Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - The AGI Promise Is a Cover Story | Bill Thompson | Ep. 476

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

Bill Thompson joined the Army at 17 and spent 22 years there, most of it on the technical and communications side of a special missions unit. He now runs Spartan Forge, an AI-driven hunting app with over 100,000 users, advises high-profile clients on communications security, and is building his own compute network to run AI without feeding anyone else's system. His core argument is that AI as it exists today is training data, matrix math, and human correction. It produces novel output, not novel thought. He argues the companies promising AGI know they cannot deliver it, and that calling for regulation lets them blame the government, guarantee investors a captive market, and shut out the open-weight models anyone can run at home. He is moving his own companies off the closed systems now. Spartan Forge: https://www.spartanforge.ai Take the Operator Code Assessment: https://www.theoperatorcode.com Today's Sponsors:  Black Rifle Coffee:  https://www.blackriflecoffee.com Better Help: https://www.betterhelp.com/clearedhot

Okay, got the red smoke. To the smoke, I'm looking at danger close now. Silence my phone. Silence your non-Iphone. How secure is your personal device? Not. It's not anymore. No.

Was it ever? Yeah, it was up until about six. Oh, no. Rotate that thing? Relat. Really secure. Why did you give up on it? Just because they...

Because the social media thing. If you're going to install, you know, are we recording? Yeah. If you're going to install, you know, WhatsApp or Instagram or Facebook on your phone. Is it possible to exist in both words? Words, good. I need more of this coffee.

Worlds of both security, but also you want to play on social media? Yeah, just two different phones. Yeah, but that's... Exactly. Also, don't you think there's an ability electronically for them to sniff each other's butts, if you will? The phones?

Depending on the permissions that you give. if you're running them from the same IPs, from the same router, yeah. Well, I'm more worried about the permissions that other people that I don't know gave my phone put into there when I bought the device. Yeah, or in the apps when you downloaded them. That's what I'm saying.

So you could have two different phones, but I mean, I can't go into the back end of code and look at permissions or lack thereof. Yeah, it's an exercise in futility. So what's the answer? Surrender? Don't do anything you wouldn't want that government knowing about on your phone.

Courier pigeon. I mean, what joy is left in life. I know. I mean, no, it's not, that's not entirely true. So, like, I, I still advise for people, and I just put out a pretty secure internet system for, like, a person that we, like a high profile person, secure their internet. Like at their house? What are we talking about? Well, part of it's at their house.

Part of it's at their workplace. part of its escapes out through a VPS. And so it gives security to your, between terminals and people that work with him and for him. It doesn't give security to the end device. The end device is always exploitable in one way or another. But it makes like message sending, it really undergirds things like Signal

or under encrypted protocols that you're using to send messages. It just helps in that regard. It's a better version of a VPN, essentially. How secure would you say Signal is? I know a lot of people rely upon it. For most people, I'd say relatively secure or as secure as like, you know,

if you're just a normal dude or even like, I would say for people like your, or people like, you know, if you're dealing in things, you know, that are freedom enhancing, or like a guy like, you know, Rogan or a guy like Tucker Carlson or the president, it's not secure. Meaning you have the eye of Sauron of another government has looked at you and now they're deploying national level assets towards your device? That or, yes, or just by virtue of there's, so breaking the actual encryption is still very, is still probably impossible.

But there are what we call side channel attacks or peripheral channel attacks where you can, for instance, if you know a particular app that someone's using, you can put in a key logger. So now you're seeing what's being typed on the device. And then if you know who they're speaking to or you have an idea or there's ways,

for instance, if I were going to do this and I were in this kind of, if I were a bad guy, So I had a guy runs like a pretty high profile place where he gets lots of distinguished visitors. And he reached out to me a couple of years ago and said, hey, I'm really worried about like I'm getting weird messages online. I'm getting people that are reaching out to me that straight up look like, you know, GRU or Russian intelligence or something like that. And it started happening right around the time I started entertaining dignitaries and that type of thing. That is the move.

The dignitarious or VIPs are harder to get to, so get to that nexus point. Yeah, exactly, a la Epstein. Yeah. So if I were to go after him, you know, using my full suite of capabilities, it would be very easy to park something like a Fem2 or Pico Cell, which is like a small cell phone per network. And then you copy the broadcast, broadcast, cut. criteria of the of the terrestrial cell in other words project that femture pico cell to be like

it's part of the network and then have it act as a man in the middle between my you know van is running a my 15-pack van has a small cellular network on wheels and it's parsing traffic as a man in the middle between the real network and the fake network and then it's just a matter sitting around and waiting until Dignatory show up. And then when Dignitaries show up, now you have a channel to monitor their self cellular communications. And you can build out like things like I used to build for guys like you like analyst notebooks. Here's who he's contacting. Here's who he's talking to. Or you could use it to push a persistent implant to the phone. And then once you've done that, now it doesn't matter what network he's on or what he's doing in different places. So physical, what I'm saying is, what I'm saying is, physical security in these types of scenarios is just as important as operational or cellular security. You know, traveling to a foreign country and going through secondary. And they've got CCTV cameras everywhere, so they watch you unlock your phone.

Now they've got your password, and then they bring you to secondary, and they separate you from all of your stuff. And now they're dumping your phone in the next room while you're being interrogated. And then, you know, they're like, oh, sorry, Mr. Stump, this was all just a problem. like this was a misunderstanding here's all your stuff back but now we've implanted your device um they would be so bored whoever was assigned to me would say all this dude does is take pictures of helicopters and mini dachshunds yeah but then it's who are you talking to and and i mean you at this point you're fucked yeah probably more than likely um and like i said i i abandoned really

trying to operate with a heightened amount of operational security because a it's the indicator Are you talking about Fieldcraft? Yes. It's an indicator. So if I'm taking an SDR to go to a dignitary... Have I told you about how my wife drives yet? I don't think so. I am actually concerned.

Here's the bottom line up front. She takes a different route home every day. Not because she wants to, but I believe she refuses to pay attention. Oh, I see. So I actually... I have watched her on Life 360. And because she'll say, hey, I get an alert. she leaves the gym.

And then I'll find her three and a half miles west of our house. Yeah. So I call him like, what are you doing? She goes, oh, I took the wrong turn. Like, we're using singular in wrong turn? I actually think if an intelligence agency were to watch her. She's trained. Oh, my, they'd be like, are you guys seeing this?

Meanwhile, it's security through obscurity. Meanwhile, she's talking on her, and she talks on her phone to all of her friends when she's driving. She's just, do, do, do, do it. And meanwhile, they're putting together a package to, like, rendition her ass somewhere to figure out who taught her this stuff. Look, if you don't start using Google Maps, we're going to end up at a black site.

You're going to have John Kariaki. Now, first off, he's awesome, by the way. Yeah. I enjoy it. Did you see the thing with him at the New York? Fashion Week. Fashion Week? Yeah, he just walked it. Oh, my God.

Every time I saw it, I kept commenting Asian provocateur. I mean, I bet you. Yeah, it is funny. I bet you that guy never thought he was going to be walking Fashion Week. I mean, let alone a week ago, well, probably more than a week ago, but a few years ago when he was rebuilding. He's become like the foreign forest gump of foreign intelligence.

He's like everywhere and everything at the highest levels. Have you watched? Have you watched the episode where he sat down with Andrew Bustamante? Yes. Fascinating. Today's episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee.

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Sign up for some notifications. Enter into a giveaway. That's what I'm talking about. That's how you spend a good Monday. Back to the show. predictable but fascinating yeah i mean that i call him bussy yeah you're not the only one yeah that guy is when i was listening to him say you owe the government and all of these things that you enjoy are because of the government and i was just waiting for john for karaoke to pounce he doesn't

really do that well he kind of said no fuck those can i swear you've been on the show yeah i'm sorry do you not a podcast and the internet works? He said, no, fuck those people. They tried to take my life from me and throw me in a cell. And that is the role of the government. Like, I won't do this again because I've done this on this podcast before.

By the way, you would not believe, I don't remember which podcast it was of ours. It was either the last one or the one before. But I went on some diatribe about the government in some regard. I had so many people saying like, oh, you should run for office and you should go blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I was like, well, you weren't listening sufficiently enough. If you think I'm the answer. And you think I'm the guy. Yeah. But anyway, back to the, the boost. I mean, yes, the Bucamante thing was just. It was fascinating. It was fascinating, but it was also a perfect distillation of where our politics sit today.

And the distillation that I use for where our politics sit today is people who want to be left alone and people who won't leave anyone the fuck alone. That's a good way to put it, actually. That's the way to put it, actually. look at the political spectrum is do you want to be left alone or do you want to not leave anyone else alone and and and pussy is a guy that just won't leave anyone alone and he also talks about things and i think john actually said this but it was something that i picked up on i always say it and i'll remind again by the way this place is awesome i keep wanting to look around um this is such an upgrade um i i i'm getting my i'm getting distracted uh it's just your your you're you

You should have given me 15 minutes in here before. National defense level fucking autism. Well, I just want, I'm like, oh, carbine, knives. Tomahawk. Carbines are airsoft, knives are real. Each one of those things will cut you. Yeah, I'm eyeing the MKC top hatchet over there. I have an extra one at the house.

I'll send it to you. I used to throw tomahawks for sport. Of course you did. Actually, first off, I'm... That's not a tomahawk. I'm retracting what I said, because I know you like to go put on beaver peltes and fashion your own hatchets. Yes, I do.

So I'll send you a piece of metal that you can fashion into your own hatchet. Yeah. I've got on my Instagram some videos where I'm like, you know, throwing a tomahawk, it's easy to stick a tomahawk.

You measure them by revolutions. So revolutions is a function of pace count. So I try to do like two, three revolutions for my throwing. And when you can get accurate at two or three revolutions, that's a lot of fun. I digress.

Has that skill served you well, live? No. Okay, just checking. Most of the things that I go down these rabbit holes, on don't serve me very well. But like I said, on the podcast I'd done in the past,

I was never a cool guy or a long tabber or an operator, but I got to work with a lot of cool guys. Why do you describe it like that? Why do I describe what, like what? There is an overwhelming, not by just you, but by many. I mean, I know at a relatively deep level, the kind of things that you were doing.

And I know there's some sensitivities around the places that you were at, but it was anything other than vanilla. And in the modern era, I don't know why this is the case. I don't know if it's a symptom or it's just part of the system itself. But it's like, unless you were special operations, it's not enough. You know, so you have to quantify. Like, oh, I was never a cool guy. I'm like, what are you talking about?

The stuff that you did enabled us to do the stuff that we did. Well, I would say the missions versus, like I was in a special missions unit. Yeah. I would say the mission was special, but I was video. Like, I think a lot of people could have done the job. Welcome to everything in special operations. Yeah, yeah. And so I just, I'm not trying to, there's, I'm not describing any level of profanity

myself that anybody else who's sufficiently interested in a niche technological endeavor wouldn't be able to do. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. So, um, at the end of the day, it's about shoot, moving and communicate. And I was more on the communicate side of things. And, uh, but, but the reason I do this is because I'm, I'm, I'm, super fearful of our own community and the people the special operations the special operations community

they're gnarly um because they will listen to this podcast and other podcasts and wait for you to trip up and say something incorrectly and i say things incorrectly all the time so i just want to make it known from the outset that i you know i wasn't a ranger i wasn't um a seal i i served with these guys and it was the greatest pleasure of my life to do it. But I just, you know, that mob and its ability to tear people down, look, do I want people claiming that they've done things they haven't done? Of course not. But for me, personally, if I heard you say something and I wouldn't, this would never do

this. And I think why I count you as a friend. But if I already hear you say something that I know you didn't do or they just didn't sound right or didn't add up, that would be a phone call between you and I. And if someone else in the community does it who I don't know or have access to, I would expect that to be a phone call from someone else who's been through the agogi to say, hey, that's not right. Like you should go out and immediately dispatch with this. People get spun up on podcasts and they say things that they don't mean. And I just think it should be handled internally because I look at the special operations community or the military community writ large as like an extended family.

And when there's a problem in my family, I handle it inside of the family. Like, I often tell my son or my daughters, like, when you have a problem with a sibling, that doesn't leave the house. Like, when you're out of the house, you guys should be thick as thieves and check each other, but the checking should happen internally because how you guys comport yourself externally is a reflection on who I am as a father. To a degree. To a degree.

How old are your children? 19, 17, almost 18, 14, and 10. Yeah. So you've already seen that that's mostly true. However, they have their own genetics that express their own way. For sure. For sure. But I mean, it's a good standard to try to hold with your children. But I'm not saying the special operations community or the military community are my children, but I'm saying it's a family that I'm a part of. And I just the part that bothers. There's two parts that bother me about this. It's a part of people saying things they didn't do because they want some kind of clout. When in most cases, just, just. having served in the military in this infantessimally small collective of people that you're already part of something great and there's no reason to church it up. Why do you have to talk about Tim Kennedy like that? I mean, we can say this about many people and how many times have I sat at a table

with someone drinking beers and I'm either watching a buddy of mine say something to a woman that he's trying to sleep with that we all know he didn't do or he waxes poetic on a story that that was 10 or 15 years old where it's like, okay, you've gone a little far afield here. He happened to just do it on the air. But there's, four years. There's an inverse to that story with Tim

where the inverse is, he had a exceptional career in his own right. Still does. And still does. And he's still in. And I know, because I still speak to him, he's still out there doing things, I think as a contractor,

although it's not clear to me. He might be still doing it as a reservist, but he's still out there doing cool things like cool like cool shit and and we talk about it um but the there's a flip side there's a two edges to every sword the other edge to that sword is when you have done something that's cool and then you have people in the military who haven't done those cool things but they see a chink in someone like tim's armor they will attack that because what they really want to do is attack themselves because they didn't do some of the things that he did or they didn't go some of the places that he did there's a there's a there's a there's an inverse where

you're showing as much of your ass when you're attacking these people, when we should be handling it internally, I think. And so I will never talk smack about anybody who signed on the line in a public forum. Now, if you and I go get beers, I will have a very different tone and tenor to the conversation that we're having. I'm going to add one thing to what you said. I agree with everything that you said. There's one compounding and confounding issue that is making it worse for Tim. He refuses to admit that. he lied. He will not use those words. I thought he did a video here a little while ago where he basically fessed up to it. I watched that guy. Have you ever watched that guy? Jamie? Jamie Travels? Jameson Travels. Have you watched this guy? I know who he is, yes. I listened to him because he usually puts out like, he's in my YouTube. So he usually puts out like pretty dense, compacted videos where it's just saying what it is. In fact, I've heard him talk about you a couple times. I thought he put out a video where he said, all right, Tim's pretty fessed up here or something like that.

Or maybe I'm confusing it with another one. He did an episode, so he started a new podcast. And I'm not throwing shade at anybody, and I've actually said all of these things directly to Tim. Yeah, yeah. And the advice that I gave him was pretty simple. I think it's possible to rebuild. I think it's possible to start by showing people.

The difference is, you know, You say that these things were, by your own admission, fell short of what you wanted to be. Okay, show people that moving forward. But you have to be based on an actual solid foundation. Yes. And you can't say unintentionally misspoke. Okay. You have to say the reality and truth of what it is.

Right. That you lied. Yeah. So my presupposition was I thought he had done that. Maybe I'll have to watch it because, like I said, I don't have time to watch all of these things. He won't use that word. That's unfortunate. I agree.

the the the the problem I run into with Tim which I think is probably the same problem that you run into with Tim is I know personally he's a fantastic human being and I've watched him spend 15 minutes talking to some kid he's just fan girling in front of like a coffee place or something and he'll spend a lot of time and I only know a few people that have reached that you know I don't know if you call it fame or I don't know what you call it um who've reached that kind of that height who still take the time to talk to people And I've, you know, had beers with them or sat with them or, you know, went to his jiu-sidoo gym or did workouts with them. So I have that dual problem where I'm not a, I would not be a reliable source of information about Tim just because I have an inbuilt bias. I agree with everything that you're saying. And so it's just, it's very unfortunate. Agreed. And but you're right. People love redemption arcs.

I think it's actually the best, one of the best stories we can tell. But it has to start with an actual foundation. Yes, yes. Do you still speak with him? The last time I spoke to him was right before the first episode of his podcast came out with Brian Callan, which is the video that Jameson was referencing. Okay. And the advice I gave him was, I wouldn't do this with Brian, who is a huge, do you know Brian? Brian Callan?

Yes. Actually, I think I'm doing a podcast with him next month. The silliest of Gooses. Yeah, he's funny. He is funny and he's also, I mean, you want to talk about somebody who is pro-military, loves everything about it, knows just enough terminology to be dangerous, but he's joking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he, he instead of bringing on a military member who knows not only the first question to ask, but the follow-ups that you can't be snowballed with, he brought on somebody who was a good friend of his, no, there's no knock against that, who is very, you know, has affection for the military and everything that the military stands for, who asked to the best of his ability, the things that he could without having the lived experience. to know where to take it from there.

And in that instance, there is an unequal power balance sitting across the table because one person can still control the narrative in a way that they want to. And the other person thinks, I'm getting all the answers that need to be, you know, brought to light here. And it just wasn't the case. I advised him not to do so. Would you have done it with him? Yes.

But he wouldn't have enjoyed that conversation. Right. But that's the sometimes I think in life, those, that's the catharsis that you need. Yeah. Because it just allows you to like unpack that. rucksack and just lay it all out and then the team leader can tell you how you're fucked up. Let's use Hunter Biden as an example, who interestingly enough is- Has it undergone a resurgence?

He has, and look how bare that guy was stripped in the public specter. Yeah. I mean, everything was out there. Now at this point, and again, I still, he's obviously trying to sell a book and he just fucking did a pump and dump with a coin called. Oh. Yeah, laptop. And again, so I'm not saying I'm a fan of the person.

Following the Trump playbook, I see. Yeah, actually, the coin was called dollar signed laptop. Also, people were shocked that they didn't get generational wealth from this. But the point, I'm not saying I'm a fan of the person. The point is that is somebody, you want to talk about the recovery arc. And for some people, he'll always be written off totally get that. And that's always going to be the case. Stripped completely bare, I can't fathom a more embarrassing

public feathering than that person had. Yeah, that was bad. And now, fearlessly says whatever the fuck he wants to. Yeah. And it's like, oh, really? You're going to see naked pictures of me smoke and crack? Congrats.

Everyone. You know what I mean? It does make you kind of untouchable. Like, once you own it? If once you bear yourself. And I am not endorsing Hunter Biden by any stretch or excusing his behavior. I'm just saying he has nothing to lose at this point.

Right. Love the guy. I hate the guy. Whatever it is. he's out there. Yeah. So we'll see. Yeah. That was a nuts. That was a nuts story. The coin thing still shocks me that people are participating in these pump and dumps. I don't understand it. Yeah. I don't know if anyone's gotten rich off of it. There used to be junk coins and sometimes you could play the numbers. I was an early investor in Bitcoin and made some good money.

Do you already sell it? I sold most of it to pay for this litigation. which I can't talk about yet. But yeah, I've sold it, well, to subsidize my life too while I wasn't paying myself during litigation. But anyway, I made money on Bitcoin and Ethereum. And I think I had invested in it as early as about 2014 or 2015. Just because I liked it, and it was like an FU to the system. But then there were these junk coins.

And every once in a while, if you looked at the underlying framework of a junk coin, and you can see, oh, it's using parts of Ethereum or Bitcoin, so it could be good. So you can invest in those. But now it's just, you know, buy my NFT. It's just garbage. I forgot about that era. What's going on with NFTs now?

Are they dead? I mean, largely, yes. I had a buddy who made some money on it. I feel like a screen grab is just as good as an NFT. I don't know if he'd want me to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about it anyway. Leave his name out of it. Yeah, so my, no.

No, because he wouldn't do it to me. So a very good friend of mine. In fact, he married my wife and I. His name is Drew Carroll. He runs a, he is the, I would say, the creative genius behind this YouTube channel called Seek 1. And they're a massive, in fact, I'm wearing a shirt of theirs right now. They're a massive white tail. They're the biggest hunting white tail channel on YouTube.

And there's two of them. There's one guy named Lee Ellis. Lee is probably one of the best hunters in the world, White Tail hunters. And then Drew is also a great hunter in his own right, but more it's got the creative, you know, he can edit videos and, you know, the business side of it. He took, do you remember that picture of,

I'm going to get his name wrong? How can I get this? LeBron James, the basketball player? I was just Carmelo Anthony. Do you remember that picture of him where he's on, Michael might be able to pull this up for us? Do you remember that picture of him where he was on like a boat with like four other guys.

No. And they were like rowing out in Jamaica or something near like a carnival cruise liner or something like that. Bill, why do you assume that I would have any reference? Because it was a meme. And memes, it was a meme that propagated everywhere. All right. For a long time, I thought those were called memes. Oh, really?

Memes are interesting. We could do a whole podcast on memes. It's one of the most powerful and nested ways to send a message. Yes. Yeah. Through a picture. Michael, have you found a meme of LeBron James? Yes, that's the one.

Okay. So he took that picture. Okay, the one on the right. Yeah, that picture. So that picture went everywhere. There's memes everywhere and like, you know, Instagram reels and stuff. This is a few years ago. So for clarity, this is not a boat.

That's an inflatable that they're riding on being towed. Yeah, yeah. So it's hilarious and it's ridiculous. Yeah. And you can imagine all of the funny jokes that, you know, meme moors could come up with with this. He took that picture. Okay. This was his picture.

So I believe he sold the NFT. So in other words, the original got interlaced and made into an NFT. Yeah. And then now that's the original image. Yeah. And I think he sold it and got really good money for it, like very good money for it. Michael, screen grab that, so that way we have it as well and we paid nothing. We're going to devalue his currency right now.

Well, he already sold it. But he sold it during the height of the means. Whoever has that. NFT stuff. If you hear this, we're screen grabbing this. Michael Screege Rubbit five times so we can really dilute the power of it. So now he's the government. He's printing more.

Yes, correct. And he's putting no underlying value assigned to it. That is correct. Yeah. It's called quantitative easing. Yes, I know. It keeps me up at night. I want to go back to, uh, yeah, there was a whole.

No, Bustamante. Yeah. In curiocchio. The reason I brought that's all up is because there is a lexicon having been in and around with these people for the better, for most of my life, for 22 years. You know, I joined when I was 17, got out just a few years ago. There is a way, there's a parlance that when you talk to people who've been inside of the fold, and not just with access to it, but really inside of the fold, you can just, I don't

know what it is, but you can just tell right away, like when someone calls something a troop or the troop sergeant major, or someone talks about a Sopmod 2 bill, or someone talks about why they like this versus this or how like you just get it right away like oh this guy probably served or something like that or when someone says you know they serve with the north virginian army or something like that you know you you can quickly deduce this person's background where they came from all those things and when i listen to this busomante guy it was apparent to me that he was just a support nerd like me or or just a uh but he would talk like so the the the cogent analogy would be if I came on here and talk like a long taver, which the equivalent in the CIA

is someone who recruits and handles and trains spies. A big case officer. That is the role that he speaks from. My understanding is that at the apex of his career, he was an assistant case officer as a recruited exactly zero sources. My understanding was he was an operations officer for a case officer, which is a little different. Similar to a role. He didn't, he didn't handle a recruit in resources, which is kind of like the threshold. It's kind of like saying not only that you go through ranger selection and Rasp and become a ranger, but you're actually in Ranger Bat and you actually did Ranger things, right? Because a lot of times in the military, a good analogy here is in the Army, at least.

You can go to Ranger school and never be a Ranger. 100%. And so that just means you went to a school. Right, exactly. So you just went to the school. And so you'll run into someone, he'll be like, oh, I was a ranger. And then the guy will be like, well, what battalion were you in? It's like, oh, I was in the 10th Mountain Division.

You weren't a ranger. You went to a school and you're in the 10th Mountain. So he would talk like someone who was a long tabber or like someone who had handled trained sources and done those types of operations, which is a very small cadre of people for an otherwise large micro-D like organization. And then it became obvious to me like after listening to him on like the second or third podcast, like this guy doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Like there was one podcast where he said something along the lines of like the most elite military group in the world. Army Delta Force Ranger Marine Recon. I added a few. That's not an exact quote, but he fucked it up completely.

It was like, oh my, like for me, it was kind of like watching the crying game. Yeah. Like, that was a dude the whole time. And so at that point, like that is a part of that nomenclature or that, that system where when someone says something like that, who's apparently been inside of the fold, you know they were never inside of the fold. Like it's just, it's obvious at this point. Have you ever seen the video where he kidnapped and for the audio only crowd I was using air quotes there, Julian Dory and waterboarded him? I don't even know who Julian Dory is. He's a podcaster, I believe, based out of New York.

I've chat with him online a few times. People can go research it if they want to. But it was my opinion and my opinion only, just such an utter clown show of somebody trying to pretend as if that is what they used to do to people. Like, dude, it was cartoon-esque what he was doing. And it's interesting. One of the things that stuck out to me the most was when they were talking about the enhanced interrogation or torture program.

Mm-hmm. Have you been following at all? What's happening with KSM? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Not recently. You know where he's at, right? He's in a supermax prison, isn't he? Gitmo.

Gitmo. He's in Gitmo, okay. has never been charged, convicted, or even prosecuted on anything associated with 9-11. You know why? No. All of his statements were taken under, guess what? A judge just ruled that they can't use his admissions against him. A judge ruled that last week.

They set a trial for him for next year. And I... What are they going to do? I don't know. but this is a perfect example of fruit from a poison tree. Yeah. And the only reason I know that, I wasn't tracking it either, is I'm going to an October host a documentary you just came out called Daughters of 9-11.

One of the women on there has been down to Gitmo, I think eight times now, with her retired FBI agent. They're both going on. And they've been tracking what's going on. And they're, you know, she straight up says on the documentary, like I want him fucking. killed. But the legal system back and forth is mired in an inability to do anything because of how the information that they want to use against him was acquired. So I'm going to get, you might shit all over me when I go down this road. If he went free. I'm not saying he should go free by any strategy. I'm just saying, I'm not saying he should either. In fact, I would have no

problem if a group of men with no compunction for pomp and circumstance rolled up on them and decimated them. I would not lose a wink of sleep. I'd ask for what's for lunch? What I'm saying is when the justice system fails, the system needs to be meaningfully updated. So hold on though. Did the justice system fail? Or did we as a nation deviate from who we should have been? I think we deviated from who we should have been. So the justice system is actually operating the way that it should. And that's where I was going. Yeah.

Is people would be all up in arms if he were released. Mm-hmm. But it would point to the kind of society that we are where we're not going to change the rules to get an outcome. And that's the type of society that I aspire for us to live in. And I don't think you'd have to go free in the, in the documentary, there were multiple reporters that have gone down there. and they'll do face-to-face interviews with him. And he will admit to everything, not in duress. Right.

Like, he has no qualms. He expresses no regret. He expresses no remorse. He wishes that more people have been killed. Admits to being the mastermind behind putting the plan together. He's the one who pitched it to bin Laden. Yeah. He has no qualms against that.

He, it's just, it's, you know, when I was sitting there watching Bustamante talk about, you know, it was legal at the time. I'm like, yeah, just because, you know, George Bush, junior found out lawyer somewhere in the justice system that was able to say, hey, yeah, that this is now all of a sudden legal. And then we change from who we're supposed to be as a nation. I mean, and you and I think can agree upon this. If you apply enough pain to people, yes. Will you get information from them? Sure. But is it reliable? Exactly. I mean, first off, if I was ever captured and somebody got out the, a car battery and some clamps for my testicles, I'd be like, hold on. Yeah, we could talk. Get a pencil. The nuclear launch code is four X-rays. and write this down because I'm not going to remember it as a second time. And you would hope that they're changing the nuclear launch codes at the same exact time that you're doing this. I don't know what they are to begin with. But I mean, you remember you ever heard about some of the things they were asking in the Hanoi Hilton when people were getting torture?

How many pigs are on an aircraft carrier? Where do you keep the livestock? You know what I mean? It's the information. It just was fascinating to me to hear him say not only should we have. done it, but we had to. And again, they're tangentially connected, but now this shit show of a dude who is literally the mastermind is struggling in court. And who knows what the end will be, but like I said, the court date was just set for 2028. I don't think they're going to have an issue getting a conviction

on that because he is so open about it. Right. But all of the troubles that they have had, because we chose to go down that pathway, should be one of the starkest reminders we have of our behavior in the future. Yeah. But almost nobody knows that's happening. I wouldn't have known that if the woman hadn't reached out and asked about coming on the show. And then the documentary just came out on 9-11 when I watched it. People weren't going to listen to this podcast and think, oh, Bill thinks collegiate Chek Bahamas should be released from prison.

It's not what I'm saying. So please allow me to walk the dog here. I would rather see, and this actually goes back to the founding of the country and the reason why our legal system was erected in the way that it was. Well, there's two points I'll make. But the first point is I would rather see nine guilty. men go walk than one innocent man be jailed and the the impetus is on the state to prove someone is guilty whether or not they are and the system that says hey we've broken the rules

or we didn't have a warrant or we didn't do it this way is not a system that you want to live inside of so to me when someone's like oh that he got off on a technicality this is bullshit it's like well then the system needs to be updated so that that technicality is is accounted for the future. And his, his, the recidivism rate on people who do the types of shit that are getting prosecuted is huge anyway.

He's going to fuck up again. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I get what you're saying. That's tough for people to hear when they're the victim of that. I know, but I know.

But the sit, but we aspire to have a system where it's, this burden of proof is on the state and it's a high threshold. And we, we want that in a free and open society. Because it's, it goes, back to you when you asked me, you asked me on our other podcast about, would you, you know,

if they recalibrated and got rid of the TSA and there was a new flight program, would you send your family on that? And I said, well, after a amount of time I would. Like, obviously I watched the experiment unfold. But in the same case as the TSA in the same case as the judge, you know, Jefferson said it that the tree of liberty has to be replenished with the blood of patriots and with tyrants. And unfortunately, that's the system. That's the best system because, yes, TSA going away and Elon Musk after going to run an airport will mean maybe a plane will crash. But it's a more free and open, perfect system than if the top town government just controls everything down to the NASAS. And in the court context, it's the same thing. Yes, it's, but it's a system where the,

the system can't just throw any charge at you because I think the stats are something like you break like 10 or 15 laws a day. So I think it was Stalin who said, show me the man and I'll show you the crime. That's the opposite end of this system. So yes, there will be innocent people that, or there will be guilty people that walk free.

Yes, there will be an airplane that might fall out of the sky once or twice. But it's on us to update the system because we're trying to pursue individual freedom and liberty. And yes, the cost of that will always be that there will be junctures

where the system has to be updated because of something catastrophic happening. But the opposite of that is top-down control where you get a Stalin type of figure saying, show me the man, I'll show you the crime. I can arrest you for whatever. Give me a day. I'll figure it out. Have you seen the picture of the guy taped to his airline seat? No.

Michael. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? Oh, to include his forehead. I mean, my man. What is the story here? I believe the stories he had an incredibly deep two-hour religious conference. conversation with his seatmate, lost his shit, started fighting people. And the only reason they taped his head is he continued trying to bite them as they walk by. Now, find me an unredacted.

Well, there he is. What, do we know what he was saying? No. Is this very recent? Yes. Yeah, it was like a week ago. That is wonderful. God. That is hilarious. I mean, the window there. Uh, do they put like black? That's a good question. I don't know what that. is. I think they might be at the gate at this point. Who knows, though? Well, if he'd been to Sears School with us, he'd be out of that tape there in pretty short order. Man, there's some hair that's going to come off. If you've never had a happy hat, which is your hands taped together and then tape to the side of your head. Yeah. Man, that tape doesn't come off clean. Yeah, that is hilarious. What's on his, Michael, what's on the yellow? Yeah, go to the full body. I think they

zip tied him first. Oh, I love that. Enhance. Yeah. Oh, yeah, he's got some stuff. Oh, man, He's bleeding? Yes. God bless it. I love it. Just stuffed up there. I mean, at least he's in comfy seat, right? First class.

He was in first class. I wonder if he was in first class or they moved him up there to tape him. Would be a good way to get an upgrade. Yeah, tough. You'd have to have somebody feed you your in-flight meal, though. Let's go back to your health maxing. Don't think we're avoiding that. Oh, God.

So you currently, your current provider is doctor. So you're receiving all medical advice from Dr. Rogan. No, not all. I check with him just because he's been in the stuff for so long. He knows, he gives me good questions for me to go to my healthcare providers about. Like what? So, so during COVID, I was a very unruly, unhappy little boy. And with- Color me shocked.

Probably a functioning alcoholic. Yeah. I think I went through, there would be some nights where I drink like a third bottle of blue. whiskey. It's not that bad. Why do you keep trying to pick the table? Every night of the week. Control your fucking tism.

I can't. Every night of the week, I would drink three or four Manhattan's, which is three shots of alcohol, you know, and I was really deep into the sauce, mostly just because I was reading the science that was coming out. I wasn't happy with what was being said. I felt like there was a snake in the grass. I just couldn't prove it. And I put on a ton of weight.

Like that much drinking, sitting in front of a computer, just like doing research. research, reviewing code. Like, it was bad. It was a bad situation for me to be in because I can sit in front, like, I just did it like three weeks ago. I can sit in front of a computer for 48 hours and just. You're talking straight? Go. Yes. Does it feel like 48? No, I'll, I'll look at the clock and be like, people probably, I know guys get this when they play video games. I don't get it with video games, but you'll get into like a flow state where you can just stay up all night and keep going. I'll get into those flow states. and I just can push.

And then I'll just crash hard. What's the end state of that, though? After 48 hours, are you talking about for like Spartan Forge stuff? Or other companies that I'm building, yeah. What are you able to accomplish in those 48 hours? Well, these days, a factor of 10 more than I could two or three years ago. Yeah, using AI, I can get a ton more done. But like, measurably, you are able to do a demonstrable amount of work in that, even though it's 48 hours straight.

What we used to take three or four months to do, I can do in two or three days. Are you operating at the code level, like the stuff? If it came up on the screen, it looks like the Matrix. Yeah. Yes. I mostly have people who are doing that now. Yeah. And then I have guys that review it and let me do.

But you during those 48 hours. Oh, so I was, yes, I was doing my own side project in this case where I was, I'm, I'm messing with, I'm reviewing old neural networks that we had built. and I'm trying to build a new neural network that's got a different underlining schema than anything that I've seen out there. So when these types of flights of fancy hit me, I'll get into like this weird state

where I just can go. And it just doesn't stop. How do you know when you're done? I'll pass out. Like I'll go sit somewhere to have a drink or something like that and then I'll just wake up like eight hours later. Seems normal. I wouldn't say it's normal.

But this is a lot more normal in the video gaming world. Because I've been reading about this. Okay. Because it was a conversation that I had with Rogan. And then he brought it up on the podcast. Dr. Rogan. Dr. Rogan. Yeah, it's your primary care provider.

So look, if I'm going to have a question about Jiu-Jitsu, I can go to you or I can go to Gordon. I'm not a coach. I would go to the best fucking grappler in the world. That's Gordon. Correct. Yeah. I do. Good.

But what I'm saying is there are other sources of knowledge that can regulate the entropy that I would otherwise encounter during research. Please tell me that when you ask Gordon Ryan Jiu-Jitsu questions, try to make them the most pedantic, simple questions ever. Like this, how do I, somebody's on top of me. How do I get out? Just make it so childish that he just hate. hates answering your questions. I know. Well, then I'll lose that resource. I don't think so.

He's, look, a lot of shit can be talked about Gordon Ryan from people because I see it online all the day, all the time. That guy has an understanding of that shit. Like John level, like Donahar level. Yeah. And I think I vibe with him because we both have a bit of the ability to focus on something for a long periods of time. Anyway, I'm getting off track.

during COVID, I'm going to get back to your original question. During COVID, I gained, I got up to about 270 pounds. Okay. Right now I'm about 2.15. And I couldn't sleep. I was snoring. I had no energy. I just felt like total shit.

So I started fasting on my own just because I've always fasted. Did you stop drinking? I stopped drinking after COVID was over. Like right now I maybe drink once or. twice a month. Okay. And I don't drink to excess anymore just because it ruins the next day for me. If I drink to excess, I'm unusable for the next day or two. And so I've largely stopped that. But I started fasting. I lost some weight. But then I was getting to like a point where I, because now I'd gotten back down to just through fasting, I'd gotten back down to like 245 pounds.

But I still had no energy. I would have the nap during the day. until I would get into one of these sessions where I could just go, which was weird. And I just knew I had to do something about my health. So I initially, it was Gordon, Ryan, who is friends with Brigham. And he said, hey, go talk to Brigham. I told them that you're going to be coming in. So I was in Austin to see Tyler from Artery Country. And so I went over there and they were like, yeah, dude, you're pre-diabetic.

you know, your, your testosterone's through the floor. You have like the testosterone of like a seven-year-old man. You've got all of these markers for inflammation. You've got something is going on with your thyroid, which is a whole other story. All of these issues. So I basically said, what are we talking about here? Is this a weight in inflammation thing? Like, do I just need to lose the weight?

And they're like, well, that would help considerably. But in the meantime, you're not going to get any of this energy back until your body can get to a point. where it can start metabolizing things. Because one of the problems that happens is your body has to shift resources on just living. So you might be eating the vitamins and minerals, but your body's not taking them in or your liver or your kidneys are overtax. And they just can't do the work that they're supposed to do on clearing stuff out. So you have to start supplementing.

So at one point, I was doing like 11 supplements a day. And I would go and do research because of the type of mind that I have where I'm like, do I really need 11 different things every day? and the answer would come back like, yeah, you're extremely fat and your body can't process these things. That's what the search result would net you. Essentially. Yeah.

Essentially. I feel like you are taking something that was probably very bland and just adding your own. Yeah. I'm adding my own flavor. Because I would, you know, and I would read the peer-reviewed research and stuff. So I started doing all of these things. And then I kept the fasting going. And then what Ways the Well had said was,

you should go on testosterone and there's other things but my testosterone was like and this was true it was like a 75 year old man's testosterone levels I think my first reading or something was like 283 or something and then in 310 the next time or something

it was extremely low but the research that I had found said this could also just be because you're a fat ass and you might lose the weight and then these systems will kick back in and you like estradol and these types of things are changing the way that your body can process the testosterone. So I did reach out to Rogan and say,

and I don't like name dropping, but you brought it up. I would have just said a buddy of mine who really knows this stuff. Who's a physician? Who's a physician? Dr. Rogan, I presume. Yeah. And he said, hey, you know, I don't know if I should say this. He had said, if I could do this over again,

I would have waited until later in life to do the testosterone. I would assume that he wouldn't be fine with me saying that. I don't like talking about his internal monologue because he might not like that. Yeah, I think that's fair. He said, if I could have, I would have waited to do it later in life because I think he started it earlier in life. I don't know how early he started it. And I said, okay, so what should I do? And he's like, well, there are these peptides that I'm taking and they're really good.

And they can, the goal, the thing that's positive about these peptides are, you can go off them at any time. and your body will just resort back to whatever it is before. But if you go on testosterone now, you're going to have to be on it for the rest of your life. Or it's very difficult to get off of it. Maybe you can get off of it, but it can become very difficult. So I was like, let's just run the experiment for a year. Let's keep fasting. Let's do some peptides.

Let's do these supplements. Let's do the saunas. Let's do the cold plunges. Let's do the red light therapy. Let's do the hyperbaric chamber, all of these types of things. Like whatever I could throw at the problem. not because I couldn't solve it just by fasting. I think a lot of this could be solved just by fasting,

but I knew that I could speed it up or do things that might make it play with the process. So I did start with the peptides and I've continued fasting. And every quarter or so I do a three to five day fast where I'd still eat anything except for water and salt for three or five days. And yes, I've gotten, you know, I've lost about 60 pounds and I am doing the peptides. but, you know, I think in short order, I probably will at some point do the testosterone just because if I go back in there and I'm extremely low still, I just know so many people who are on it. How do you feel, though?

My energy is not quite where I would like it to be. Only the reason I say is because I remember pre-COVID bill who had just retired from the military, I would wake up with energy and I would very rarely need more than five or six hours of sleep. Yeah, because pre-COVID bill was like in his 30. Well, I was 39, but I was still in shape, too. I was like 195 pounds. I was still running all the time. You know, I could, I was deadlifting a ton of weight and doing jiu-jitsu and all of these things. I was very active. And I, but, but I'm only 44 now. You know what I'm saying? Like, there's not a huge delta

between 39, 44. There is a delta, but it's not a massive delta. And I know lots of guys who were in their 40s and 50s and 60s who are supplementing testosterone and these other things, who seemingly have an endless supply of energy and when I read the research on it, sure there's downsides to everything, everything has a cost, but it seems to me at this juncture, and after about 60 years of medical science, the testosterone thing is pretty solid. Like, this is something that most guys should do if they're interested in quality of life at a certain point. So I just, I wanted to run the experiment and, you know, getting that advice from Dr.

Rogan seems like good advice. or at least, you know, when someone says, I wish I had done something a little different, I tend to listen. Yeah. So anyway, I've been doing it with Ways the Well and there, that, I don't get paid by Ways the Well. I don't do anything free for them.

I'm not endorsed by them. I would say if you have 500 bucks, which I think is what I pay and whatever my peptides are and stuff like that, which I think is really cheap, I think it's only like 120 bucks a month or something like that. you could spend your money in worse ways and the upside is tremendous and like they have this app and you can I get my blood drawn every six months and it shows me exactly where everything is and I can track my progress and I can see meaningful progress like just with my weight loss my kidney function my liver

function I'm no longer pre-diabetic um my sleep is awesome like even last night uh let's see so I got an 82 last night for a little over six hours of sleep. So I'm getting back to where I only need about six hours of sleep, which used to be about the stable threshold for me. And so, yeah, I mean, I feel, you know, how I felt pre during COVID, I would have given like a D minus. Right now I probably feel like a B minus or a B plus.

And so I think, you know, 15 or so more pounds and continuing to monitor these things, I can have a better quality of life with relatively small amounts of downside. My favorite part is when we were walking over here, we were talking about testosterone and you're like, I just don't know, man, needles. And then you're like, but I'm giving myself shots with peptides.

Yeah, I know, I know. It's just, I shouldn't say just needles. I should have said needles forever. Look, I'm more likely going to do it because I want to put muscle back on. You don't have to convince me. I've just recently started, you know, doing things that I hadn't done in all. a long time like jiu-tzu and how's that going for you not well michael just got his brown belt oh

congratulations that's awesome i'm now a white belt as we all were well i mean so when i again when i was dealing with gordon and we had done some stuff together he had said i'd think you're like a beginner blue belt like a blue belt or so like your knowledge that's just called being kind yeah maybe Text him questions like, hey, somebody grab my hand. How do I get them to let go? What do I do? This guy's really heavy. Yeah.

How do I get out? Yeah. But I'd done the military's mixed martial arts program for about eight years. In the Army? Yeah, in the Army. I am aware that it exists unfamiliar with the curriculum. Combatives. It's more, once you get to higher levels, it's more weapon oriented.

Like now that you're here, put a knife in his neck. Or now that you're here, do this or that, or breaking calls. contact, those types of things. Yeah. So it's not about keeping the flow going. Like the thing that I like about jujitsu, and it's weird, and I'm not sure if I've heard people talk about this. But just like with working on Spartan Forge or other things, I can get into this flow

state. But when I'm just sitting and rolling with someone, I can, or hunting, I can get into a similar flow state where I'm not even, I'm only focused on the task at hand, but I'm not even focused at the task at hand. Yeah. It's very therapeutic. It's very, I don't know how to, I don't know how to, I don't know. what to call it. I don't know if you have a similar experience. The flow state is how it's most

commonly described. Yeah, but I'm saying the outputs of it are there's a recalibration that happens. You feel good. You and it gets harder the longer you've been at it. It's harder for that. Well, I'm thinking about more things at this point because I have particular things in my game that I want to work on or try, which requires me to be a little bit more present. Like I'm trying to enhance my timing or get better at pattern recognition and combine the two or work on something in particular. Sure. I'm looking for particular things. But again, And there are days where you can just, I know exactly what you're saying. You go back and you'll train for an hour and you're like, I don't know if I could tell you

anything that happened in that hour. Right. I love that. Yeah. That is a great feeling. And this, I also think, and this is not, I don't know if this is a hot take or not, but I also think if you're not exploring that part of your physicality, you're leaving a lot on the table. What part of the physicality?

Like rolling with someone and engaging in that type of. Pseudo-violence. Pseudovilance, but it's using and manipulating and controlling the spatial awareness that's required and you're doing it with someone else. There's a, one way I used to say this was you really don't know your buddy until you've fought with them. Of course, I don't fight my friends anymore. Man, I thought that sentence was going to go down a different path, but. Hey, good.

I was in the military. Is it Thursday? Like I said, as you got to the tail into that sentence internally, I'm like, oh, no. I would say you don't really know yourself until you've pushed your body and find out, found out what kind of person you are when the chips are down. And if you're not, if you're not grasping towards that every day in a different physical domain, you're leaving a lot of life experience on the table. I agree. And so Plato was famous for his wrestling. In fact, I think Michael can check me on this.

I think Plato means big shoulders. I think that's what it means. And I also check me on this because I don't want to say something incorrect. But I think he was known for his rolling prowess, and I think he said some of the same things. In other words, you're not a fully formed man until you understand your capability for violence and you engage in some type of exercise every day that pushes you towards that thing. I think that was Plato. And I think there's a ton of wisdom in this.

that. I agree. Michael, is their truth? Plato means broad. Broad shoulders. Fair enough, I'll give it to you. He was an accomplished wrestler and athlete. Yeah, there you go. I'm still looking for quotes. Their uniforms, though, were, whew. Naked? Yeah, I was going to say they left a little bit of the coverage areas to be desired. Yeah, yeah. But hey, who might have judged? Hey, north-south just has a different meaning, I guess. Yeah. So I just, I've just gotten recently back into it.

Where do you train? in Virginia Beach I'm sorry in Williamsburg I'm actually going to switch though I'm a bit of a hypochondriac and I'm not I'm not I feel like you're choosing that word

bit let's let's dive into this what is your concern do you have a Costco jug I don't see a lot of cleaning happening it's tough it mischumes I'll get to the like the I've only been there a few times have you asked them how often they clean

I don't like having those conversations with people I don't know. Okay. Are you going to get to know them unless you talk to them? I'll just go to a different gym. Yeah, that sounds like a totally reasonable thing to do, Bill. Well, they're like 15 in that area. Do they have a front desk manager? Yes.

Just say, hey, I'm just out of curiosity. If you need to, you know, make some shit up. Be like, hey, I was thinking about bringing my kids here. One of my kids is autoimmune challenged. And this is all just the pad your apparent inability or inability to have a fucking conversation with a new human being. And just say, what do you guys use for cleaning? And how often do you guys clean?

Yeah, they would be like we don't. Well, the other than you can make an educated decision. Yeah, it's just very sweaty on the, you know, I'll see sweat stuff on the ground. Yeah. I just like cleansing of this. And I've also seen what happens to people when they're, like,

I need these guys that were rolling when we were in the Southern Philippines. Yeah. Where it's extremely hot. Yeah. And I don't remember what it's called, but like that flesh eating Mercer or whatever it is? Yeah, MRSA. Yeah, Mercer. Yeah, yeah.

He'd gotten that on his calf. A lot of that, there's, I mean, again, self-care is an important aspect of this as well, too. Yeah. Anyway, I'm just, I'm going to shop around for more at different ones. I also just don't like the vibe of the place. Are you going to ask any of the other gyms you shop around at? If I find a gym I like and I have an incentive structure to pursue more knowledge about it, then I will. It's just, this place is like literally a room that you walk into.

Michael, I feel like you'd be with me on this. About what, the cleaning aspect? Yeah. About being a hypochondriac and unwilling to have a conversation with another human being to get simple answers. I mean, I think the gym should be cleaned multiple times a day. Yeah, it should be. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure they do, just not enough for my liking.

If only there was a way to actually find out. Okay. But I also, like I said, I've been looking at other ones in the area. And I haven't been at this one very long. You don't even have to look at the person. Just go up to the front desk and look at your water. bottle and just talk to them. This is a problem for me because a lot of people see me on these podcasts and they think I'm very social and affable. You are very affable and you're very social to

the people that you know. I have to know people. Like for the first few months that you and I were talking, I probably wasn't the most like, what is this guy's deal? It's probably what you're thinking. I have to get to know people and I know that I'm talking publicly on a podcast, but in my mind. Yes, just you and I. It's just me and you. I don't remember. I know how we got linked up, but I don't remember how, did we ever talk much before you came on the very first time? Not mostly through chat. Yeah, through unsecured chat. Unsecured chat.

And so. Fortunately, we were conducting espionage. I really don't like being, I hate being in large groups of people, not because I'm some dysfunctional vet that's just seeing some stuff and got blowed up. I just don't like large crowds of people. And I don't like, but my grandfather, who is responsible for most of my rearing, would always say it's very rude to talk about. about yourself in public. That has always stuck with me. And that seems really old school,

but he was a child of the 30s and, you know, Korean War. And he just thought it was not a manly thing to talk about yourself. And men shouldn't be doing that. And let other people talk. You might learn something. Shut your damn mouth. Give it a conversation as like a ping pong game. Yeah, I know. I just don't. That stuck with me. And people are going to be like, oh, the guy who's talking all this on the podcast. Like, all right, meet me in public. You can have a different, you can have a different calculus on how you think of mine. Yeah, like where's Bill? He's sitting in the booth over there

hiding behind his menu, talking to his water bottle about how often they clean the restaurant. Right. Yes, exactly. How often do you guys wipe down the tables? Is it every time what cleaning solution do you use? Yeah, exactly.

Those are good questions. But you don't ask them. I'm surprised you don't ask these questions. I operate on a baseline level that most people are trying to do the best to fill the core competencies of their roles or responsibilities. Oh, I think people do the minimum them to get by. I'm not saying that I don't feel that way too. I'm saying I hope that that's what it is.

And I have enough stuff going on in my own life that I only have so much bandwidth to dedicate to other people's stuff. Yeah. Like if I saw a cockroach on a dinner table, I'm not going to eat there. But if I walk into a restaurant and it looks pretty good and I don't travel with a microscope like you, so I can't get out a science experiment in a petri dish and an autoclave or whatever you would put the silverware in. I'm not that, though. Not so sure. But anyway, yeah, so how do we get on jujitsu?

Because I don't like talking about jujitsu. I really don't know shit about it. Well, you're talking about health maxing. You're coach does, though. Gordon Ryan. Yeah. I would say I know more than the average bearer, but once you know you more than the average bear,

you know you know nothing. Well, there's also a really big delta between knowing a lot and being able to do a lot. Yes, that's also true. Knowing the path and walking the path. Yeah. Gordon and John are fascinating to me. They seem to have almost a didactic sense or just, you know, photographic memory of just about every aspect.

Yeah. Which is impressive. Yeah. And the spatial awareness. And like, I don't know if you've rolled with someone at that level. I'm sure you have. It's just the pressure that you feel all the time. Yep.

In places where you wouldn't think pressure is even the option. And you're just like, what do I? do. Yeah. Like, there's nothing I can, like, I know what I should do. I should try to pass this or I should, you know, I could get into side control here. If I manipulate his arm here, I, like, I know what. He could sit and tell me what I should be doing. But the right thing. I don't have an ability to do it. Like, I'm, I'm a, I'm like a cockroach under a boot, right? Um, I know the feeling. And it's, it's, uh, humbling and it's good humbling. I've been trying to get my son to do it and he won't do it. My son's leaving for the military in the spring. What branch? Air Force. What's he want to do? He wants to be on a flight crew because he wants to see the world. Any particular platform? He wants to do something. So the flight crew structure in the Air Force has changed. It used to be that there were MOSs.

This is my understanding. That could be wrong. It used to be that there are MOSs for each part of the flight crew. Like this guy would run the intel centers. This guy would run the camera. This guy would run the refueling portion. Whatever. There were different ones.

Now it's just you're on the flight crew. And then once you get into the flight crew, they'll assess you and then say, oh, you're going to be on this or this or this. So I believe his intent is to be on a flight crew of an Intel collection asset. Okay. Which I pray and hope for him. We initially wanted to do the Army, but I'll have to, if I can smite my own, the recruitment process with the Army was lacking.

How so? Just engagement, following up, showing up to appointments. Like my Army recruiter, mine, my son's Army recruiter, they were like, oh, you got to be at Mepison this morning. Like my son had taken the ASVAB and did surprisingly well, which I was very worried about. And he did really well. Like, he did better than I did in almost everything. And they told us to go to MEPs one morning.

And my son is like me in that if you tell him something's going to happen, he expects only that thing to happen. And if other things are happening, he starts feeling like he's getting the rigmarole. And so we showed up there for him to just to take his ASVAB, certification test, which I don't know if you had to do this. I didn't, but... This is the first I've heard of this. Yeah, so you take your ASVAB. Yeah.

But because what recruiters were doing, especially during the height of the war, was they were helping soldiers on the ASVab. Because you get someone who couldn't pass, but they needed the numbers. Oh, God. So they'd be like, hey, mark that one D, mark that one GDF or whatever. Which, to me begs a question, why is this person an NCO? Like, they should just be thrown out. Like, that's the way to fix that.

But anyway, he takes the ASVAB. Then you have to go to MEPs and take a distilled ASVAB that's only like 30 questions. Oh, interesting. Just to prove in an audited manner that, yes, the, the, when I, when I do a juxtaposition of the two, it seems the same person took both tests. Dude, can you imagine the size of the problem that had to have existed for them to input that? Yeah. That's not a one z-to-sie. No, no, it's huge. Holy cow. But then when we got there, A, he didn't show up the recruiter and he said he was going to be there. So we didn't, like the MEP station in Baltimore, is huge. And so he had, he had to walk around. And then he ended up having to take like three or four more

tests than what he said they were going to do when we got there. And then he was, and then one of the other recruiters was telling my son things that just weren't true. One of them was, well, once you take the oath at MEPs, that's it. That's what you are. That's what you got. That's where you're going. And my son was like, I don't like that. Like, what if I change in the next year? Yeah. Because he was going to be a year out from when he shipped. Yeah, delayed entry. And he said, well, what if I figure out another job and I want to do that, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the recruiter's like, no, you're locked in. And I told my son's like, look, that is demonstrably not true. Like, we can look this up. He's like, well, why is the recruiter saying it? And I'm like, because he's a

shithead. Well, what is the role of the recruiter? Right. First, to get as many people possible into the army. And then once they do sign up, convince them that there's nothing left to do other than execute their contract. Because his performance is probably based on numbers as well. Or hers. Yeah, for sure. And so, but anyway, it just left us lacking. And then my son was like, hey, let's just talk to the Air Force recruiter and I was like look I have no problem with you going to the Air Force there are trades like in the army you're going to get that sense of community when you roll around in the shit with people when you do awful things there's a sense of tribe that gets developed that has been very hard for me in my life to replicate anywhere else and it might have been one of the things I valued most about my military

experience was just being with a small group of people that I knew had my back no matter what I really enjoyed that portion of it. Like you get to develop these relationships over time and I still talk to all of these people and I still count them as some of my best friends. I would say based on friends of mine who've been in the Air Force, there's a little bit less of that

just because there's not these shared suck. I'm sure there is some places. Obviously attack P or something like that is probably going to have those things. But by and large, if there's a distribution of suck versus quality of life. Oh, it's a different job for sure. different job for sure. But the Air Force recruiter was in our first call, very open and very clear.

So I'll shout out Sergeant Brown from Virginia. We know, Newport News recruiting, whatever. She was like everything that he had a problem with in the Army, she was very clear and upfront with him from the beginning. She told him, here's what you need to do. You're basically a unicorn with your scores so you get to choose whatever job you want. I will lock you into that job. If any moment, you decide you want to do another job until the day you leave, we can modulate that. and make the changes. There's thresholds that you have to meet once you meet those. It's my pleasure to get you into the Air Force, and I think it's a great career,

and it was just a breath of fresh air for him. Hell yeah. And it could be personality-based, too, right? I'm not saying all Army recruiting is bad and all Air Force recruiting is great. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying was there was a stark contrast in the experiences and put him in a much better headspace,

which is where I need him before he ships out, because if I have failed in a father in one regard, it's that I grew up in a situation where most people would call poor. I wouldn't have called it poor. Most people would call it poor or like, you know, not a great youth. And my thing when I became adult was I don't want any of my children to suffer under these same things that I suffered as as a child. And so I'm going to give them and make sure that they're never for want on things.

And I probably overcooked that goose. and it's my downfall as a father. It didn't really affect my daughters that much, but it's definitely affected my son, who I love more than anyone. Like I tell my son all the time, there is no one in the world that I want to beat me except for you. Like every moment of my waking days are,

how can I make Bill Thompson 2.0, my little, my son, I'm not trying to be a narcissist, but how can I make him? William James. Yeah, he calls it by Liam. But how can I make this guy better than me? and I will celebrate the success of him becoming a better man than I will. And it's one of my singular endeavors. And because I've given him this kind of lap of luxury to exist inside of the incentive structure,

it just isn't there for him. And that's my feeling as a father. The military will sort that. Exactly. So anything I can do to get him on that road to go and understand, like there's a lot of tremendous value and growth that can take place here that, I just haven't set the circumstances up and my feelings as a father to give you these things. Do you really feel like you failed?

I wouldn't say failed. I'm just saying he's a good kid. He's a really good kid. And he's got a huge heart. He's really nice. But my grandfather definitely could have given me more than my grandfather primarily raised me. My father primarily raised me. My grandfather was a child of the 30s and went through the depression and, you know, was

not a lot of feelings in the household, but it ended up being a great gift to me. Do you think he was capable of deep feelings? I don't know. My grandmother was a wonderful woman, and they jived really well. And I just think that, I think they were called the greatest generation for a reason.

And he just, if I could, I should have been, I should have remembered a lot of the hardship that he imposed on me even though he didn't need to. And made a conscious decision to transfer that to my son in a way where I would be more of a safety net than a comfy pillow for him. Like in other words, I'm not going to let you fail catastrophically, but I'm also, you're also going to do these things every day. And you don't have a choice but to come with me to jiu-jitsu. You don't have a choice but to come with me to the gym.

If you want a phone or an allowance, these are the things that you're doing along with all of these chores. I just didn't do a lot of that. And a lot of it was I was deployed or gone while he was a kid. So he was being primarily raised by his mother. And, you know, we didn't really get to get close and spend a lot of time together until he was probably 12 or so, 11 or 12. So all I'm saying was I could have done. Look, if you don't relay the challenges of the world, to your children at a young age and impose them on them,

then you are not equipping them for a world that will do it and give them no safety net when it does it to them. In other words, if you don't impose the nature of the world on your children at a young age, then the world will impose nature on you. And that's in every aspect of life. If you don't impose training on yourself or not becoming a fat ass or staying in shape

or keeping rolling or doing these things, you'll die younger. nature will impose and judge you for your lack of comeuppance earlier on if you don't choose the discipline for yourself the world will judge that lack of discipline and and it will not be a soft landing for you and very few people can hit from my own family experience you know raised with a lot of people who are alcoholics and drug addicts lots of jail time they didn't choose the hard road for themselves so the world chose the hard road for them and um and it's a once you've done that it's a very difficult thing to rebound from even when you do rebound like i know a lot of friends and family

who are addicted at methamphetamines it killed my two sisters um my brother-in-law it killed um the meth did or did they get it that was uh well my sister once my sister my well there's three different stories here. My sister Jenny got addicted to drugs and then OD'd and just died at like 40. And then my sister Heather got addicted to methamphetamines, who my sister Heather was mostly like me. We were kind of the black sheep of the family in that. We wanted to get out and do better. Whereas our family, a lot of whom, not to speak for them, but at least from the outside looking in, seemed like they were fine with the status quo. And so she left early, had a family, Heather, beautiful children, awesome kids. Her husband was one of the hardest working guys I've ever met.

The family that she married into was the best group of people you could hope to marry into, like truly salt of the earth, hardworking, really, just really good people. I would love to emulate that for myself, like the family that they built and the way that they love each other and support each other. They don't cut corners. Just very good people. She married into that family and then got on, and I'm distilling this for purposes of the podcast,

but she got on antidepressants. And then antidepressants turned into methamphetamines. And then she just left her whole family. Like I think they took her off antidepressants, which were very powerful at that time. This is the 90s. Like they were really playing science experiments with the mine and putting on stuff that was people on.

stuff that was essentially methamphetamine or other types of drugs. And when they took that away from her, I think she started seeking drugs elsewhere. And then she got addicted to methamphetamines. And then she went to a clinic in Fort McMurray, Alberta, which I think is just north of here. Alberta is. Yeah, in Fort McMurray. And this clinic allowed them to do meth while they were in the clinic. So they would get a meth allowance and do it like every week or something like that. Okay. It's fucking Canadians. America's top hat. And so while she was in there, I think, and this is bluey. I'm not sure exactly how this happened. But she ended up storing meth or collecting more or getting some from someone else. And this, and then did a catastrophic amount and killed herself. Damn. And then another brother who got addicted to drugs and then, while addicted to drugs, engaged in very unsavory behavior and then killed him. himself in jail while he was probably still high, I don't know, but he hung himself with his

mattress liner in jail. So that is to say, and then, you know, my father wasn't around. So we were being raised in very unsavory circumstances, I guess you could say. I saw it as life. And I am actually quite thankful for my upbringing. But why would, why did I get on this whole thing about my family and my own. Oh, my son. Well, I asked you if you actually feel like you failed. So, so my grandfather then, um, start, raised me for a couple of years. And, um, I lived with them. And he was a really good dude and really walked the line and gave me very important lessons that I still think about to this day. And my grandmother as well said things that at the time I thought were like cliches. And now in my 40s, I think of them as like knowledge bombs.

Like my grandmother would always say to me and I'm sure you've heard this. saying, but she would say, be good for goodness, be good for goodness sakes. And that was always just like a throwaway thing my grandmother would say. But now in my 40s, I think about it. And there was a point in my life where I would donate and help and tithe and give money away. And I would do it, not because it was the right thing to do. I would do it because it made me feel better about my place in life. Yeah. And I would use it to like massage my own ego. Like, oh, look at how benevolent you are. And now I'm trying to be good for goodness sakes. I just do these things because it's what good people do. And that has, if I can say, elevated me

to a different spot in my life where I'm better for it and I'm better off for it. And I often try to do things where I know I'm giving something to someone and they will never know who gave it to them. I will never know who I gave it to. And I just want them to walk around thinking there are angels in the world that are helping them out. And I do that at small levels and I do that at large levels. A small level is every time my kids and I go through McDonald's, I always pay for the person behind me. I'm poisoning the people behind me. But I'll always pay for them. This one time I did it and there was a- What if a school bus was behind you? I had an SUV full of kids that had all done the truffle shuffle at one point in their life. And the lady behind me was like, hey, are you sure you

you want to pay for this? And I was like, yeah, why? And she's like, it's $170 bucks. My wife looked at me and just started laughing. All my kids were laughing in the backseat. And I was like, it's not a principal if I don't do it right now. So I paid it. And I could see them back there cheering as we drove off. They're trying to add to the order. Hold on, hold on, hold on. His number.

And then I do it in other ways that I won't talk about because I don't want to self, I don't want to self congratulate myself. But that is something, that's an example of something my grandparents gave me at a very young age that seemed cliche. Yeah. But now later in life, it's like, yeah, that's awesome. Like I've unpacked that now to a sufficient amount. Dude, it's all I want to do in my life. is just to have a positive impact. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I don't know necessarily the prescriptive mechanism of that. And I think a lot of it is little choices throughout your day. I think if you listen to your consciousness, it will tell you a lot of these things. I think consciousness is uniquely human, and it's a system that we can use to update ourselves in meaningful ways, where if we just sit and listen to it, and you can say it's the voice of God, you can say it's transcendent reality. You can say it's a million lessons of a million relatives over a million years compacted into your collective. subconscious. Whatever you want to,

whatever moniker you wanted to ascribe to it, I find that if you just listen to it, it will give you the right answers 10 times out of 10. Any concerns with your son joining the military, seeing what's going on in the world?

Yes. Absolutely. Do you express those to him, or is that a personal journey? I can only, I will say things to him, knowing that 90% of what I say gets thrown out the door.

Similarly to the way I threw out the door, most of the things my grandmother, my grandfather said. Yeah. And I only hope that when I'm gone later, he will reflect upon these things and then be able to build on them at a later date. Yeah, I don't think they're thrown out the door. They're in a pantry on a shelf. Yes, exactly.

You just, you haven't come to that part of the recipe. These rations will become valuable later. Yeah. It's like, what do we need the Worcesters sauce for, Dad? I don't like that. And then you come to a complicated recipe and you realize. Or a skirt steak. Sure.

I didn't know that you put that on a skirt steak. Oh, yeah. You use it to tenderize a skirt steak. I just cooked them. Oh, no. Tenderize it with Worcestershire sauce. First off, what's Worcestershire sauce? What did you call it?

Worcestershire sauce. First off, if we keep saying this, it's both going to get worse for us sequentially. Well, an English person in the comments, please tell us the correct pronunciation of Worcestershire sauce. What do you make of what's going on in the world militarily? Oh, Jesus. I mean, we have a time allotment here, so let me try to compact this. We have a case. I'm not the expert here.

I've advised experts, and I can only look at this really from what I learned throughout the military, which is we are great at tactical victory. In other words, the U.S. military can break anything and kill anyone it wants to at any time. And I kind of talked about this on our last podcast in that the threshold to do those things should be very high. Agreed. So high, in fact, that we almost never have to do it. But at the same time, our ability to do that should be our advertising. It should be the central thrust of whenever anyone thinks about what the American mind is capable of,

they would say to themselves, that's the bully on the playground who I ought not muck with. And so I like defense spending. I think we should be spending a lot on defense, not because we need to use it. The same thing with jiu-jitsu. Yeah, you're going to keep the scalpel sharp. Yes. Go every day. Become as dangerous as you can, knowing you'll probably never use it.

it in a real case and if you were smart and disciplined you would know break contact and run don't get into it that's what years of violence teaches you so I like lots of defense spending I like you know five to 10 to 15 percent of GDP being spent on the military because the sword gets bigger and sharper and people muck with us less where I differ from I think every almost everyone is once war is the route it's so overwhelming and violent and not tit for tat, that it only needs to be done once, and then anyone with a functioning memory

would never do it with us again. So my hope is that out of exercising overwhelming military capability, the world could look at us and say, well, there, you just don't mess with them. And so- What level are we talking about here? Nuclear? No, not nuclear, but if we're going to go to war,

the society probably ceases to exist in its current form forever. So, uh, Cool. So there would have to be a plan. Essentially, Iran would be like, it's gone in most. And you'd only have to do it once. And people would say, well, that's too violent. That's too much. You're talking to the 80 million people in Iran? Well, they would have to. What would happen is we would bring an overwhelming military force. We would depose the government. Anybody associated with the government or even farted in their favor is gone. And then now we have to come up with a new plan. That's horrible. I don't want to do. that. I'm hoping that we can advertise ourselves in such a way that we never have to do that. But if we have to, in other words, if someone breaks into my house and killing them, if somebody is coming up with a plan to break into my house, I'm going to go find them and kill them. And then my hope would be, anybody else would look at that and say, violence is not the answer

with Bill Thompson because he or his other friends will kill me. Or even if he kills me, my friends will go and kill him. I want peace. That seems easier than regime change. It is easier. I don't, Look, to be clear, I don't want regime change. What I'm saying is that we advertise something that's so overwhelming and so deadly that we never have to use it. No one's going to go pick a fight with Jock Willink one-on-one who's got his head about him. And if someone does, he'll eviscerate them. And then that'll be the story of him. And then other people will know, I don't need to do that.

But once you are going to engage, it needs to be overwhelming because otherwise you get, World War I where the lines move six inches every 180 days and it's death and carnage and half measures and you and there's no victory. There's an armist and nothing was ever really solved. So why did all those people die? If people and blood and treasure is going to be executed, it's going to be through overwhelming mechanical and methodical violence that will make you wish you rude the day that you ever mucked with us. But also going after someone just because you think they're developing the nuke would not meet my threshold for war. We could do economic sanctions. We could engage the world community in a meaningful way and say, if you want to trade with the Americans, you're never

going to trade with the Iranians. Reagan did it during the Cold War. He never had to fire a bullet. That would be most of my answers to things, is we have the greatest economic engine in the world. And if people want to play with us, we can use that economic engine to impose our well on truly bad actors. So people might hear this and say, oh, in Iran, you would have killed everyone. No, Iran warned would have never happened. It wouldn't have met my threshold for war. So we have to be intentional about what I'm saying is the threshold for war. What I'm saying is once that threshold is matched, the gloves come off and you go all in, all in. And then I'm doing that, not because I love violence, I'm doing it because I hope it never has to happen again. Yeah. That the world

learns a lesson. So to go to your back to your question, we're great at imposing tactical surprise and achieving tactical ends and we're the best at it, probably in the history of combat. The problem is our civilian leadership, which is necessary, confuse tactical advantage with strategic end state.

And they think that one can lead to the other. And there's no, the Venn diagram is very scant when it comes between those two things. And I would say you can't, engage the tactical side of that Venn diagram, unless you have clear goals on what the strategic side of that Venn diagram looks like. And we didn't really think through, in my opinion. Maybe they did in some room, some smoky room in the Pentagon, but it's not clear to me in what's being said

by the administration that we had an idea of what strategic victory looked like. What do you think in their initial planning? Clearly, neither of us were there. I'm sure at some point a duration was thrown out there, an expected duration of the conflict. six weeks or something or eight weeks or something. I mean, I remember telling you and I can talk about this because we're here now. There were planning meetings about this that I was invited to a few months before this all went down. Yeah. And I told you, hey, we're going to be invading Iran in the next three months.

No question. I don't remember what your response is. I think your response was like, yeah, it makes sense. But at that time, you know, I told other people and they're like, come on, dude, we're not invading Iran. We just did that, you know, then we would, did Venezuela, which was hot prep for Iran. And we, what we, the other thing that we misinterpreted with Iran was, we called them a radical theocracy. And they're not a radical theocracy.

They're a military industrial complex where the military runs everything, the generals who are in charge run everything. And the theocracy exists by virtue of the military industrial complex. And going to war with a theocracy versus a military industrial complex are two. separate things. Those are two separate ways that you prosecute that war. And so we didn't have clear strategic vision on what the end state looks like. How could we confuse those two things? Because people think if we can break it all, then it's over. Yeah, but I would like to think that smart people are in the right rooms and could make that simple explanation to the people who say

that the M1 Abrams tank is the answer to everything, which it certainly is the answer to many things. Yeah, sure. But not everything. Yeah, I mean, I think it's hubris. I think that there's a lack of the way that people get appointed in these government spaces I'm very familiar with, A, because I used to do some appointing, and B, because I was at one point considered for appointment. And there's not a lot of diligence that goes into that process other than do you know the right people and do you say the right things. and that really when you talk about the administration the administrative arm of the federal government and the people who are appointed

it's less do you know the target space and more do you agree with how I view the target space yeah low T above all that's left and right by the way that's both sides so we confuse tactical and strategic victory we assessed the enemy as being a theocracy when they're actually a military industrial complex,

and we didn't specify end state from the outset. Because Trump's doing something, which is right right now, which is saying, look, everything's going to suck for a while. That should be the narrative that any government says before you go to war. This shit's going to suck. But when we achieve A, B, C, and D, things will suck less now. Trump's saying part of that. Right now he's saying, yes, things are going to be expensive.

The Straits of Harmuz are attack. tactical asset that we need to exercise control over or at least exercise control over the people who exercise control over it because until there's a pipeline, it's the only shipping route and that things are going to get expensive. He's saying that part. What he's not saying is here are the things that how we define victory. Yeah. And you owe the American people when you're exercising blood and treasure. This is what victim, and you would have thought after Iraq, we would have learned this, um, this story. And then the other part, what the part, what the problem with government that answers the second

party of your question here is I can't remember the guy's name he had Bell's palsy and he was a bomber during he was a bomber during World War II and

he was the general that Stanley Kubrick used as the Dr. Strange Love the guy riding the nuclear bomb you remember Dr. Strange Love I mean, we're talking probably three decades ago. Yeah.

Can you help me, Michael? Yeah, Curtis LeMay. Curtis LeMay was a famous pilot. And I believe at this time he was no longer a general officer. Maybe he still was. But JFK during the Bay of Pigs kept him around as an advisor despite RFK saying, get this guy out of here. He's crazy. Like he's nuts.

Curtis LeMay's answer for World War II was, we don't need to use a nudge. nuke, let's just carpet bomb the entire island. Because the estimates for an attack on mainland Japan was, we're going to lose a million soldiers. And despite what people say, there's these revisionists that are coming out. Japan had not surrendered. There were, there was three men in a room, including the emperor who were saying, we can beat the Americans, we can do this. And it wasn't until the second nuke dropped that they came out and said, okay, uncle. LeMay's answer was we hit them with, what is the, I'm forgetting my terms right now, the putty, the, the, the, C4? C4 or C6.

Napalm. We napalm and carpalm. Napalm is not putty. It's nice to you. I've never used napalm, so. Unfortunately, neither have I. I did try to find a flamethrower one time I was denied. I bet you got to mess with a bunch of C4 and C6 and stuff.

Oh, yeah. Like charges and, like, did you? you like lots of breaching courses and stuff like that. Lots of fun. Anyway, Curtis Lemay's answer was, well, just carpet bomb the whole thing. No use to use them. With napalm.

With napalm. The whole place. Just kill them all. North to south. Just go for it. Because they had, if you read about what Japan had been doing to the Chinese, what Japan had been doing to the Koreans, what kind of force they were, that industrial complex,

they were a bunch of bad dudes. Like they were doing, you look at like, like Nan King and like read about that stuff like they were truly bad people and and and so during World War II that was his thing and they're like no we're going to drop a nuke and

you know the estimate was either a million people or we drop a nuke and we think after the first nuke unit 731 this is this will keep you up at night 731 will keep if you've not read about this this this is the first time I've ever heard of this I mean we can get into it's terrible

It is un... They were doing surgeries on people, experimental surgeries on people, and they were not providing anesthesia just because they didn't want to. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with my long-term partner BetterHelp,

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That's betterh-H-E-L-P dot com slash cleared hot. Back to the show. People, like people do you mean like, prisoners of war? Okay, okay. But they were purposely giving them diseases. They were doing these surgeries on them. Vivisection.

Surgery's in organ removal is performed on living prisoners without anesthesia. Disease infection. Oh, they're talking. Deliberate exposure to bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, and typhus. Physical extremes. Frostbite testing. Holy shit. Pressure chamber tests in flamethrower or weapon trials.

On living people. Field testing. Releasing disease, fleas and contaminated materials on Chinese villages, causing thousands of civilian deaths, estimates of total death range from 3,000 in direct facility experiments to hundreds of thousands from broader field. And then we paperclip them. What does that mean?

Are you aware of Operation Paperclip? Wasn't that the atomic bomb? The Nazis? Yeah. The exchange for the Nazis. We did the same thing with their scientists. We gave the emperor immunity for all of this. As long as he gave us the data, check me on this too.

I've heard this is true, but I will look it up. Michael, you are not AI. We told him we won't not prosecute him for this. Total surrender should have meant his death. That would have been my only... At his own hands or ours. Yes, the United States grants an immunity to specific Japanese military personnel

involved in horrific war crimes in exchange for human experimentation and biological warfare data. So tell us what you learned, and we won't prosecute you. And they also tested on children, infants, and pregnant women. Yes. And there are... What kind of person do you have to be to do that?

But don't look up the stuff they did with the pregnant women. It is unfathomable, Andy. And so these guys needed to go. Why were they doing this? Not that there is a benevolent reason to do this or a military... But were they just trying to... I mean, was this early, like, biological weapons engineering? What the fuck were they doing?

It's not clear to me what they were trying to achieve other than pain and suffering in the world in a similar fashion that the Nazis did in places like Krakow in Poland and, and, and, uh,

Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. Um, but they, they needed to go. So when people look back and like, oh, the Japanese weren't that bad and, oh,

they were actually going to surrender and we didn't have to drop the bomb. It's like, no, bullshit. Do you read. Read into the, the peer-reviewed firsthand documents. These were truly barbaric people.

And they did truly barbaric things. And we've done our own barbaric things. Don't get me wrong. Regardless, like exchanging data and not prosecuting somebody that was taking apart women while they are alive and opening their stomachs with babies and watching them die on a table. And then documenting it in egregious fashion. Regardless, Curtis Lemay, back to the point, said, yeah, we just, we don't need to, we can just, give me and my B2s. We will lay waste these people.

And we don't have to drop a nuke. and anyway the decision was made to drop a nuke. The reason I say this, and the problem we're speaking to with the problem of government is JFK, who I think in a lot of ways was a great president, of course he had his personal comeuppances, which I think any, you know, presidents always have those. RFK said, Curtis Lemay, you got to get him out here. And in JFK's wisdom said, look, Curtis LeMay is crazy. and he's a wild motor scooter.

But if this Bay of Pigs goes the way it could go, we're going to be glad he's on our side. So he kept someone who is an opposite political philosophy of his, who saw the world contextually in an entire different way than he did, and he kept them around of those facts, because he was different. And he wanted to see the world through that lens because there is valuable, there might be a nugget that he can extract, and that would help him prosecute the Bay of Pigs better.

And so he didn't get rid of him. And like I said, he had Bell's palsy, and they were always like, oh, he's a gunslinger, he keeps a cigar on the side of his mouth. He kept the cigar on the side of his mouth because he would drool if he didn't have it. He got Bell's palsy while he was on a bombing run. And so that is lacking in our government today. Having people with totally different worldviews at the highest level, informing the president about a situation is desperately needed.

And anybody who's effectively ran a scientific experiment can tell you the value of having that kind of distribution of opinions in the room when decisions for the future of the world are being made. And we totally lack that in today's society. And it's partly because of the polarization. It's partly because of how presidents fear that they'll be judged if they're keeping a lefty-loonians. in the room or how lefty loonies will look if they're keeping a righty tidy in the room. And it's just like I keep those people in my life. Like one of my very good friends is like, you know, I don't want to say too much description. He's the opposite end of me on the distribution.

But I can sit down with him and have a beer and I can see the world through his eyes. And I can pluck things out of there that are valuable, even though we couldn't disagree more. on the core issues. But it's the only meaningful way that I can update my system where I don't become a self-licking ice cream cone. And it's invaluable to have those people around. And that is nowhere in government these days. Yeah, it's vilified, even the thought of that.

Yeah. What if you were a betting man, how much longer for Iran and how do you think it plays itself out? Three to nine months. And the powers that be will raise. remain and the nuclear enrichment will take about two years, three years. If someone doesn't trade for them because they could go to Pakistan and say, we're going to give you hundreds of thousands of barrels of free oil.

Just help us get our nuclear program up on, up off the ground. And they'll do that after, they'll be a Democrat president. And I'm not saying that because I hate Democrats, but Democrats don't care about these things. We shouldn't care about Iran having nukes. You think Democrats don't care about Iran having nukes? Or it's just not their priority? I mean, they really loosened the restrictions on the nuclear program under the Obama and the Biden administration. They unfreeze a lot of funds that they directly committed to terrorism and nuclear development with the Houthis and Hamas and the killing of Americans.

That's, I think, pretty widely and broadly documented. Do you think that any agreement that Iran signs is going to be lived up to anyway? No, which is why, if we're going to go to war with them, we kill them all. 80 million. No, no, no, no. the core again I wouldn't go to work with them in Afghanistan and Iraq

I know I know that's why I'm saying my threshold is so high you either get rid of the cancer or you deal with it and if we determine that someone's a threat a cancer you use chemo and you cut it out and there's really no other way to deal with it and so if we determine that someone is a cancer that for me again I wouldn't have gone to this war

this war wouldn't have happened under Bill Thompson's regime. I'm never going to have a regime, thank God. But what I'm saying is this would have never happened. But if I met Threshold as the commander in chief, then yes, everyone who's like, say there was a dirty bomb that went through the border from country X. Everyone in country X who was in political control or benefited from the political controller was associated with it or farted in the favor of it. dies and then now we need to come up with a plan for the rest of those people and it's going to suck and it's not going to work and it might create other problems but you either confront the cancer or you

don't and and that's unfortunately that's why I don't like when I start hearing people saying like well their responses aren't proportional proportionality is not a circumstance of war I'm not going to say well they only have Kalisnikovs Andy so I'm only sending you to Afghanistan with Kalisnikovs and no NVGs because they don't have MVGs and that would be proportional. War is not the grounds for proportionality. War is the grounds for the survival of the better experiment because the problem with war in its nascent, most embryonic sense is a misunderstanding of the military capabilities of the parties in the room. So if I truly under, if you and I are countries and I truly understood what your capacity as a country is, I know I ought not go to war with you because you,

you can flex more military muscle than I will, and it will lead to my demise. When we don't advertise or develop the military capability and make us the most sharp, the sharpest razor in the room, then people start thinking, I think I can win a fight with this guy. I think if I did X, Y, and Z, they wouldn't have the political temperament to deal with this. So I am going to bomb these places. I am going to conduct these acts of terrorism because you either lack the vigor or the will to confront it or they're busy somewhere else. So they didn't, fully under. That's war is like if there's four guys in a room and you don't know the fighting capabilities of any of them, say Michael's sitting with the three of us. And you and I have never

done any combat sports. We've never done anything. But Michael, you know, weighs 35 pounds less than us. We look bigger than him. We immediately disregard him. We immediately disregard him, as we should. But, but then push comes to shove and he's a nerd assassin. He's a nerd assassin. And he locks me in an upside down triangle and makes me beg for mercy. I, didn't conduct a proper threat assessment. And he wasn't wearing his brown belt at the time. So there wasn't an advertising of his capability. Have you seen the way of the fist?

No. It's the, I think this. This is a movie that I haven't seen? Jesse Eisenberg. Yeah. It's about karate. And he makes colored belts. He gets a yellow belt.

And then he gets confronted in a parking lot and a guy slaps his groceries out of his hands. And he's just like, I feel so less than I didn't have my yellow. but he like he sternly talks to himself but so then he does he makes colored belts for everybody to wear around so that way they can feel you know as if he is a yellow and when he went shopping he only bought yellow things so there you go yeah so there was i could see michael walking around with this brown belt on right now he's probably got it in his pocket right now yeah it's in my back pocket just in case yeah but there wasn't an advertising a capability there was an impedance mismatch and my ability to metabolizes military capability and so i engaged and now i it's

If he brings overwhelming violence and, you know, snaps my arm with a handy arm bar, I know better going forward. And so the thresholds, I'll say this one more time because I know people are going to think I'm a warmonger. I'm saying all these things because I don't want war. The threshold for war should be so freaking high. Yeah, you're saying it should be a measure of last resort for a reason. But once the thresholds met, everything comes off the table. And in the same way that if someone breaks into my home and wants to kill my family or take from my family or do whatever, they have to die.

That thought experiment has to die. If I tolerate it, then you get Chaz, you know what I mean? You get people overtaking downtown city centers. That was a cool social experiment. Yeah, right, exactly. C-H-A-D-Z. So, again, but if you come into, if you build up the military capability in the budget and you make it huge, the thought process is always like, well, we have to use these things.

No, you don't have to use them. You need to advertise them. You need to let them know. how far ahead we are. So they don't ever want to muck with us. And yes, there will still be somebody who's going to fly planes into a building. That will still happen. But once that happens, the gloves come off.

Like, I would have been very bullish in Afghanistan and with the people associated with it, Saudi Arabia or whomever else. And that would have been the story of them. And we have the capability to make it the story of them. And then that would avoid that in the future. And what I'm about is avoiding war. The role of the military, and a lot of people don't, know this, but I'll say it, is to deter war. When deterrence fails to win forcefully and overwhelmingly,

and we only do that through shooting, moving, and communicating. That's it. That's the whole experiment. And when you become the best at those three things and you advertise it, then nobody will fuck with you. So I'm sorry, I've gone over. Again, I'm not a war monger. I feel like I have to keep saying that because people aren't going to understand me. I love it, but Michael, I need your help. Now that we've discussed Chaz, how did Chaz the experiment end? They finally moved in and just cleared them all out, I thought. Will you look this up, Michael? Yeah, that's what it looks like.

Yeah, I'm curious to know how this ended. Because we heard about it when it was ongoing. It was the summer of love. I think it was the month of love. I'm not sure the transfer of the whole summer. Police cleared the occupied zone on July 1st. Or six days. I think it was somewhere between 30 to 60.

So they forcedfully just went in and cleared it out. I believe so. Arrested over 30, let's see. Rested 30 to 44 people for offenses including blah, blah, blah. Additional arrest occurred during subsequent demonstrations. Let me see how long it lasted. I know what I wanted to talk to you about because I know you're super pumped and very not worried about it at all.

That's AI. Oh, okay. Because I love your text asking when the episode was coming out because you think people will try to keep you off Joe's show based off your feelings. You got to say that part out loud, didn't you? Of course. So I actually wanted to talk about Joe with this on the last podcast that we did. Yep.

But he wanted to focus mostly on like the... First off, you don't know when you sit down with Joe. What is going to be going to talk about about? or the fucking surface of the sun or the giant of candahar do you know how many people have reached out to me not that i was intentionally being dismissive i've been getting this heat you haven't looked into it bro like listen listen yeah with joe you can be talking about dinosaurs or cellular you know molecular Yeah, biology. You never know what it's going to be. So what did you want to talk with them about?

I saw what's going on right now happening with AI. What do you mean by what's going on right now? Right now what's trying to have. So there are two flavors of AI. And if I start to get too deep into the weeds, I tried to talk in a way that everyone can understand me. Because if I were truly to get into the weeds here, it would 5% of people would know what I'm talking about. It's not because I'm smart. It's just because I'm extremely. focused in this area. Just talk to me like I'm a golden retriever. Yeah. There's two types of AI right now, generally. There are closed systems and open systems. I use closed systems sparingly, and I try to use as many open systems as I can. Can you define the differences between the two? So a closed system would be, what's a good analogy? A closed system would be an Uber. So you rent a car for a function. You don't know what engines under the hood. You don't know who the mechanics are that built it. And that's why you use them sparingly. Yeah, and you don't even know what's baked into it.

All you know is it's going to get you from point A to point B. So it's good enough for that function. What is an open system? No, what's a recognizable example in the AI world of a closed system. Are we talking things? Chat, GPT. Okay. So LLM's like Claude, chat, GPT, all those things? Yes. Okay. So you, I can't get into the weights. How these things are, so I said this actually on the Josh Smith podcast that you and I went on. AI is, people have gotten so over the skis about what AI is that it's insurmountable in my mind that we're using words like AGI. AI in its simplest form is training data with linear algebra with nonlinear transforms and matrix multiplication. So those are the, those are the essential elements. And humans,

evaluate the matrix multiplication, the training of the systems, the weights of the neurons, and say whether output is good or bad. So there's human data is given. A particular type of algorithm or neural network is selected for the particular problem. And output is given. And then the output's evaluated. And then we tell the AI how it's done things incorrectly. And then we recalibrate weights and we train again. And we've automated some of this, but it's still the same process. It rests on human data, human generated data. There's a bunch of math, and then there's an output. That's the simplest form of it. Of course, there are other variations and degradations of it, but generally what I've described is the system. So there's these closed systems, which are like

renting an Uber, I guess is a good analogy. All analogies break down at some level, but this is useful for our purposes. Then there's open systems. An open system would be you either are mechanic or you've hired a mechanic and you've told him look I want a T3 transmission out of a 1986 Ford Thunderbird I want a Shelby or a what's what's a what's a I want a 302 from a 1986 Ford F150 with that T3 transmission I want it in the body of a Ford F250 from from 1986. I want this slave cylinder. I want these types of shocks. I want these tires. And it needs to do this. And you know everything that goes into it. You know how it's weighted. Or at least you have the ability to evaluate all of those things. And what AI in the closed realm has done is that

they've been promising AGI now for about five or six years. AGI broadly has two definitions. one definition of AGI would be we have to separate things out and again I'm sorry but this is a big problem and I have to try to when I'm losing you tell me so that I can over explain AGI there are two definitions I think the initial definition back in the day

used to be the Turing test and Turing was the father of the modern computer and Turing established when you can have an interaction with a computer and not know whether or not it's a human or a computer you've passed the Turing test that used to be the the goalposts for artificial intelligence.

With the advent of large language models, the Turing test was largely passed, although I wouldn't say totally pass. But largely passed. But the goalposts shifted in that because the training data is fixed and the weights are fixed and the output is

such that you can still trick these things and get them to hallucinate and to do things where they really haven't they really haven't gotten anywhere close to AGI and they can't based on the system that we're using and I can get into that later. But the open versus closed systems, the closed systems have been promising AGI now for about six years, seven years, maybe longer, but they've been saying we are on the precipice of AGI.

And AGI is going to, and what they mean by AGI is there are two, there's output from a neural network. The output that we get today and the only output that we get today is really novice, I'm sorry, novel computation or novel output. So the novel output might be, we could use AlphaGo. I'm going to confuse people with AlphaGo. The novel output could be, here's a math problem we've never been able to solve. Or we haven't taken the time to solve it is a better way to say it.

I feed it to an AI and an AI gets the problem solved in a few minutes or a few days or a month. And people think, whoa, like it's done something no humans never done. Well, humans could have done that if we had 30 people sitting around and doing the math because there's so much computation involved in the problem that we're trying to solve for, the AIs can do it. So that's novel output. And we have novel output today. I can define a system that we've made up.

Humans have made up. I can say here are the left and right limits. And an AI can look at it and it can solve in a way that either we haven't thought of or we just haven't done. But we've been doing this with calculators for 80 years. Calculators can do more than we can right now. It's just another type of state machine or computer or calculator where it's doing something that a human can't do. But a human built a system, a human trained the system, a human evaluated the output, and

the calculator gives you the answer. So when someone says it's doing calculations we've never heard of, well, yeah, I would expect that a system that's built on mathematics and weighting in linear and nonlinear algebra and matrix multiplication would solve math problems that we either haven't had the time for or haven't thought about. That's novel output. What they're not doing is novel thought. And novel thought, how can a novel thought would be somebody presents you a problem and you stand outside the box and you come up with a way to solve a problem that's never been done before. And there, an example of that would be Newton looked at an apple falling from the tree.

tree and drew a string from an apple falling from a tree to the moon and started telling us about the moon and gravity and how we understood Newtonian what we call Newtonian physics today, which was a very good way of solving things in the world, right? A computer that existed at that time on the training set of data that we had at that time would have never watched an apple fall or been described in apple falling and then generated theories of gravity because those things were never in the training data. Yeah. The computer can't create anything that's not in the training data.

It needs the training data. And then it can vary. It can perform tons of calculations on the training data and give you a novel output, a new output. But it's not going to, another example would be how we looked at viruses back in the day or demons were inside of somebody's body. And that's why you have tuberculosis or something or whatever. disease, you want to call it. If the training data that the computer is using to make these

decisions never had any understanding of microbiology or of viruses or of bacteria, and you were using the training set of the day, you would never get novel thought out of that training data set because the training that you gave the AI, in other words, if I were to take a computer in AI and use the training set of the time, nobody would have conceptualized, I think these are actually tiny little animals that are doing things to us that we cannot see because they exist at a microscopic level because the AI didn't have the training data. Yeah, it wasn't input to the data. It wasn't input to the data.

So now we've established there's novel output. And that novel output is it could have told you some things about if we put training data in the 1800s about wheels, it might have given us something cool or new about wheels that we hadn't thought about. And that would be novel output. But it's not giving us novel thought. Another example of novel thought on, so I established the virus. Like starting to think about viruses in a new way.

Like how do we solve for this cold? Well, we're looking at colds in an entirely total different way. And the AI system would have never done that. Another example would be Einstein sat around and said, what if I could travel at the speed of light and view light as it's traveling? And out of that, he upgraded Newtonian, a conceptualization of the world that was Newtonian. and he got into well, E equals MC square,

which is basically energy is equal to mass which times the speed of light squared. No one had ever thought that way before and Newtonian physics worked for the proximal world. And Einstein conceptualized something that no one had ever thought about and said, if I'm in an elevator and the elevator falls

for a moment, I'm going to feel weightless. Why? Like, what is happening? I'm traveling at such a speed. Now, if I take that and I say, I'm traveling at the speed of light, not just the speed of falling, what is that going to do the way I conceive things? And that's the novel thought. And that's novel thought. There was no training data.

There was no one working with these ideas. There's no one conceptualizing these ideas. That is, when I told you before, listen to consciousness. I believe, and this is a theory, that the input that people are playing with, is consciousness. And consciousness is a uniquely human animal experiment experience where you can sit and think about an idea or a problem that you have in your life. And if you think about it enough and you calm yourself and you pray or you sit at the

end of your bed and you think about it, an idea will come to you. And it comes from that collective subconscious layer that we talked about before, which is you can say it's the Holy Spirit. You can say it's evolution over a million years where all of these experiences of your ancestors get densely packed into this thing we call the collective subconscious. And when you sit and think about a problem, the idea will propagate out of the collective subconscious, and all of a sudden you've had an idea you've never had.

If we were meat machines, in other words, if we worked like a computer, and if computers and humans think, which we don't have an idea of what consciousness is, there are no good academic, there's no good academic rigor on what's actually going on in subconsciousness. There are some good ideas, and I can get into them. but you can sit around and have an idea you've never had.

If you were in AI or if we were built like AIs, you would never be able to sit around and have idea you've never had. Because you're bounded by... The training data. Yeah. So in other words, human consciousness gets projected. Can it combine data and parse data? Well, that would be novel output.

Yeah. So if we establish the training data. So it's not a thought. It's just taking a different cup out of the studio. Yeah. You're still in the box if you want to think about it. Okay. Einstein took himself outside of the box and said, I'm going to dispatch with Newtonian physics. And I'm going to say, when I look at a particle beam of light, here's where it goes.

And Einstein, without having an idea of metaphysics, physics as we conceptualized it today, came up with E equals MC squared, which it basically says, and he could fact check me on this, because I'm talking from the hip, essentially. in one gram of mass of resting material, you have the explosive output of something like 26 kilotons of dynamite. Damn. That idea is how we got the nuclear bomb.

So the nuclear bomb is saying, if we disrupt these particles and these neutrons in specific ways, there's in this small amount of resting material, one gram of mass. 90 trillion joules of

energy. And now ask it, what is that, what is that, how many kilograms of TNT is, kilotons of T&T that is? Because I think I said 26. You did. Yeah, 90 million jewels. 90 trillion jewels. 90 trillion is a large number. Unfathomable. 21 tons of TNT. Okay, so 26 tons. Not tons, kilotons. Hey, it's still going to leave a good Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, 21 kilotons. It's going to leave a good hole. That's a hole. But I'm talking about a gram of resting potential. So that is what Einstein came up with. That is truly novel thought.

And because of those novel thoughts, when we launched the cluster of the first GPS satellites, we had a problem where there was what's called clock drift. So we put these atomic clocks on these GPS systems and we send them into space. When they're out in space, the first problem that they came up with is there for some reason, we don't know why, they're losing, and you can check me on this, 30 microseconds of time a day.

Atomic clocks. The atomic clocks on GPS sensors when deployed to outer space lose about 30 microseconds of time a day. Did you get all that, Michael? And so that sounds minuscule, 30 microseconds. The microseconds a millionth of a second.

Yeah, until you can't figure out where the fuck you are. But when you are using that to do time distance of arrival geolocation on the ground, you're talking about 7 to 8. kilometers of drift a day? Advanced atomic clocks in space, lose your drift by only about one second every 10 million years. Yeah.

Which I don't know what that translates to. Yeah. So about how many microseconds a day? Are you using AI? Michael is AI. I'm just using Google's. Do you think that Einstein regret? 38 microseconds per day.

Yeah, you're 38 microseconds. Yeah, there we go. Did he ever talk about his thoughts on the development of the nuclear weapon after the E equals MC squared? I mean, the equal as MC squared didn't directly lead to... I get it, but again, it was kind of the underlying foundation of people probably thinking in that. He worked with the people who were doing

it, and there's much more important people surrounding Einstein Gertl. Yeah. I'm not saying he was alone, but I'm just... I'm curious... I mean, I'm sure he did. I'm not aware of that. I haven't dove into that piece. I've read, you know, I am become

death, destroyer of worlds. but but but what the point I was making if I can put a bow on Einstein was that clock drift happens every day because of relativity and relativity is when Einstein conceptualized if I travel at the speed of light what happens to space time and we understand now energy and mass and the speed of light have a correlation that's tightly coupled and that altering any of them alters other things in an inexplicable manner so when we launched the GPS clusters, we were having this drift. We have to now correct for that drift in GPS satellites every day through complex math in order to keep GPS sensors accurate. The reason is

because gravity, as you move away from the center of the earth, speeds up because you're farther away from gravity. So if you watch like interstellar, they go to that planet where there's a ton of gravity, an hour is like 30 years or something like that. That is actually a real phenomena that we deal with when we launch things into space. The time, there's a time shift in space that has to be accounted for that Newtonian physics would have never been able to figure out. And so Einstein had this novel thought that we use every day now. And it's, and it's, we could get into things like the halting problem,

superposition, Goddell's theorem. It doesn't matter. What I'm saying is these are novel thoughts, novel, thoughts that couldn't have come from the system, but they have to come from somewhere. And they come from this, I think, this collective subconscious. And this collective subconscious, when we, when we mediate with it, we get new things that have never been conceptualized. I, as a Christian, and people are going to laugh at me, but I don't care. I call it the Holy Spirit. And it's the Holy Spirit that guides me throughout my life. And I'm just as fine.

with calling it collective transcendence. These are monikers. I don't care about monikers. What I'm saying is I can mediate with this thing and update my system in a one-on-one dialogue, the Diologos, and I can come up with new ideas. And I work very hard to get into these flow states where new ideas come from. And that would be the same flow state that we're talking about. Maybe you've got a problem in your life and you start rolling with someone.

And then after it comes to you afterwards because you are engaging with this part of you that you don't fully understand this collective subconscious, which allows us to update our system in a meaningful way. And as a Christian, I see the parallel in the way that Christ came to earth to update the system, the old law in a meaningful way. And I can get very deep on that subject, but I won't do it for the purposes of this podcast, but that would be another four-hour podcast on the linkage between the story of Christ and the advent and understanding of consciousness and what's called orchestrated objective reduction

and how our brain uses certain lattice inside of the brain in order to collapse phase state and come up with moments of fleeting consciousness. It's tightly woven with the story of Christ. What I'm saying is AGI would be novel thought. And there is no artificial intelligence system. There's anywhere near novel thought. They're doing novel output all the time.

So then how do you explain the modern headlines where they usually, the heads of modern AI firms are saying, we are on the precipice of existential within 10 years, it's going to destroy humanity. Follow the money. What do you mean? So what's happening right now is that they're realizing they're nowhere near AGI. And they can't, and I know this because I'm talking to people who are on the inside.

And dealing with people who are heavy researchers in this area. What they're seeing, what they've promised their investors is we're going to be an AGI. At first, it was a couple of years, and then it was five years, it was six years, and now maybe it's 10 years. Because using matrix multiplication on a data trading set doesn't give you a new output. Oh, so you're saying their end around is we'll have the government force slow us down. Force slow us down. So we don't have to deliver on the promise. Now I get to go to my investors and say, well, the reason I haven't reached AGI yet is because we've all collectively agreed to slow down.

and we've all corrected and slowed down. But at the same time, they're going to tell the government, look, AGI's on the precipice. We can't allow people like myself to be training on these open systems where they understand what's going on. So the government looks at this and says, huh, so now I get to lock down, just like with the housing crisis. I get to inject myself into a system where I don't belong,

which is the free market of housing. I get to say everyone gets a loan, and I create a huge, I widen the gap on everyone who can now participate in housing, and I tell the banks that I'll back them. Everyone participates in the system. The system fails. I know it's going to fail.

But I've expanded government. I've expanded expenditure. I've grown the system, and now everyone's dependent on the government and subsidized housing. And in the same way, the government is looking at the AGI thing and saying, huh, I can give these guys what they want, which is the government decides who gets to be in

AI because AGI is so fucking dangerous. They get to keep doing their AGI thing. I get to inject myself and regulate another system and tax it and get all kinds of things from it. I get to say it's for the benevolence of human beings and I now can restrict people who are dealing in open systems. And oh, by the way, I will make sure as a government official that these A.A. AIs aren't saying stuff that I don't want them to say. So I can now also regulate them in that way. So the big AI people that are no closer to AGI get to say, well, AGI slowed down because the government told us to. And, oh, by the way, your paychecks are now, investments are guaranteed for the next 10 years because the government is going to keep feeding this beast and telling people they can only use our stuff.

And I've removed competition because the free market now can't deal in these things. Because they're trying to get rid of the closed systems. The hugging face attack was an attack on an open system. Hugging face is the GitHub of neural networks. It's the open, it's where people get to mess with neural networks and pull them down and experiment with them themselves to build new neural networks. So in that. They attacked that.

But was that an attempt for the AI to just enhance its training protocol essentially? Again, was it a novel thought for it to attack that? Or did it, you know what I mean? No, when you read into it, it's quite obvious that they had a sandbox environment that had open doors that shouldn't have been open. And if I had to bet my bottom dollar, they orchestrated this attack to take place exactly the way that it did. They did this because it fits the narrative of this is becoming too dangerous. You really think that it all comes down to, and I'm not saying I disagree with you because I had never thought about it like that, mostly because I hadn't tracked the promises that they were making to investors, that it really comes down to they can't deliver.

so instead we'll make it an existential global threat to protect our investment. They're getting exceedingly large amounts of pressure from their investors who've put billions and billions, trillions of their own dollars into this because they were promised AGI years ago. What would be the actual threat to AGI? People says it's the end of the world

or say that it's the end of the world. I mean, I don't... I mean, their thought would be Skynet. Essentially that now you've created a system that can think and reason on its own and it might decide that humans aren't needed. How would it exterminate us? Shutting down power grids,

shutting down critical utilities, launching, preempting a nuclear strike, all those things. But if that happened, it wouldn't be a result of AGI. It would be a result of engineering, bad engineering. And that's how hugging phase took place.

You had a sandbox environment that you're not supposed to be able to escape. Doors were left open, I think purposefully. And it wouldn't attack an open system where people were using the program to experiment with AI. It literally went and attacked its competition. And no one's being sued. And then you had this guy on Rogan a few days ago who said he was a top tier guy inside of whatever.

He resigned from Anthropic, I believe. Yes. And if that story were true, Anthropic would be suing him into eternity. So what do you think that guy is? He's somebody... He was either a useful idiot. And Anthropic said, hey, if we let this guy go, he's going to... go and say we're doing all this crazy stuff and that we're so close to AGI that's going to help us

with our investors and is going to help us get the government regulations that is going to keep the money coming for the next 30 years. And it will then eliminate our competition because these people who are building smaller neural networks and experimenting with these things are going to figure out that they don't need us because that's their biggest fear. Their biggest fear is that people experimenting with these open networks, what AI should become is a water heater. And what do I mean by that? You in 10 years, if this goes right, should have your own GPU in your basement sitting next to your water heater. How do you know?

I don't know. Maybe you do. Also, wouldn't it be unsafe to keep an electronic device near a container holding water? Maybe. But it can be, you know, move somewhere else in the house. It would be. But their biggest fear is that because what's going to happen is when you feed a closed system, they use your inputs to update the system.

So when I use a closed system to write my code and then I tell the closed system, oh, you are done here. You did a bunch of dependence injections here. And there's no unit test coverage for these lines of code. The neural network on the closed side remembers all of that and says, all right, the next time you execute these functions, make sure that these things are in here. So just like I told you that they're using us for advertising,

they're now using us for training. When we tell an AI it's stupid, that goes back into the system, the system recalibrates, and it gives better output. I've heard you shouldn't talk to it like that because it remembers. Right. And it's the same thing. It's the same thing with these closed networks

or where I'm moving and my companies are moving now is you can get a 70, 80% solution from these open systems. you can do the same training, but now your personal data, your personal thoughts, your personal updating is not going and feeding a beast. This is into your CPU that you're talking about. It's just being trained locally.

It's being done locally. And it's using these open weight models that are available to everyone. And that is their nightmare. Their nightmare is everyone will start seeing this as a personal utility where the questions that you ask AI stays with you, with your family,

and your home and they don't propagate or leave. And they now cannot update their... Because they need us to update their... system. Yes, I want what you're talking about. Yes. But we're not going to call it a water heater because I just think that's right. I'm just saying it's a utility in your home, like a water heater, like anything else a desalinate or whatever.

Why do all of your examples have to include water and electronics? Because they're critical functions. But let's separate them. They're utilities. Yeah, maybe we'll just keep the CPU. AI is a utility. AI is a utility. Put it in the garage away from the water. Away from the water. But so the game that they're playing

is that they have over-promised to their investors. They are under delivering. There's only so much compute and there's this cycle between NVIDIA who's provided the GPUs, the federal government, private industry through all of these overcooked valuations that they're assigning these companies and the need for training data. They're only updating these systems through training data and the training data come from humans interacting with the system. When humans say, actually, I don't want you to calibrate the advertisements or I don't want you to know about my urinary tract infection.

Or you don't want you to do my taxes. I don't want you to do my taxes. I don't want you to be my psychologist. I don't want you to do all these things. And then close it and saying I have no access to it or knowing how it's being used or knowing how the system is being updated. I am not, you are not a parasite on my life. I'm going to use these open weight models and do this stuff locally where it never

leaves my enclave. That will destroy them. So the moment they can use the government to stop the open system development to certify that the training data will always be present because humans must use these utility AIs and they get a useful reason to put off the advent of AGI. They will now have everything they need, just like government's always done. Government has always went in and subsidized where it shouldn't, and then it creates a pricing crisis, and then things fall apart, and then people look back to the government to fix it.

That's what they did with medical. The medical system is a free market system when it's at its business. best when people get to compare prices and they get to look at where there are shortages or where there are pluses where there's price fixing where there's not price fixing and make their own decisions what government did was they started regulating medicine then it became unavailable and then it became subsidized and then the system collapsed and then the government got to go in and create the department of health and now the government now you don't do anything without the government approving it's the same with the housing it's the same with the medicine it's the same with school

It's the same with our education. The founders would be revolting if they knew that the Department of Education decided what is or isn't safe knowledge for our children because the government should never be the font of those activities. The founders would never want the ruling class to be the ones to decide what is good education or what isn't. Look at, Michael can look this up. You can look at what the quality of education is before the advent of the Department of Education and after. It's gone down precipitously. meanwhile our prices on it have gone up a factor of 10. We are paying more than we've ever paid for it

and the quality's never been as good as it was when it was regulated by the free market. Yeah. Do you think they can pull it off? I talked back to the AI companies. Enough of the useful idiots are propagating that, yes, there's a high likely... AI overview, but...

Yeah. Let's see what our closed loop overlords say. In 1979, the advent of Department of Education's two student test scores have largely stagnated. Now, graduation rates have improved. Why have they approved? Because we've lowered the standards for what it takes to graduate. Most kids today graduate with like a third to sixth grade reading level.

Like you can watch these videos where they go around and ask kids like, point to America on this map or where's Iraq on this map. The standards for education have gone down precipitously. What was required to graduate from high school in 1965 is they used to take a Latin in grade school. Yeah, but an argument. could be made for why. Why take Latin? Yeah.

Because words are important when you understand the root meaning of what a word is. It tells you how you should use the word in modern parlance. Do you need to understand Latin to be able to figure that out? It's a dead language. Well, no, you don't, it's useful. It's like saying I want to learn Python. Well, let's go learn Objective C first. I want, okay, I want to learn.

Okay, I want to learn. I want to learn. Fuck are you talking? Okay, hold on. Is this computer stuff? Yeah, sorry. I want an AR-15 with a Sopmod 2 kit. Let's get you iron sights.

Let's get you qual on iron sights and hitting a tight shot group at 300 yards. Then let's talk about optics. Yep. It's like, I want everyone to speak, read, and write well. Okay, well, let's understand why we choose words the way we do in the syntax that's built around them. I'm not saying you need to memorize Latin, but you should understand why the romantic languages contributed to. to the American language or English language in such a way. Pascal, a jour-ou-ouille, I don't speak Spanish.

But the reason why I learn French is because it's important to understand how the romantic languages impacted how we use language today. All right. And so we used to learn Latin. We used to learn Al Jero without a calculator. Or a long division without a calculator. We used to do all of those things. Kids are useless now without AI or calculators.

Because whether the government's doing it on purpose, they've developed a dependence on the systems of learning and control that they implement. Like free and open schools where people learn what's important to them regionally is important. The Department of Education cannot possibly understand what's important to education in the Midwest versus what's important to education on the southeast part of California. And they can't develop a system that will modulate both. what's important in North Dakota might be weights and simple algebra and simple farming, what you need to learn farming. What's important in Southern California or in San Demas might be linear algebra and non-linear transforms because Silicon Valley and everyone wants to go work in the tech sector.

There should not be one regulating body that controls both of those things. And how can we expect that a government proprietor sitting in Washington who's never done farming or AI is going to be able to develop a system that's going to suit both systems? It's this it's a power upheavals Follow the money It's the concentration of power So that we become reliant on the system That they want to provide us They all go in poor and they all leave rich

So I'll use examples that people will recognize And they're probably the only ones that I know Chat Cheap T, Anthropic and GROC as AI engines that externally appear to be competing But I believe it was the head of those three Organizations that came together So do you think Why what incentive structure would force them to come together

Well, that was my question. Like, are we talking where they gingerly touch tips of their yachts in Monaco and they have a meeting and cloaks? Like, what, what's going on here? A lot of, a lot more behind the scenes, communication that you think, from competitors. I don't think you need the subterfuge when values align. They don't have to say. It's a more exciting story, though. They don't have to say the quiet part out loud.

They just know this is good for us. If we can come together and say, this is also dangerous, the government needs to regulate us. they create a captive audience. People must use these closed systems. We get to compete. We get to say we're not closer to AGI because we're being regulated. And we get to get rid of the people who are engaging in this experiment in a free and open fashion or publishing free models. Elon is still doing good things in other regards.

And we can talk about those later if we want to. He's probably the least poisonous of all of these guys. But agreeing to all come together. And he may be doing this for novel reasons. but the best, the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions. And you can come up with all kinds of great ideas about how you're going to fix things. But any social experiments are worth their salt knows. When you engage in widespread social experiments, you'll never get the output that you expected.

In fact, you usually get the inverse. You think they're going to be able to pull it off? I think there's a high likelihood that they will pull this off, especially if a Democrat comes in the power in the next administration. Trump, who, look, I get so much, if there's some, Something I get hate about the most is that I'm no longer on the Trump chain. You would not, I'm serious, brother. You would not believe the amount of hate I get in my DMs about people saying I'm wrong on Trump.

Or I don't understand the 3D chess that's being played in Iran right now. I read, I don't understand. I read your tweet. I did not apply your name to it, but I use it as an example of people who are so, it's a level of blind loyalty that I don't understand. because the tweet in and of itself, for better or worse, I can 100% see... Which tweet are we talking about? The Sun is the Star of America.

Can you pull that one up? I wanted to look at that one again. I didn't know you saw it. It's on my ex-Twitter. You sent it to me. Oh, did I? Yeah. And when I read it on the show,

I think I read it on a Friday episode with Michael. I did not apply your name to it. Oh, that's okay. But since you're sitting here, fuck it. Yeah, that's okay. At Spartan Forge. Yeah. It's always good to say things like that into your business name.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, people need to know what kind of business they're dealing with. And that's another thing. I'm always going to be open. Where does the blind loyalty come from with an inability? Why can't we just call balls and strikes? It's okay to support your team and be critical of no team is perfect. No person is perfect. When I was asked on Rogan, I said I gave him like a B minus. I'd say he's now in C minus territory. Yeah. But he is still saying good stuff on the AI front. On the AI front, he's like, yeah, we're not doing this. If you want to slow down, slow yourself down. He actually said that. Did he really? Yeah. So he might see what's going on. What do you find it?

For some of the same, X is in Arabic right now. Yes. Hell yeah. You might want me to take a look at that when we're done here? Maybe just do a brief overview of our systems. Talking about drawing the eye of sorrow and of foreign governments. Right. I can probably find it myself quicker.

I'm sorry to hop on my phone, but it'll be. be the quickest. I don't do enough on Twitter, because I will come up with some bangers, then people will laugh, but I just don't have the time for it. Oh, here it is. P-O-V, it's 20-27. The dollar is no longer the world reserve currency. Gas is $7 a gallon. China has taken Taiwan and her debts at $50 trillion. Gavin Newsome is the commanding presidential front rudder. However, the sun is now known as the Star of America. You sent that to me, and I think the exact message was you would not believe the blowback that I got from this from your conservative friends who basically told you did you cut your brain out of your head and people saying that to you no no you were

saying oh yeah no dude oh god I got no likes on that thing which I don't give a shit about but I what I did get was an inverse amount of what coolate are you drinking now bro and I'm like hold on hold on I look when Trump was running in 2016 and and even rerunning for election I was a big fan because I thought he was going to come and break all of this shit up. But he's done the opposite. We've got a forever war. We added 10 trillion more to the debt. I will give him one plus,

which is he closed the southern border and the northern border, which is good. But we were promised a lot more. Don't add the northern border to that. It's a fucking mess. Oh, is it? Yeah. Well, the southern border is better. Well, the southern border has always had more resources.

Well, the northern border used to be police too. It's nearly 5,500 miles of no infrastructure, architecture. The border is a mode. stretch of grass and just like anything else criminal networks if they are one thing they move like water and when they find resistance they find other ways well that's disconcerting so i get so maybe he's a d plus um well he ran specifically i would say more on the southern border he ran on i'll say what i conceptualized epsine transparency big deal to me sorry um epstein transparency um closing the border, no forever wars, lessening our debt, getting rid of government bloat. Those to me

were the five, maybe there was my bias, but those were the five things that are focused on. I said to myself, if he can get in there and do three of those, I'll be extremely happy. He's done one half of one, right? So he's done, you know, one out of ten, essentially, because that's two out of five. But so he hasn't done, he hasn't delivered. And he's actually taking, the anti-pattern to what he stated. We've added $10 trillion of debt. He's talking about giving people $5,000 a piece. Which would be another $1.5 trillion.

There's your quantitative easing. And that's a debt our children will pay. I am very concerned about leaving our children with a better world than we inherited. That is not going to be the case. It's going to be more dystopian. It's going to be more totalitarian. We're going to have these closed AI systems. We're going to have $40 trillion dollars of debt.

We're going to have China moving all over the world, taking everything. the American experiment is atrophying. There is no electrical impulse to reinvigorate the muscle. And we're dying slowly. We're dying fat. We're dying earlier. Our education sucks more. There's more debt than there's ever been.

The unfunded liabilities, which no one ever talks about, this blows my mind. We have $40 trillion of debt today. $10 trillion has been added since Trump came in. I don't even know, Michael might be able to help me. my guess is that our unfunded liabilities are somewhere on the order of $300 trillion. In other words, we've promised money to countries, people, political organizations, and the future, based on voting that we're doing today that our children will suffer the burden of. 75 to 88 trillion. That's not true.

That's not true. The last time I looked, that's shitty AI. The last time I looked at this, I think the number I came up with, this was about seven years ago. was 130 trillion of unfunded liability. Even 85 is horrible. 85 trillion. It will never get paid off. Now, to the opposite end of this, where am I hopeful?

Because I am hopeful. I am hopeful that if we can institute an open AI architecture, it will do a lot of good things. The open AI, an open eye system where everyone can understand how these things are being built and they can have their data in their basement or not in their basement in their garage. We will reduce prices. the barriers to entry on business when someone has a whole

like when a plumber has a holy shit idea today he needs between $50,000 and $100,000 of capital, a fluid capital to get that idea in the market. Mostly because of red tape, price constraints, the develop of cost and all of those things. So he's more than likely to sell that idea to his boss and get some penance for it.

When AI becomes open and extremely cheap process, the amount production will go down precipitously. The amount of money it takes to make a product will go down precipitously. We can also now regionalize products instead of depending on them being built overseas because the cost has gone down so much more. That will mean people will have to, there will be a deflationary output from free and

open AI that will make things cheaper. And if things get cheaper, then you need to make less money to live. And if you need to make less money to live, then you can concern yourself with other pursuits. And in order to engage in those pursuits, to go through a lawyer with a new idea, through a patent office and then to start a business, you need $150,000. In a couple of years with AI, you're going to be able to do this for nothing. You're going to be able to, it's going to be very cheap to have an AI navigate the bureaucracy in order to get an idea out there.

And these ideas will be able to propagate themselves out there. And just like with when the iPhone came out, when the iPhone came out, only rich people could afford iPhones. That's how it works. And then through rich people affording iPhones, iPhone gets to iterate. Now everyone gets an iPhone. Not the duo. Not the duo.

But in five years, poor people will be able to afford an iPhone duo. And that's because the rich people are subsidizing the development so that Apple can spread it. Okay? You take this all the way down. So the comparison I often make is the biggest movie of 2019 was Avengers Endgame and filmed entirely in front of a blue screen or green screen, whatever you want to call it. That movie was filmed and there was almost nothing real in these movies. We had gotten so good with graphics and we'd gotten so good with all these things

that as long as you had a modicum of a good narrative below it and then you put on all of this stuff all of this AI and graphics and all of these things you had the biggest movie of all time like a couple billion dollars I think it made something like that

people were all in on it and everyone loved it now you go to this last year what were the biggest movies per dollar spent at the box office the movie obsession I think cost it, fact check me, $700,000 to make, and made $300 million. Damn.

So it's one of the per dollar spent most profitable movies of all time. The question now needs to be asked. There's three or four movies like that that came out in this last year. There's another one about basements or something. I didn't see it. But all of them were really good story, all real set pieces, all real people. So there's been a subconscious recalibration of the types of movies that people want to see because even though something looks real, they understand it's all fake.

So the system recalibrates itself, and people go from, I'll take fancy graphics and overproduced and all of this stuff and huge budgets, and everyone will watch it, then they get sick of it. And now they want to see a movie that was made in someone's basement by a YouTube creator for $700,000. And it becomes the biggest movie of the year. Why am I illustrating this point? Because in five years, everyone will be able to make an Andy Sumpf Avengers movie where you're Captain America and they're going to be able to watch it on the screen like you're the real Captain America. Everyone will get sick of it. Everyone will be like, yeah, okay, I've seen for the 15th time now how you're Wolverine and Bill is Fat Captain America and it looked awesome.

Great. What's on like, so what's going to happen is there'll be a recalibration. And I talked about this when I was with you and Josh. In a world where open and free AI is published and it has a deflationary effect, people will start looking for handmade tables because you're going to be able to get a table from Amazon or whatever replaces Amazon for five bucks. was made by an AI. And it's going to look like we look at AI now. It'll be like gross. Like you'll be like, yeah, okay, if you're poor and you need a table, you'll spend the five bucks.

But now I want an artisan table. And because things have gotten so much cheaper, artisans can set up these businesses and people that wanted to maybe go and start those table making businesses will be able to start those table making businesses. And so now you'll get, the market will get saturated with, at first, subsidized by rich people, only someone who's got money can afford a table like this right now. But when the market gets flooded with people now, that can come up with ideas on new ways to make artists and crafts that will flood that market. And in my world, and I could be wrong about all of this. And I hope I'm not.

But I think in five or ten years, the rich people activity will be going to Joe Rogen's comedy club. It will be going to a local theater. No one's going to care about Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in 15 years. How dare you? I know. But what they will care about is there's a regional theater house in Missoula where they're doing Hamlet. And it's freaking amazing. And they want to go see it because.

Because they know there's no... It's real. Yeah, there's no computer magic involved in it. Yeah, and they'll be sick of seeing the 15th Avengers movie that your nephew created where everything looks freaking amazing. It will become saccharine to us. And people... And then what we'll start with, and it's starting now, one of my favorite places to go right now

is Joe's Comedy Shop. Have you been? You go in there, you lock your cell phone up. You go in there and you're sitting around people like it's 1996. Everyone's having beers talking crazy stuff on stage and no one's recording. There's no fear of retribution. People get to say crazy ideas. The marketplace of ideas par excellence.

It's a beautiful thing. That right now is for people with money. But through AI and things will get cheaper. And then people who want to start a comedy store will be able to start a comedy store. And then just like with the iPhone, more people will have access to these things. And we will be looking for genuine engagement. The rich people activity in the next five years will be these local theater houses. My wife and I now are going to more theater houses and ballets and musicals in person.

They're expensive. But once AI makes these things easier to set up, more people will be reaching for these genuine interactions. And we'll see a recalibration of the system. Another example of this would be what cars are rich people driving right now? I can tell you all the rich people that I know, they're driving 60s to 80s, muscle cars, old trucks, Broncos. They look like that on the outside. Yes, yes. And they've got meaningful technology upgrades on the shocks, on the Bluetooth.

Sometimes everything. But even the door handles look like door handles. And even the radios look like old radios. You're talking about also in a way the resurgence of vinyl. Yes. Where in a world where you could fit, you know, in our anxiety rectangles, we could fit. I want crackle and pop on my music. Yeah.

Yeah. You can fit almost probably all the all the Mozart in the world or whatever it may be. Whatever your genre is, you could load your phone up with it. And that's why AI will be. the utility that sits in your garage. It will be my locally trained AI that I can know use and trust. I can ask it questions about my ankle. I can ask it questions about. So if it goes that way, what does it look like when companies like Anthropic and chat GPT detonate? They know this is happening. They are looking at guys like me who are serious about this are now, I'm moving all

of my three companies. I'm moving. We're in the process right now. We're calling it the arc, but we're setting up our own local compute. And we've done it in Florida and we've done it in, we've done it in Virginia. And I'm setting up another one in North Dakota. Our own local compute to run our own local models to protect our privacy, to protect our data, and to make sure that we're not being pigeonholed by people

that see us as the product and not the AI as a product. Because that's become the inverse. Just like with social media made the people the product and not Facebook the product, AI is trying to make the people the product and the utility through which things are exercised and done at scale, which brings me back to my two definitions of AI. The definition of AI, of AGI that should be there is novel thought versus novel output.

We've established that, I think, in spades. The definition they're going to use for AGI is it's running every critical part of the economy. Anthropic will call that AGI. They'll just say it. They'll just say that's what it is, or some other company. And that's why I'm very, like, there are stories. I'm not saying this will happen to me. Maybe it will.

I'm not suicidal. I love life. I love my children. You're not going to shoot yourself in the back of the head twice. I'm never going to shoot myself in the back of the head twice after I get off of a jog with Hillary and Clinton. But there are stories and I do hear pre-tell of stories in certain circles where people that talk on national platforms in the way that I'm talking on a national platform, suddenly you get in a car accident. or, you know, have you ever watched that interview with Sam Altman and Tucker Carlson talking about...

I mean, maybe it depends on what he was... He had a lead engineer who started doing things and saying things that apparently when I hear on the inside were not good for business and never suicidal, had ordered a pizza and killed himself before the pizza arrived. And his family's saying he didn't kill himself. He was not suicidal. He never had any of these things. So Tucker's interviewing, I think is Altman.

Fact check me here because I don't want to... get sued. Please, Michael, sorry, I'm not trying to be a rude asshole. Do you please fact check me on that? You're way nicer than Andy right now. So he went on there and said,

he's leaving in January. Yeah, I want to talk about that before. I know you probably get to wrap up, but I would like to hear what Michael's plans are because I'm very concerned about Michael. Well, I'm just going to make an AI agent to replace him. We can do that.

I'll make sure it's trying to locally. It will be very easy. We can even give the GPU glasses and a brown belt. Yeah, I just got to get a water here to put over there next to it. So, yeah, during a 25 interview about former open-al-a-I researcher and whistleblower, Souture-Belagy, sorry if I don't pronounce that correctly.

But everyone in his family, people close to him all said, there is zero percent chance that this guy killed himself. He became a whistleblower, and all of a sudden he's dead. Yeah. I do worry about talking about these things. I'm probably not a voice that people really care about. So maybe I'm the perfect person to do this. It depends.

It depends on if the tide starts going in the opposite direction and your voice starts sounding more reasonable than theirs. So maybe in this moment, that isn't the case, but you don't know what the tide's going to do in five weeks. Yeah. And so, you know, I do worry about these things, but I will say, and this is not me, I've entered a strange period in my life where I really, I'm working as hard as I can every day. And I try to be as truthful and as loving to everyone in my life as I can. I try to genuinely help people. And it's given me a life of fulfillment that if you had told Bill Thompson in the trailer park in 1997,

that he would hold court with presidents or Joe or you. and that this in America your story is a possibility that will be realized I wouldn't have believed anyone who said that to me at that point. It would have been impossible. Like literally we're going to get my brother from, you know, jail tomorrow. He just robbed a fire station and someone came and told me, you know, my story is only possible in America. Hold on.

What was he trying to get from the fire station? My sister and him robbed it of beer. They had stored beer at the fire station for like bingo or something. And they went and stole a bunch of beer from there. Did he need a fucking hose for something? Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, it was in Edinburgh in North Dakota.

Yeah, not traditionally known for their cash storage. Yeah, not a cash hoard. But so what the phase of my life that I'm in right now is I do think of myself as someone who lives with a full heart. And I don't welcome death, but I am ready for it at any time. And what are you trying to say? I'm trying to say. Are you throwing down the gauntlet?

I'm trying to say I'm not afraid of any of these people. Just get a Molol-Labbe tattoo on your forehead. No. No, that's not. Use your Latin or Greek. That's not a distillation. Civis pack and parablellum. I'll use my Greek.

Oh, you're going to have to start out the cheek then. If you want peace, prepare for war. But no, I'm not saying I welcome death. I'm not looking for death. What I'm saying is a good terminus for my life would be, and I strive for this every day. is something like Bill got locked up in jail because he was giving too much freedom to the masses.

I strive for that story. And I would welcome that output. I despise these systems and I despise these people who sit in them. And people will say to me, well, why don't you run for government or blah, blah, blah, yackety, schmackety? It's like, because I want to destroy them

with the free market of ideas. I don't want to, I don't necessarily want to reach into the pig pen and muddy myself. I think I can destroy this thing from the outside. And look, until the outside, the big three anthropic rock in...

Come to my front door. Chat GPT, just buy the arc from you through an unknown Cayman Islands registered company that's supposed to help humanity and then they just... I've been clear with my investors.

There's not an exit to someone unless that exit is to a person who's precisely like me. So if you're investing in this, you're not investing in this because you're going to make a ton of money. So, but, but, but, but, but, but I'm not, I don't welcome death. I don't want death. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is I, I, I, I work every day as if it's my last one. I have a full heart. I try to treat everyone better than I treat myself. And, and, you know, I have a friend, um, he died 10 years ago. His name was Devin Grubb and he was a seal. He was out in the Chesapeake. And when I moved to Cavalien, he, and he died. And, when I moved to Caval North Dakota, my freshman year of high school, I was a real shithead.

I talked shit, I would stomp on anyone, and I had no friends. It was not a good person. But it was coming from a place of like the same place where we would sit in a team room and bullshit. It came from that place. It just there wasn't an environment that tolerated it at that time because everyone needed to sit in their classroom and shut their mouths. and like I wasn't tolerated well.

Devin, um, uh, uh, saw something. And he was a very popular guy. And he was the first person I met when I moved to Cavalier. I went to this shot doctor basketball camp in 1997. There was this guy, him and Matt Herzog. And I think Devin was just like, what is this guy? Like I had orange hair. I had a Nike sign shaved in the back of my head.

I would wear soccer jerseys everywhere. Is there any pictures of this? Oh, yeah. I'll send you one. So, so. I think he looked at me and said, all right, this guy's weird, but there's something there, right? And he treated me way better than anyone else did. He was always good to me. He was always like, he would bust my balls, but he would always like, hey, how you doing? What's going on? How's your

family? He would pick me up in the morning. Him and this guy named Sean Seeger would pick me up in the morning before football practice, make sure I was going to football practice. And my senior year, I got cut from the basketball team. I was the only person, I think, maybe one other guy, to get cut from a public basketball team in a school where they didn't cut anyone for anything. And it was because I had orange hair and I was an asshole. And, you know, he came to me afterwards and said, that coach shouldn't have cut you. Like, it's, I remember saying like him and this other guy, Sean, were like, yeah, this is bullshit. Like, everyone should be able to play on a public basketball team where there's 50 kids in a class. There was no reason to cut you. He cut you because he didn't like you. And it was

shitty. And that was a particularly hard time for me in high school. But Devin was always there for me. figured something out at a very young age and he lived like I think most seals live which was everything's at 10 like he just he loved swimming he loved hunting outdoors he got tattoos of the things that he loved on him you know like you know seals do but he lived at 10 and it was a devil make care type of situation and he just went hard as fuck he was hard as woodpecker lips he was a great seal, great guy. Everyone that knew him in a professional capacity loved him. And he had three, I think, wonderful kids. And everyone loved Devin. And I always looked at him like, you know, there's a point in life when you figure out you do something right in a moment and you figure out

what you could be. And then you're always ashamed that you're not living up to that. And I'm constantly shaming myself in how sometimes I act unconsored. consciously and then I quickly look back and recalibrate and try to fix myself. Devon lived at this 10 and he went out on the Chesapeake. He was at Damneck and he went out at the Chesapeake with a friend, you know, when there was going to be bad weather and he was in a in a canoe or a paddling vessel, small paddling vessel. I don't remember what it was. But it happened on my birthday. So right before I went to Afghanistan, my last tour, he called me and he's like hey Bill I hear you're out in like Maryland my mom told me

you're a station of Maryland like I'm down in Virginia Beach and I saw on your on your on your my space that you've got a Harley right so I said yeah dude and he's like do you have a Harley he's like yeah I've got a Harley and I'm like oh that's awesome he's like hey dude like let's go riding and I was like well hey man I'm about to go to Afghanistan as soon as I get back like let's go riding you know because I wanted to go and thank him for I just remembered him, it's always one of those people who was good to me when he didn't need to be. He was good for goodness sakes. And it had profound impact on me. And I just wanted to thank him. I'm going to get emotional talking about this. So I apologize. Anyway, I'll go to Afghanistan. I was doing a deployment

where I was supporting the SEAL teams out of the Jaya talk. And while I was in the OCE, but Jay Talk. And I talked to them about Devin and said, hey, you guys know Devin. Another guy from my hometown who served, his name was Tony Clark. I think he might even still be in. Was very good friends with Devin.

And they all knew Tony or Devin. They all knew of them one way or the other. And so while I was out there, a friend of mine from Cavalier said Devin died while I was there. And he'd gone out on the Chesapeake. Storm came. It was December 28th, my birthday. I think 2016.

And he got turned over in the boat, something along those lines. And treaded water for like six hours, I think, and like 30 degree water. So yeah, some cold water. And was in it for a long time. And when they found him in the helicopter, he was still alive. And they tried resuscitating him on the helicopter and he died en route to the hospital. Why am I telling this story? because the whole circumstances that surround Devon's death are horrible.

Children are growing up without a father. A wife is living on as a widow. But what did he get? He got to die, and this is sounding horrible, but the recesses of my mind, there's something alluring about this. He is now fixed in our psyches as this top performer who lived at 10 and loved his country fervently. and was a good person

and everyone that knew him, loved him and treated him well. And he treated people like me well when he didn't have to. Like, how many people do you know like that? I don't know many people like that. Especially when they're young. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And so it crushed me when he died. And I felt like I had lost a huge opportunity. And as I think about it these days, I speak to his wife, his widow every once in a while. And I'm going to talk to you about her after this, actually. and my company raises all kinds of money for this foundation where they send kids to our school

that we went to Cavalier high school where we raise money for them to go to college. I break my back to make sure I'm at this golf tournament every year and that we're signing money up and we're doing things with it and I'm offering positions to kids to come and do internships with us and stuff because I'm trying to live up to a standard that he's set and it's what's fortunate about all of this is if there's a silver lining on this dark cloud of his death, it's that in our psyche

he never fell from that grace in a meaningful way. Of course he probably fucked up in his personal life or did something wrong or someone could tell a story. But his general pattern, the remembrance of him will be at this elevated level. And there is something beautiful in that. And so why am I saying all of this is because

I'm doing my best now every day to live that ideal. I try so hard to live that ideal. And it's done so much for myself and my family and my life. And it's given me such a peace that I just listen to my consciousness and I try to choose, and I still make mistakes all the time. But I know that I'm trying to choose and do the right things. And so if the question, you know, I was dealing with and people at who I was talking to about what we just talked about with AI is like, hey man, you're painting a target on your back when you start talking about this type of stuff. The guys on the inside are telling me this. And my thing is like, then that'll be the story of me. But I'm not going to shut my mouth. You know of a particular

instance in my life where I was offered a lot of things that I won't talk about. I was offered a lot if I just did a little sacrificing of my own character. And you know the same story of mine in reverse. Yes. And you're in reverse. Sat you there for 10 minutes where you had to fucking recalibate your girl. Yes. And that's why I consider you a friend. Because So few people do that. And I'm not saying I did that because I'm a shining example of what a man is to be. I'm saying that I did that because I'm striving towards that same ideal. And if striving towards that ideal means that my experiment ends in an unsavory fashion,

then so be it. Like, let's fucking go. I'm fine with that because I'm living with a full heart. And the only thing I really care about is what my friends and my children won't think about me. And I did not live up to this standard. any meaningful way until about seven years ago where I had a life event that really recaligrated the way that I look at things. And so, yeah, I welcome those outcomes. In fact, I would embrace them. I don't know. Oftentimes you state these things, then you never get to realize them, right? So I'll probably

die at 80 in a piss-soaked bed mumbling, maybe. Or I get to go out like Devin did as the peak of what, human potential can become, which is just someone who's good for goodness sakes. Damn, dude. Well, there's three hours right there. Can you bring up a picture of Devin? Devin Group. I just want people to see him.

Michael's story isn't that great. He's just going to PA school. Well, that's good. That's good. Same thing. It's just a different letter. There he is. So, yeah, it's not 29 December, that's wrong.

It's 28 December my birthday. That is incorrect. He might actually, he might have died at midnight or something on the 29th, but it happened on my birthday because that's, that's seared into my mind. But that's Devin and I feel like I'm doing him a disservice. But, you know. Boy. Just by showing this and saying this is him, because this isn't him.

Oh, that's a picture. Yeah, he's got three, I'm saying with the write-up. Yeah. He's got three wonderful children. He's got a legacy. He's got people who gather every year in his name. He love him. And one of my great regrets in life is that I didn't, there he is,

is that I didn't, December 28th, 2016. So is that I didn't let him know how much I appreciated it. And it's a weight that I carry now. So if you have someone like this in your life who is this way, call them up and tell them what you think about them because it might be the antidote that they need in their time of crisis. So anyway. How would you like to close it out?

Oh, well, you know, I've done it again. Companies called Spartanforge.aii. Perfect. Way to throw that out three hours in. We've done a bunch of updates. We've done a bunch of updates. Where's my helicopter? Every time I talk about this, it's my favorite aviation app

that has nothing to do with aviation. Your update will be out in December. Sweet. It'll scroll with the rotor arc. Yes. Yes. But we've done stuff that you can use like battle maps and other things.

I demonstrated that perfectly. I love it. One of my favorite ads. So, Spartanforge.com. We have three huge updates going this year. We're calling the system of updates Hunt Plus. Hunt Plus has more features than I can hope to talk about. Updated tracks, updated color schemes, updated property information, updated LIDAR, updated UAV,

updated battle maps, updated Blue Force tracker, updated historical imagery. You might be better off what didn't you update. Car play, what I didn't update. I don't have wind at. pain yet. Okay. But it'll be there. Everything else has been updated. But everything else is there. It's beautiful. Today is the 15th of September. It will drop in three or four days, the second of three updates. The third one dropping in October. And then we'll have off-season updates, which falls under the updates that you and I talked about will be in December. And it's doing great. You know, we pass

100,000 users last year. We continue to build. It's built under this same rubric of freedom. And then I have two other companies. I've started what's called the arc and this is that distributed compute stuff that I'm talking about. I don't plan to make much money on this and I plan for it to be part of my downfall. And then I'm and then I am throwing my hat in using the arc and doing distributed UI and UX mapping and doing some stuff with the government like to to go back and provide for the space from which I came from. Don't know if that'll be successful. But I think things like ATAC need a meaningful update. So, and I'm not talking about building anthropic systems where drones are going to go and kill humans in Kandahar.

I'm talking about making a better map, just like with Spartan Forge for our soldiers who are on the ground. Hopefully not at Kandahar. Hopefully, hopefully on a training exercise at NTC. So those are the three companies that I'm involved with right now. they consume all of my time along with my wonderful children and thank you for having me here today and your wife

and my wife of course fucking believable my wife's a force of nature and you know what pisses me off not pisses me off I went on this whole diatribe about her when I was on the Modern Wisdom podcast

and like you know talked about her he cut the whole thing out so I was on there for like three hours and I told my wife was like oh I said some nice stuff about you and you're really gonna like it So she popped the podcast on.

She's like, you're saying shit about me. And like, now he edited the hell out of that. Because I was in there for like three hours. Yeah. And I talked about some of the same stuff that we're talking about. The podcast that came out was like an hour long. So he must have just thought, you know, Bill went to Tizzy. And as possible.

Like I did on this podcast. I don't, I don't begrudge him. Hero out. Yeah, I don't begrudge them. Chris is awesome. Chris is awesome. I love Chris. The interesting thing about Chris is he really, he reminds me of a general officer.

How does he remind me of a general officer? How does he remind me of a general officer? He reminds me a general officer in that he asks questions that are adjacent to what you're talking about in a way that shows that he really understands it. And I would say only 5 to 10 percent of general officers that I worked with were like that. But Traus was one of them. You would ask questions where it was like, oh, this guy really, he's not here just for us talking points. Like, you really understands what we're talking about here. He is asking poignant questions.

A couple times during the podcast, Chris had asked me questions where I was like, wow, you either really did your freaking homework. and really understand what I'm talking about, or your ability to play mental jazz is unparalleled. So he really is a smart dude in that way. Very much so. Yep. So anyway, again, I did a whole three-hour podcast. Didn't mentor any of my endeavor silly end, but.

I mean, I could always splice that in and just put it up front. Whatever you want, brother. No, dude, I don't edit this stuff. Yeah, it's all good. Michael, what camera do you leave it on when you walk to the bathroom? The wide shot. All right. Sometimes he just leaves.

You had to go do a TT. You know who doesn't have to do that? Our open circuit AI. That's right. Michael 2.0. Yeah. Michael 2.0 that won't leave for PT school. I mean, honestly, it's just, we can just Michael 1.0.

I'm iteration. We need to get to the minimal viable product. Totally.