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

Episode Date: August 1, 2026

Bill Thompson is a retired U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer and a former military intelligence specialist. Is your private life actually private? As AI rapidly outpaces our privacy protections, everything from your personal data to your deepest vulnerabilities is becoming easier to exploit. So what can be hacked, how exposed are you, and is even your mind still safe? Expect to learn what the government can and can’t actually see of yours, why companies actually try to hack their own systems, how AI is supercharging espionage in various nation states, who the most surveyed people in the world are, if there is any hope for real privacy in the age of AI and much more… Sponsors: MW Merch is now live - for 6 days only! Shop now at https://mwmerch.com See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) Why Bill Doesn’t Trust Apple (03:35) How Is Information Collected and Distributed? (09:13) Can Humans Keep Up With Technology? (11:21) Why Companies Hack Their Own Systems (17:05) The Biggest Exploitation Hack (20:48) Why Threats Are Constantly Changing (25:17) Is DOGE Really a Mess? (32:03) How AI Is Supercharging Hacking (36:58) Do Intelligence Operators Know You Better Than You Do? (47:15) Who Is the Most Surveilled Person in the World? (54:39) Is the Bad Outgrowing the Good? (01:03:59) How Bill Built Spartan Forge (01:13:16) Where to Find Bill Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So get it. Once it's gone, you won't be able to buy it again. That's it. Completely sold out, never to be printed in the future. MWMurch.com. What phone have you got? What is that? This is a Galaxy Fold. So it's got like the regular phone set up, but then when you don't want to go wide, you get this bad boy. Why no Apple? I mean, it's a philosophical thing for me. I just, back when I used to do a lot more of this myself instead of running companies that do this, but when I was doing it on my own, essentially the Android.

operating system is published online and the AOSP it's called, it's the open source project. You used to be able to see a good amount of the inner workings of the phone, essentially, and understand how it works and where the holes were. I looked at it for two reasons. One reason was I was trying to develop implants or zero days for the military at the time, and Android being open allowed us to look into those types of things. And then the second reason was, I could dump my phone myself and look at it. So if I was traveling to a country where I was sure something was going to be going on with my phone, or maybe I got pulled into secondary customs and my phone was out of my hands for a while,

it was a lot more available to me to do that, whereas with Apple, it was very difficult to do those types of things. Does it not make it more secure that it's a closed architecture that doesn't allow you to see where potential vulnerabilities are? As long as you trust the company. Right. So you've got, on one hand, how much I trust Apple, and on the other hand, how competent I think people that can look at the Android operating system to find its vulnerabilities are. Yes. Right. Okay. Yeah. And I'd rather be able to look for myself. Have you got any idea what the justification is for getting access to somebody's phone without them giving permission? You don't need a lot of justification with things like the Patriot Act. I mean, with those things hanging around, it's just... Even that that was created before phones and phones. operating systems for phones. Yeah, at that point, they were going after the telephonic infrastructure.

So microwave links, down and up channel links from BTS's base transceiver stations. That's tapping into signals. The infrastructure. Right. Yeah, and the signals that live from the tower to the cell phone. But by saying infrastructure, you've kind of future-proofed yourself for if there's going to be technology that comes out, which is a different kind of infrastructure. Yes. Oh, so it was very cleverly written, unless they updated it in future. Well, they updated it and made it more, it's more usurpacious. It's one of the most usurpacious pieces usurping, underhanded.

It was, you know, the Patriot Act. Can you think of a more innocuous term for something? Department of Peace. And it's just, it's just one of those things where, you know, we would need a six-hour podcast to pull the string on how we got there, but it's, it's a conflation of a lot of useful idiots looking for power. It's essentially the long and short story of it. How much do you think, I've heard the people bring up 9-11 Patriot Act after that,

surveillance, NSA. Pfizer. All of the Pfizer. Foreign intelligence surveillance act. Oh, right. I thought you meant the fucking. How is Big Farmer involved in this? No, I'm sorry.

She said, got their fingers in everything. I knew it was a COVID vaccine. Loop it around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 5G FISA is a foreign intelligence security act which is a kangaroo court that sits near Fort Meade, Maryland,

and when there's classified work going on, this is all you can Google this, I'm not giving the keys away to anything. When you want to go after someone furtively or undercover, you go to a court that's part of the NSA or part of the triumvirate three-letter soup agencies

and you go to this judge and you say, hey, we think this guy's, you know, we think Chris is a bad guy. He's actually here spying for the English and here's three reasons why and the court will sign it and it never sees a light of day. I never thought about this. Meta, even now, Open AI, you know, relatively new company, they must have, hey, we've found this person that we think is potentially a bad guy. We need access to their chat GPT logs. I'm sure that's happening. So for every big platform, software and hardware, there is going to be some form of interface between them and the government.

And for some of them... A formal and informal. So there'll be the government, and this is... I'll use the proxy, a government. I won't say the U.S. government again, because I don't want to get sued. They'll do a overt relationship that's got a memorandum of understanding or an agreement between or a memorandum of agreement between the two companies saying, you know, here, and it'll be very, you know, what you would expect to see.

If there's a terrorist or something like that, you guys are going to help us. But then there'll be alternate channels that will get built, you know, on the clandestine side, where a government will recruit someone in that place to say, hey, you're in charge of the security or you're in charge of the infrastructure here. You know, you've got a daughter who needs really good cancer treatment. We can hook her up with Johns Hopkins or something like that. I'm not saying the U.S. government, governments do it. Yep.

Allegedly. And so they'll set these relationships up. You know, the triumvirate that you think about when it concerns spying is placement, access, and motivation, susceptibility, and accessibility. So when you're looking at a source, someone you want to recruit to spy, it's, does he work in the organization? Does he have access to the information that we want? Is he motivated to share that information? And can I access him when he's outside of the organization to get, you know, a hold of the secrets? And that's what you, you know, I was also training the military as a human intelligence operator, which is a, you know, recruiting people to screw over their own countries. So those are the things that you consider. And so, you know, and if the Americans wouldn't do it, then they'll allow the English or some other Five Eyes organization to do it. And then they'll talk to them. So, you know, the Americans might know that the English has recruited a spine for inside of a MI5 or MI6 is recruited a spine side of an organization that they can't recruit against.

at least on the books. So they'll just get debriefed by a Five Ice partner who's doing the same thing. Oh, okay. So one country that is in partnership with another one has been able to place somebody who will feed information back to them in an organization.

Yeah, the English don't care about the bill of rights. A different country can't do that. Yeah. But as long as the umbrella at the top is able to disseminate that information back down, everybody can share. Or they'll just collect against that. They'll know that there's a spy here.

So then a security agency will collect against that spy while he's operating in the country, have an understanding of what he's doing. And then if there's a U.S. person's nexus, then there's a process called minimization procedures, which again, you can Google and read online. But it's how do we minimize the exposure of a American person, but all of it still gets cataloged. So it's all still there. What's minimization's procedures? Minimization is when there's an inadvertent collection of an American U.S. person or even a dual citizen, the government's not supposed to be collecting against them. So once there's an inadvertent collection, whether it's through technology

or you accidentally recruit an American, which really doesn't happen that often, or you come across some media that was generated by an American. Ostensibly, they're supposed to be protected by the Bill of Rights. And unlawful search and seizure, freedom of speech, Ninth Amendment, all of those things

are supposed to come into play. But what the government will do is they'll start a minimization channel. And it's a good idea in practice because, of course, there will be inadvertent collection. Like, I as an American, might be traveling in Bahrain and then show up on a on a cell phone channel that they're collecting on and then my excuse me my information is now collected and that goes back to you know fort meet or whatever and they're like

oh there's an american there's a process to get rid of that information it's just uh the process moves conveniently slow in my experience um and uh uh is another vector for usurping people's rights um so there are people in there trying to fight it in the government. The government, you know, you can listen to Rand Paul stump on this all day. You know, I agree with some of what he says. Some I don't agree with. But they are obviously aware of these things happening. They're fighting things like FISA, which we've mentioned. They're fighting things like the process for minimization, but it's a slow. The government's a, you know, a behemoth. It's got to be hard when technology is able to move as quickly as it does to be able to keep up as well.

Legislation just takes so long. And even working out, okay, what is the strategy we want to implement, let alone can we get it past the appropriate hurdles legislatively to get it brought in. Yeah, the staffing of that legislation and then the voting and the pork and. Presumably, the talent is always going to be on the side of the people building the technology, not legislating against it. In order to be able to at least begin to understand how we want to compensate for this new type of technology, you need to understand the technology. But the people understanding it from the government side are never going to be as talented as the people that are building it. So you're always in a race that you're very far behind. Very few organizations are as competent as the free market

inside of the U.S. government. One of them would be DARPA. I advised there for a couple of years. It's kind of the black box of the DOD. Their job is to like just come up with holy shit ideas. And then they get, you know, a budget to to work after these things. Oftentimes they'll fund things that they don't, they know will not be built. But they're hoping that they'll be spin from the idea that will help. So they might say like we want to build, I always use this analogy, we might want to build a, you know, a, a rocket ship that can make it to Mars

and half the time. That's just something easy we can talk about. So they'll fund that. And the only thing that might come out of it might be a new type of carbon fiber that they had to develop as one of the subject lines. One of the key performance parameters was this new type of carbon fiber that was lighter and stronger.

So they'd never built the rocket ship, but they have three other products that came out of it, and then those things get released into the free market. So it's quite a useful organization. It's quite good, actually. It was more applicable back in like the 80s and the 70s, because technology hadn't evolved to the point where any big idea was going to need hundreds and millions of dollars, whereas today there's people out there like Elon and others who can fund these really big ideas. So it's still a good organization, but I would say that's

the last bastion of competence inside of the government. Otherwise, it's a totally incompetent organization. What was it that you said you had human hacking as well as software hacking? Well, human intelligence is the gathering of intelligence through human like, you know, source and method means, sources and methods means. And then there's, the government calls it ethical hacking, which is really a ridiculous moniker, where you're, you know, you're exploiting computer systems and building things like zero days and you're exploiting structural cracks or crevices and technology. And sometimes you'll never use. use them, they'll just sit on the shelf and that's kind of where the term

zero day comes from. It's like break in case, break glass in case of emergency. Then there'll be other ones that get used all of the time. And then there'll be people who do this in the government. There'll be people who do this, you know, white hat hackers who will expose these things and then, you know, either do it for a bounty with a company or do it to enable something that's going to on their own side. These people who are talented hackers get employed by a company to see if they can break their own system. That was my first job offering when I got out of the military he wants to do it for a bank.

My friend, I have a very good friend who, we went through the same training pipeline together, and we were both offered a very good amount of money from a bank to just go after their own infrastructure and then report back on how you're able to, you know. It's a weird kind of ransom. Yeah. It's a victimless ransom that only makes things stronger.

Yeah, right. Yes, exactly. Penetration testing is the unfortunate moniker. Huh. When it comes to getting access to information systems, How often is it a software hack and how often is it a human hack? Well, that depends on your budget and how fortified the infrastructure is and how they treat operational security or OPSEC. So you'll do like a target profile.

You'll, you know, your commander or whoever you work for will state a goal. We want access to, you know, X information at, you know, X organization, whatever that might be. And then you'll get a bunch of people like myself and from other disciplines. There's multiple, there's many modes of intelligence, especially within the DoD. There's Mazint, there's Fizant, there's Elyt, there's Elyt, there's Comet, there's Cyber, there's open source intelligence. Mazant is measuring in area signals. Fizant is telemetry intelligence.

So, you know, a space shuttle will report back information to the ground station as it's ascending or a plane will be giving information back to its ground station while it's maneuvering. It's the interception of that information. There's Eeylint, which is electronic intelligence going after radars associating with aircraft or AAA batteries or early warning radars or fire control radars on ships or airplanes. That interception of those signals and parsing it, I realize I set a bunch of acronyms and didn't explain them, so now I'm explaining them. And there's open source intelligence.

There's a variety of intelligence. So you'd have all of those people in the room who conduct those things. And they'd say, what are the vulnerabilities? You know, we've done a target analysis of this. What are the vulnerabilities or likely vectors that we can access? And if you've got a budget, so, you know, what are some of the cheapest ways? Well, the cheapest ways are always recruiting humans that work inside of the organization. So whether it's terrorists or government or infrastructure.

That's always cheaper than trying to hack the technology? 95% of the time it's cheaper. It depends, again, it depends on what technology we're going after. If it's, you know, a 3G Nokia in Iran, that's an easy day. If it's a, you know, let's see, what would be something very difficult. A highly encrypted satellite communication network where you need to be in the physical footprint of the satellite lobe in order to do the collection. That's placement, that's access, that's money, that's recruiting, that's hacking, that's decryption. And there's a bunch there.

So it really depends on the nature of the target and the technology. But generally, inside of an organization, there would be people with loose morals. And you can often get a lot out of them for just paying them 30 or 40 or 50K or, you know, finding out someone who runs the security network whose daughter needs eye surgery or has macular degeneration. You bump into them at a coffee shop and strike up a conversation. And I like what you like and establish rapport. and then eventually get to the point where you recruit them and then you pay them and then you get your information. That's more classic spy craft type stuff.

Yes, exactly. So I was trained in that classically while I was in the military, but it was in order to conduct forensic exploitation. Forensic exploitation. Yes, in support of these types of operations. What's forensic exploiting? You're handling a source and you're worried that he's not obeying your instructions. So now you're going to pull the GPS or data from the phone to make sure. that he drove there the way that you told him.

Okay, so this is beginning to cross the two. This isn't just the human side. It's not just the technological side. It signals intelligence and computer network operations supporting the human intelligence targeting cycle. Wow. Okay. Yeah, to ensure the assets are doing what they say that they do.

Right. Yeah, because there's layers and layers. There's what you want them to achieve technologically, but then there's surveilling them to ensure that they're doing what you want them to do in order to achieve what you want them to achieve. And you don't want them showing up, like, you know, they might be running late from work. So they just take a direct B line to your meet instead of conducting a surveillance detection route.

And now they, you know, they left their facility and they left with surveillance. Now their surveillance pulled them all the way to where you're doing your meet. Instead of doing the surveillance detection route and dumping the surveillance, not dumping, cataloging the surveillance and then not attending the meeting because you've got a tail. Wow. Okay. What are some of the gnarliest exploits or information hacks that are publicly available and you can talk about? but not enough people know about. I mean, Pegasus is probably the king of that.

It's basically a persistent implant that lives on the phone. That in its earliest iterations required, you click some type of link. So there would be a phishing element to it where, you know, you're getting an email or you're getting a text where, you know, I might, you know, conduct some exploitation on your phone and figure out you text a lot with person A. And then so now I'm going to use the network.

and send a message that's looking like it's coming for that person saying, hey, Chris, come and check this link out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I'd be innocuous or a website or something like that that it sends you to, but then it would deliver some packets that would implant itself and, you know, a part of your telephone. That was specifically for iPhone, iOS? Yeah, but I believe it branched out since then. So Pegasus was post my military career, so I didn't actually get to go and do the exploitation

on it that I wanted to do on it or that I would have wanted to do it on. I read some papers. I talked to some friends who were still in and, asked them about it. But it lived in a different place on the phone than it would even stand up to a person like me doing a quick triage nature and forensic exploitation where I dumped the phone and looked through it. It was stored in a place where it wasn't obvious that you should be looking for any type of code there or malicious code there. Who made it? I mean, I believe it was made by the Israelis. I think that's common knowledge. That certainly was one of the most, like, holy shit,

these guys cracked the nut here. Say what you will about Israel. They certainly have their tradecraft and their military operation planning down well. Dude, if you can blow the balls off 3,000, the fucking enemy combatants at the same time using a pager. Oh man, I wish I'd have been a part of something like that. That'd have been great. That kind of fell away, that new story. It was, I mean, it happened. Everyone was interested in it, but that to me seems like one of the most, like, insane. They should make a movie about that. Precise.

Yeah. Yeah. It would be just years of target development, sourcing, corporate espionage, supply chain interdiction, the amount of things that had to go into that to make that happen. You know, just getting plastic or whatever they use inside of a, you know, a pager, that's easy. Supply interdiction, you know, making it through the, you know, network, paying off the right people, delivery, the patients to wait, you know, that they're with all of these people. It's just, you know, that was a stroke of genius. Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution? Something that identifies

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health and start knowing. And right now, you can get $25 off, bringing it down to $340. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom using the code, Modern Wisdom, a checkout. Why were they using pages? Is that more secure somehow? There was, they probably, yeah, they probably got the idea that smartphones are no longer secure. So now we're going to go revert back to, which is actually, you know, throughout my time in the global war on terrorism, that was definitely a thing that would happen. Like we'd nailed down one type of technology, we'd exploit it,

we'd kill a bunch of people, and then they'd, you know, pivot to a different piece of technology or regress back to, you know, something more primitive. They did the same thing even with IEDs. You know, IEDs started very primatively, you know, pressure sensors, pressure triggers. You had to physically, you know, manipulate, you know, drive over something.

And then they got to command and detonated. And then they got to using garage doors that were operating in a frequency band that the, the initial Magellular that we put out, which were sensing the RF environment, would tell you if there was something in the area, and set it off. So then they started using the garage door openers

that were in a very low frequency band range that was outside of the Magellas. The Magellans pivoted. And then they went back to... Pressure. Or running a wire up to a hotel room and sitting in a hotel room and waiting. So, you know, like you said,

the free market can pivot and develop new technology. In asymmetric warfare, in asymmetric warfare, the threat can pivot, especially when you're dealing with somebody who doesn't wear a uniform and doesn't care about the law of Geneva conventions, they'll just go wherever they need to go to keep being battlefield effective. Yeah, exactly. This is what we saw in Ukraine, right, with drones, that $500 drone with a bit of plastic explosive, yeah, was able to find the weakness in this particular tanks. And then the tanks got webbed, like frontage, like prongs at the top so that they were

would get caught. Okay, so we'll find a way to get around that. So then EMP blasts will be used to knock them out of the sky. So then we'll run basically big fucking strings, big cords. Yeah. It's this rapidly evolving. It's like that baseball game with the bat where you're putting hands over the top and then, you know, Rochambeau or whatever they used to call us. The same thing. You're just, how can we pivot? That's what the military and the government by and large is really bad at is pivoting and responding to pivoting because we're militaries that are built around. We were thinking about the Russians. We were thinking about the Chinese.

And that's, you know, Geneva Conventions, Law of Land Warfare. You know, there's certain gentlemen rules that you'll obey and say we're not going to do, we won't target civilians, we won't target churches, we won't target mosques, we won't do these types of things. And then, you know, terrorists just look at that and say, oh, they're showing us their weaknesses.

Let's run all of our operations. You know, I just read a news report the other day about Gaza using the hospitals as torture for things. as torture facilities. It was just like two or three days ago. Fuck me. That's morbid. Yeah, yeah. So they're just overtaking these hospitals. There was a book. I brought the author on, I wasn't ever able to actually release the episode,

but I brought an author on who had written a book that was about all of the intelligence failures of America. And it was like a popular history book, but it came up to pretty recent. And when they did the Osama bin Laden raid, they found the book on his bedside table. And this guy was an old school British bloke. And he immediately rang his publisher and said, we need to put this on the front cover of the paperback release. Like, so good that Osama bin Laden had it on his bedside nightstand. But yeah, he was using Osama bin Laden was using a popular history book about the failings of the American intelligence agencies and the rest of the five eyes.

Right next to his Avril Levine CD. Yeah. Honestly. Yeah. Yeah. And it's bacon. Yeah. We put a lot of that out there.

I mean, I'm proud to say I worked in a lot of military organizations where none of the members have published books yet. I'm anti-blooded government. I'm like so against, you know, Andy, you mentioned at the beginning, had me on his podcast and said, if you, you know, if you're a dictator for the day, how much you, would you reduce the federal government buy? And I said 80%. And I just gave a long list of organizations that would just go away.

It's just, it's a self-licking ice cream cone that its only ends and means are to grow and to pull more purse strings for the majority of the time. It's been an interesting loop to watch Elon's arc over the last, what, like two years or so. Oh, very much so. With Doge, right? Because I think it's this weird auribora. eating itself of we shouldn't have trillionaires because they're able to evade tax we need to take more taxes a lot of rich people say i want to pay tax i think the top like one percent of

earners pay 30 percent of the taxes already but the main concern of most rich high tax paying people is look at all of the fucking waste and fraud that this is being spent on and the guy that's paying the most tax was also the guy that was trying to remove some of the inefficiencies to be able to, as opposed to pouring more into the top, it's like, let's make the system that spits it out the bottom more efficient so that we can actually get more of that. We have some taxes going in. Lots of that's being wasted. How can we make it more efficient? I had the CIO, the chief information officer for the Treasury Department, Sam, Korkos, who said, founded levels. I had him on the podcast last year, and it was the first long form interview

to anybody from Doge had done at his level. I think I saw that one. Great. But he's like, dude, it's fucking ancient. This entire organization is a big lumbering behemoth. It leans left as well internally. And it's not agile. It's not able to be kept up to date. And all of these systems He was explaining. It's like 16 intersecting different systems that need to, well, this type of information is held on this particular type of database and we need to do a lookup request that comes across to this. So it's not one, it's not a big fuck-off Excel spreadsheet. Right. Right.

Right. It's this Frankenstein's monster that's been like contorted over time to, it functions. It functions in as much as the country hasn't fallen apart. And you're able to submit taxes. and you're able to pay them. But yeah, it's a mess. It's a mess. Yeah, my experience was my last job when I left the military was I was advising a two-star

general and a full bird colonel who were in charge of all the offensive cyber development for the army. So offensive cyber is hacking. It's another term. Offensive cyber operations. Offco is what we called it. They recognize the ridiculousness of the program. But all of these programs, you get a budget for the year.

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

military to have on the battlefield. They need to be able to do these things. And here are the peers and near peers in these areas. And here are the countries that we don't want to go after. So I would sit down with the general after he got hit they would flow down to this general who's in charge of offensive cyber then we'd have these round tables where we would say you know in this area what can we go after what product lines that we have that already support these efforts um which one of these can we not do or should we tell them that we'll either need more funding or it's not a vector that we should pursue at this time and we would go over all of those things and we would think that we got most of the budget program that was the sole thing that drove everything and this is the most

frustrating part, it really opened my eyes of government. Budget and money drove everything. It didn't even really matter if we were meeting the president's requirements. As long as we got to say we, as long as we could lie to a threshold that they wouldn't be able to figure out that we were executing the budget. It just needed, the money needed to be spent. That was what it was all about. So there's not any espionage and subterfuge happening externally. It's also happening intern. Yes. And then when the money wouldn't get spent, you would, like, all the military guys, would get, and there's only a few in the organization. It was mostly civilians. I'd say 85% of it was civilians. They would get pulled in and say, look, we've still got $100 million and it's July.

The budget's up in September. Where can we spend money right now? And they'd just be like, whatever course you want to go to, Chief Go, whatever thing you want to go to, you want to go to, you want to go do that, just spend it all. And then when you executed the budget, it was successful. But it never really, like, in my mind, it was always, if a general officer who's got a cadre of folks like myself who are experts in their fields say, look, we can achieve the effects the president's looking for for 70% of the budget. That to me is a promotion. We're getting the intended effects and we've done it with three quarters of the budget. What do you think was being insinuated by someone not hitting budget that they basically fallen short and not tried

as hard as they should have done? Yeah, or you didn't know what you needed. You thought you, you asked for way more than you needed. Because the request for the budget was also done by the and that didn't spend it. Yeah, yeah. It's not like, here is your budget. It's, here's what I want. Well, here's what you asked for, and I got you that. Right.

I went and stumped for you, and I got you that from the Secretary of Defense. And you didn't execute it. Now I've got to go tell them we've got this money we can't spend. You might not believe me, but this is what peak sleep optimization looks like. I'm not talking about the nightgown. It's just for sex appeal. I'm talking about my eight sleep. The eight sleep pod five comes with a smart cover you throw in your mattress that actively

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think it's as robust as everyone else thinks it is. I mean, it's very good. There's a lot of pluses to it. I'm obviously using it inside of our companies because it will, the mundane code or the less elegant code that's been written a million times over, you can generate very quickly. It can be integrated. Someone can review it in your GitHub. The branch gets committed. And now you've got code that would have otherwise taken a week or two to develop.

You get it developed in an hour. And in hacking, it's the same thing. Again, I've really been outside of hacking for probably three years now, four years. I was advising some friends on the side with like a small company where they would just, I'd be a good idea fairy. And they would tell me the targets and the networks that they were looking at. And then I'd recommend ideas or here's what you can do. Or, hey, that one uses HF comms.

You know, you could sit and intercept these HF comms from this area, go and do this. I would do that type of thing. But for the large part now, I'm running two and almost three companies now. I've largely gotten out of that space. But I would imagine it's the. same thing. So what you would do is you would you would get a blob or like, you know, a technical dump of a particular device that you're, you're targeting and you would feed it to an AI and it's probably being done in the Pentagon right now, Anthropic or Open AI or whatever.

There's probably a hacking version of this. I would imagine, like I said, I haven't been in there for a while. And you basically say, what are the, here's a, here's a router, here's everything we know about it. Here's how it looks. Here's all the logic. Here's the hardware. Here's the software. here's the software that runs on it. Tell me where the chinks in the arm are all. Brewls the fuck out of this. And it'd say, hey, the IP tabling is messed up here.

They haven't patched that yet. Or they'd say, this buffer can be overflowed and it will give you access. You can go here. Or on this network diagram that you pass me, it looks like all of these are being provisioned by the same IT guy. And you have historical reporting that says he uses password

for his passwords. You know, all of these things would be looked at and gone through. And that target development cycle now would have been three to six months in the past, or even a year or two, you know, we would get a phone and dump the phone. A phone would become popular in the Middle East. We'd dump the phone. We get the E.O.1 file, which is just, you know, as much code as you can get on a phone and we combed through it and look for the vulnerabilities. That can be a year processed, you know, three to, three months to a year easily to do that. Unless there's parts of the code that, you know, unless, you know, unless,

that the, you know, Apple 13, a lot of the same code exists in the 14, therefore the same exploits or it hasn't been patched. A lot of that would be there. But when you're talking new phone or new architecture or new ecosystem, easily you can spend a year. And now I think there's probably a month of most people would spend on these things and probably most of the works getting done in the first three hours. AI powered hacking, I would have guessed, you know, with some of the some of the nightmares that we've seen over the last couple of years there was a few in retail in the UK.

I would have guessed that AI fueled hacking would have just like exposed all of these vulnerabilities. I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is. I don't know. I haven't heard many massive stories about it. I don't think you would hear a lot about it. Maybe.

But I'm 100 because a lot of models, so this is a bit esoteric, it basically comes down to training data and power. A lot of the math and a lot of the algorithms that AI uses or at least the initial instantiation of it used were around since the 70s and the 80s. Like we knew the math behind a convolutional neural network or a long, short-term memory neural network, which is a derivative of a recurrent neural network.

We knew a lot about how this stuff was going to work, but we lacked two things. We lacked the compute, which we got through like tensor processing units or GPUs. And we lacked training data, which we got through the. the internet. So there's more to it, but largely those are the three things, part of the awesome sauce for training an AI model. So there are people out there certainly who are going to be able to train their own models and use their own code repositories that they've generated for different exploits over time and train their own internal network on their own GPU and their own server and their own basement. Without any guardrails on it? Yeah. They wouldn't, yes. Certainly it's being

done by organized crime right now. There's no way it's not being done. What are the most common things that organized crime are using hacking for? Access to phones is a big one. Banking, stuff associated with Bitcoin, things associated with, they're embedding. There's a lot of it embedding. What do intelligence operators understand about human behavior that most civilians don't, do you think? So I'm not, so I'm trained in human intelligence. My human intelligence operations that I ran were usually to enable a separate part of an operation, as I alluded to before.

But that being said, I learned how to do car pickups, car drop-offs, bumps, initiate, debrief, handle a source, all of those things. But it was meant for a different aspect of the mission. I think that really when it comes to, when you ask the question what other people don't understand. I guess I would ask you back what kind of other people because I think when you talk about somebody who's really been around the block, Rogan has a very deep understanding of people. I sometimes he can quickly suss people out. Like, is this guy full of bullshit?

Is this guy angling? Is this guy doing this? And I've seen it enough to where it's a pattern I've now seen over the past few years where he's very good at figuring out who good people are and who shitty people are. He just has that tick. It's an interesting skill. I think I kind of become fascinated by rich and powerful men, distorting reality around them, especially when you walk into a room.

But when you get to very, very, very, yeah, that having spent some time around some pretty fucking powerful and influential people, when they walk into a room, the whole vibe of the room changes. People aren't, just, people are unable to act normally around them. And then after a while, it would be like some weird version of Stockholm syndrome where, you go, well, this is just what the world is. Everybody treats me in this sort of a way. Isn't that strange? And people can't hold it together when they're in the presence of somebody that they really admire. They've got loads of respect. Maybe they think that they can get something from them or they want them to like them. And or this person is maybe the gateway between them and a thing that they think that they want.

He's so powerful and rich and cool. And I want to be associated with them. Maybe we could be friends. And before you know it, you're the guy garbling his words to a hot girl trying to hang with somebody in a comedy green room. Yes. And the reason I brought up Rogan was because, especially in the military, when I was dealing with the CIA or I was dealing with the DIA,

who have their own source recruitment divisions, everyone can do, everyone can go to the farm or everyone can go to in the military, the Fort Wachuka's where they run the courses there, and learn how to recruit a source. And the 30% of people who can do it can do it to effect once they've learned the how.

So the military breaks it down into a very rigored approach. And oftentimes the people that you're recruiting are people who have shown up to a base and said, hey, I think my brother's going to blow some car up or I think this X, Y, or Z. And then they'll say, oh, that person is a lead. Let's go recruit that person. And so most people can do that.

Now, there's a separate class. There's categories of human intelligence sources. And those are derived from what their placement and access is. So, you know, a guy who is a gate guard at an IBM is like lower cat three, cat four, very low source, but he can give you access or he could give you a security card or he could get you X, Y, or Z. So there's value, it's valuable. You just pay that guy off. And then there's cat three, cat two, cat one. Cat one sources would be like, I'm recruiting the secretary of defense for the, you know, British government or whatever you guys call him, defense secretary,

Defense Prime Minister, whatever that person's called, I'm recruiting that guy. That's a level one source. So that level one source requires an artisan, somebody who really knows this craft and someone who can really create circumstances and understand a target. But the reason I brought up Rogan is because they also have that thing where they can quickly deduce a person and put them down and understand exactly what motivates this person, have a very good idea of what motivates this person, the tactics that they're going to use, how they're going to keep them interested. And they can do that with like a 15 minute conversation. Just an insanely strong theory of mind.

Yes. And rigorous. It's one of those things where you have to have the anima and the animus. You have to have the structure to follow the cycle. And you have to have the diligence and the patience and all of those virtues. Because deviating from the cycle that's been around for a thousand years will get you killed. But then he's also got to have the artistry or the anima to be able to navigate the chaos. and get thrown all different types of punches

or this thing happens or he gets rolled up at a checkpoint or he is now getting recruited and this is turned into a CI operation. And to navigate all of those things, you need somebody who's got real command of their total self who can deal with the rigor and apply all that

but then can play jazz when it's needed. And then have the wisdom to do all of those things that I talked about. Most guys at that point are at 40 or 45 before they have that. But man, these guys you know, you get three of these guys, you can take over a country. You know, you said about cat four, cat three, cat two, cat one, cat one would be super super high

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description below we're heading to join dot whoop.com slash modern wisdom that's join dot whoop dot com slash modern wisdom i was thinking about how serial killers seem to not have proliferated in the same way, largely because of forensics, DNA, fingerprinting, digital tracking. Do you think it's likely now, do you think it is less likely that Cat 1 people of interest are going to be turned for the same reason that it's less likely that there are longstanding serial killers that they are realizing I'm probably going to get caught. There's more of a digital footprint. It's hard. You cook that up just now? while we were talking.

Yeah. That's interesting. You know the analogy? I'm trying to make there. Yeah, no, I totally understand it. It's just great. Like, I would, I've only been thinking about what's happening right here and I haven't, my, my CPU is limited.

So I'm not, I can't go. I've got, I've got low processing power, but very high RAM. Very good. I think, so, certainly handling Cat 1, it has gotten more restraining. but then what ends up having or having to change is you have to handle your cover differently. So all of these operations, you're in cover when you're running these operations.

And so the cover now needs to become, instead of a guy I met at a bar, you're going to set up a new company in this country adjacent to whatever sector this person's in, become the CEO of that company. And the government will spend a ton of money setting that up. Okay. So you're not turning people that are already there. people that are going to become it. Yes.

Or you're, say you're in charge of a, let's just run a thought experiment or a hypothetical, say you're in charge of a new type of GPU development company in Abu Dhabi. And I want to recruit you. So in the past it might have been, we became good friends from a bar. And you know, your girlfriend knew my girlfriend and we went out and here's all this happened. And then when you're, you know, the Chinese are buying your GPUs, which is why I'm going after you. I want to cut off the head of the dragon here and not give the Chinese access to your GPUs and I want you to sell them to the Americans. Let's say that's what's going on.

The Chinese would come in and say, hey, who the fucks this Bill Thompson guy? How much do you know about him? Blah, blah, blah. They'll be so proactive because they'll be watching you. If you're a critical supply choke point for them, they will have been watching you from day one before they even start selling, buying from you. They'll know your ins and outs. That's what happens to deal with the Chinese. And so they'll know all of this. So they'll go to you. You'll get a meeting with someone.

Someone will show up at your office and be like, hey, I'm so-and-so from so-and-so. You deal with the government, the communist, you know, people's Republic of China. We've noticed you've been hanging out with this bill guy. You know, you need to shut that. Like, what is his story? He just showed up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So now how this changes is because we can't change the technical vectors and the collection capabilities and all those things.

So how this would change is instead of happening and we're friends because of girlfriends, I will go into that country and set up either competitive or adjacent technology, fully funded by the U.S. government through cutouts and other things, and either be on the chief of staff or staff or whatever, and I'll make my product that you need slightly cheaper, maybe as a transistor or something like that. You'll come to me to say, hey, I've noticed that you're selling this microchip here for half the cost. I need some.

I'll be like, oh, great, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah. now I've got what's called cover for action and cover for status. And so when the Chinese come to you, be like, well, yeah, I'm buying it from him. He runs this company, and this company's got a cheaper one, and that allows me to make it cheaper for you. So the Chinese are cool, you're cool, and now I'm over here. More sophisticated cover. Yeah, so far more backstopped is what it's called. More backstopped, right.

Yes. Who do you think is the most surveilled human on the planet? Elon Musk, I'd probably say. At least... There's a laundry list of people that I would want to recruit, and he would be one of them. Who else would be on it? Some of them I know, so I don't want to say their names. Who else would I be going on there?

I mean an interesting list that you're going to give us of people who you don't know. Yeah, who I don't know. Let's see. Family of Trump would be another one I would be looking at. It's a big fucking family. Yeah, it's a big fucking family. I would be, you think anybody in the tech sector, it also depends on, you're asking me this, who am I recruiting for?

You know, if I'm recruiting for the Chinese, that would be one set of people. If I'm recruiting for the Russian, that'd be another set of people. Original question was just like, of all humans on the planet, seven billion, whatever it is now, eight billion,

uh, who has got the most amount of eyeballs looking at them digitally? Yeah, so as you restate that I actually realize I'm wrong, I'd probably want to recruit people who work for Elon. I wouldn't want to recruit Elon. I'd want to recruit someone close to him, because I talked about accessibility being one of the vectors when you're doing a target profile.

Very inaccessible. Even if I'm friends with them, he's inaccessible. I would never be able to get him to show up for a meet, like to debrief them or to get any information from them. So you'd want to recruit someone around them. And that's the same thing. You know, that's the thing that's always kind of made me scratch my head about Epstein. I would never, I would never, you know, people brought up Clinton in saying Clinton's now associated with Epstein. I'm sure there were nefarious, crazy things going on over there.

Clinton's not a person I'd ever want to recruit. Clinton would be a nightmare of a target to try to manage or a source to try to manage. He's not someone you recruit. He's also not someone you leverage. You could, maybe Epstein being an idiot, wanted to set up all of these things and use them as leverage against them. That might be one play. But as far as saying, like, Israel's involved and like these things, possible. One of the most interesting ideas I've heard about Epstein was a friend who spoke to,

somebody in Israeli intelligence and he this guy said do you know how fucking insulting it is that people say that we would have recruited that guy? Yes. After he was already popped for soliciting sex

from a minor. Yeah. And that was the most I don't know the Epstein rabbit hole goes so fucking deep. Oh no, don't get me wrong. It's so there's a lot going on to. Very squirrely and that would be great cover. The fact that he's so obvious is to not be a normal standard candidate for being an intelligence operative would maybe be great cover for why he might. But he was like, how unsophisticated and ungraceful do you think we are that we would recruit that guy, this very flash,

very lavish, very public-facing dude? And what are you going to recruit him with? He's rich. Anything that you would use to insidvise. The argument would be that the, the, the, money wasn't his, that the money had come from them. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. It's just... Still, it's an interesting, it's an interesting argument. And it makes sense when, um, this guy's obviously a Fed or this guy's glowing or whatever. Right. The, like, how glowy somebody looks is probably proportionate to how visible they are too. But if somebody's very visible, they're going to get more accusations of being whatever

controlled opposition or a Fed, whatever. But you go, Would you really want that person? No. It's the best argument. I have no fucking idea whether Nick Fuentes is a Fed or not. But it's the best argument for why Nick would be a horrible candidate. It's like, do you want someone that's being watched by hundreds of thousands of people a day? Like, is that, that's your guy.

Although Anderson Cooper was that rolled up. So this is the thing, man. For every example, there's a counter example. Fuck it. Nick Fuentes is a Fed. It all depends on what you can. It all depends on what you can. what you get from them. I think, I mean, if I had to, I'll put it this way. If I had to place money,

he's getting money from Israel. I had to bet, I would say he's getting money from Israel. Why? Strah, man. This helps them in so many ways to have people like him running around that he might not know he's getting money from them, but you need enemies. It's kind of like racism. Who's funded the most of the KKK and who shows up in the chat rooms when the KKK is having a meeting? I don't know. The federal government. Okay. Why?

Because they need an enemy. They need a straw man. They prop up. There's no, white supremacy is like real white supremacists. Yeah, there are some out in like rural Alabama or something like that. But as far as like tens of thousands like they would lead us to believe in all of these things, most times when you look into these things, there were fed involvement. Like even again, January 6th, very hot topic. There were feds in that audience that were, that, you know, look, going back to the Gulf of Tonkin, anytime we need it.

motivation to use government money, taxpayer money, to launch an operation to achieve an effect, the government's almost always involved in every part of the nexus when it comes to certain things. Just before you keep going, can you just pop that on for me, please? What is this for? It's it's, it's when you're, it's when you're pushing out into the deeper recesses of theorizing it's a, it's a, I mean, I would have imagined as a well everything I said is agency person that you would have understood what this is. It's a disguise, Bill. Yeah. Go on. Lots of these things, when you look, when you really get down to the nitty gritty, the government's,

this is so ridiculous, the government's so involved in most of these things. And lots of times, here's the way the FBI will look at something. We've got a whole division that's focused on, on, on, I can't even think. Right, all right. We've got a whole, we've got a whole, we've got a whole, we've got a whole, division that's focused on threats to the homeland. And 25% of this budget is for white supremacy. The Biden administration will throw $100 to $2 million, $100,200 million at countering white supremacy so that he gets to go out and have talking points. But then the FBI gets on the ground, and there's really no white supremacy. So then the FBI will be like, hey, and I'm not saying

this is happening now, but there certainly happened back in the day. I know it happened back in the day, there would be a KKK meeting either on the dark web or on the white web or open web or in an area or whatever, 60% of the people showing up would be feds. Why? Because they have a whole division and all of these jobs are organized around defeating white supremacy. And if you can't find white supremacy, it's like Al Sharpton. Al Sharpton made his bones on helping black people back in the day. But once racism in the 90s washed up, he had to go searching for. racism in order to keep his stick going. That's the problem with government is that they create their self-licking ice cream

cones in that they create the incentive structure. But once they've won, they can't go away. None of these guys are getting, none of these useful idiots will get rid of their jobs. They're going to go out and create the thing they were developed to counter in order to keep the purse strings going. A lot of people have this same issue with Big Pharma. Yes. Yes.

Yeah, it's the same. Keep you fat. It's the same dynamic. Big Pharma wants. you're taking type 2 diabetes shots in your stomach or whatever you have to do for type 2 diabetes, they won't tell you to fast, they won't tell you to lose weight. You've got heart problems or cholesterol problems. They're not going to tell you to lose weight and go on a clean diet. They're going to give you statins. The interesting thing here is just changing the incentives or coming up

with a better solution. Like, this is why it's cool and noble. And I love when people want to kind of flip the entire system over. But I don't think that it's as realistic as, just coming up with a better alternative that aligns the incentives toward what you want. For instance, OZemPEC plays within the rules of big farmer, but gets the outcome that you want, which is preferable, right? It realizes that, hey, maybe we can try and take down these greedy corporations that are trying to capitalize on people's bad health so that they can keep them addicted or dependent on medications. Roger that.

However, if you can just get a medication that gets the outcome that you want that has minimal side effects through using innovation, you indoctrinate, because Big Pharma doesn't care about what the outcome is, what they care about presumably, using this, if this is true, that they care about its profits. Okay, so just that's their rule set. How can you get them to continue to make profits? whilst also making people healthier

or helping people to lose weight. The long-term studies on all these GLPs and stuff aren't out yet. But that to me seems like a much quicker way to do. But as you've said there, this sort of intersecting, fucking endless spiral of, well, this thing that you thought happened maybe didn't happen for that reason. It happened to be an example to push back against so that it can keep people in a job

so that it can permit expansions of power so that it can increase budgets so that there is still the opportunity for people culturally to nudge society in one direction or another. This is why I think... I'm like not very conspiratorial. I'm very interested. I don't consider myself one either.

Quibono. The reason that I find it... like interesting to be around my friends, but also sometimes it's like quite fatiguing to me, my more conspiratorially minded friends, is what I'm left with is not more certainty. It's just more like apathy. Yeah.

I go, I don't know what the fuck to think, dude. I actually don't know what the fuck to think. For every incident that occurs, you can make an equal and opposite case for it being legitimate or not, or a, you know, fourth-wave Trojan horse, you know, triple agent that actually start, I'm like, I just, I have no idea what I have no idea what it's.

What do I do with this information? Yeah. And I think that that, even that could be the outcome. The desired outcome could be confusion and apathy. Yes. So even the matter of this entire situation is, look, we can't convince people of any one narrative because there's too much information out there, flood the system with more information. and make them so confused that they have no conviction as opposed to some conviction in a direction that

we actually don't want. Yeah, yeah. And I mean you're saying they always designed the means. And I'm not conspiratorial. I'm not a cyclops. There's good and bad to everything, just like you said with the GLP's. Obviously, if you're 400 pounds and you've got all of these snoring problems, you can't sleep, your chest is caving in on you, you've got diabetes, you're going to lose your left foot. You've got all of these things going on, obviously, go get on a GLP1. If you can't beat the food addiction, like go and do it and then get healthy, but then learn how to deal with food after you do that. But for sure, that's good that you're getting thin again and that you can sleep at night or that you can make love to your wife or that you can, you know, play sports with your kids.

Like all of those things are, the net good is there, right? Even if they said, GLP1 is the lessen your lifespan by five years. It's like, okay, if I'm 35 and 600 pounds, only got five years left. So like obviously there's black and white to everything. There are good aspects of government. Don't get me wrong. It's just that the bad is far outgrown the good. Obviously there's good things that got government. We need roads. We need a military. We need interstate commerce. All of the things that the articles of Confederation were designed and why we revamped it went with the Constitution. There's goodness there. But the founder's intent was always for the government to be constrained and for the, you know, individual rights would be paramount in these

institutions, freedom of speech, all of those things. And the government has just way overstepped their bounds in every way. And so I could go down that whole thing and I won't do it to you unless you want to. But it's just, it's grown so much and it's become part of our lives where you can't buy a toilet in here or a light bulb without the federal government approving it. That's patently ridiculous. You know, they're in everything and they're taxed everything. When you make your money, when you spend your money, when you save your money, when you die, every aspect of your life is overtaxed. And, you know, I guess if I'm anything, I'm a constitutionalist.

And I think the founders would be revolting if they saw what this government was today. I think they would say, hey, you boys better grab your muskets. Like, this is ridiculous. That is a guy who both him and his wife were incredibly embroiled in being close to the government for a very long time. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I didn't, I joined the military to get out of North Dakota. Like I said, my father died when I was five. My mother was an alcoholic. She became a waitress. I lived in a trailer home. When I joined the military, my older younger brother were in jail. Well, one was in boys ranch, which was like jail. My older one was in jail.

My two older sisters, one got addicted to drugs later and died. And one was addicted to drugs when I joined the military. And my mother was still battling alcoholism, like she would vacillate between. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of North Dakota. Like whatever, I'm not a farmer, and the only people that can make it there are farmers. And otherwise, you're addicted to meth. Methamphetamines are a huge problem there. Or you're working in the support industry for farmers.

And I just knew that none of this was for me. So when I saw the military recruiter, I saw the girls looked at them. I saw, you know, purpose and meaning. I always, when I don't have purpose and meaning, I have anxiety and depression. Those are the two things that fell the void. And I saw the military as my way out. and it's only in this country that my story is even even approximately possible,

even like getting close to this story being possible, is only in this country and we owe so much to it. But when I joined it was to get out of North Dakota, when I re-enlisted it was to preserve the American experiment and everything that undergirds it. I really relisted and stayed in because I started reading Montesquieu and John Locke and Cicero and the Federalist Papers.

and the stories of our founding. And sorry to say we had to battle, you know, England, but you're an American citizen now, aren't you? No, no, I'm still on a visa, but I've also still got a plus four four phone number. So you'll take my taxes, but not my area. Well, anyway, all of these things were bought with blood and treasure. And when I reenlisted, it was to preserve the experiment and that I believed in the experiment. I believe it's the greatest experiment ever ran in history.

And in 250 years, we had one of the greatest economies. we technology culture um what you know whiz all of these things um is only popular and it's only possible in this kind of country and you know that's why i stayed in the military and i love it and that's why i'm trying to preserve these things now with the companies that i'm building now and what i'm doing going forward is because i i bet on the individual i bet on families i bet on freedom of choice when people are left to their devices to make decisions they'll be engaged in far better work with more meaning than any government could bestow upon them um any other way. If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength App is the best

place to start. I've been in the gym for two decades, and it wasn't until this last year that I had some of the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around the obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, the weights, everything. So all you have to do is show up and lift. If the answer, RP Strength app could wipe your ass for you. Probably would. And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing.

For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. And if you're serious about your training, it'll do the same for you. Right now, you can follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below. I heading to RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout. That's RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. a checkout. Can you take me through what your app does? Have you got it on your phone? Oh, yeah. So my applicant, you know, my, my co-founder,

co-founders were like, hey, you were on Rogan. You didn't mention her app until they very end. And I was like, sorry, I don't think about those things until it's time. I'm a fucking fun conversation. So the app, the app is called Spartan Forge. Again, there's many things, how there's so much into this. I wanted people to get outdoors. and I did this work while I was in the military. So while I was in the military, I was, you know, essentially my job was variable analysis for commanders. The commanders have a goal to kill bad guy.

Hunters have a goal. Harvest meat, have an experience with their son. Initiation rights, I think, is something that this country is in desperate need of. Hunting is a useful vector for initiation rights between a father and a son. Like, you've killed a deer now. Today, I treat you like a man. Baptism by the river. You're 16.

Now you're a dude. hunters, people hunt for all kinds of reasons. And so when I was leading the military, I had anxiety and depression because I didn't know what I was going to do when I got out. Like I got paid to kill and break things or to break things so other guys could kill, bad guys who were trying to harm our country. And I, you know, got to, you know, had a blank check to just prosecute war. And I had a great amount of meaning from it.

And, you know, I did, looking back on the Iraq War, I wish we were never there. But certainly Afghanistan, the work I did in Africa, the work I did in Africa, the work I did in the Southern Philippines, we were killing bad guys. And people that would have killed us if we didn't kill them. And in most cases, and I was getting all this anxiety. And I said, what am I going to do when I get out? Like, how can I, I want to keep having this meaning. If I lose this, I'm going to die. Like, I'm going to become an alcoholic. Like I said, I'm the only one of my family that wasn't addicted to drugs or alcohol. And I could feel the alcohol calling me like, hey, I got something for you. So I said, what am I going to do when I get out? And I was a hunter and I've been both. And I've been

bow hunting for a few years. And I thought, really, these are just target analysis problems. A hunter and military guys have, they have variable analysis that they need to understand a target better so that they can prosecute the target. Hunters are in the same way. So my company, Spartan Forge that I started, the first product that we released was a neural network that did deer movement prediction, which sounds kind of cliche, but hunters only have so much time off. So the first thing we built in this area was just a neural network that used caller GPS data from deer. So biologists, universities, private people would collar deer and they would let them run and they'd learn things about fond recruitment or how many were getting killed by wolves, how they move,

where they move, why they move. We took that data and we started building neural networks to predict movement. And out of that, we got a few thousand users. And then I started looking to mapping programs after we had a few thousand users. And I really just wanted to focus on machine learning because there's so much I can do in machine learning in the hunting space, I'd never really wanted to get into mapping. But then there are these huge, you know, a couple of multi-hundred million dollar corporations that are in the hunting and mapping space. And I met with them. And they were really offering me,

like, sounds like a lot of money, but like a half million dollars for like six or eight years of work. And I was like, look, I could go to work for Accenture next week and make that in a year. Like, that's not what I'm trying to do here. A, I'm trying to demystify the woods. And be, I want to get people into the woods and see, I think, neural networks, machine learning, artificial intelligence, mapping, geospatial intelligence is going to be a huge player in this space. So all of them kind of just said, this was 2015. So they were like hearing AI and they had no idea what AI was. So anyway, we said, I said, look, the hard part's the machine learning, the hard parts of the neural networks. The hard part is the geospatial intelligence. Building a map box map and putting it in an app is not the

hard part, which is what all these guys really are at the end of the day is there a mapbox map inside of a... So we built this Spartan Forge. We've got like LIDAR, high resolution imagery. Like the imagery is five centimeter imagery. Jesus fucking tries. So you can see... That's better than Google Maps. Oh, it's far better. A hundred times better than Google Maps. You can see down to the ground. Is that that as far as you can go? Can you go further? I can go further. And then I can go back in time too. I can go back to... Where have you taken this data from? So we contracted with a... a company that runs airplanes, and we go in with a couple of other companies that are in, like, soil and mental rights, real estate, other places. There's a solar company. They need high

resolution imagery of the tops of houses so they can measure it for solar. Like, people knock on their door, try to selling you solar. Anyway, we throw in a bunch of money with them, and they collect this highly, highly, like high resolution imagery that we have that goes back in time. So we do all of that, and then we have LIDAR data. I'll make this really short, but, but light our data and other things. So you can get a visual understanding of the ground where it rips away the trees. So what you can do is this is mapped

using light data similar to how a radar works. And you can throw it into like 3D and my service is kind of weak right now. But once the service gets up, you can see paths under the ground. Like during the hurricane in North Carolina, we gave a bunch of accounts to the first responders and they were trying to get to houses

that have been washed out and the roads were washed out, but they were able to use our app to find paths that were used for logging trails in order to get to the back of these people's houses and deliver them like diabetes medication, oxygen, if they were on like an emphysema machine. Fuck me. And then we had this, we have this capability called Blue Force Tracker where you can set up pins.

So when there are roads washed out, they were using it. And so hunters can use it the same way. When they're organizing hunts, they can drop pins and everyone sees them. They get the high-resolution imagery. they get the LiDAR, they get the historical imagery, they get the neural networks. Then we have our own neural network that we call Cyber Scout. So if you had never shot that bow that I gave you before, you could sit down with a cyber scout and say, hey, I need to tune this bow, here's the type of bow, how do I do it?

And it walks you through all of those things, far better than like a chat GPT would or other ones would because all of our training data is solely focused on hunting and best in class information on hunting. Neural networks often regressed to the mean by giving you the broad spectrum of the internet. so you'll get some bad and some good data. Our retrieval documents that we use are all sourced from the highest caliber of hunting information. So CyberSkout, and soon it'll be interacting with your maps. So it'll tell you how to hunt an area, how to do all of those things.

But yeah, we started this company in like 2017. We got our first mobile app in 2021. And then we, you know, in the app store right now, I think we're like number 14 in mapping around outdoor or something like that, you know, hundreds of thousands of users. And really all of it was born out of just, really just kind of my first principles as a human, which are the tribe's important, friends are important, get out into the wilderness, disconnect and get things. Paradoxically, I'm using an app to do that. But the reason I'm using an app to do that is because people have so little vacation, so little time. They want to hunt public land in Pennsylvania and they live in Texas.

like they can go up, they can scout through my app, they can understand things, they can drill down, they can use a high resolution imagery, they can do all that stuff and at least have an idea of what the ground looks like before they get there so that they can download an offline map and get disconnected and go out there and create some, you know, my favorite time as the CEO is on our social media, a father and a son will message being say, we'd been targeting this buck for like three years, we'd never saw it, this white tail buck, and my son and I were using your app, we use the neural network, we use the prediction, we use a high quality mapping, And we figured out a spot.

We got in there and we killed the deer. And there's a father and a son holding a buck together that they're going to eat dinner over or, you know, put on a wall and make a permanent memory. That is my favorite part of running this one company is that experience right there. It's just people going out and reconnecting with nature and being in it. But also buying down risk. And like I said, paradoxically, through an app. But you can drop pins and tell your wife where you're going to hunt. And if you're offline, if you fall from a tree stand or whatever, break your legs, they'll know where to send.

the people to go and help you out and all of that type of stuff. So, you know. Jesus fucking Christ, you're kind of a terrifying human. I'm very glad you were on our side. What, what do you mean? Just this, like, five centimeter map data. Oh, by the way, also, I'm able to basically be Q from James Bond for a bunch of, like, scary guys.

Oh, also, by the way, I can probably download your phone data and work out whether there's some vulnerable. Oh, also, by the way, like, I'm glad that you're on, I'm glad you're on our side. Well, I, thank you. Whenever people ask me for like the 30 second job of who I am or what I did in the military, I would often use the Q thing. I'm not James Bond, but I built cool shit for people like James Bond. And that's a very accurate summation of my military career.

I never kicked the door. I was never intentionally in a gunfight. I was never the guy at the tip of the spear. I was the girthy part of the staff that was supporting the head of the spear. I mean, if I was the girthy part of the staff is not the way to end this episode, I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is. you fucking rule, man. Where should people go to check out everything you do? I'm sorry. I can sign up there or you can download us to the app store. We're on Instagram. I said this on Rogan's podcast and I did regret it, but I'll say it here too. We have questions about the app or complains or gripes. I as the product owner, I see that as my bigger role than CEO. I answer all of the social media every morning. I spend about two hours. So when people say, I wish the app did this or it didn't do this.

I didn't like this or hey, we did this hunt, you're dealing with me. Now, if you have a problem that needs a technical solution, I'll usually farm that off to our QA team, but otherwise you're dealing with me. So you got questions about the app. You don't know how to get into bow hunting and you want to get into it. You want to learn through our Cyber Scout or through our app how to be a better hunter. Jared, can you quickly grab the gift that I got today from outside just while we're winding inside? Yeah, so they can find me there and I'm happy to interact with people. After I did Rogan, I think had 3,500 messages of people and it took me about a month. Glutton for punishment.

Took me about a month and a half. I should work for Zendesk. You know, that could be your new, you know, I could go and work for Accenture and do the whatever, whatever. I got to say thank you as well, man. Like this gift that you got me is so fucking. Hoyt and Archery Country and Dialed Archery made that possible. They're all friends of mine.

The guys at Hoyt, Tom from Hoyt's amazing. My buddy, Tyler, I think you've met Tyler from Archery country. and dialed archery. My friends Taylor and Jordan run that American Made and great companies and I work with all of them and I was so upset because I thought oh, he doesn't look like he has a bow and then so I got ordered all this stuff,

got it all put together and we're going to go tune you up with this at Archery Country and then like three days ago I saw a post where you had a bow. Got a bow, but this is, you can never have too many bows as I've been reliably told by Canhains. Dude, you're awesome. I appreciate you very much. Thank you for having me on. I look forward to firing this sucker with you soon. Awesome.

All right. Goodbye, everyone. Dude, yes. Lovely. Good.