're encouraging them to go and do X, Y, or Z.

And it's tolerant. And even to, you know, I even remember a few years ago, like it's getting a little better, but you couldn't even make a transgender joke, you know, a few years ago without getting into. Don't tell you that to Dave Chappelle. Yeah, right. Apparently is under fire for allegedly continuously showing up to comedy shows just faced, just hammered. I read something about him being a fascist the other day. Someone was like, he's a fascist now or something.

My dad was sitting in your chair a few weeks ago and decided to call some people Nazis. And I'm like, hey, buddy, that means a really particular thing. Michael was in the room. I'm like, we're going to. He tried to move on from him. I'm like, no, and going backwards. You have to have. words have to mean something.

Yeah, for sure. Those are, they fall into the category. I hear people having conversations all the time. If you get them to a place intentionally or accidentally where they feel a little bit cornered, they start reaching into the quiver for magic words. Yeah. That shut conversations down or they can't they argued against. And my theory is, first off, the noises you're making with your vocal cords,

they're not inherently going to offend me. But you can't call everybody a Nazi or a fascist unless you wanted to have absolutely no meaning. Right. That stuff is very specific. You pollute the word and make it useless. And they're not magic. I have a question for you. Can I flip it on his ear here?

Sure. How do you feel about the flag burning stuff? I actually, I think I covered this on Friday's episode. I missed that. I haven't listened yet. So you and I are really unique in comparison statistically to the percentage of population that's ever served. Not many people are ever actually issued an American flag. A lot of people, I mean, everybody has the ability to buy one, but there is a difference

between being issued and empowered to wear that in the world and doing your best to whatever degree you may think it is to be a beacon of what the country stands for. It is, I mean, they put that fucking thing over our friends and coffins. Yep. And, you know, it's the most heart-wrenching thing to watch that movement of people from the flight line onto the aircraft. And it's, I don't have the vocabulary to describe it or the funerals associated with that. So it has an immense meaning to me.

And I don't know if I would be able to tolerate it if somebody were to do that in front of me. I've never been somewhere where somebody is actively burning a flag, but they absolutely have to maintain their right to do so. Okay. So I was afraid we're about to be in disagreement, but I'm in agreement with you on that one. Just because, I mean, to me, the First Amendment is not about what I get to say or do. It's about what other people get to say and do it. And it doesn't matter if it turns my skin. I don't want anybody to do that.

It would absolutely boil my blood. But the First Amendment, there's a reason I think it starts off Numero uno. Yeah. And I think it was an absolute mistake. And it took away. And again, I do believe it's going to be challenged anyway. And I do think the checks and balances are working. You know, people are so incredibly worried about executive action, this, that is.

I'm going to look at the number of lawsuits and block and like all these things. That's the system working. I think it was a huge mistake. And I think it weakened the Constitution. Yeah, I agree. I mean, the reason I ask the question is because you said the sounds that I make with my voice. Yeah. And that's always made my thing about people who are anti-First Amendment. It's like, so if I modulate my vocal cores and force air over them, there's ways that I can do that. You won't approve of? Do tell. Because the same thing is, goes with a flag. If I take cloth and sew it together in a certain way, you think I should go to jail for a year if I set it ablaze. If I use my own shirts and jeans, and I put a flag together and it looks like the U.S.

It's got the stars and stripes and the 50 stars and it's all that. Then I go outside and burn that. Now you're saying, I could have burned it when it was all closed in the house and you would have zero problem. But when I arrange them in a certain way,

like I modulate my vocal cords in a certain way, now you have a problem. And you're willing to put me in jail and my kids won't have a father and my life's turned upside down because I'm burning this item. Well, what if it's $4?

49 stars and it's at the actual banner. What if it's 18 stars? 13 stars. Are you fine with that? And why or no, why not? Like, where does, like, me modulating my voice or sewing clothes or things together, I can make the most convincing American flag out of, you know, anything. When does it become illegal and why?

And it's reductio ad, like, serum is like, you know, if I boil this down to its constituent elements, what are you saying is illegal about this act? and why should I not be able to do it? They just a free American. Yeah, and so you're willing to jail me for that. It's a slippery slope. You're willing to jail me for sewing things in a particular way

and then setting them ablaze. That to me is, that is fascism kind of, if you ask me, in a way because you're actually trying to control narratives. My theory is especially because the flag is one thing of many. You know, people say the same thing about what they consider to be fascism or Nazism. You know, they should be deplatformed off of every. And I'm not advocating that people should go watch that content.

But I would rather know where those people are so I can be aware of that, then push them off of everything out of the spotlight and then I don't know what they're up to in the shadows. Yeah, we have to be allowed to have bad ideas so that the bad idea can die and we don't die. Yeah, leave the idiots in the light. Yeah. So we can watch them. I don't want them to go scurry off amongst another group of idiots. Or going someone's basement.

Correct. I think more dangerous things happen there in private, allowing them to, Yeah. I don't know. I also think that most outrage is completely optional. Yeah, for sure. I mean, people would probably say I have a flatter emotional range than most. I don't think that I do. I'm very emotionally impacted by a lot of things, but I try to keep it in check. Yeah. As opposed to going the other way and allowing them to drive the way I feel about things. Yeah. And so that started with me when I was young. My mother was a recovering alcoholic, and she would take me to alcoholics and honest meetings.

And not much of it stuck with me other than like the crazy stories you hear. like somebody would be like, you know, I went to bed somewhere, drunk and woke up somewhere else or went on a three-day bender, blah. Who hasn't? Like all of that crazy stuff. Who hasn't woken up? Some of these stories were pretty crazy. At least contemplate, where am I?

Yeah. But they said this prayer, the serenity prayer, which was, you know, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can. There's no difference. That stuck with me. And my wife always says, like, if I have one superpower, it's that I'm really good at, just whenever our problem arises, she will stress out about everything to the nth degree. And there's goodness in that because a lot of times I'm not stressing about anything.

And it probably could get me killed or someone I love killed or something or I'm not thinking something through. So she balances me in that way. But also it's just like I'm only going to think about the things that I can control. And I've gotten really good at it. I'm not saying it always happens. Of course, I still will freak out about things. But I usually can talk myself in two or three minutes into being like, no.

Oh, what's the task at hand? What can I change in this situation? Imagine if that was a taught skill in school. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Not that it makes it easier, because I follow the same approach often, but repetition over time. It's like any other skill. Just because you try it the first time doesn't mean it's going to change the world.

But a lifetime of being able to control yourself in that way and reorient yourself, I look at a lot of what's going on in the world, especially the division in the U.S., it's emotionally based, not logically based. For sure, for sure. And but you said about not getting, you know, fired up about, you know, having, I don't remember your words, but not getting crazy about everything. You're in control of your reaction. Outrage is optional. In other words, you're not affected by thing.

Like, what happens in the world doesn't affect you. It's your reaction to things. Yeah. Well, I can't control what happens to me, but I have 100% control and how I want. My reaction. Yeah, exactly. Which is a tough pill to swallow because people will then say, well, life isn't fair. And the answer is, yeah, it's completely not fair.

Absolutely. not fair. But we wouldn't want to be. It has a merry-go-round and cotton candy. Yeah, you wouldn't want fair. I've seen where they tried making things fair and it never works out. Well, that's because you've never seen it applied correctly. Yeah, that's right. I think it was Jefferson said if men were angels,

then we wouldn't need a constitution or a government. Yeah, they also say if your mom had balls, she'd be your dad. So, I mean, you know, it's very circular. Yep, pooping one hand, which on the other, see which one fills up fast. What do you get planned hunting-wise this year? I mean, let's get on to the important stuff. All white-tail stuff this year, like in the past, I focused on elk.

It's unacceptable. I know. The only animal that should be hunted. Well, I'm not, I don't have elk on the agenda for this year. I applied for Montana and I didn't get it. Really? Yeah. I have heard that the odds are, are they greatly favor the out of staters.

Maybe that's for higher, maybe that's for a draw district. I also drew two years in a row before this. Okay. So maybe they just figured it was my time to not draw. But, um, mostly just white tail stuff. I'm going to be doing a pig hunt in Austin next week after, or next week after, or the ninth, around the 10th or 12th or something like that. Have you Googled the temperature in Texas right now?

Yes. Okay. But unfortunately, a buddy of mine is going to be out there at the same time that I want to meet up with. All right. And I'm trying to get him a bow and get him shooting. So I'm going to take him out to archery country. My buddy Tyler runs archery country. We're going to get him on a bow, get him shooting.

And then just he's never killed anything with a bow. Hogs are a great for a start. Yeah, great for a start. And so we're going to take him out, do some hog hunting, throw some meat on the grill, go check out of the mothership. And, you know. I've yet to go. I've heard of great things, though.

It's fun. It's so much fun. The best part about it for me, obviously, the, you know, the comics are great and they're hilarious, like Ron White. Yeah. Redneck comedy tour growing up was one of my favorites. Seeing him, obviously seeing Rogan. The funny thing about Rogan is, and you know him pretty well, is I'd never really enjoyed

this comedy until I saw him alive. Really? And then when I saw it was live, like, not that it was bad. It just wasn't like, you know. There is a difference. It wasn't just like top, top tier to me. But then when I saw them live, I was like rolling on the floor. And there's something about the in-person thing.

It's way different than watching it on like Netflix. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing I really love about it is, and I think this is public knowledge, I'm 95% sure it is. You have to lock all your devices way before you go in there. Oh, do they have, is it a Faraday bag or just one you can get access to it? It's a small Faraday. I think it is a small Faraday and then it locks. They started doing those.

because of people filming stuff for their specials. Yeah. I think he was early on in that. I think he was having people do those for a few years. I love it because I get really angry when people are looking at their phones or you're looking at somebody on stage and there's 1,500 phones.

And I know I'm a disagreeable old man or whatever you want. My son gives me crap all the time because I'm always like, put your phone down. We're talking, damn it. And so going into that place, it's three hours of no phones. And you're just bullshuting with dudes.

Yeah. Last time I went was with Evan. and Matt, micro-s-f. Could he see over the seat in front of him? They gave him, he was standing in the back. He had the prime seats. He was out with us, but the black rifle guys were there at Clint trial, and we had done like a veterans adaptive shoot earlier in the day.

And then Rogan invited all of us, so we got to go and watch. And it was like going in a time machine. Like there's no phones anywhere. You're there for three or four hours, just drinks, BSing with guys. And it was like a breath of fresh air. I like didn't want to take my phone out of the case when I was getting out of that. there because I knew there was going to be 15 work messages, 20 text messages. Why can't I get a hold of you?

And I was just like, man, I don't want to turn this thing back on. And that's where I met Logan. And I ended up doing the Black Rifle podcast with him. But we met out there. And Logan actually, so for some reason when I see Logan before, he doesn't know this. So this is going to be funny. I always thought like, that guy kind of looks like a dick. He looks like a dick.

Yeah. Like, I always thought, what are the technical descriptors of a dick? I don't know. It's just my, I have a gut feeling about people. And before I met him, I was always like, that guy looks like a dick. Like, I wouldn't like him. That's really booked by its cover type stuff, Bill. I know, but I'm usually right about these things.

And I can tell you a list where I've been wrong. But I was wrong about Logan because we were into a barbecue, like, I don't remember what it's called, but it's like Rogan's favorite barbecue place. Anyway, Evan had invited all of us to go and like do a, dinner or something there. How good was it? Good. Phonomenal. Texas does barbecue right.

But this place is like I guess one of the better ones there. So you know it's like cream of the crop. And you know, I'm my carriage is quite rotund. I could put away some food and I just couldn't even walk when I got out of that place. But anyway, Logan was sitting across from me and he came up to me and he's like, hey man, are you Bill Thompson? I'm like, this isn't how this is supposed to work. Like this is the opposite.

I know who you are, sir. And he's like, I saw you on Andy's podcast. And he's like, I need to get you on my podcast. He's like, I loved that podcast. That was one of the best podcasts I've seen. And I was like, that's awesome. Logan's the best. He was my roommate on the triple seven.

But now, I mean, we talk all, I just spoke with him this morning. You know, he's got a young son. Yeah. Loving it too. I met his wife. And we did the podcast and hung out there and shot some bows and hung out. And like, I'm not often wrong. and maybe it's my own bias,

but usually when I derive that someone's a dick, I'm usually right. Not always, but sometimes. And I know when I've called it wrong, because I've called it wrong, in the past thought someone was cool and they ended up being a dick, and it's cost me.

And I've done the opposite. But anyway, Logan's like been one of the best guys, like sends me books. We talk about, you know, all kinds of craziness. He's got wild ideas. He's like you, one of those guys where you can really have,

you know, thoughtful, in-depth conversation, about things and I usually wear people out whenever I want to talk about something because I want to talk to it and trace it all the way down to first principles. Kind of like we did last time when I was here talking about like, you know, this function of the Senate, you know, people's eyes glaze over 10 minutes into the conversation. It shouldn't because they should understand how it works. Yeah. But with him, like I, you know, we can talk for an hour and a half about something super obscure

and he's super well read about a lot of things that I've only recently gotten into. And so I was totally wrong about him and he's a great dude. Logan's the best. It's funny what you said about the phones. One of the jiu-jitsu coaches I train a bunch with is Henry Aikins, who has been training with Maynard from Tool for years. And I've had the chance now to go to a couple cool tool concerts. And Maynard actually gets out there.

He'll be like, listen up, you retards. Put all your phones away. Yeah. He's like, I'll let you film the last song. Yeah. So don't worry. you're gonna he'll stop the show if he sees people up there yes the last show i was see counter revolution the last show i'm at a guy comes up to film but he had his light on

and he's saying he's just like is this your first time i remember your dad god he is i can see your dad out there with the phone the light on it is the worst we put life 6 360 on his phone just because he's getting to that age like i need to know where this crazy son of a bitch is but then he'll show up at the house and I'll I'll pull up the Life 360 I'm like dad where's your phone he goes I don't know I haven't seen it all day I kind of love that I do too

a little bit but also you know sometimes it's good to be able to call him to coordinate stuff my sister's trying to get a hold of him we got one of these watches for my daughter that you can text message and track our location on I don't think he'd wear a watch just stick it in like his wallet or something get him there trust me he doesn't he has the you want to talk about a

a stanza wallet. It is probably as thick as that green pouch. You can find some room for some CTL in there, little tracking tagging locating. I'm surprised it doesn't give him a low back problem sitting on that thing. It's like, yeah. But I love that Maynard will stop a song and call somebody out. And then at the end, he'll be like, guys, we don't do encores. This is the last song. You can pull your phones out now if you want to. I love it. And he'll say, I think it's, stupid. I think you guys are idiots, but and then it's a sea of you can see this. Everyone, everybody you're behind. You're just watching their screen. Yep, I'm an idiot. Yeah. Everybody does it. I love tool. I've never been to one of the concerts, but I listened to them for many years and

they're awesome. I have not been to a lot of concerts in my life. I think I've seen them live now three times just because of Henry. I happen to be with him when Maynard's in town. One day it was actually really cool. He invited us. It was in Salt Lake. We went and did some jiu-suitzoo before. And he's a beast, right? Isn't he really good at jiu-jitsu? So he's really, and again, I am not anybody to rate anybody's jiu-jitsu. He, I think, has to be very, very careful with who he trains with. And, like, this was before he was about to sing. Like, I'm not going to go.

Like, you know what I mean? You roll with the wrong person. They might grab and try to cross-collar him on his throat. Yeah. So he's super cautious. We just did positional stuff, which I think has to be the case for him until he has an immense amount of trust in his training partner. Yeah, sure.

Because that guy still has to go do his J-O-B later than night. Yeah. So I've never rolled with a guy full speed. I actually wouldn't want to because I would feel too nervous that I would even accidentally do something that would in any way, shape, or form prohibit him from doing what he is. I just think I heard him on a podcast talking about it. And you know when you hear some talk about Jiu-Jitsu, it's obvious whether they're not they've done it.

He may well be. I have no idea. But yeah, we got to go train for a bit. We went out to dinner and then went back to the show. We were like 10th row dead center. It took what I learned after the first time going to that show, ear plugs. Yeah. You can still hear it just as well, but I could hear for the, the following days.

Yeah, yeah. They sound identical. Live? Oh, my God. That's so awesome. I love that whenever band sound the same live as they do. There's a clip of him singing at Ozzie's last concert where they pulled all the music away and it's just his vocals.

Dude, that guy rips. Yeah. Absolutely rips. I don't think I do a workout without having tool somewhere on the playlist in the background. God, it was underneath my Peltors many a night. Yeah. on the way in on the bird. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Metallica ride the lightning for like one minute out. For him, the belt holes. Oh, God. 46 and 2, though, I'm sure final. I also loved, um, God, only because we're on a podcast. I'm going to jack this up.

Oh my God. I'm going to get so mad at myself right now. You remember as soon as we're done. A perfect circle. That his like counterband or whatever you want to call it. I never got deep. Pusiver. I never, they're all a little bit of a different flavor.

I can appreciate. almost any type of music, but Tool is a staple. And I got introduced to it. My first platoon, it was actually mandatory that you listened to Tool. There were some people who were just devout. Sounds like some good dudes. Yeah. He's only a little bit taller than Evan.

Really? And Evan could be standing under this table right now and wouldn't he be hitting his head. You do not let him get free of that at all, like almost every time he's mentioned. Have you ever seen the man? Yes. He had to get a waiver to three foot nine. Did he really have to get a waiver? I think so.

Oh, okay. That's just conjecture. I've been making up things about him to include founding his company. That's how it all started. I think that's when he and I really became close friends. I'd be on airplanes wearing black rifle shirts. And people would say, oh, man, I love your cough. I'm like, yeah, I started the company for people like you.

And then I, of course, told him about it. And then it started coming up in board meetings like, hey, Andy's telling people that he's the founder and CEO of Black Rifle. And Evan would say, well, yeah, he is. And they're like, stop. You can't say things like that. So we had to back it off a little bit. That's awesome. So only White Tail.

We got to get you back on, you've killed a note before, right? Only with a rifle, and it was a cow. I've not killed a bull. What? Yeah, I took a shot at one two years ago. And then last year, I don't think, so last year we did the helicopter drop. Yeah. Video has not been released yet.

So hold on. I'm already, vision board for 26 needs to include a bull elk. Let's go. I'm ready. Yeah. I mean, we got to put in for the Montana tag. I think it's in March or April. It's an extended period of time before the season.

Yeah. I mean, I put in for it every year, like I said. but I was thinking about putting in for harder units to draw too. There are other units that are more productive that are a little harder to draw. And then the general tag is like a 50-50. Not to interrupt you. Did you guys jump in or did the Helly land? Helly-landed.

Okay. Because I obviously am now thinking about doing exactly the same thing because may or may not have access to one. How, I'm assuming you guys chartered one to do it. Do they have any hesitation in doing it? A couple of them did. Yeah. Because it's not illegal, but it is frowned upon. Well, apparently there's a.

certification, I could misquote this. I'm going to speak as well as I remember the subject. Apparently there's a certification or some type of license or grant that you get from the state to land on BLM. And you have to land on BLM. You have to land on like a road. So wherever the BLM is, you have to find a two-track road. Okay. And the helicopter can land on the two-track road only. Only. Okay. And then can't stay for any amount of time. And then you can just throw your stuff out and leave. So now that doesn't mean you can't be 10 or 12 feet above and then just, you know. I mean, you could be a foot. Yeah, and just jump in.

I was going to say 10 or 12 feet. Why are you trying to blow your knees out? No, I know. Practice. God, man, but skin it down to the ground. Yeah. So, but we went to a spot right after we did our last podcast that we had been looking at for a long time that was public BLM surrounded by private. That's the move.

And that's why I'm asking. Yeah. Yeah. And so what ended up happening was like the second or third day, the wildfires had switched their trajectory and were coming to our spot. So we're getting ready to move on on some elk. You know, the first couple of days we just spent scouting walking around. Well, there's a 24-hour cool-off, right? So you're not allowed to hunt within 24? Yes. Okay. Yeah.

Yep. That's right. We got in there the evening before, and we didn't hunt until the next time, the same time, something like that. But by the time we had gotten a bearing and found out where the elk were, the pilot got a hold of us and said, hey, the wildfires are coming that way. And it was smoky, so we knew. So he ended up coming and getting us and we left.

And then we just had to, like, non-scout, like, we went and hunted places where we hadn't scouted. Yeah, that's tough. We didn't know the score. We didn't know where the bulls were. and I think Drew, my buddy, got in on some elk. I got close, but we didn't get it done. So I'm not even sure if they're going to release the video or not for sure. They might just because of the novelty of using a helicopter.

Sometimes the failure aspect is even better. Yeah, and they do do a lot. They released a video of me two years ago where I messed up on a bullet like 50 yards. And I got so much shit in the comments. Yeah, welcome to being a hunter. Because it was called killing. That's what they would do. Yeah.

Yeah. People have this, hunters especially, have this thing where, they are so quick to criticize people. It's probably got something to do with they've had their own problems or whatever that makes them feel better, self-petting, whatever it is. But we're one of the most catty groups, and I'm a hunter so I can say that.

They will just crap all over people because there's like, it's a long story, but long story short is, is it easier to try to replicate what someone else is doing to achieve success or just cut them down when they fail? Like, it's easier to just cut them down when they fail. So instead of... What does that say about you as a person?

I wonder. Yeah. And there's a lot of crappy people out there. Who takes the time, though, to purposely spread negativity on a video that honestly has nothing to do with them? Like, the universe will not care whether the- Well, they'll find a way to tie it to them and make it about them. And so what had happened was I was drawn down on the bull, made a cow call. It looked.

And as soon as I released the arrow, it took a giant step forward. And I hit him in the back end. I should have been closer. A million things I could have done differently. But anyway, I didn't kill the bull. And then this last year, we got close but didn't get any shots. So I don't know if they'll release the video or not. Maybe they will.

They do release a lot of videos where there's no kill. At least that's reflective of actual hunting. Yeah, exactly. And like not putting a Jesus standard on hunting is pretty important in my capacity. Your average hunter is far more unsuccessful than successful. Yeah, for sure. Sure. But most hunting films or stories don't necessarily show that. Yeah, and that's, you know, the money comes with the, you know, harvesting the animal or whatever for a lot of people.

But they release a ton of videos where they don't kill. And I think it's just important to show people not having success to let people don't, just like with social media, everyone posts their best day. I just post pictures of my dog. Yeah, you do. But honestly. A little fur missile. He's kind of some of the best part of my day. Yeah.

Mine too. Yeah. Yep, my little point, I've got pointer Leo and he's like always like down to do anytime I stand up he's like, I'm in, let's go. Oh, that dog's down to tear shit up. Yeah, let's go. I don't think he has any idea that he might be seven inches off the ground from toes to top of his back.

I think in his mind he thinks he's a great dame, but then I don't understand. It's like you haven't figured out you're looking up at the entire world. I think great dains are looking down on stuff. That dog just doesn't give a shit. I love dogs. Dogs are the best. They are indeed. Yeah.

What do you want to close that with? We've been in a couple hours. I don't even know what the hell we talked about. I'm not sure what we talked about either. Every issue under the sun. I mean, you know, people download the app, gave it a look. If they like it, if they hate it, please let me know either. I do all of the customer service.

It's super important to me. Like I told you before, my role as a product owner, I still spend two hours a morning doing customer service answering people. It's just super important to me to do that. So if people have gripes or compliments or we help them get on their first deer or shared in a father-son hunt, Those are my favorite messages to get. So let us know there.

And maybe we'll be doing elk next year this time, something like that. Yeah, we have a vision board that out. Are you planning on any elk this year? Yep. I have a tag in Utah and my tags for Montana. Awesome. Yeah, so. It's a guarantee for us.

For a non-draw district, we can get a general. It's a combo tag, an elk and deer. Yeah, it's another reason to move to Montana. It is. So, yeah, I mean, that's what we're, and then I've got white tail mostly this year. And then we're doing some traveling, a couple more podcasts that I'll be doing. and we're having a great year, which is really what I need right now, just because we've really expanded the feature set

and reinvested a lot of money back into the company, like that UAV update and the other stuff that we're doing. So just come out and check it out and hit me up on social media and I love hearing from people, and thanks for having me on. I'll try to do better job. Next time I talk to Michael about eating Snickers upside down. I'll try to throw a Spartan forge ad in there. I was dying when you guys were talking about that.

And I remember listening to it because... Expert placement. I generally listen to your podcast whenever I have to drive usually like either up to DC or something. So I usually rip your podcast listening in the truck. And as soon as that conversation started, I was like, please be a Spartan Forge. Because if there had been a Spartan Forge ad after that, I would have cut that whole reel and said, here's like this is the marketing. This company's made of. This is what we need.

Yeah. Yeah. Like upside down Snickers and he didn't even know what I was talking about. Have you even figured out yet what I mean by that? No, I mean, I know what you mean. But it balls flat because I'm allergic to nuts. So these nuts are just like all nuts I was waiting for it

I was waiting for it But I was like praying I was like please be a Spartan Ford dad After this conversation So I can cut this whole thing up I mean technically you could cut one from a previous episode And just overlay it there So you could create what you were looking for

Yeah I could create it but it wouldn't be genuine Just the next time you know If you're gonna run a Spartan Ford dad Just give me something really spicy beforehand You can't force magic to happen Some of the highlights of my day Are you riding on Michael And giving them a hard time

time. People think I'm too hard on him. He lives a charmed life. I even picked up the mess for him that I filmed that day. You disgusting. Yeah, he cleaned up after me. I did. I mean, nobody else was going to.

I think a lot of people would kill for his position. I think. If people think you're too hard on him, I don't think so. The world is not ready for the weapon that you'll be. I'm still a little baby. We got some advice for him recently. He needs to stop messing around going to places like Japan. He needs to go to Australia, apparently.

For what, the women? Yep. The old Gold Coast. Stay out of Alice Springs. It's my only advice to you. I don't even know what that means. I don't know either. It's a city in the middle of the country

where you're like nine hours from the ocean. Oh, yeah, that sounds horrible. So what do you think? After Japan, you're going to hit Australia? Yeah, maybe. We'll see. That is the most non-committal answer. A human being is ever given.

Austria is a pretty good one, too. You should check out. I actually do want to go to Austria. Do you know that there is a desk at the main airport in Austria just dedicated to people who realize they're no longer in Australia? I think I saw that, but is that true?

I feel like that's not true. How can you make that? I'm sorry, do you not navigate the same people that I navigate? Actually, I say that. And today, today, I was getting on the flight to come here. Yeah. And I was bored, it was in Chicago,

coming here, and a guy was in line with me for like 30 minutes. It took forever to board the groups in front of us. Yeah. I was like group three or four. it took about 40 minutes to get to my group, which United should only take about 10 minutes. We got to the front.

He had a ticket for New Jersey. That's like nothing like Callispell. It was right in for like. In any way. It was written everywhere. Didn't they scan his ticket at some point? Well, that's when they told him. Yeah.

He was being indignant. They were like, hey, sir, this is for New Jersey. And he's like, yeah, I'm going to New Jersey. And I was like, oh my God. Now I believe you. Just get on. Get on. Let me know how New Jersey is. All right. On that note, Spartanforge.a.ai.

The best aviation app ever, not designed for aviation. Thank you, Andy. Yeah, of course.