Bill Thompson on Joe Rogan: How Pre-1840 Rules Rebuild Men

1. 0:02 – 1:31

   A handmade 1840s-style knife gift—and the rendezvous tradition behind it

   1. SPSpeaker0:02

      Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. SPSpeaker0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music]

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:12

      What's up, Bill?

   5. SPSpeaker0:13

      How you doing, Joe?

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:13

      Good to see you, brother.

   7. SPSpeaker0:14

      Good to see you.

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:14

      This is, this might be one of the coolest things anybody's ever given me. So you gave me this knife. [laughs] Explain all this.

   9. SPSpeaker0:22

      All right, so I mean, there's a larger explanatory reason behind this. My brother and I grew up... My father died when I was five. My brother and I grew up doing, um, these things called rendezvous. Have you ever heard of them?

   10. JRJoe Rogan0:35

       Um, in what way? What is a rendezvous?

   11. SPSpeaker0:37

       So there you go. So what a rendezvous is, is it's not... You know, you go to those like, uh, where I don't even know what they're called, but people do like reenactments.

   12. JRJoe Rogan0:46

       Oh, okay. Like Civil War reenactments?

   13. SPSpeaker0:48

       It's not like that.

   14. JRJoe Rogan0:49

       [laughs]

   15. SPSpeaker0:49

       So that's the closest thing, approximation to probably what it is. You get invited to them, or these days they're easier to get to, but my stepfather, my, the guy my mother remarried, brought us to them. All you do is camp, but you're only allowed to camp, and no one comes to the camp, or sometimes they might have people at the end, but while you're in the camp, everything in the camp has to be 1840 or prior. So there can be no modern appurtenances, nothing like a, you know, refrigerator, nothing like that.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:14

       1840. Why that year?

   17. SPSpeaker1:16

       18... The end of the fur trapping. At the end, like that, that was considered like Jeremiah Johnson time, like peak fur trapping.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:21

       Oh.

   19. SPSpeaker1:22

       So there's people, you know, they dress like either, you know, revolutionary, like American revolutionaries, or they dress like mountain men, or they dress like Indians.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:30

       How'd you guys dress?

2. 1:31 – 5:41

   Brain-tanning hides and building the knife: bear jaw handle, quillwork, and period materials

   1. SPSpeaker1:31

      Mountain men. So, uh, while we're there, you learn all kinds of stuff while you're reenacting. Like I learned how to brain tan hides. I learned how to traditionally ar- or do traditional archery, stuff like that. So anyway, this knife was a knife I had actually started working on with my brother a while ago. I do more of like the brain tanning, tomahawk quilling.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:51

      And when you say brain tanning, you're talking about using brains to tan animal hides, right?

   3. SPSpeaker1:55

      Yes, yes.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:55

      Using animal brains.

   5. SPSpeaker1:57

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:57

      What, what, what does brains do? Why does brains work?

   7. SPSpeaker1:59

      It softens the leather in a natural way, and what's cool about it is every animal, no matter what animal you kill, has the exact amount of brain needed in order to tan the hide.

   8. JRJoe Rogan2:08

      Oh.

   9. SPSpeaker2:09

      So you don't need any additional... Like, people use egg yolks or mayonnaise or something like that. All you do is you take the brain out of the cavity, you grind it up, you mix it into some water, and then after you've, after you've cleaned the leather and you've scraped it clean, you stretch it. I usually use like a dull shovel. You stretch it over the dull shovel, and then you soak it in the brain water mixture, and then you just keep repeating that pattern, and the leather gets like a really nice soft, um, uh, feel to it.

   10. JRJoe Rogan2:37

       What is it about the brain? Is it the fat?

   11. SPSpeaker2:39

       It breaks down the leather. Uh, I'm not sure if it's the fat or n- I haven't gotten that deep into it, but it breaks down the leather and just makes it feel really soft, really nice. So anyway, this knife here, I started, I, I killed that bear, so the jaw is made out of two, um, bear jaws, or out of one bear jaw split in half. So, um, that was a bear I killed in Canada in 2017. It was my biggest black, um, black bear. And, uh, so we split the jaw, put that together. Um, it's Irish linen threading. Then that's a knife that, uh, my brother had picked up that was from 1860. It was totally rusted. We had to grind it back, or he had to grind it back down. And then the sheath is, uh, is traditional, like, you know, you could dr- The cool thing about doing rendezvous and the cool thing about this is you could have a DeLorean and drop that in 1840 and somebody would pick it up and think it was made yesterday. And so everything on there has been done traditionally from the, um, the quilling on the beadwork is made from porcupine quills. The backing is, um, a buffalo brain tan, and then the front is beaver hide, or beaver tail. I'm sorry.

   12. JRJoe Rogan3:46

       Mm.

   13. SPSpeaker3:47

       And then, um, the sides are horse and turkey hair hanging off of it.

   14. JRJoe Rogan3:51

       And these are bear teeth?

   15. SPSpeaker3:53

       And those are bear teeth, yep.

   16. JRJoe Rogan3:54

       Wow.

   17. SPSpeaker3:55

       From the same bear. So wh- when I was thinking about what I was-

   18. JRJoe Rogan3:58

       [coughs]

   19. SPSpeaker3:58

       'Cause I wanted to give you something for inviting me on because it's still a shock to me that you did it.

   20. JRJoe Rogan4:01

       [laughs]

   21. SPSpeaker4:02

       Even though we've been talking for so long, I just never imagined a scenario where you'd wanna have me on here, so-

   22. JRJoe Rogan4:07

       Well, you're an interesting dude.

   23. SPSpeaker4:08

       I thought, "What could I give this guy that, you know, money or people or whatever couldn't get you?" And so I thought this is the right thing to do. So it went from a me project to a you project, and, uh, my brother Aaron, uh, helped me out with it tremendously. Um-

   24. JRJoe Rogan4:23

       So how'd you find this knife from the 1860s?

   25. SPSpeaker4:25

       Well, he found it. My brother is, um, even more esoteric and odd than I am, believe it or not, and, uh, he collects this kind of stuff. Um, the, I mean, the guy who dated it said 1860 to, to 1890, they, is what they figured.

   26. JRJoe Rogan4:40

       Oh.

   27. SPSpeaker4:40

       And, uh, and you can tell by the way that, like, around the hilt and the way that it's, the, the pitting on it and stuff like that and, and the way that it was made that it fits that era. I mean, it could've been somebody redid it in 1900, but it's definitely that old, like the type of steel and the way that it was worked and the way that it is around the hilt, around the bottom there.

   28. JRJoe Rogan4:59

       Wow.

   29. SPSpeaker5:00

       And, um, so it's at least, you know, 130, 140, but most likely 160, 170.

   30. JRJoe Rogan5:06

       It actually fits my hand perfect.
3. 5:41 – 6:33

   How rendezvous camps function: food, coolers, showers, and living off the grid for weeks

   1. SPSpeaker5:41

      Yeah, so the rendezvous, um, uh, we did those from when I-

   2. JRJoe Rogan5:44

      How long do they last?

   3. SPSpeaker5:46

      Uh, they vary from a week, and then some go up to three weeks.

   4. JRJoe Rogan5:49

      And what do you do for food while you're out there?

   5. SPSpeaker5:51

      Um, so inside of your lo- So there's two types of rendezvous. Ins- at, at, at most rendezvous inside of your lodge, you can have a coolerAs long as it doesn't leave the lodge. So I have like a, a 20-foot teepee that I take to these things, and, uh, inside of my teepee you can have a cooler-

   6. JRJoe Rogan6:08

      Oh

   7. SPSpeaker6:08

      ... and some modern appurtenances.

   8. JRJoe Rogan6:10

      Did they have any kind of coolers in the 1800s?

   9. SPSpeaker6:12

      I mean, they had ice boxes and I- like steel ice boxes and that type of thing, but nothing like we have today. Um, you know, stuff was getting, um, dug out, buried in the groun- or put into the ground, like cool areas of the ground-

   10. JRJoe Rogan6:23

       Mm-hmm

   11. SPSpeaker6:23

       ... or, or digouts. And they dried everything. So pemmican would've been the, you know, everyday thing to eat that's just dried.

   12. JRJoe Rogan6:31

       So did you bring your own food or did you have to hunt for food?

4. 6:33 – 10:23

   ‘Juried’ rendezvous and hardcore authenticity: mules, stitching inspections, and hunting with trad archery

   1. SPSpeaker6:33

      Uh, so you bring your own food, but there are other rendezvous that are kind of r- invite only, and I don't even think a lot of people who do rendezvous knew about these, but there's ones that, I think they're called... I think I might be speaking out of school. Somebody might send me an email after this, but I'm gonna talk about it anyway 'cause I never got read the riot act. They're called juried, I think they called them juried southerns, and I've only been to one of those, and that's where everything in the camp has to be pre-1840, and you meet down in a parking lot, you put everything on the back of a mule, and you g- wh- when I did mine, it was up in the, I think it was the Bighorns. So, you know, you talk to a rancher, um, get everything packed up. You go into the back of the Bighorns, and everything in camp has to be pre-1840, as close as it can get. They'll even look at your stitching and say, "Oh, that was sewn with a, with a, uh, sewing machine. You gotta take that off."

   2. JRJoe Rogan7:19

      [laughs]

   3. SPSpeaker7:19

      And it's always these weird, like, eccentric history teachers that run them. Like guys who-

   4. JRJoe Rogan7:24

      Oh

   5. SPSpeaker7:24

      ... you know, uh, teaches history at Berkeley or something like that-

   6. JRJoe Rogan7:27

      Mm-hmm

   7. SPSpeaker7:27

      ... or s- other places, and they just really enjoy living like this. And at those ones, if they're in season, you can hunt whatever's in season, and you're hunting with traditional archery. And it's really good for kids. Like, the internet wasn't a problem as much when I was a kid. I was certainly into computers. I have been since I was a child. But you could just detach. Everyone's running around crazy. You're sitting around the campfire at night. People are singing with the, you know, songs on the guitar. You're learning how to do things like this. You're learning how to brain tan. You're learning how to live traditionally. And, uh, it's, it's a eccentric cult kind of... It's not a cult. It's an eccentric group of people. It's a lot of fun. People take it very s-

   8. JRJoe Rogan8:03

      Community.

   9. SPSpeaker8:04

      Community. People take it very seriously. They, there's b- there's more advertising surrounding it now than there used to be 'cause num- numbers k- are kind of dwindling. But, uh, I did my last one last year with my brother. So if you go on my Instagram, there's a picture of my brother, my son, and I doing, I think, our second rendezvous together, and we're just dressed like, you know... I've actually got a awesome war shirt. I can show you the picture. [clears throat] I've got an awesome war shirt that a, a friend of mine, uh, uh, went to war with. His, uh, he was half Native American. His grandfather was, um, Ojibwe or something, Chippewa, something like that, and he was... I don't remember what his role was. But anyway, I went, we, we deployed to Iraq together, and his grandpa made me this war shirt. Oh, there, you found it. F- Jamie, he pulled it up. That's my lodge. Um-

   10. JRJoe Rogan8:51

       How much do you enjoy a shower after you get out of here? [laughs]

   11. SPSpeaker8:55

       I mean, I, I... As long as you, um, keep, you know... They're, they have showers in camp. They've got a showering area, a showering area where it's just, like, pallets. That's the inside of my lodge. Um, so there's a cooler at this one. This is not a juried rendezvous. Um, and, uh, so you can shower while you're... There's some of them, they call them hooters. There'll be, like, a latrine and a shower area in camp. But also, like, some of them I don't, I don't do it at all.

   12. JRJoe Rogan9:19

       This is wild.

   13. SPSpeaker9:21

       And so there's no reenactment. Like, there's not, like, civilians walking around and-

   14. JRJoe Rogan9:24

       It's not like Renaissance fair.

   15. SPSpeaker9:25

       Yeah, exactly. It's just more like I wanna act like it's 1840 for a couple of weeks and not look at my phone one time and not worry about the news. It's amazing after a week here, you really forget about the world, and you, like, don't even know you're supposed to be stressed out about things. You're just out there doing your thing for a couple of weeks.

   16. JRJoe Rogan9:43

       And you just cook over open fire.

   17. SPSpeaker9:45

       Yep, everything gets done traditionally that way, yep.

   18. JRJoe Rogan9:47

       And did you bring your own meat and everything?

   19. SPSpeaker9:48

       Yeah, you bring your own meat and stuff in the cooler.

   20. JRJoe Rogan9:50

       Yeah.

   21. SPSpeaker9:51

       Um, and then, uh, there's also cooking classes where they teach you, like, all the recipes to do with, like, a, a Dutch oven, like an old cast iron oven. And, uh, y- they do gambling at nights. So you'll walk into, like, a huge, they call them marquees, but it's like a huge 100-foot square lodge. There'll be three gambling tables in there, girls in, like, the low-cut shirts and dealing cards and smoking cigars and just having an amazing time. And there are pe- you go by camp names while you're in there. Nobody uses their real na- well, some people use their real name. I'd say 60% of people don't use their real names.

5. 10:23 – 14:35

   Camp names, coming-of-age rites, and why modern men lack transitions into adulthood

   1. JRJoe Rogan10:23

      What was your camp name? [laughs]

   2. SPSpeaker10:25

      This is embarrassing.

   3. JRJoe Rogan10:27

      It should be.

   4. SPSpeaker10:28

      Yeah. So, uh, I got my camp name. I got christened with my camp name in the Bighorns when I was 14 or 13, and it was Talks a Lot.

   5. JRJoe Rogan10:38

      Talks a Lot?

   6. SPSpeaker10:39

      Yeah, in Sioux it was pronounced Eyota. And, uh-

   7. JRJoe Rogan10:42

      Just 'cause you talk a lot? Or the-

   8. SPSpeaker10:43

      When I was a kid, I talked a lot. Uh, actually, as an adult, I don't talk that much unless I know you.

   9. JRJoe Rogan10:49

      [laughs]

   10. SPSpeaker10:49

       Um, but as a kid, I would never shut up. I had really bad ADHD. They kinda diagnosed me with having some low l- level version of Asperger's, and, uh, I was a rapscallion in class, just never shut up, never listened, never did anything. And, uh-

   11. JRJoe Rogan11:05

       Those are the people that are the most fun.

   12. SPSpeaker11:07

       Well, I w- they didn't enjoy me in high school or in grade school.

   13. JRJoe Rogan11:09

       [laughs] I probably would've been your friend.

   14. SPSpeaker11:10

       [laughs] But, uh, yeah, they d- they ca- called me Eyota. Uh, and, you know, we got christened, and, uh, it was a, you know, it's a... One of the things we're kind of missing in culture today, or something that I'm trying to reinvigorate, especially with my son and with other, you know, young men that I run into, is kind of like coming-of-age rites.

   15. JRJoe Rogan11:29

       Yeah.

   16. SPSpeaker11:29

       Something to say, "You're a man-"

   17. JRJoe Rogan11:32

       Mm-hmm

   18. SPSpeaker11:32

       "... and I'm gonna start treating you like a man from this moment forward." Like, you know, what does that... There should be structure to that. You know, w- we're tribal, and, um, it's important to me, so, uh-

   19. JRJoe Rogan11:41

       I think that is really something that's missing from society. I think that it... I used to think it was silly when I was young, and then as I got older, I realized, oh, I went through that. I became a black belt, and I started fighting.

   20. SPSpeaker11:54

       Yes. And you had a group of men telling you, "You're at this level. We're gonna treat you like that."

   21. JRJoe Rogan11:57

       Yeah.

   22. SPSpeaker11:57

       "And if you fall from grace, we're gonna remind you right away."

   23. JRJoe Rogan12:01

       Yeah

   24. SPSpeaker12:01

       And, uh, we, we just don't do that with young men, and we have a society now where young men act like young men till they're 45 or 50 or 60.

   25. JRJoe Rogan12:08

       And sometimes never stop.

   26. SPSpeaker12:09

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan12:10

       Yeah.

   28. SPSpeaker12:10

       And, um, you know, women, nature imposes itself on women. They become fertile.

   29. JRJoe Rogan12:15

       Mm-hmm.

   30. SPSpeaker12:15

       They're able to have babies, and, uh, and, uh, they gotta seek security or find a husband or a really good job that will supplement whatever a husband would provide, and they gotta start acting like a woman. Whereas men can sit in a basement, uh, you know, and it becomes very dangerous, uh-
6. 14:35 – 18:38

   Divorce culture, step-parent risk, and societal overcorrections

   1. SPSpeaker14:35

      But I mean, it, it, it was, um, you know, growing up in the '80s and the early '90s, it was really, like, a divorce culture.

   2. JRJoe Rogan14:44

      Mm-hmm.

   3. SPSpeaker14:44

      And I o- obviously understand that if you're in a bad relationship or an abusive relationship or, you know, there's, there certainly there's a threshold where a marriage should dissolve.

   4. JRJoe Rogan14:52

      Sure.

   5. SPSpeaker14:52

      No question. But I kinda feel like it, our, the central thrust of a lot of culture at that time was about, like, divorce or not getting married or, you know, discovering yourself and that type of thing, which in some ways is good. There's goodness there. But when it becomes a central thrust or a central narrative, and divorce becomes very easy, or it's happening everywhere, it's super-

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:12

      And it's normalized

   7. SPSpeaker15:13

      ... and it's normalized. It's super destructive. Children are the ones who suffer the most on it, and I think the data's clear on that.

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:18

      Mm-hmm.

   9. SPSpeaker15:18

      Um, when you look at, you know, single-parent homes or no-parent homes or being raised, you know, without a, a, an authority-

   10. JRJoe Rogan15:24

       Or an abusive step-person.

   11. SPSpeaker15:25

       Or an abusive s- And that is, you know, when you look up the stats on that, like, remarriage and having a new family-

   12. JRJoe Rogan15:31

       Mm-hmm

   13. SPSpeaker15:31

       ... like, that, that becomes the single most likely vector of abuse in a chi- a young child's life-

   14. JRJoe Rogan15:36

       Mm-hmm

   15. SPSpeaker15:36

       ... is that new person, right? Because now they're raising someone else's kid or whatever. Um-

   16. JRJoe Rogan15:41

       I mean, it's a, that's in every old movie, the evil stepmother.

   17. SPSpeaker15:45

       Yeah.

   18. JRJoe Rogan15:45

       You know?

   19. SPSpeaker15:46

       Yeah.

   20. JRJoe Rogan15:46

       Or evil stepfather, but it's in the old movies, it's always the stepmother that abuses the girl. You know?

   21. SPSpeaker15:52

       Yes. And, and, and so, you know, I kind of, uh, I kind of resented that part of that time and that culture was, um, I, I shouldn't say when I was a child, I should say as I got older, 'cause I was in a single mom home, and, uh, the guy that my mother remarried right after my father died was abusive. And, um, you know, he really got hard on my younger brother, and, you know, my mother moved us out almost immediately. But, uh, when I reexamined that time, it really was a, you know, I don't know how to describe it, but, you know, there are no rules when it comes to relationships and family, and every family's special and particular in its own way, and they all need to be venerated. And there's, of course, some truth to that. We shouldn't deride someone because they come from a broken family. But we shouldn't elevate it like it's at the same level as a unified family. Um, and, and that's a tricky line to, to walk. But also, the people who are making those movies and that culture came from the '50s and '60s, where divorce was just not in the cards. And so that was a, you know, Hooke's law. As you bend any object, it wants to return back to its natural state. And Hooke's law kinda played there, where nobody could get divorced in the '40s, '30s, '40s, '50s and '60s. And then you had the baby boomers who kinda culturally said, you know, "Actually, there's, it's not as bad as we think." But then it over-corrected, and then it became kind of, kind of part of that cultural zeitgeist. And-

   22. JRJoe Rogan17:15

       That's kind of what humans do, right?

   23. SPSpeaker17:17

       Yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan17:17

       We always over-correct.

   25. SPSpeaker17:18

       Yeah, we do.

   26. JRJoe Rogan17:19

       Yeah.

   27. SPSpeaker17:19

       Yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan17:19

       We go in one direction until we realize it's destructive, and then we over-correct until we realize that's destructive.

   29. SPSpeaker17:26

       Yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan17:27

       Yeah.
7. 18:38 – 23:50

   Conservatism, discipline, and ‘suicidal empathy’ in governance (with California as example)

   1. SPSpeaker18:38

      And I would say that's the... And, and not, uh, this isn't a political thing, this is just the reality of it. That's mostly what makes me conservative in nature, is I agree systems need to change, but they need to change slowly and pragmatically, so we... Because, you know, any social, um, any social scientist worth their salt will know a social experiment almost never has the outcome that we thought it was gonna have. In other words, we thought doing something to society would form society this way, but it almost has the, the inverse, the anti-pattern, like we talked about before, and, and almost ends up propagating itself. And so that makes me... I'm, I'm still a proponent for change, but it should be slow and, and thought out and, and done in pockets first.

   2. JRJoe Rogan19:21

      Yeah.

   3. SPSpeaker19:22

      Kinda, you know, federalism. Let's do little changes here. Let's let California be crazy for a while and see how that works out for them. But let's not nationalize the craziness. Let's learn from what they learn there, and there, there'll be goodness. You know, hot baristas that make great coffee and cool art, and let's take those parts. But how about the rampant homeless? Let's find out what caused that and, and c- and solve for that. And, and, you know, that was kinda the founders' intent with federalism. They were really federalist-minded, state-minded, and there's, you know, even for that being as 250 years ago, there's a profound amount of profundity in that. Like, let's change things slowly, and then let social experiments take place, and adopt the best parts of those things, and then integrate them to the culture overall as we move along. But, you know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

   4. JRJoe Rogan20:09

      Yeah. I think in this country, one of the primary problems that people have is a profound lack of respect for discipline and how important discipline is for your life.

   5. SPSpeaker20:20

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan20:20

      And discipline is associated with conservatism. And because of that, like a lot of people think that I'm... I don't think I'm anything. I, I think I, I have... Politically or ideologically, I have a lot of everything in me. I don't think I identify with one side or another. But if one thing that I agree with conservative people on, conservative people lend more towards the importance of discipline. Hard work, discipline, don't complain, get things done, re- deal with the hand that you've been dealt with, and just sort it out and get to work.

   7. SPSpeaker20:53

      Yeah.

   8. JRJoe Rogan20:54

      Don't, don't cry. Don't look for other people to save you. They're not going to. And this is not something that's celebrated in society. It's thought of as a cruelty, that if you, you say that you need discipline, that, well, you're b- you're, you're not treating these people that are victims of circumstance with the proper respect or with the proper empathy, and I think a certain amount of empathy is probably not so good for you at a certain point in time. There comes a point in time where you're letting people wallow in their bullshit and just make excuses for why they're not getting anything done. And in that sense, I think California is... That, that is a giant part of what's wrong with California.

   9. SPSpeaker21:31

      Yeah.

   10. JRJoe Rogan21:31

       What's wrong with California when it comes to crime, what's wrong with California that, you know, their... The way they address crime and the way they address homelessness and all these issues that they have, they don't put their foot down. At a certain point in time, you gotta realize, like, what Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy. A society can suffer from suicidal empathy, and at a certain point in time, you gotta enforce rules, and you gotta make it so that people have to get their shit together.

   11. SPSpeaker21:56

       Yeah. And that suicidal empathy becomes a way for the person who's imposing it on someone else to feel good about themselves-

   12. JRJoe Rogan22:01

       Mm-hmm

   13. SPSpeaker22:02

       ... which makes it even trickier and even more, um, insidious because they're, they're, they're feeling good from the, the weaponization of other people's, um, lot in life.

   14. JRJoe Rogan22:12

       Mm-hmm.

   15. SPSpeaker22:13

       And, and, and the, the thing about that is none of the rules that you're going to impose, especially as a legislator or as somebody in a think tank, you'll never feel the repercussions of them. You'll never have to actually deal with it day to day. You're just imposing it on someone else and saying, "I better understand the f- the structure of reality and the fabric of the world, and you can't help but be this way. It's the system that's done this to you. So let me give you pittance that I'm gonna take from someone else."

   16. JRJoe Rogan22:40

       Mm-hmm.

   17. SPSpeaker22:40

       "And, and that makes me benevolent, and I get to feel good about that."

   18. JRJoe Rogan22:44

       That's a giant part of government, for sure. That's a giant part of what's the problem with, like, liberal governments. Liberal governments should... They should get paid based on whether or not the city does better or worse financially than when they were in office. If their policies lead to, uh, greater domestic production of goods and services and, you know, GDP does better and everything does better, then you should get paid more. If more real estate sales, more people are making more money, media- medium income raises, less homeless people, you should get paid more. And you should get paid less if homelessness goes up, if crime goes up, if there's more destruction, if there's more, you know, assaults and home invasions. You should get paid less.

   19. SPSpeaker23:29

       Right.

   20. JRJoe Rogan23:30

       You're, you're doing a shitty job.

   21. SPSpeaker23:32

       Yeah.

   22. JRJoe Rogan23:32

       And if you did that, I think they would impose laws that made it safer and healthier and made it for, you know, b- better for society.

   23. SPSpeaker23:40

       Yeah. And then they would just inevitably change the ways that we track and measure those things [laughs] and pay themselves more anyway. [laughs]

   24. JRJoe Rogan23:45

       Well, they shouldn't have the opportunity to do that. Then you need some sort of an oversight that's completely-

   25. SPSpeaker23:50

       I'm being cynical.

8. 23:50 – 29:57

   Government incentives, fraud as ‘GDP,’ and military budgeting that punishes saving money

   1. JRJoe Rogan23:50

      You'd be right, though. You're right it to be cynical, because that's what they do about everything. Someone was explaining to me yesterday that one of the problems with, um, cleaning up fraud is that fraud is responsible for a giant percentage of GDP, and if you... You have hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud in this country, and you eliminated that, you actually lower GDP, 'cause you, you actually lower the amount of money that's in circulation.

   2. SPSpeaker24:19

      That's interesting. I've never thought about that before.

   3. JRJoe Rogan24:21

      He was explaining it to me, and I was like, "Oh my God, that is crazy that a giant percentage of our GDP is fraud." And if that was somehow or another eliminatedIt'd be like one of the things that they do when they raise jobs, like they, they increase GDP. We've, we've added, you know, 200,000 jobs to the market. Well, what are those jobs? Like, what are those jobs? Are these government jobs? 'Cause the government is a giant percentage of our GDP, government jobs.

   4. SPSpeaker24:49

      You know, it's, it's way bigger than it should be. [chuckles]

   5. JRJoe Rogan24:51

      Yeah, way bigger. And those jobs, a lot of them are bullshit and waste. A lot of them.

   6. SPSpeaker24:56

      Yeah. Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan24:56

      You know? And that was some of the stuff that was uncovered during DOGE.

   8. SPSpeaker24:59

      Yes.

   9. JRJoe Rogan24:59

      You know, the limited amount of access that DOGE had to it, just, just the beginning of it where you got to see the curtain pulled back and get to see exposure of so many of these fraudulent, supposedly charitable organizations that were really just money laundering. They were really just funneling money into these people's hands, like, like the homeless thing in California.

   10. SPSpeaker25:21

       Oh my goodness.

   11. JRJoe Rogan25:22

       It's a b- bonkers situation where they've spent $24 billion. They cannot track it. They've tried to audit it. The, the government has vetoed these audits, and they have no idea where that $24 billion went, and yet homelessness went up.

   12. SPSpeaker25:38

       Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan25:39

       But you've got a giant machine that is this homeless establishment, this homeless industrial-

   14. SPSpeaker25:45

       Yes

   15. JRJoe Rogan25:45

       ... complex-

   16. SPSpeaker25:46

       Yes

   17. JRJoe Rogan25:46

       ... that is being funneled money into that, and that actually aids the GDP, which is kind of crazy.

   18. SPSpeaker25:53

       Yeah, I mean, it, it, it was one of the things... My last three years in the military, um, I was advising a colonel and a two-star general, and they were in charge of all of the, uh, offensive cyber development, ethical hacking, offensive cyber development. I was their technical advisor. And one of the things I kind of learned about government at that point was, um, these systems have their own incentive, and the incentive's not the output of their purported mission. The incentive is the growing of the organization and the execution of budget. So while they're in there, you know, I've never seen a field grade officer get dressed down more than when he didn't spend all of the money that he was budgeted for for that year.

   19. JRJoe Rogan26:35

       Isn't that crazy?

   20. SPSpeaker26:36

       He would go to the Pentagon, and they'd be like, "Well, you didn't execute $300 million of OCO, of overseas contingent operations funds here," and they would dress him down for an hour.

   21. JRJoe Rogan26:46

       And what people don't understand is if you don't spend that money, your budget for the next year will be lower-

   22. SPSpeaker26:52

       Yes

   23. JRJoe Rogan26:52

       ... because there's no need to have a higher budget.

   24. SPSpeaker26:54

       Instead of tying it to mission to say-

   25. JRJoe Rogan26:56

       Right

   26. SPSpeaker26:56

       ... "Did you achieve your mission objectives?"

   27. JRJoe Rogan26:58

       Right.

   28. SPSpeaker26:59

       "We, we started the year agreeling, agreeing from the fret- president's framework, the NPIF, the National Intelligence Priority Framework, we wanted to achieve these effects." What you would want to hear is, "We achieved them and we saved 25%."

   29. JRJoe Rogan27:11

       Right.

   30. SPSpeaker27:11

       But instead it's, "We achieved them, but we didn't execute all of this money. Well, you're fired."
9. 29:57 – 38:38

   Anti-ideology mindset and the ‘outsider anti-hero’ pattern (Trump, Patton, Petraeus)

   1. JRJoe Rogan29:57

      I think that's the problem. I think the problem is these ideologies that people subscribe to, where you have a predetermined pattern of thinking that you're supposed to adopt.

   2. SPSpeaker30:04

      Yes.

   3. JRJoe Rogan30:05

      You're supposed to adopt these opinions, and some of them just don't fit, and that's how people get pigeon... That's like on, people on the left, they get pigeonholed into weird stuff that you can't really, really justify, like trans women in sports. Like, what the fuck are you doing?

   4. SPSpeaker30:18

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan30:18

      You know? Like, "We're, we're, you know, we're being inclusive." Like, no you're not.

   6. SPSpeaker30:21

      Or loving the borders of Ukraine while hating our own border. [laughs]

   7. JRJoe Rogan30:24

      Yeah. Fucking bonkers. Yeah. It's... There's so many crazy things. There's so many crazy things that people just adopt that don't make any sense. And, you know, when you subscribe to an ideology, the problem is if, like, if you, you define yourself as this person, "I am this. I am a hardcore right-wing blah," whatever it is, you, you immediately close the door to all the very productive and interesting things that the other side thinks.

   8. SPSpeaker30:49

      Yeah, and you're also making yourself into a tool of propaganda.

   9. JRJoe Rogan30:52

      Mm-hmm.

   10. SPSpeaker30:52

       'Cause if I... If someone... If I meet someone and they just say, "I'm this"-

   11. JRJoe Rogan30:56

       Right

   12. SPSpeaker30:56

       ... it's like, well, I could reasonablypredict everything that's gonna come out of your mouth.

   13. JRJoe Rogan31:00

       Yeah.

   14. SPSpeaker31:01

       That's not entertaining. I don't wanna have a conversation with that person.

   15. JRJoe Rogan31:03

       Right.

   16. SPSpeaker31:03

       I can't seek to learn from them 'cause I could just pick up the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf-

   17. JRJoe Rogan31:08

       Right

   18. SPSpeaker31:08

       ... and have a pretty good understanding of who I'm dealing with, and therefore a conversation's not, is not relevant. It's not needed.

   19. JRJoe Rogan31:14

       I think a lot of people are afraid of social ostracization too. So they're, they're afraid of, of straying outside of the narrative, whatever side they're supposed to be on. And, you know, some groups are really good at making you feel like dog shit if you don't agree entirely with even things that don't even make any sense.

   20. SPSpeaker31:32

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan31:32

       And so that's why people go along with stuff that's illogical, like open borders or what- whatever it is.

   22. SPSpeaker31:37

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan31:37

       They go along with things that's not in their best interest because they're scared. They're scared of being ostracized. They're scared of being cast out of the kingdom. There's, you know, they're scared of being excommunicated.

   24. SPSpeaker31:47

       Yeah, I dealt with a lot of people first when I retired from the military, and then more recently, um, leading up to the last election, where, you know, I was entertaining the deal of doing some work for government, um, believe it or not. And 'cause I'm... A- as we talk more, you'll figure out I'm pretty anti institutions. I'm, I'm really, uh, a- against those types of things. But I really felt... If you would've asked me three years ago how I felt about the Trump election and all of that stuff, I was very excited because he was saying a lot of things that I wanted someone to say. Trump fits a pattern, and this is what people, I think, kind of lack when they... M- my whole life is built around pattern analysis. I really enjoy patterns and exuming, e- exuming and ex- and looking into patterns. And there's a pattern of like a, you... There's... You'll laugh when I say this first part of the pattern, but then I'll, I'll, I'll make it ma- make more sense later. But he fits the pattern... Well, first he's a Jacksonian in, in, in, in that he's a pragmatic person the way that he governs, which I liked, or at least I did in... You know, there's some things he's done recently that I don't enjoy. And, um, uh, but he's also a, a- an outsider or a, or a savior type, uh, a la, you know... I don't remember the movie, but The Magnificent Seven back in the day. I don't remember the actor's name. There's this group of... You know, there's this Western town. Everything's going to shit. These seven guys walk in. I think Chris Pratt remade it with Denzel Washington or someone else.

   25. JRJoe Rogan33:16

       Oh, really?

   26. SPSpeaker33:17

       I think so. I c- I can't remember. But there's an old one that I used to watch with my grandpa.

   27. JRJoe Rogan33:20

       God, there's too many movies to pay attention to.

   28. SPSpeaker33:21

       Yeah. And, uh, there's this pattern where y- you wouldn't invite these guys to a dinner party. You wouldn't want them in church on Sunday. But when a system is so corrupt and so horrible, you have to rely on these types of people to come in and be a check to the system. But then also you don't want them to stick around when the system is reset. So there's a scene in the movie where he says, uh, you know, "Man, these," the seven, these seven guys are talking, and they said, "Man, these people must have really wanted us. Like, it's, it's crazy. They must be happy we're here." And I think it's Gary Cooper or someone or one of these guys says, looks at him and says, "They're gonna be even happier when we leave." And Trump kind of fits that narrative. Wolverine from the X-Men would be another one who fits this narrative. Like, is he gonna be at the X-Men Christmas party? No. Right? Is he trying to hit on Scott Gray's wife, Cyclops? I'm a comic nerd, so I'm sorry.

   29. JRJoe Rogan34:09

       Right.

   30. SPSpeaker34:09

       Is he trying to hit on...
10. 38:38 – 58:33

    Woke politics in the military: DEI briefings, speech rules, and the limits of ‘feelings-based’ standards

    1. JRJoe Rogan38:38

       What were the problems?

    2. SPSpeaker38:39

       Oh my goodness. Um, books that general officers were being told to read and that I as an advisor were being told to read. Books like "White Rage"-

    3. JRJoe Rogan38:48

       [chuckles]

    4. SPSpeaker38:48

       ... like understanding why you're a problem, uh, you as a white man are a problem in the modern-day military because, um, this whole thing's built on systemic racism. You have inbuilt implicit bias that you can't escape even if you wanted to or you recognized it.

    5. JRJoe Rogan39:04

       It's woke politics.

    6. SPSpeaker39:06

       Yeah, it was woke politics, and it, and it was, um, and it was, uh... You know, I would sit there and say, "You know, all of the friend- all of the people that I know who've died during this war, not all of them, but 80% of them," and the numbers bear this out when you look at them, "they're all white guys from the middle of the country who were on their farms or..." You know, not all of them, 80% of them, I think the numbers bear out about 80% of them, were these guys from the Midwest or these places where they didn't really have a lot going, and they went off to fight a war that we probably shouldn't have been wi- fighting in the first place, especially in Iraq, and they died for their cause. And, uh, and now you're saying that those people who make up the majority of the combat deaths are somehow part of this problem and that other people aren't benefiting from it? Um, I don't believe... Race to me is disgusting. Even to talk about someone's race, even, you know, i-i- on both sides of the spectrum. When they were, you know, electing that Supreme Court justice, I can't remember her name right now off the top of my head just 'cause I'm a little nervous still, um, she was Black, and they were talk-

    7. JRJoe Rogan40:06

       Ketanji Brown Jackson.

    8. SPSpeaker40:07

       Yeah. They were talking about how it's historic because she's Black, and Biden had said he's gonna hire a Black woman to do this job.

    9. JRJoe Rogan40:13

       Mm-hmm.

    10. SPSpeaker40:14

        If I had worked my whole life to do something, but now I'm only being elevated to this next position because of my gender and the color of my skin, I would turn that job down so fast because that's not what I wanna be known for. These are immutable characteristics that I'm not in control of. I, I wasn't, I didn't choose to be born white or with blue eyes. I didn't choose to be born in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere without a dad at five. I didn't choose any of those things. I don't see how I benefit from these things at the individual level. And, you know, the indi- individual level of analysis for me is really the only way to evaluate someone for their pluses and their minuses, and anything beyond that to me is discriminatory at, on its face.

    11. JRJoe Rogan40:51

        Of course. It's just a great way to control people because you pit people against each other that way, and it's, it's just an awesome way that they can stay in control and make everybody walk on eggshells and think that, you know, they've victimized people in order to get to their position, and they have to be shameful of who they are that they had no control over. It's nuts.

    12. SPSpeaker41:13

        It also gives people an easy rubric to judge other people.

    13. JRJoe Rogan41:15

        Yeah.

    14. SPSpeaker41:16

        Because nothing's easy really, and it gives some... like white guy bad-

    15. JRJoe Rogan41:20

        Mm-hmm

    16. SPSpeaker41:21

        ... you know, Black guy good. Chinese guy, as long as he's not applying to the college I wanna get into, he's good.

    17. JRJoe Rogan41:26

        Right.

    18. SPSpeaker41:26

        Um, and, and it gives pe- people want easy answers really at the end of the day. They wanna be told the easy rubric to navigate life because really none of it's easy and it requires discipline, like you said before, um, and thought. And, and, and so the, the... it was that stuff in the military. I remember getting told i- in an equal opportunity briefing we were getting, um, "It doesn't matter what you meant when you said what you were saying. It only matters what the person felt when you said it."

    19. JRJoe Rogan41:57

        They said that in a military briefing?

    20. SPSpeaker41:58

        It was a military equal opportunity briefing.

    21. JRJoe Rogan42:00

        [laughs]

    22. SPSpeaker42:01

        So and, and the example they gave was if a woman walks into the... Like we worked with a lot of civilians at this, um, at this, uh, military organization where we were developing these, um, uh, offensive cyber capabilities. A lot of civilians in there. And, uh, so if, you know, Woman X walks in today and she's got a dress on, and the thought in your head is, "I'd like to get my wife that dress or something like it or find out where she bought it," and you just say, "That's a nice dress. Anyway, here's the TPS reports," if she heard something sexual or didn't like the connotation or whatever, there's gonna be an investigation. You're gonna be pulled out of that office. Th- this is all gonna happen despite what you meant. So the idea probably was good. We want to prevent sexual harassment inside of the office, um-

    23. JRJoe Rogan42:47

        But it was weaponized

    24. SPSpeaker42:48

        ... but, but it was weaponized and it was carried out in a way where it's only about how people feel and not what a reasonable person standard would be in a particular situation. And from the time I joined the military until that time, we had been at war. My entire time in the military, we were at war. Um, I deployed throughout my career. And I w- I wouldn't say that I was a war horse. I was not a long tabber. I was not a cool guy kicking in doors. It was my job with the, as the guy with, you know, tape over his glasses to point out the door for someone else and say, "Bad guy's in thereUm, so I was not, you know, a super badass in that regard. I was a nerd for super badasses. And, um, but we also all engaged in gallows humor, and we would, you know... [scoffs] The jokes and stuff, even someo- even someone who had recently died, we'd make a joke about. It's because you have this tremendous, uh, pressure, and comedy is the relief valve-

    25. JRJoe Rogan43:41

        Yeah

    26. SPSpeaker43:41

        ... for that in a lot of ways.

    27. JRJoe Rogan43:42

        Yeah, of course.

    28. SPSpeaker43:43

        And-- But then someone would overhear that joke or something, and now you're looking down the barrel of a fifteen six, which is a military investigation, and all of these things that could permanently impact your life in a way and give you a scarlet letter to where you could never be employed again or do anything ever again because you were simply trying to re-re-relieve some pressure, or you were trying to find what out where to buy your wife the next dress, and now your life's being ruined. And I know guys who suffered under that sword. Like, I wouldn't name them, but I know guys who, you know, their career met a terminal end because of a dumb joke or something. It's like you can't be expected to go out and shoot people in the face and then be sensitive to someone's feelings an hour later.

    29. JRJoe Rogan44:25

        Right.

    30. SPSpeaker44:25

        It's just-- It doesn't-- It does not work. Now, should you talk to that guy and say, "Hey, you know, you made woman X feel so and so. Be more cognizant of that whenever you're around her in the future"?
11. 58:33 – 1:04:45

    From signals intelligence to cyber offense: how smartphone evolution reshaped modern operations

    1. JRJoe Rogan58:33

       When you were working in cyber defense, like what, what, what-

    2. SPSpeaker58:37

       Cyber offense.

    3. JRJoe Rogan58:37

       Cyber offense.

    4. SPSpeaker58:38

       Yeah.

    5. JRJoe Rogan58:38

       What was the, the primary function? Like, what did you do?

    6. SPSpeaker58:43

       Um, so in the beginning, it, it-- I, I have no short answers, and I apologize. In the beginning-

    7. JRJoe Rogan58:49

       I don't like short answers.

    8. SPSpeaker58:50

       Oh, yeah. [both chuckling] I just, I, I always feel like I'm-

    9. JRJoe Rogan58:52

       I like a good long answer.

    10. SPSpeaker58:53

        Yeah. I always-

    11. JRJoe Rogan58:53

        Don't worry about that.

    12. SPSpeaker58:54

        Okay. When I joined the military, I was in signals intelligence, um, and essentially learning the ins and outs of radars, how radars work, what they do, um, how they function.

    13. JRJoe Rogan59:05

        Did you guys ever see any s- weird shit, like UFO shit?

    14. SPSpeaker59:08

        I, I, I wish I had. [laughing] I really do.

    15. JRJoe Rogan59:11

        I wish you had too.

    16. SPSpeaker59:12

        Yeah, I really do. [laughing] Um, I was more in the signals intelligence side of the house, um, focusing first on electronic signals or emanations from radars, mapping them so that, you know, if we were gonna go do the ground invasion and there was gonna be some air support going in first and blowing shit up, we would tell them, "Hey, there's a man-packable SA-7 here. There's a SA-10 here. There's this here. There's there." And then telling these pilots so they didn't get shot out of the sky.

    17. JRJoe Rogan59:35

        Mm-hmm.

    18. SPSpeaker59:36

        Um, uh, quickly when the war kicked off, that became irrelevant because there was no, you know, surface-to-air missiles, surface-to-surface missiles in Iraq. We had knocked them all out in the first few weeks. So then it shifted to communications intelligence. So I kinda retrained on communications intelligence, and that was at that time off of cell phones, off of, uh, push-to-talk radios, repeaters, um, long-haul networks, terrestrial networks, extraterrestrial networks, and what I mean by that is the stuff, the satellites in the sky, um, and doing analysis on those to try to inform the, the, the what we call the common operating picture of the battlefield for a combatant commander. So combatant commander wants to know where the bad guys are, what they're doing, what they're saying. To the eve- to the amount that we could, my job was to, um, come up with solutions and conduct, you know, um, passive and active, um, signals analysis on these things and then inform the commander so that we could, you know, uh, mitigate risk. It was all about mitigation of risk. Um, from-- This is 2008 or so. I'd been doing this for about seven years, eight years. And, um, from there, it shifted to the phones getting smart, and essentially it went from you walking around with a 2G phone or a 3G phone that had limited compute capab- capability to now there's robust compute cap-capability with the advent of, like, the iPhone. And now it's like, well, now we've gotta get after guys who are, you know, es- essentially walking around with a computer we could never have envisioned 20 years ago in their pocket with all this capability. 'Cause the military and our, and our, our forces that we're fighting against, it all comes down to our ability to shoot, move, and communicate, communication being the part that I was focused on. So as the advent of the iPhone and those things came out, the Army realized we didn't have a, a computer network operations MOS. We didn't have a, um, offensive com- um, cyber component. We didn't have a defensive cyber component. So we kind of-- I was there for, at the ground floor when we were building out these new MOSs now that are all over the military. But at that time, there was a, a th- thought going into, uh, you know, we need to have people who know how to be on-it operators. Ethical hacking, as paradoxical as that sounds, that's how, the lawyers called it that. So it's hacking at the end of the day, but ethical hacking because you've got the backing of the U.S. government. And so we set up that framework and really started launching into operations, you know, 2006, '7, '8, all the way into my last deployment in 2017 or 2015, sorry, '17. It was all focused on computer network operations and how they lash up with terrestrial networks. How do we exploit all of that, um, was one facet of my job. And, um, uh,Your question was how did I-

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:02:12

        Yeah

    20. SPSpeaker1:02:13

        ... get into all of that, and that, that was the, that was the, um-

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:02:15

        How did you get into it, and what was, what, what did, what was like, what was the operational aspect of it? Like, how did you actually... What did you do?

    22. SPSpeaker1:02:23

        Uh, going, so you know, there's, there's... I'll stick to terms that are more, um, generally understood by the public. But learning how to do things like war driving, um, collecting on networks, Wi-Fi, you know, endpoints, um, cell phones, uh, understanding the ins and outs of them, understanding how to do forensic analysis of them. So after there was an operation and a bunch of guerrillas had been sent, sent in to kill a bad guy, um, we could derive maximum intelligence value from the hand, from the handset to plan other operations. Um, and so, you know, it would be passive, um, monitoring of networks to inform the intelligence picture whi-which would lead to either combat operations or active computer network operations, where now it's like, well, there's, you know, a, uh, I don't know, a, uh, an Iraqi or an Afghani router that hasn't been patched in three years, and we think we can either write or find a zero-day, which is just an exploit of those routers, where, um, we can muck with their router in a way where they think they're getting good information, and they're not, or they're, or erecting other things, um, to, uh, mitigate risk for the commander. And so, um, that really, you know, exploded at that point. And between that and human intelligence, which is kind of the, um, the actual gathering of intelligence from other people, you know, you would call it spy or, you know, James Bond, but that's, James Bond was a horrible spy. Um-

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:03:55

        Was he?

    24. SPSpeaker1:03:56

        I mean, yeah. You know, your job's to remain, um-

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:03:58

        Anonymous

    26. SPSpeaker1:03:59

        ... anonymous, and you're walking into a casino, and there's Goldfinger calling you by your first and last name.

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:04:03

        [laughs]

    28. SPSpeaker1:04:04

        It's not a great look. Um, you know, you generally don't wanna be sleeping with your sources or, uh-

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:04:10

        Right

    30. SPSpeaker1:04:10

        ... um, you know, using your real name or what-whatever. So human intelligence, and then my focus for the last 10 years was how does signals intelligence, computer network operations, um, become a force multiplier for people conducting overt and clandestine operations, um, throughout the theater. At that time, uh, my, you know, my deployments and my time was spent in Iraq, Afghanistan, um, Africa, Northern Africa, and then the So- a lot of people don't know it, but we were in active combat operations in the Southern Philippines as well for, uh, a, a fair amount of time. I wanna maybe say seven or 10 years we were doing combat operations-

12. 1:04:45 – 1:11:26

    Philippines counterterror operations: Abu Sayyaf, terrain realities, and overlooked deployments

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:04:45

       When was this?

    2. SPSpeaker1:04:46

       ... in the Southern Philippines. My first deployment to the Philip- um, um, Southern Philippines was, uh, 2007.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:04:54

       Who were we doing operations against?

    4. SPSpeaker1:04:56

       So, um, there were terrorist elements down there that were traveling back and forth from Pakistan and Af-Afghanistan, and there was a terrorist organization down there called the Abu Sayyaf group. And, uh, there were other ones as well. Jemaah Islamiyah, I think, was the name of the other one. And, uh, they were conducting their own terrorist anti-Christian operations in the southern part of the Philippines. In the s- in the southern part of the Philippines, I don't... Can I say it? Can I say the word?

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:05:22

       What do you mean?

    6. SPSpeaker1:05:22

       Jamie, can you pull up a map of the Philippines? Can you pull it up?

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:05:25

       Oh, say that?

    8. SPSpeaker1:05:26

       I wanna say that.

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:05:26

       Say the term? Yeah, pull it up, Jamie.

    10. SPSpeaker1:05:27

        I've been listening to it forever.

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:05:28

        Yeah. [laughs]

    12. SPSpeaker1:05:29

        Uh, so there's what's called the autonomous region of Muslim Mindanao, which is the southern part from, like, a place called Zamboanga down to Hulu or Holo Island. Um, and there's a... It's a funny joke because if you zoom into Zamboanga, which is-

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:05:44

        God, look how many islands there are in the Philippines.

    14. SPSpeaker1:05:45

        I know. It's... Go, go down to the south there. See Zambo- go down, right there. Right, right, zoom right there on that island. Now move to... Sorry, now move to the southwest. See that penis?

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:05:57

        Mm-hmm.

    16. SPSpeaker1:05:58

        At the tip of that penis is called Zamboanga.

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:06:00

        Mm-hmm.

    18. SPSpeaker1:06:00

        All of our combat operations, now if you zoom out a little bit more and, and pan more south, and zoom out just a m- little bit more so the joke hits. All that sperm-

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:06:11

        [laughs]

    20. SPSpeaker1:06:11

        ... south of the tip of the, uh, the Zamboanga City, this, there are terrorist operations in here. Now, if you go to that main island called Sulu-

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:06:20

        Oh

    22. SPSpeaker1:06:20

        ... there's Holo Island. That's where I was-

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:06:23

        Oh

    24. SPSpeaker1:06:23

        ... on this tiny island out in the middle of nowhere, and on that, there's a mountain-

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:06:27

        That, that's all the Philippines?

    26. SPSpeaker1:06:28

        Well, no. I mean, this is all the Philippines down here, yeah.

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:06:30

        Wow.

    28. SPSpeaker1:06:31

        So this is called... There's a mountain in there. I think it was called Mount Tumitak or something like that, on the, near, uh, on the eastern part of the island called Luke. It's called Luke. Yeah, so-

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:06:39

        There is

    30. SPSpeaker1:06:40

        ... there's mountains. There's a mountainous region there. There are a bunch of terrorists up there. They were killing people in the area, conducting bombings. They were getting trained. Um, in fact, there was a guy, and I believe, I'm gonna get his name wrong perhaps, but I believe his name, it was either Ib- Insulon Haplon or J- oh, it was Jamar Potek, Jamal Potek. He was actually arrested outside of Osama Bin Laden's compound the day after he was killed.
13. 1:11:26 – 1:22:12

    Early tech curiosity: crystal radios, first computers, ADHD as focus, and the ‘forgotten license’ turning point

    1. SPSpeaker1:11:26

       I wouldn't-- Yeah, I wouldn't, I'd call myself curious before I'd call myself smart. But, um, uh, you know, my mother, uh, you know, I, I don't know if you remember, you would remember this, but maybe other people my age, you know, you'd get these scholastic book order forms that you'd bring home from school, and you could order books.

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:11:43

       Mm-hmm.

    3. SPSpeaker1:11:43

       There'd always be, on the back page, there'd always be, like, little cool stuff. Like, you could get, like, you know, a pair of gloves or a hat or something. Anyway, one time there was a, um, a coil radio that you could order where, with an earpiece, and you'd put this coil radio together, and with an earpiece, no battery. It was just the electromagnetic rad-radiation would, would, would, um, activate the coil, and the coil would... You could listen to radio chatter.

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:12:08

       Really? With no battery?

    5. SPSpeaker1:12:09

       Yeah, yeah. Just a tiny little, little radio.

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:12:11

       How did it-- What was the power?

    7. SPSpeaker1:12:13

       The electromagnetic radiation, and you would just... Kind of like a record, a, a, a, like, you know how you-

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:12:19

       Uh-huh

    9. SPSpeaker1:12:19

       ... coil, you hit a record. Electromagnetic radiation would hit the coil, and the coil would feed up to an amplifier or, or up to an earpiece. In the earpiece, you could hear chatter, and you could tune in.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:12:27

        Did the earpiece have a battery?

    11. SPSpeaker1:12:29

        Noth- I don't think anything had a battery on it. It, the, I think it was just a-

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:12:33

        Wow.

    13. SPSpeaker1:12:33

        I, I could be mistaken, but I don't believe there was.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:12:35

        Powered by electromagnetic radiation.

    15. SPSpeaker1:12:37

        Yeah. I mean, you can look it up, [chuckles] Jamie, if you want. Sorry to say that again, but, um-

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:12:41

        Turn that thing down. That thing's driving me crazy.

    17. SPSpeaker1:12:44

        Yeah, sorry.

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:12:44

        This thing.

    19. SPSpeaker1:12:45

        Like, like here or here?

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:12:46

        Right here. Look at my finger.

    21. BTBill Thompson1:12:47

        It's right here.

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:12:48

        Yeah. I've been meaning to do that. Like, literally, when everybody uses this fucking thing, it's wobbling around, ready to fall off.

    23. SPSpeaker1:12:53

        Yeah, but if you look up coil, coil radio with small earpiece, I could be wrong. I don't remember there being a battery on it. But um-

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:12:59

        Electromagnetic radiation powered it. That's bananas.

    25. SPSpeaker1:13:03

        Yeah, so kind of like a ra- same thing with, like, you know, not at the same wattage, but a microwave, right, um, sends power through the air.

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:13:09

        Right, but it uses-

    27. SPSpeaker1:13:10

        Or DC

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:13:11

        ... but it uses power-

    29. SPSpeaker1:13:12

        Yeah

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:13:12

        ... in order to send it.
14. 1:22:12 – 2:00:58

    Phone security, Pegasus, Huawei/ZTE risks, and why ‘unhackable phones’ don’t exist

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:22:12

       One, one of the things that I wanted to ask you about that is when new technology is emerging, how, how do you, how do you stay ahead of the ability to extract information from this technology, hack into networks before people understand the capability?

    2. SPSpeaker1:22:35

       You really can't.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:22:36

       You really can't?

    4. SPSpeaker1:22:37

       And that's the beauty of the free market is that the innovation to perform the function that you want someone to pay for will always move faster than your ability to exploit the technology.

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:22:48

       Then how do you explain things like Pegasus?

    6. SPSpeaker1:22:51

       Well, I mean, something like Pegasus, well, first off-

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:22:55

       Explain Pegasus to people that don't know.

    8. SPSpeaker1:22:57

       It was a, a persistent implant on cell phones for people, um-

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:23:02

       Initially it was, you had to click it. It was a click or exploit.

    10. SPSpeaker1:23:04

        Initially it was click, a click, and then it became a non-click exploit. So in other words, you had to interact with something on the phone in order to initialize and install the implant. And then after... And, but the, the reason why it was so good is because it wasn't stored in the, um, it wasn't stored in the usual areas that you would want a persistent impl- or where you would have a persistent implant. For instance, uh, you know, you might wanna put it in the application layer of an app or something like that where there's a binary that can run and execute commands or functions. Um, and so they-- I won't get into the very specifics of h- where and how they did this because I'm not sure if I got this information from the government or not, so I won't say it. But they stored it in a place where it wasn't normal. Um, and you can read papers on your own for, uh, and, and, and look at the forensics of it and how the actual implant was executed. But it essentially, you know, allowed people to own your phone, um, and, and, uh, you know, was the kind of implant I only dreamed of when I was helping develop my own plants, implants in the military. Mostly what we would rely on is, um, you know, zero-day architecture and looking for something in a phone that either they hadn't patched or that the phone that you were looking at hadn't been patched. So phones, as they have their own red teams, are going through the, the phone for their own... 'Cause they wanna sell a product that people will use, and people won't use stuff that can get hacked. So they'll do their own red teaming, and they'll discover like, "Oh, you know, we, we, on this router we developed, we left this port open and it shouldn't have been open. So now we're gonna write a patch that will close that port so that this port is no longer accessible by a guy like me, so I can't go in there and, and do something to this particular type of router." Another great thing, I'll say something good about the administration. They're, they're doing some stuff right now to make sure that we're getting rid of, um, Chinese technology and Chinese, um, routers. And, um, um, you know, there's a widespread network of, um, uh, there's, the PLA has a, and I can't remember the name of the botnet, but they essentially implanted a bunch of old unpatched routers to get access to government and business, um, proximal people, and it was widespread and huge. And, you know, they, they, it looked like to me, I haven't read this anywhere, but if I were looking at this implant and how it was done, they were trying to really cause some trouble.Um, it was being placed at critical places. Think power, think energy, think banking. Like, they really wanted to cause some ruckus. And I w- I have not been part of this administration, so I'm not saying anything classified, for those of you who are listening. And so, but there was a decision to say, "Hey, we need to make sure that these things get patched, and also that we're not bringing in, um, architecture from the overseas," because they don't play by the same rules that we at least say we play by.

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:25:51

        Well, that's why they banned Huawei devices in America, right?

    12. SPSpeaker1:25:53

        Oh, yeah, and ZTE.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:25:54

        Yeah. Well, Huawei had a phone that I was really interested in back in the day. They had a Porsche Design, had partnered with Huawei and made this insane Android phone with, like, the best camera, the best battery. It was, like, really high level, and I was, like, gonna buy it. And then all of a sudden they banned all the Huawei phones, and I was like, "What's going on?"

    14. SPSpeaker1:26:15

        Yeah.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:26:15

        And then, you know, I'd heard some people say, "Oh, they're just trying to stop competition. It's like American companies are trying to stop it." And then I, I went into it deeper and I said, "No, it seems like there's third-party input on some of their routers and some of their, um, some of their network devices-

    16. SPSpeaker1:26:32

        Yeah

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:26:32

        ... that they had engineered in order to be able to access them by third party."

    18. SPSpeaker1:26:38

        Yeah.

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:26:38

        And this, because of whatever, p- lack of understanding, lack of, uh, knowledge of how these things are constructed, the people that purchased them didn't, weren't, weren't aware of them, and th- these things had gotten into place, and they had gotten into place in universities. They had got into place in military establishments. They were using them in cell phone towers that people had, you know, inadvertently bought from China.

    20. SPSpeaker1:27:01

        Yep.

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:27:02

        You know?

    22. SPSpeaker1:27:02

        And, and that's really... I mean, I can tell you firsthand from having done some of the forensic exploitation on this stuff, another large part of my career I didn't talk about was just o- on mobile forensics and media forensics, which is essentially, you think of, like, "CSI: Miami" or "CSI" whatever the city was. There's a crime, someone was killed. You have forensics that are doing forensics on, like, blood and fingerprints and blood splatter and all of that stuff. There's a whole another part of that same forensics branch that focuses on media forensics. What was deleted off this phone at one point? What remains on this phone? What was it being used for? I would do this in the military so that when we did do an operation, and I was part of some of the largest ones ever done out in Afghanistan, uh, there would be treasure troves of phones and all of these computers and stuff like that, and it was my job, and I had a great team that worked for me, uh, in 20- f- my deployment in 2015, um, we would go in afterwards, gather up all of this stuff, and, you know, the s- task force commander would literally be standing by, and we'd say, "You know, here's the intelligence that we've derived. Here's the multi-point analysis. Here, it, you know, it was on this hard drive. It was here, it was here. You know, there's a bad guy place out here." And those guys would be rolling, like, within moments after the last operation. Like, some operations we'd do where we'd be rolling one after another target because we were getting really good at media forensics and, uh, intelligence that was there, and then getting into active media forensics, which is a different discipline, but essentially... I, I'll get in- I can get into that later if you want to. But, um, [clears throat] launching and, and, and doing these, these follow-on operations off, you know, dumping the binary from a phone and examining it at the ones and zeros level to say everything that was going on with this thing, or if it was a really high... Like, the organization that I worked for at that time, uh, did the analysis of the Osama bin Laden media. And, you know, at, on that media we're doing far more than we would for another piece of media in that we're, you know, X-raying it and we're looking at maybe what the, the disk looked like before or what was destroyed or reconstructing things, spending millions of dollars on that intelligence analysis because we wanted to fully understand everything that this guy was involved in and what he was doing and where he was and who he was talking to. Um, and so that was another part of my career that I did for about five years or so, four or five years.

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:29:14

        What was going on with the Huawei phones? Like, what were they doing with them?

    24. SPSpeaker1:29:18

        I mean, th- they were, they were, they were either... Some of them were coming out implanted. In other words, there was access built in for a foreign actor. And then oth- in other terms, other places with routers, with the ZTE stuff, there were just things that you would patch or that you would fix as a company who was trying to protect the consumer and create a product that would, people u- would use, and they weren't doing it. So they were creating persistent backdoors either by actively placing code on there that would allow, you know, root access, or they were leaving things open, especially in Africa. Like, the work that w- I, you know, when I was working in Africa, the Chinese were just owning Africa. They were just giving them communications infrastructure. And, uh, they were doing that because they wanted their resources and they wanted to know what these people were saying and what they were doing. Um, and so I'm a free market real... Like, I'm as free market as a guy can get. I want the best people building the best products, and I want everyone to be able to compete. But in that case, I would never own a Huawei or a ZTE or anything else.

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:30:18

        On a consumer level, what were they doing with those phones? Like, w- if they had imported them to the United States, if they didn't have that ban, what would've been the issue?

    26. SPSpeaker1:30:27

        Uh, getting access to, you know, mil- any, any number of people that... The Chinese really want access to everybody. But you could start at the topical level of just saying, you know, getting Joe Rogan to use a ZTE would be, [chuckles] that would be my wet dream as a guy who used to do this work back in the day, 'cause you're talking to the president or you're talking to this guy or that guy, and I can build out a, a, a network of understanding who you're in contact with, who you're talking to, what's being talked about, but then also finding out, you know, this person's phone number and now doing a deep dive on there. So it's really about, you know, getting all of that data and constructing an a- you know, an analyst notebook, essentially outline of who's talking to who, who do we need to implant, and it, it, but it's for business as well. Like, they're really trying to g- they would want this in the hands of somebody who's in charge of a business 'cause they want their IP. They would want this in soldiers' hands so they would know deployment dates or who's going where and w- who's doing what. They want this in routers because, um, routers are usually the most unpatched piece of technology in that you're not... Especially, you know, these days they're more automated patching, but back in the day, like, you had to manually update a router, and if you didn't, well, then you had potential exploits that were sitting on that router where I could gain access to your, the router in your home, or I could gain access to a BGP router, which is like a border gateway, which is moving all of the internet data, or I could get access to a microwave terminal. You know, if you look at a cell phone, they've got the microwave terminals on there that are sending information in between them. If those are Chinese... parts that are either being used for the processing, the CPU, or the phys- the physical infrastructure of that, the, the products that they were putting out would give me direct access to the information that's being passed on those terminals. So you're getting, you know, system-level, root-level access through machinery, through communication devices, and through things like routers, where you can know everything you wanna know about your enemy.

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:32:17

        Wow. And so as far as today's technology, I see you, you use an Android phone.

    28. SPSpeaker1:32:22

        Mm-hmm.

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:32:22

        Like, is there a phone that is more secure or a platform that is more secure?

    30. SPSpeaker1:32:29

        The, it all depends. Like, I, I always take this from Thomas Sowell, "There are no answers, there are only trade-offs." So there's, there's like... The way to answer that question would be is like, who are you? What are you trying to do with your life? What are you talking about on your phone? What are you doing on your phone? You know, most of these phones, if you're just an average everyday citizen who's just going about your job, um, you know, the phones today are pretty secure, especially versus a few years ago. Um, if you're a reporter, it, it... Now the come, the nexus is do you trust the government and do you trust Apple? If you trust the government and you trust Apple, then Apple's probably your best bet, um, for using an, a... You know, there's lockdown mode on an Apple phone, or, um, they used to call it back in the day, I think it was called reporter mode, but there was way to, ways to encrypt the devices and to encrypt the chatter and the, um, tunnel coming out of the phone, um, the RF coming out of the phone. And, uh, you know-
15. 2:00:58 – 2:21:06

    Centralization vs liberty: Patriot Act, the 17th Amendment, judicial review—and a brief AI thesis teaser

    1. SPSpeaker2:00:58

       from some of these big things because the way that this government is going, I'm very worried about the rights of the individual now, um, and going forward because we have an uneducated class of people for all of the reasons in the world. Like, if you wanna just focus on your family and you're not thinking about these things, I don't hate that for you. But the idea of individual autonomy and rights has been so shit on in, in recent years that where this g- when we get more uneducated and we rely m- l- large language models are great, but they're not a foundation of learning. In other words, um, we have a lot of people with access to information but no wisdom. It's like when your parents would say, "Learn how to do addition and subtraction on paper before you use a calculator." Like, understand how to do research and cite sources and understand, you know, how to d- conduct really good analysis before you just use a neural network for everything. Because as we lose focus of our civics and, and, and what our founders were trying to do and the uniqueness of it, which it's truly unique, which is, you know... When I joined the Army, I joined the Army to get out of North Dakota. When I re-enlisted in the Army, it's because I believed in the experiment, and that's a wh- another five-hour podcast. But, um-The foundation of the experiment is good, but we've eroded it in so many ways over the years and given up so many individual rights in the name of security. And I'm sure it's been said on here before, but Franklin said anybody who gives up their individual rights in the name of security deserves neither. Your freedoms in the name of security deserve neither. And some of the ways that they've done it have been really above the surface. And it frankly blows my mind that we let the government get away with some of these things that we let them get away with, where you even explain it to people and they're like, I don't see it. Like, I don't see how that was a big deal. And I'm like, it was a total recalibration of the system that allowed the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to usurp your rights in a way that if you knew any better, you'd probably be protesting. Like some of the ways that they've done this, you know, we can go with the easy stuff like the Patriot Act, right? In the name of security, we're going to start collecting on Americans. You know, and the Biden and Obama administration, I will say this at risk of, you know, getting in trouble because I used to have a clearance. They had a massive vacuum cleaner and they knew what it was vacuuming up and they kept vacuuming it up anyway in the name of security. I'm not saying they were going after American citizens, but they certainly knew they were. And they just vacuumed shit up and collected it and stored it in a database.

    2. JRJoe Rogan2:03:36

       In case they needed it.

    3. SPSpeaker2:03:37

       In case at some point we needed to, you know, come up with a narrative or get rid of somebody who's inconvenient or whatever else that just flies in the face of individual American rights and American autonomy and is really, in my mind, the anti-pattern to freedom. It's just really, really bad. I mean, I'll give you one that people always crap on me whenever I talk to them about it, but there's two that really bother me. One of them being like the 17th Amendment. Do you know the 17th Amendment to the Constitution?

    4. JRJoe Rogan2:04:05

       I don't.

    5. SPSpeaker2:04:06

       So the 17th, so when the founders, when you read the Federalist Papers and the Federalist Papers, I really love reading the Federalist Papers. I love reading how they informed the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration even. John Jay, James Madison wrote these documents explaining the framework and the 17th Amendment, essentially how the Senate, the Senate, right, the 50 people there that are supposed to be representing us, was originally constructed was a state would have legislatures and the state legislatures and the governor would appoint the senator. The reason that the founders did that was because the state governments had to give power to the federal government to exist. Back with the Articles of Confederation, Confederation, is that right? Articles of, I think it's the Articles of Confederation. I'm blowing up, sorry, I'm going nuts. Back before there was a strong centralized American government, we had problems with money, we had problems with interstate commerce and those types of things. And those articles eventually turned into what is the Constitution. But the states had to grant that power and the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution knew that the states needed to be those small projects that we talked about before where if California wanted to go nuts, let them go nuts. But it shouldn't impact what's happening in Texas. It shouldn't impact what's happening over in New England. It shouldn't impact what's happening in the Midwest. But if that goes nuts and it fails, it needs to fail. So the state senators, I'm sorry, the state legislatures would come together and they would vote for a senator. They would elect a senator. And that senator's job was to go to the federal government and protect the rights of the state, not to protect the rights of individuals per se, and certainly not to embolden the federal government. But with the 17th Amendment, what happened was the House of Representatives' function was to be the petulant children of government. So their job was to come up with crazy ideas, crazy laws, all of those things. The more liberal version of government jurisprudence would be the House of Representatives, your crazy ideas. And then you had state senators who were supposed to be between the House and the president who would say, well, here's a good idea, but the rest of this is retarded, AOC. Like we're not doing all this. That's crazy. Or whoever else, name your Republican who's an asshat as well. We're not doing these things. And that's because it would erode the state's rights and the state's constitution and what made this state great. Because what the legislatures would do is say, hey, Joe Rogan, you've made a lot of money and you've got a big podcast and a big voice and you've learned some lessons around the way and you were able to do that in Texas and you decided to come to Texas because we had all of these things that California didn't have. We need you to go to the Senate for three years or six years or seven years, whatever it was back then, and represent those same principles. So when Obamacare comes through, you can say not only no, but fuck no. Like I'm not voting for this thing. And it was to protect the state. But what the 17th Amendment did was it was redundant with the House of Representatives, which was in the founders' eyes, the only popular vote part of the American government was the popular vote. And then you had, you know, the way the president gets elected through electors, but you had the state Senate, which was appointed by the states. So the legislatures, and I'll use North Dakota where I'm from, you'll have one big city, two big cities, Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota. It's where the universities are. It's where your crazy kids are. Crazy thought exists, hyper crazy ideas, but some of them are useful. The rest of the state's agriculture, right? So all of those legislators from all those counties, those legislative districts would get together and say, we're going to put Bill Thompson, that would never happen, but in charge of our, he's going to be at the Senate representing North Dakota, but he has to represent the whole state. In other words, you can't do things that will help Grand Forks or Fargo because that's where the universities are. That's where all the crazy politics are. You also need to be thinking about the guys out in the Western counties, Lamore County in North Dakota or way out West. You have to protect agriculture. You have to protect small businesses. You have to protect families.What the 17th Amendment under Woodrow Wilson and how they really usurped the Constitution and made the Senate a redundant, they made it a redundant House of Representatives and using the popular vote. So now we use popular vote for that. But if you want the popular vote in North Dakota, 85% of the population is in Fargo and Grand Forks. So now you've got, if I want to run for Senate in North Dakota, I'm just going to spend all of my time in Fargo and Grand Forks.

    6. BTBill Thompson2:08:36

       Mm.

    7. SPSpeaker2:08:36

       Because if I can repeat back to those people all the ideas that they want to hear, I'm going to win that vote, and I don't have to represent those people out in the rest of the state in anything.

    8. BTBill Thompson2:08:45

       Right.

    9. SPSpeaker2:08:46

       So they created a redundant House of Representatives. But another reason why it happened was they wanted popular vote because there is no amount of money that you could stick into a legislature out in the western part of North Dakota. You can't bribe these people. But the DNC and RNC now can say, "Look, these two senators are running. We like this guy, so we're going to... This guy will do whatever we tell him to do." And it has nothing to do with the state or representing the state's rights or the rest of those legislative districts. We're going to pick this senator, and he's getting $300 million for his election bid. And this other guy who's, you know, a slower-moving constitutional conservative who might be a free, you know, market absolutist and a classical liberal, he's not being funded. But under the state architecture, you might have been a better representation of the state, and that's why the legislators had to vote for you to put you in as a senator. You had to represent the whole state. But now, all that someone who wants to be a senator needs to do is go to the Republican National Committee or the Democrat National Committee and say, "I'll do all the things you tell me to do. Fund my campaign, and I'm going to go stump in Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota, and the hell with the rest of the state." It's very important. It's a very important sleight of hand. And when that happened, you made a redundant House of Representatives, and the state no longer was protected at the federal level. And what happened was all of the power from all of these states and these legislatures and these individuals got sucked up into the federal government. And then after that, you see all of these things that would never have been passed by a state getting passed, things like Obamacare, things like the Patriot Act, certain war resolutions, all kinds of things where it just further erodes the power of the state. And federal government wants that because it puts all of the power up in the federal government. And people always say we need to get money out of politics. No, we need to get power out of politics. That power that they've taken, you know, over the last 130 years or so used to exist at the state and local levels because they wanted these thought experiments happening where we could pluck the best things out of them and forget the rest. But all of that power has now gone up to the federal government, and the federal government won't ever release that power, and they only want more budget and more spending to execute that power. And that's also because the interest groups that want to go, they don't want to have to go and convince a whole state of whether or not something is good that people are going to vote on. They just want to go take a lobby and go up to the federal government because they want all of the power up there as well. And the federal government wants all the power up there as well because they make $300,000 a year before they become a politician, and they're worth $30 million when they're done being a politician because all of the money has to go to the federal government because they're in charge of light bulbs we can use, computers we can use, flush toilets we can have, how our roads are going to look, what our medical care looks like. None of those powers are explicitly written in the Constitution of the United States, and they use things like the commerce law and other things in order to create things like Obamacare, where really we want competing states. If Texas comes up with a great way to do healthcare and North Dakota's isn't so great, they can look at that experiment, and they can adopt the principles, and they can have it at that level. But it's much easier to get change at the local level when the power is derived from the state and the individual because if I want to change the way that my state does healthcare, I have one of two options or three options. I can run for office, I can support someone who is going to go into office and do what I want, or I can move. But when everything's centralized at the federal government and everything flows from the federal government, all of the money, power, and gravity is up there, and the individual, the 300 million of us or so, have really no power now to exercise either states' rights or individual rights at the higher level. I hope I'm elucidating this correctly.

    10. BTBill Thompson2:12:28

        You are.

    11. SPSpeaker2:12:28

        But it's a real usurpation of individual and state autonomy that really got rid of state power, which was, if you read the Federalist Papers, was so important to the founders that there was this state, that the state's needs were organized because the state was where the founders wanted these thought experiments. You read Thomas Hobbes Leviathan or John Locke or Montesquieu, all of them talked about this great experiment that was being set up and how it was built on all of this Western politics and everything that had came before it on how we could have a government that was forced to respect the rights of individuals and allowed for these competing think tanks of ideas and that the power would never rest at the federal government. But the 17th Amendment was a way that a lot of that power went from the state level and the state legislatures. And now to become the president, they want to do a popular vote. And under a popular vote, you would just have to campaign in New York and LA.

    12. BTBill Thompson2:13:21

        Right.

    13. SPSpeaker2:13:21

        You would get the popular vote out of the likely voting people, and now the rest of the country is not. And that would be another, you hear all these people saying we need a popular vote. We can't have the electoral college. We can't have all of these things. Everything needs to be... Pure democracy allows 51% to rule 49%. And that was another thing the founders were working fervently to get away from. And that's why we had an electoral college. And it's actually quite beautiful when you actually read about it and examine it. It's why we had the state senate and state legislatures, and this is why we had the House. You had all levels of the things of government that the founders cared about being represented in this body politic, and it was a beautiful thing. And I could go on for 15 more things about that. I won't do it for the sake of your listeners because I doubt this is what they wanted to do. But similar things happened with the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison.And allowing the Supreme Court to have judicial review. That was never a thing that was in the Constitution. And the Supreme Court, if you like the Supreme Court being able to have the power to describe everything as being either constitutional or unconstitutional, then you're not ruled by a democracy, you're ruled by an oligarchy. You've got eight people in robes that are gonna tell you whether or not laws are good or bad, and that's not the founding of this country. It's not how it was intended to work. And that all started back in Marbury v. Madison with Thomas Jefferson, um, and these writs of mandamus that where the Supreme C- Supreme Court, long story short, essentially granted itself the power to conduct judicial review. Under the old system or the sys- old system, the system that was ratified and that the founders approved was if a law was deemed unconstitutional, um, it would go before the Supreme Court, and they just wouldn't rule-- they would rule in favor of the person. And then eventually the government would fig- figure out, oh, this law doesn't work. But it was never on the Supreme Court to say constitutional, unconstitutional. You would get arrested for some law, you'd go-- and it would get appealed to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court would say, "We're not punishing this person. This is against the Constitution." But the government would have to keep arresting people. [chuckles]

    14. JRJoe Rogan2:15:18

        Wow.

    15. SPSpeaker2:15:18

        And it'd have to keep going in front of the federal government. So what I'm saying is, and I'm sorry to go off on this, we can go back to tech, but all I'm saying is the core of the American experiment in individual rights and what makes this coun- country so great and why I was willing to die for it after my initial enlistment and why I have such love for this is because it was the only experiment where the value of the individual was held at the top of the hierarchy, and that people could truly be allowed to flourish. And in 250 years, we did more than any society could have hoped to have achieved in tens of thousands of years. Or not that it's been around that long, but in thousands of years. Everything tends towards, um, disorder, and everything, uh... Power always gets centralized, and we had a framework to do that, but we were willing participants in our own demise. And now we're scratching our heads and wondering why there's no individual and why there's no individual autonomy, and why a guy can't smoke weed on the weekend, or why a guy can't do X, Y, or Z because we have centralized the authority and the power and the decision-making structure, and we're allowing them to be... There would be no problem with money in politics if the federal government had only the powers that were outlined to it in the Constitution.

    16. JRJoe Rogan2:16:25

        I think that's very well said, and I could have never said it the way you said it. And I think there's a lot to absorb here.

    17. SPSpeaker2:16:32

        I'm sorry. [chuckles]

    18. JRJoe Rogan2:16:32

        That was fantastic. No. No, it was great, dude. It was great. I'm-- That-- This is one of the things that I love about you. You're very thorough. [laughs]

    19. SPSpeaker2:16:38

        Yeah. [chuckles] Thorough is one thing. My friends always say, "Bill's 'tism is starting to show."

    20. JRJoe Rogan2:16:42

        Ah. You got a touch of the 'tism. But I think that's good. Like I said, they-- just like ADHD, I think it's a superpower. Lot to absorb, so I think we'll wrap it up right here. But thank you. This was an awesome conversation. I really appreciate it. It was really great.

    21. SPSpeaker2:16:55

        Yeah. Um-

    22. JRJoe Rogan2:16:56

        We could do this again, too. I'm sure-

    23. SPSpeaker2:16:57

        Oh, yeah. I mean-

    24. JRJoe Rogan2:16:58

        ... we could probably have 30 or 40 of these.

    25. SPSpeaker2:16:59

        We didn't even get to AI. I wanted to get to AI 'cause I th- I think I have a very anti-pattern to AI and how you understand it. But, um, we-- if you want, we can save that for another time.

    26. JRJoe Rogan2:17:08

        Yeah, we'll do that for our next one 'cause I think that's another four hours.

    27. SPSpeaker2:17:10

        Yeah, probably.

    28. JRJoe Rogan2:17:11

        Yeah.

    29. SPSpeaker2:17:12

        Yeah.

    30. JRJoe Rogan2:17:12

        For sure.

Episode duration: 2:21:06