Modern WisdomEx-Military Hacker: The Secret World Of Government Surveillance - Bill Thompson
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
80 min read · 15,984 words- 0:00 – 3:35
Why Bill Doesn’t Trust Apple
- CWChris Williamson
What phone have you got? What is that?
- BTBill Thompson
Uh, this is a Galaxy Fold. So it's got, like, the regular phone setup, but then when you wanna go wide, you get this bad boy.
- CWChris Williamson
Why no Apple?
- BTBill Thompson
Um, I mean, it's a philosophical thing for me. Uh, I, I just... Back when I used to do a lot more of this I, myself instead of running companies that do this, but when I was doing it on my own, um, essentially the Android operating system is published online and the AS- AOSP it's called, it's the open source project. Um, you used to be able to see most, like, a good amount of, um, uh, the inner workings of the phone essentially, um, and understand how it works and, and where the holes were. Um, I looked at it for two reasons. One reason was I was trying to develop implants or zero-days for the military at the time. Um, and, and Android being open allowed us to look into those types of things. And then the second reason was, um, it, I could dump the, my phone myself and look at it. So if I was traveling to a country where I was sure something was gonna be going on with my phone, or maybe I got pulled into secondary customs and my phone was out of my hands for a while, um, it, it was a lot more, um, available to me to do that, whereas with Apple it was very difficult to do those types of things.
- CWChris Williamson
Does that not make it-
- BTBill Thompson
It's a closed architecture
- CWChris Williamson
... does it not make it more secure that it's a closed architecture that doesn't allow you to see where potential vulnerabilities are? If you're able to just-
- BTBill Thompson
As long as you trust the company.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. So you've got, um, on one hand how much I trust Apple, and on the other hand, how competent I think people that can look at the Android operating system to find its vulnerabilities are?
- BTBill Thompson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. Okay. Okay.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah. And I'd rather be able to look for myself.
- CWChris Williamson
Have you got any idea what the justification is for getting access to somebody's phone without them giving permission?
- BTBill Thompson
You don't need a lot of justification with things like the Patriot Act. I mean, with those things hanging around, it's just-
- CWChris Williamson
Even though that was created before phones and operating systems for phones.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah, at that point they were going after the, um, telephonic in- infrastructure. So microwave links, um, down and up channel links from, um, uh, uh, BTS's, base transceiver stations, um-
- CWChris Williamson
That's tapping into signals
- BTBill Thompson
... the infrastructure.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah. And, and the signals that live from the cell- from the tower to the cellphone.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, but by, by saying infrastructure, you've kind of future-proofed yourself for if there's going to be technology that comes out which is a different kind of infrastructure.
- BTBill Thompson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, th- oh, so it was very cleverly written, unless they updated it in future.
- BTBill Thompson
Well, they updated it and made it more us- it's more usurpatious. It's one of the most usurpatious-
- CWChris Williamson
What's that word?
- BTBill Thompson
... pieces, uh, usurping, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Right, right, right
- BTBill Thompson
... uh, underwrite, like, uh, underhanded. Um, it was d- you know, the Patriot Act. Can you think of a more innocuous term for something?
- CWChris Williamson
Department of Peace.
- BTBill Thompson
Uh, and it just, uh, it's, it's just one of those things where, you know, we would, we would need a six-hour podcast to pull the string on how we got there, but it's, it's, uh, a conflation of a lot of useful idiots looking for power-
- 3:35 – 9:13
How is Information Collected and Distributed?
- BTBill Thompson
keys away to anything. Um, uh, when you want to go after someone furtively or undercover, um, you go to a court that's, you know, pa- you know, part of the NSA or part of the, the triumvirate three-letter soup agencies. And you go to this judge and you say, "Hey, we think this guy's, you know, we think Chris is a bad guy. He's, he's actually here spying for the English and-"
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm
- BTBill Thompson
... "here's three reasons why," and the court will sign it, and it never sees the light of day and-
- CWChris Williamson
I never thought about this. Uh, uh, Meta, even now, OpenAI, you know, relatively new company, they must have, "Hey, we've found this person that we think is potentially a bad guy. We need access to their ChatGPT logs."
- BTBill Thompson
I'm sure that's happening.
- CWChris Williamson
So for every big platform, uh, uh, software and hardware-
- BTBill Thompson
Mm-hmm
- CWChris Williamson
... there is going to be some form of interface between them-
- BTBill Thompson
Yes
- CWChris Williamson
... and the government, and for some of them-
- BTBill Thompson
A formal and informal. So there'll be the, the government, and this is, uh, I'll, I'll, I'll use the, I'll use the proxy, "a government." I won't say the U.S. government again 'cause I don't wanna get sued. They'll do a overt relationship that's got a memorandum of understanding or an agreement between, or a memorandum of agreement between the two companies saying, you know, "Here," and it'll be very, you know, what you would expect to see. "If there's a terrorist or something like that, you guys are gonna help us." But then there'll be s- alternate channels that will get built, you know, um, on the clandestine side, where the government will, uh, a government will recruit someone in that place to say, "Hey, you're in charge of the, uh, security," or, "You're in charge of the infrastructure here." You know, um, "You've got a daughter who needs really good cancer treatment. We could hook her up with Johns Hopkins or something like that." I'm not saying the U.S. government. Governments do it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- BTBill Thompson
Um, allegedly. And so they'll set these relationships up, um, you know, uh, the, the triumvirate that you think about when it concerns, um, spying is, uh, uh, placement, access, and, and, and, uh, uh, motivation, susceptibility, um, and, uh, accessibility. So when you're loo- looking at a source, someone you wanna recruit to spy-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- BTBill Thompson
... it's does he work in the organization? Does he have access to the information that we want? Is he motivated to share that information? And can I access him when he's outside of the organization to get, you know, a hold of the, um, the secrets?
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
Um, and that- that's what you... You know, I, I was also trained in the military as a human intelligence, um, operator, which is a, you know, recruiting people to, um, screw over their own countries. So, uh- Those are the things that you consider. And so, you know, and if the Americans wouldn't do it, then they'll allow the English or some other Five Eyes organization to do it, and then they'll talk to them. So, you know, the, the, the Americans might know that the English has recruited a spy in for inside of a MI5 or MI6 has recruited a spy inside of an organization that they can't recruit against-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- BTBill Thompson
... at least on the books. Um, so they'll just get debriefed by a Five Eyes partner who's doing the same thing, so.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, okay. So, uh, one country that is in partnership with another one has been able to place somebody who will feed information back to them in an organization that-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah, the English don't care about the Bill of Rights
- CWChris Williamson
... that a different country-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... can't do that.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
But y- as long as the umbrella at the top is able to disseminate that information back down-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah, and or-
- CWChris Williamson
... everybody can share
- BTBill Thompson
... or they'll just collect against that. They'll know that there's a spy here, so then the, a, a security agency will collect against that spy while he's operating in the country-
- CWChris Williamson
Right
- 9:13 – 11:21
Can Humans Keep Up With Technology?
- CWChris Williamson
need to understand the technology.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But the people understanding it from the government side are never gonna be as talented as the people that are building it.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
So you're always in a race that you're-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, very far behind.
- BTBill Thompson
Very few organizations are as competent as the free market, um, inside of the US government. One of them would be DARPA. I advised there for a couple of years. It's kind of the black box of, uh, the, the DOD. Their job is to, like, just come up with holy shit ideas. Um, and then they get, you know, a, a budget to, to work after these things. Oftentimes they'll fund things that they don't, they know will not be built, but they're hoping that there'll be spinoffs from the idea that will help. So they might say, like, "We wanna build..." I always use this, um, analogy. We might wanna build a, you know, a, a, a rocket ship that can make it to Mars in half the time. That's just something easy-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- BTBill Thompson
... we can talk about. So they'll fund that. Um, and the only thing useful that might come out of it might be a new type of carbon fiber that they had to develop as one of the subject lines. So one of the, the key performance parameters was this new type of carbon fiber that was lighter and stronger. So they never built the rocket ship, but they have three other products that came out of it, and then those things get released into the free market.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
So it's quite a useful organization. It's quite good actually. Um, it was more applicable back in, like, the '80s and the '70s because, um, technology hadn't evolved to the point where any big idea was gonna n- need hundreds of millions of dollars. Whereas today, there's people out there like Elon and others who can fund these really big ideas. So it's still a good organization, but that, that would, that, I would say that's the last bastion of competence inside of the government. Otherwise, it's a totally incompetent, um, organization.
- CWChris Williamson
What was it that you said? You had human hacking as well as software hacking. What was the-
- BTBill Thompson
Well, human intelligence is the gathering of intelligence through human, like, you know, source and method means, sources and methods means. And then there's, um, uh, the government calls it ethical hacking, which is really a ridiculous moniker, um, where you're, you know, you're exploiting computer systems and building things like zero-days, and you're exploiting, um, structural, um, cracks or crevices in technology, and sometimes you'll never use them. They'll just sit on the shelf, and that's kinda where the term zero-day comes from. It's like break in clase- in case, break glass in case of
- 11:21 – 17:05
Why Companies Hack Their Own Systems
- BTBill Thompson
emergency.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
And then there'll be other ones that get used all of the time. And then, uh, there'll be people who do this in the government. There'll be people who do this, um, you know, white ha- white, white hat hackers, um, who will expose these things and then, you know, either do it for a bounty with a company or do it to enable something they're trying to do on their own side.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, okay. So these people who are talented hackers get employed by a company to see if they can break their own system.
- BTBill Thompson
That was my first job offering when I got out of the military, was to do it for a bank. My friend, I have a very good friend who, we went through the same training pipeline together and, uh, we were both offered a very good amount of money from a bank to just go after their own infrastructure and then report back on how we were able to, um, you know.
- CWChris Williamson
It's a weird kind of ransom.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It's a, it's a victimless ransom-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... that only makes things stronger.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah. Right. Yes, exactly. Penetration testing is the, is the [chuckles] is the unfortunate moniker. [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Ha ha. Uh, when it comes to getting access to information systems, how often is it a software hack and how often is it a human hack?
- BTBill Thompson
Uh, well, that depends on how-- It depends on your budget and how fortified the infrastructure is and how w- how they treat operational security or OPSEC.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
So you'll do, like, a target profile. You'll, you'll-- You know, your commander or whoever you work for will state a goal. "We want access to, you know, X information at, you know, X organization," whatever that might be. And then you'll get a bunch of people l-like myself and from other disciplines. There's, there's multiple-- There's many modes of intelligence, especially within the DOD. There's, uh, MASINT, there's FISINT, there's ELINT, there's COMINT, there's, um, cyber, there's open source intelligence. MASINT is, uh, measuring an area signals. Um, uh, FISINT is telemetry intelligence, so, you know, a space shuttle will report back information to the ground station as it's ascending, or a, a, or a plane will be giving information back to its ground station while it's maneuvering. Uh, it's the interception of that information. There's ELINT, which is electronic intelligence, going after, um, radars associating with, uh, aircraft or AAA batteries or early warning radars or fire control radars on, on ships or airplanes, um, the interception of those signals and parsing it. Uh, I realize I said a bunch of, uh, uh, acronyms and didn't explain them, so now I'm explaining them. And there's open source intelligence. Uh, there's a variety of intelligence. So you'd have all of those people in the room who conduct those things, and they'd say, "What are the vulnerabilities?" Um, you know, "We've done a target analysis of this. What are the vul- vulnerabilities or likely vectors that we can access?" Um, and if you've got a budget, so, you know, what are some of the cheapest ways? Well, the cheapest ways are always recruiting humans that work inside of the organization. So whether it's terrorists or government or infrastructure. But-
- CWChris Williamson
That's always cheaper than trying to hack the technology?
- BTBill Thompson
Ninety-five percent of the time it's cheaper. It depends. Again, it depends on what technology we're going after. Um, if it's a, you know, a 3G Nokia in, in Iran, uh, that's an easy day. If it's a, uh, uh, you know, uh... Let's see, what would be something very difficult? Um, a highly encrypted satellite communication network where you need to be in the physical footprint of the satellite lobe in order to do the collection. That's placement, that's access, that's money, that's recruiting, that's hacking-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. Mm
- BTBill Thompson
... that's decryption. There's a bunch there. So it really depends on the nature of the target and the technology. Um, but, uh, generally, inside of an organization, there will be people with loose morals, and you can obviously often get a lot out of them for just paying them 30 or 40 or 50K, or, you know, finding out someone who runs the security network whose daughter needs eye surgery or has macular degeneration.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- BTBill Thompson
You bump into them at a coffee shop and strike up a conversation, and, "I like what you like," and establish rapport, and then eventually you get to the point where you recruit them, and then you pay them, and then you get your information.
- CWChris Williamson
That's more classic spy craft-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... type stuff.
- BTBill Thompson
Much more c- Yes, exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm.
- BTBill Thompson
Yep. So I was trained in that classically while I was in the military, but it was in order to conduct, um, forensic exploitation, um-
- CWChris Williamson
Forensic exploitation?
- BTBill Thompson
Yes. In, in, in support of these types of operations. So-
- CWChris Williamson
What's, what's forensic exploitation?
- 17:05 – 20:48
The Biggest Exploitation Hack
- BTBill Thompson
I'm going to, um, use the network and send a message that's looking like it's coming from that person saying, "Hey, Chris, come and check this link out," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- BTBill Thompson
You know, it'd be innocuous or a website or something like that that it sends you to, but then it would deliver some packets that would implant itself in, you know, uh, a part of your telephone. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
That was specifically for iPhone, iOS?
- BTBill Thompson
Uh, yeah. I, but, but I believe it branched out since then. So Pegasus was post my military career.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- BTBill Thompson
So I didn't actually get to go and do the f- exploitation on it that I wanted to do on it, or that I would have wanted to do on it. I read some papers. I talked to some friends who are still in and asked them about it. Um, but, uh, it lived in a different place on the phone than it would even stand up to a person like me doing a quick, um, triage natured forensics exploitation where I'd dump the phone and look through it.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- BTBill Thompson
It was stored in a place where it wasn't obvious that you should be looking for any type of code there, uh, or malicious code there.
- CWChris Williamson
Who made it?
- BTBill Thompson
Uh, I, I mean, I believe it was made by the Israelis. Um, I, I think that's common knowledge. That certainly was one of the most like, "Holy shit, these guys cracked the nut here." Um, say what you will about Israel, um, they certainly have their tradecraft and their military operation planning, um, down well.
- CWChris Williamson
Dude, if you can blow the balls off three thousand-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... fucking enemy combatants-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... at the same time using a pager.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah. Oh man, I wish I'd have been a part of something like that. That'd have been great.
- CWChris Williamson
That kind of fell away, that news story. It was, I mean, it, it happened, everyone was interested in it, but that to me seems like one of the most, like insane-
- BTBill Thompson
Oh, they should make a movie about that
- CWChris Williamson
... precise-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah. Yeah. It would be just years of target development, sourcing, corporate espionage, supply chain interdiction. The amount of things that had to go into that to make that happen, uh, th- you know, just getting plastique or whatever they use inside of a, you know, a, a pager, that's easy. Uh, supply interdiction, you know, making it through the network, paying off the right people, delivery, the patience to wait, you know, that they're with all of these people, uh, it's just, you know, that was a stroke of genius.
- CWChris Williamson
Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution? Something that identifies low T faster than a high school bully, and it won't cost you all your lunch money. That's where Function comes in. Gives you access to over 160 lab tests, including a deep dive into your full hormone panel. Every result is reviewed by clinicians. Anything out of range is flagged, and you get clear explanations with a personalized protocol with actionable next steps. So if something's off, you know exactly what to do about it. Whether you just need to go to the gym more or you need to play Creed louder in your car, Function will tell you exactly where your testosterone and everything else stands. Normally, this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's $365 a year. That's $1 a day to stop guessing with your health and start knowing. And right now you can get $25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. Why were they using pagers? Is that more secure somehow?
- BTBill Thompson
There, there was... They probably, yeah, they probably got the idea that smartphones are no longer secure, so now we're gonna go revert back to, um... Which is actually, you know, throughout my time in the global war on terrorism, that was definitely a thing that would happen. Like, we'd nail down one type of technology, we'd exploit it, we'd kill a bunch of people, and then they'd, you know, pivot to a different piece of technology or regress back to, um, you know, something more primitive. They did the same thing even with, um, IEDs. You know, IEDs started very primitively, you know, pressure sensors, uh, pressure triggers.
- 20:48 – 25:17
Why Threats Are Constantly Changing
- BTBill Thompson
Um, you had to physically, you know, manipulate it, you know, drive over something.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
And then they got to command and detonated, and then they got to using garage doors that were operating in a frequency band that the, uh, the initial Magellans that we put out, which were sensing the RF environment, would tell you if there was something in the area, uh, and set it off. So then they started using the garage door openers that were in a very low frequency band range that was outside of the Magellans. The Magellans pivoted, and then they went back to, uh, remote-
- CWChris Williamson
Pressure
- BTBill Thompson
... pressure.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- BTBill Thompson
And, or, or running a wire up to a hotel room and sitting in the hotel room and waiting. So, you know, like you said, the free market can pivot and develop new technology. In, in asymmetric warfare, in asymmetric warfare, the threat can pivot, especially when you're dealing with somebody who doesn't wear a uniform and doesn't care about the law of Geneva Conventions. They'll just go wherever they need to go to keep being battlefield effective.
- CWChris Williamson
Whatever's most effective.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah, exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Uh, this is what we saw in Ukraine, right? With drones that, uh, $500 drone with-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... a bit of plastic explosive-
- BTBill Thompson
The DJI
- CWChris Williamson
... yeah, was able to find the weakness in this particular tank, so then the tanks got webbed, uh, like, uh, frontage, like prongs-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... at the top so that they would get caught.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, so we'll find a way to get around that. Uh, so then EMP blasts will be used to knock them out of the sky. So then we'll run basically big fucking strings, big cords.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It's this rapidly evolving-
- BTBill Thompson
It's like that baseball game with the bat where you're-
- CWChris Williamson
Yep
- BTBill Thompson
... putting hands over the top and then-
- CWChris Williamson
Yep
- BTBill Thompson
... you know, roshambo or whatever they used to call it. It's the same thing. You're just, "How, how can we pivot?" That's what the military and the government by and lar- by and large is really bad at, is pivoting and responding to pivoting, because we're militaries that are built around symmetric threats. We were thinking about the Russians, we were thinking about the Chinese, and, you know, that's, you know, Geneva Conventions, law of land warfare. You know, there's ge- certain gentleman rules that you'll obey and say-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- BTBill Thompson
... "We're not gonna do th- we won't target civilians, we won't target churches, we won't target mosques, we won't do these types of things." And then, you know, terrorists just look at that and say, "Oh, they're showing us their weaknesses. Let's run all of our operations..." You know, I just read a news report the other day about Gaza using the hospitals as torture facilities. Um, it was just like two or three days ago. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Fucking hell, that's morbid.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah, yeah, so they're just overtaking these hospitals. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
There was, um, a book. I, I brought the author on. I wa- I wasn't ever able to actually release the episode, but I brought an author on who had written a book that was about all of the intelligence failures of America.
- 25:17 – 32:03
Is DOGE Really a Mess?
- CWChris Williamson
all of the fucking waste and fraud that this is being spent on.
- BTBill Thompson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
And the guy that's paying the most tax was also the guy that was trying to remove some of the inefficiencies-
- BTBill Thompson
Yes
- CWChris Williamson
... to be able to, as opposed to pouring more into the top, it's like, let's make the system that spits it out the bottom more efficient so that we can actually get more of it. We have some taxes going in. Lots of that's being wasted. How can we make it more efficient?
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I had, um, the, uh, CIO, the chief information officer for the Treasury Department, uh, Sam Cocos, who st- founded Levels. I had him on the podcast last year, and he's the ... It was the first long form interview that anybody from DOGE had done, um, at his level.
- BTBill Thompson
I think I saw that one.
- CWChris Williamson
Great.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But he's like, "Dude, it's fucking ancient."
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
This entire organization is a big lumbering behemoth. Uh, it leans left as well internally, and it's not agile. It's not able to be kept up to date. And all of these systems, it's ... He was explaining, it's like 16 intersecting different systems that need to ... Well, this type of information is held on this particular type of database, and we need to do a lookup request that comes across to this one. So it's not one cohe- it's not a big fuck off Excel spreadsheet-
- BTBill Thompson
Right
- CWChris Williamson
... right, that just holds everything.
- BTBill Thompson
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
It's this Frankenstein's monster that's been, like, contorted over time to ... I- it functions. It functions in as much as the country hasn't fallen apart-
- BTBill Thompson
Right
- CWChris Williamson
... and you're able to, like-
- BTBill Thompson
Right
- CWChris Williamson
... submit taxes and you're able to pay them. But, uh, yeah, it's, um, it's a mess. It's a mess.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah. It's ... It ... Um, my experience was, my last job when I left the military was I was advising, um, a, a two-star general and a full bird colonel who were in charge of all of the of- offensive cyber development for the army. So offensive cyber is hacking. It's another term.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- BTBill Thompson
Uh, offensive cyber operations. Um, OFCO is what we called it. Um, they're ... They, they recognized the ridiculousness of the program. But all of these programs, you get a budget for the year, and if you don't execute the whole budget, I've never seen a general get dressed down more than when I'd be sitting at the Pentagon behind them and they hadn't executed the full budget. There were these three guys, and I can't remember their names, but they sat in, like, what was the G357, which is in chop- in charge of operations, um, training, and sustainment or something like that. But they were the ones who gave the money. So they would say to general so-and-so, "Here's your $100 billion for this year."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
If they executed only $99 billion and there was a billion left over, they were gonna get fired. If they hadn't spent every penny. So the general- or the, the president puts out what's called the National Intelligence Priority Framework, which is the NIPF covers here are the effects that I want the U.S. military to have on the battlefield. They need to be able to do these things, and here are the peers and near peers in these areas, and here are the countries that we don't wanna go after. So I would sit down with the, with the general, um, after he got hi- they would flow down to this general who's in charge of of- offensive cyber, and then we'd have these round tables where we would say, you know, "In this area, what can we go after? Um, what product lines that we have that already support these efforts? Um, uh, which one of these can we not do, or should we tell them that we'll either need more funding, or it's not a vector that we should pursue at this time?" And we would go over all of those things, and we would think that we got most of the budget programmed. That was the sole thing that drove everything, and this is the most frustrating part. It really opened my eyes to government. Budget and money drove every- everything. It didn't even really matter if we were me- um, meeting the president's requirements. As long as we got to say we ... As long as we could lie to a threshold that they wouldn't be able to figure out that we were executing the budget-
- CWChris Williamson
Wow
- BTBill Thompson
... it just needed ... The money needed to be spent. That was what it was all about.
- CWChris Williamson
So there's not any, uh, espionage and subterfuge happening externally, it's also happening internally.
- BTBill Thompson
Yes. And, uh, and, and then when the money wouldn't get spent, you would, like, every, all the military guys would get ... And I, there was only a few in the organization. It was mostly civilians. Um, I would say 85% of it was civilians. They would get pulled in and say, "Look, we've still got $100 million, and it's, it's July. The budget's up in September. Where can we spend money right now?"
- 32:03 – 36:58
How AI Is Supercharging Hacking
- BTBill Thompson
Um, and, and in hacking it's the same thing. Again, I've really been outside of hacking for probably three years now, four years. Um, I was advising some friends, um, on the side with like a s- a small company where they would just... I'd be a good idea fairy, and they would tell me the targets and the, and the, and, and the networks that they were looking at, and then I'd recommend ideas or here's what you can do, or, "Hey, that one uses HF comms, you know, you could, you could sit and intercept these HF comms from this area. Go and do this." I would do that type of thing, but for the large part now I- I'm running two and almost three companies now. I've largely gotten out of that space.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
But I would imagine it's the same thing. So what you would do is you would, you would get a, a blob or like w- w- you know, a technical dump of a particular device that you're, you're targeting, and you would feed it to an AI, and it's probably being done in the Pentagon right now, um, Anthropic or OpenAI or whatever. There's probably a hacking version l- of this, I would imagine. Like I said, I haven't been in there for a while.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
And you basically say, "What are the e-" "Here's a, here's a router. Here's everything we know about it. Here's how it looks. Here's all of the logic. Here's all the hardware. Here's the firmware. Here's the software that runs on it. T- tell me where the chinks in the armor are."
- CWChris Williamson
Brute force the fuck out of this.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah. And say, it'd say, "Hey, the IP tabling is messed up here. Um, they haven't patched that yet." Or they'd say, "This buffer can be overflowed and it will give you access. You can go here." Or, "On this network diagram that you passed me, um, it looks like all of these are being, um, provisioned by the same IT guy, um, and you have historical reporting that says he uses password, password for his passwords." You know, all of these things would be looked at-
- CWChris Williamson
Jesus Christ
- BTBill Thompson
... and gone through. Um, and that tar- that target development cycle now would've been three to six months in the past, or even a year or two. You know, we would get a phone and dump the phone. A, a p- a phone would become popular in the Middle East. We'd dump the phone, we'd get the EL1 file, which is just the to- to- you know, every, as much code as you can get on a phone, and we'd comb through it and look for the vulnerabilities. That can be a year process, you know, three to, uh, three months to a year easily to do that.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
Unless there's parts of the code that ha- You know, unless that the, you know, Apple 13, a lot of the same code exists in the 14, therefore the same exploits or it hasn't been patched, a lot of that would be there. But when you're talking new phone or new e- architecture or new ecosystem, um, easily you can spend a year, and now I think there's probably a month at most people would spend on these things, and probably most of the work's getting done in the first three hours. [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
AI-powered hacking, I would've guessed, you know, with some of the, some of the nightmares that we've seen over the last couple of years, uh, there was a few in retail in the UK. I would've guessed the AI-fueled hacking would've just like exposed all of these vulnerabilities.
- BTBill Thompson
I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is.
- CWChris Williamson
I, I don't know. We... I haven't heard many, many massive stories about it.
- BTBill Thompson
I don't think you would hear a lot about it. Um, um, maybe. Uh, but I'm, I'm 100... Because a lot of models, so this is a, a bit esoteric. It, it, it ba- basically comes down to training data and power. A lot of the math and a lot of the algorithms that AI uses or, or, or at least instan- the, uh, initial instantiations of it use were around since the '70s and the '80s. Like we knew the math behind a convolutional neural network or a, or, or a long short-term memory, um, neural network which is a derivative of a recurrent neural network. We knew a lot about how this stuff was gonna work, but we lacked two things. We lacked the compute, which we got through like tensor processing units or GPUs, and we lacked training data, which we got through the internet.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
So, um, th- there's more to it, but the, largely those are the, the three things, the, uh, part of the awesome sauce for training an AI model. So there are people out there certainly who are gonna be able to train their own models and use their own code repositories that they've generated for different exploits over time, and train their own internal network on their own GPU on their own server in their own basement.
- CWChris Williamson
Without any-
- BTBill Thompson
Without-
- CWChris Williamson
... guardrails on it.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah, um, yeah. They wouldn't... Yes. That w- Certainly it's being done by organized crime right now. There's no way it's not being done.
- CWChris Williamson
What are the most common things that organized crime are using hacking for?
- BTBill Thompson
Uh, access to phones is a big one. Um, um, uh, uh, banking, uh, stuff associated with Bitcoin, um, things associated with, uh, uh... Well, they're embedding. There's a lot of it embedding.
- CWChris Williamson
What do intelligence operators understand about human behavior that most civilians don't, do you think?
- BTBill Thompson
[clears throat] So I'm not, I, I... So I'm trained in human intelligence. My human intelligence operations that I ran were usually to enable a separate part of an operation, as I alluded to before. But that being said, I learned how to do car pickups, car drop-offs, uh, bumps, initiate, debrief, um, handle a source, all of those things. Um, but it was meant for a different aspect of the mission. I think that really when it
- 36:58 – 47:15
Do Intelligence Operators Know You Better Than You Do?
- BTBill Thompson
comes to, uh, what other... Well, you asked the question what other people don't understand. I guess what I would ask you back, what kind of other people? Because I think when you talk about somebody who's really been around the block, Rogan has a very deep understanding of people. I, I... Sometimes he can quickly suss people out, like, "Is this guy full of bullshit? Is this guy angling? Is this guy doing this?" A- and I've seen it enough to where, um, it's a pattern I've now seen over the past few years, where he's good, very good at figuring out who good people are and who shitty people are. He just has that tick.
- CWChris Williamson
It's an interesting skill. I, I think I kind of become fascinated by rich and powerful men, uh, distorting reality around them, especially when you walk into a room.
- BTBill Thompson
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
But then when you get to very, very-
- BTBill Thompson
Their gravity
- CWChris Williamson
... yeah, that having spent some time around some pretty fucking powerful and influential people, when they walk into a room, the whole vibe of the room changes. People aren't, uh, just, people are unable to act normally-
- BTBill Thompson
Yes
- CWChris Williamson
... around them. And then after a while, it would be like some weird version of Stockholm syndrome where you go, "Well, this is just what the world is. Everybody treats me in this sort of a way. Isn't that strange?" And people can't hold it together-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... when they're in the presence of somebody that they really admire, they've got loads of respect. Maybe they think that they can get something from them, or they want them to like them, and/or this person is maybe the gateway between them and a thing that they think that they want. Uh, he's so powerful and rich and cool, and I wanna be associated with him. Maybe we could be friends and da pa pa pa, and before you know it, you're the guy garbling his words to a hot girl-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... trying to hang with somebody in a comedy green room.
- BTBill Thompson
Yes. And the, the reason I brought up Rogan was because i- in the mil- uh, especially in the military, now when I was dealing with the CIA or I was dealing with the DIA, who have their own, um, source recruitment, um, divisions, um, the, everyone can do, everyone can go to the farm or everyone can go to, in the military, the, the Fort Huachuca is where they run the courses there, um, and learn how to recruit a source. And the 30% of people who can do it can do it to effect once they've learned the how. So the, the military breaks it down into a very rigged a- approach, and oftentimes the people that you're recruiting are people who have shown up to a base and said, "Hey, I think my brother's gonna blow some car up," or, "I think-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- BTBill Thompson
... this X, Y, or Z." And then they'll say-
- CWChris Williamson
Warm leads
- BTBill Thompson
... "Oh, that person is a lead. Let, let's go recruit that person." And so most people can do that. Now there's a separate class. There's, there's categories of human intelligence sources, and those are derived from what their placement and access is. So, you know, a guy who is a gate guard at an IBM is, like, lower... cat III, cat IV, very low source, but he can give you access, or he could get you a security card, or he could get you X, Y, or Z. So there's value, val- it's valuable. Um, you just pay that guy off. And then there's cat III, cat II, cat I. Cat I sources would be like, "I'm recruiting the Secretary of Defense for the, you know, British government," or whatever you guys call him, Defense Secretary, Defense Prime Minister, whatever that person's called.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
"I'm recruiting that guy." That's a level one source. So that level one source requires an artisan, somebody who really knows his craft-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- BTBill Thompson
... and someone who can really create circumstances and understand a target. But he also, the reason I brought up Rogan is because they also have that thing where they can quickly deduce a person and, and put them down and understand exactly what motivates this person, have a very good idea of what motivates this person, um, the tactics that they're gonna use, how they're gonna keep them interested, and they can do that with, like, a 15-minute conversation.
- CWChris Williamson
Just an insanely strong theory of mind.
- BTBill Thompson
Yes, and, and, and, and, and, and rigorous. Uh, uh, it's, it's one of those things where you have to have the anima and the animus. You have to have the structure to follow the cycle, and you have to have the diligence and the patience and the, and, and the, the, all of those virtues, because deviating from the cycle that's been around for 1,000 years will get you killed. But then he's also gotta have the artistry or the anima, uh, to be able to navigate the p- chaos and, and get thrown all different types of punches, or this thing happens, or he gets rolled up at a checkpoint, or he is now getting recruited and this has turned into a CI operation. And to navigate all of those things, you need somebody who's got real command of their total self-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- BTBill Thompson
... who can, who can deal with the rigor and, and apply all of that, but then can play jazz when it's needed.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- BTBill Thompson
And then have the wisdom, uh, to do all of those things that I talked about. And most guys at that point are 40 or 45 before they have that. But man, this, these guys, you know, you get three of these guys, you can take over a country.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, you know you said about cat IV, cat III, cat II, cat I. Cat I would be super, super high-
- BTBill Thompson
Yep. Yep, yep
- CWChris Williamson
... value target.
- 47:15 – 54:39
Who is the Most Surveilled Person in the World?
- CWChris Williamson
big fucking family, so yeah.
- BTBill Thompson
Yes. Big fucking family. Um, I would be... Y- You think anybody in the tech sector. It also depends on, you're asking me this, who am I recruiting for?
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
You know, if I'm recruiting for the Chinese, that would be one set of people. If I'm recruiting for the Russian, that'd be another set of people.
- CWChris Williamson
Original, original question was just like of all humans on the planet, seven billion, whatever it is now, eight billion, uh, who has got the most amount of eyeballs looking at them digitally?
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah. So as you restate that, I actually realize I'm wrong. I'd probably want to recruit people who work for Elon. I wouldn't want to recruit Elon.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
I'd want to recruit someone close to him because I talked about accessibility being one of the vectors when you're doing a target profile.
- CWChris Williamson
So inaccessible.
- BTBill Thompson
Very inaccess- Even if I'm friends with him, he's inaccessible. I would never be able to get him to show up for a meet [laughs] like to debrief him or to get any information from him. Um, so you'd want to recruit someone around him, and, and that's the same thing. You know, that, that's the thing that's always kind of, um, made me scratch my head about Epstein. Um, uh, I, I would never, I would never wa- You know, people brought up Clinton and saying Clinton's now associated with Epstein. I'm sure there are nefarious, crazy things going on over there. Clinton's not a person I'd ever want to recruit. Clinton would be a nightmare of a target to try to manage or a source to try to manage. He's not someone you recruit. He's also not someone you leverage. You, you could... Maybe Epstein being an idiot wanted to set up all of these things and, and use them as leverage against them. That might be one play.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
But as far as saying, like, Israel's involved and, like, these things, possible. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
One of the most interesting ideas I've heard about Epstein was, uh, a friend who spoke to somebody in Israeli intelligence, and he, this guy said, "Do you know how fucking insulting it is that people say that we would have recruited that guy-
- BTBill Thompson
Yes
- CWChris Williamson
... after he was already popped-
- BTBill Thompson
Yes
- CWChris Williamson
... for soliciting sex from a minor?"
- BTBill Thompson
Horrible. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, and, uh, that was the mo- I don't know. The, the Epstein rabbit hole goes so fucking deep.
- BTBill Thompson
Oh, no, don't get me wrong. It's so... There's a lot going on there.
- CWChris Williamson
Very squirrely, and-
- BTBill Thompson
Yes
- CWChris Williamson
... that would be great cover. The fact that he's so obvious as to not be a normal standard candidate for being an intelligence operative would maybe be great cover for why he might ba, ba, ba, ba, ba.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But, uh, it, it was like, how unsophisticated and ungraceful do you think we are that we would recruit that guy, this very flash, very lavish, very public-facing dude with-
- BTBill Thompson
And what are you gonna recruit him with? He's rich. Anything that you would use to incentivize-
- CWChris Williamson
But the argument would be that the, the money wasn't his, that the money had come from them.
- BTBill Thompson
Oh, that's right. That's right, that's right, that's right. Um, it's just, the, the, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Still, it's an interesting, it's a, it's an-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- 54:39 – 1:03:59
Is the Bad Outgrowing the Good?
- CWChris Williamson
want to kind of flip the entire system over, but I don't think that it's as realistic as just coming up with a better alternative that aligns the incentives toward what you want. For instance- Ozempic plays within the rules of big pharma, but gets the outcome that you want, which is preferable.
- BTBill Thompson
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Right? It, it realizes that, hey, maybe we can try and take down these greedy corporations that are trying to capitalize on people's bad health so that they can keep them addicted or, or dependent on medications. Roger that. However, if you can just get a medication that gets the outcome that you want, that has minimal side effects through using innovation, you indoctrinate... 'Cause big pharma doesn't care about what the outcome is. What they care about, presumably, using this, if, if this is true, they care about is profits. Okay, so just that's their rule set.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
How can you get them to continue to make profits-
- BTBill Thompson
Mm-hmm
- CWChris Williamson
... whilst also making people healthier-
- BTBill Thompson
Yes
- CWChris Williamson
... or helping people to lose weight? You know, I-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... the long-term studies on all these GLPs and stuff aren't out yet. But that, to me, seems like a much, a much quicker way to do it. But as you've said there, this sort of intersecting, fucking endless spiral of, well, this thing that you thought happened maybe didn't happen for that reason. It happened to be an example to push back against so that it can keep people in a job, so that it can permit, uh, expansions of power, so that it can increase budgets, so that-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... the, the, there is still the opportunity for people, uh, uh, culturally to nudge the society in one direction or another. This is why I g- I think... I, I'm, like, not very conspiratorial. I'm very interested in-
- BTBill Thompson
I don't consider myself one either
- CWChris Williamson
... A-
- BTBill Thompson
Cui bono
- CWChris Williamson
The reason, the reason that I find it, like, interesting to be around my friends, but also sometimes it, it, uh, it's, like, quite fatiguing to me, my more conspiratorially-minded friends, is the, what I'm left with is not more certainty, it's just more, like, apathy.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I go, "I don't know what the fuck to think-"
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... "dude. I actually don't know what the fuck to think." For every incident that occurs, you can make an equal and opposite case for it being legitimate or not, or a, a, you know, f- fourth-wave Trojan horse, you know, triple agent that actually start... I'm like, "Fu-" I just, I have no idea what, I have no idea why to come up with all that.
- BTBill Thompson
What do I do with this information? [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. And I, and I, I think that that, even that could be the outcome.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
The desired outcome could be confusion and apathy.
- BTBill Thompson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
So even the meta of this entire situation is, wow, look, we can't convince people of any one narrative because there's too much information out there. Flood the system with more information and make them so confused that they have no conviction, as opposed to some conviction in a direction that we actually don't want.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and I'm not even saying they always design the means, and I'm not conspiratorial. I, I'm not a cyclops. There's good and bad to everything, just like you said with the GLPs. Obviously, if you're 400 pounds and, and you've got all of these snoring problems, you can't sleep, your chest is caving in on you, you've got diabetes, you're gonna lose your left foot. You've got all of these things going on. Obviously, get on a GLP-1 if you can't beat the food addiction, like go and do it, and then get healthy. But then learn how to deal with food-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- BTBill Thompson
... after you do that. But for sure, that's good that you're getting thin again and that you can sleep at night, or that you can make love to your wife, or that you can, you know, play sports with your kids. Like, all of those things are... The net good is there, right? Um, even if they said GLP-1s lessen your lifespan by five years. It's like, okay, if I'm 35 and 600 pounds, I've only got five years left.
- 1:03:59 – 1:13:16
How Bill Built Spartan Forge
- BTBill Thompson
my job was variable analysis for commanders. Uh, the commanders have a goal to kill bad guy. Hunters have a co- goal, a goal, harvest meat, have an experience with their son. Initiation rites, I think, is something that this country is in desperate need of. Hunting is a useful vector for initiation rites between a father and a son. Like, you've killed a deer now, today I treat you like a man. Baptism by the river, you're 16, now you're a dude. Uh, hunters, people hunt for all kinds of reasons. And so when I was leaving the military, I had anxiety and depression because I didn't know what I was gonna do when I got out. Like, I got paid to kill and break th- or to break things so that other guys could kill bad guys who were trying to harm our country and I, you know, got to, you know, had a blank check to just prosecute war, and I had a great amount of meaning and, from it. And, you know, I didn't... Looking back on the Iraq War, I wish we were never there, but certainly Afghanistan, the work I did in Africa, the work I did in the southern Philippines, we were killing bad guys and, um, people that would have killed us if we didn't kill them, um, and, uh, in most cases. And I was getting all this anxiety and I said, "What am I gonna do when I get out?" Like, how can I... I wanna keep having this meaning. Um, if I lose this, I'm, I'm gonna die. Like, I'm gonna become an alcoholic.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- BTBill Thompson
Like I said, I'm the only one in my family that wasn't addicted to drugs or alcohol, and I could feel the alcohol calling me, like, "Hey, I got something for you."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- BTBill Thompson
So I said, "What am I gonna do when I get out?" And I was a hunter, and I'd been bow hunting for a few years, and I thought, really these are just target analysis problems. A hunter and, and, and, and military guys have, they have variable analysis that they need to understand a target better so they can prosecute the target.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- BTBill Thompson
Hunters are the same way. So my company, Spartan Forge, that I started, um, the first product that we released was a, um, a, a neural network that did, um, deer movement prediction, which sounds kind of cliché, but hunters only have so much time off. So the first thing I, I, we built in this area was just a neural network that used collar GPS data from deer. So biologists, universities, private people would collar deer, and they would let them run, and they'd learn things about fawn recruitment or how many were getting killed by wolves, how they move, where they move, why they move. We took that data and we started building neural networks to predict movement. And out of that, we got a few thousand users. And then I started looking to mapping pro- program or mapping platforms after we had a few thousand users, and I really just wanted to focus on machine learning 'cause there's so much I can do in machine learning in the, in the hunting space. I'd never really wanted to get into mapping. But then there are these huge, you know, couple of multi-hundred million dollar corporations that are in the hunting and mapping space, and I met with them, and they were really offering me like, sounds like a lot of money, but like a half million dollars for like six or eight years of work. And I was like, "Look, I could go to work for Accenture next week and make that in a year."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
Like, that's not what I'm trying to do here. A, I'm trying to demystify the woods, and B, I wanna get people into the woods, and C, I think neural networks, machine learning, artificial intelligence, mapping, geospatial intelligence is gonna be a huge player in this space. So all of them kind of just- Said they did... This was 2015, so they were, like, hearing AI, and they had no idea what AI was. So, um, anyway, we, we said... I, I said, "Look, the hard part's the machine learning. The hard part's the neural networks. The hard part is the geospatial intelligence. Building a map box map and putting it in an app is not the hard part," which is what all these guys really are at the end of the day, is they're a map box map inside of a... So we built this Spartan Forge. Um, we've got, like, LiDAR, high-resolution imagery. Like, the imagery is five-centimeter imagery.
- CWChris Williamson
Jesus fucking Christ.
- BTBill Thompson
Uh, so you can see, like-
- CWChris Williamson
That's better than Google Maps.
- BTBill Thompson
Oh, it's far better, 100 times better than Google Maps. Um, you can see down into the ground.
- CWChris Williamson
Zoom in. Is that as m- that's as far as you can go, or can you go further?
- BTBill Thompson
I can go further.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, shit.
- BTBill Thompson
And then I can go back in time too. I can go back to 20-
- CWChris Williamson
Where have you taken this data from?
- BTBill Thompson
So we contracted with, um, an airp- a company that runs airplanes and, uh, we go in with a couple of other companies that are in, like, soil and mineral rights, real estate, other places. Um, there's a solar company. They need high-resolution imagery of the tops of houses so they can measure it for solar. Like, people knock on your door trying to sell you solar. Anyway, we throw in a bunch of money with them, and they collect this highly, highly, um, like, uh, high-resolution imagery that we have that goes back in time.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- BTBill Thompson
So we do all of that, and then we have LiDAR data. I'll, I'll make this really short, but LiDAR data and other things, so you can get a visual understanding of the ground where it rips away the trees. So what you can do is this is mapped using light data similar to how a radar works.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- BTBill Thompson
Um, then you can throw it into, like, a 3D, and my service is kind of weak right now, but once the service gets up, it, you, you can, um, see paths under the ground. Like, during hur- the hurricane in North Carolina, we gave a bunch of accounts to the first responders, and they were trying to get to houses that had been washed out, and the r- roads were washed out. But they were able to use our app to find paths that were used for logging trails in order to get to the back of these people place, these people's houses and deliver them, like, diabetes medication, um, oxygen if they were on, like, a, uh, emphysema machine.
- CWChris Williamson
Fuck me.
- BTBill Thompson
And then we had this, we have this capability called BlueForce Tracker where you can set up pins, so when there were roads washed out, they were using it. S- and so hunters can use it the same way. When they're organizing hunts, they can drop pins, and everyone sees them. They get the high-resolution imagery. They get the LiDAR. They get the historical imagery. They get the neural networks. Then we have our own neural network that we call Cyber Scout. So if you had never shot that bow that I gave you before, you could sit down with Cyber Scout and say, "Hey, I need to tune this bow. Here's the type of bow. How do I do it?" And it walks you through all of those things far better than, like, a ChatGPT would or other ones would because all of our training data is solely focused on hunting and best-in-class information on hunting. Neural networks often regress to the mean by giving you the broad spectrum of the internet, so you'll get some bad and some good data. We... Our retrieval documents that we use are all sourced from the highest caliber of hunting information. So, um, Cyber Scout, and soon it'll be interacting with your maps, so it'll tell you how to hunt an area, how to do all of those things. Um, but yeah, we started this company in, like, uh, 2017. We got our first mobile app in 2021, and then we, uh, um, uh, you know, uh, in the App Store right now, I think we're, like, number 14 in mapping or on outdoor or something like that. You know, hundreds of thousands of users. Um, and really all of it was born out of just a, really just kind of my first principles as a human, which are the tribe's important. Friends are important. Get out into the wilderness, disconnect, and get things. Paradoxically, I'm using an app to do that.
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- BTBill Thompson
But the reason I'm using an app to do that is because people have so little vacation, so little time. They want to hunt public land in, in Pennsylvania, and they live in Texas. Like, they can go up, they can scout through my app. They can understand things. They can drill down. They can use the high-resolution imagery. They can do all that stuff and at least have an idea of what the ground looks like before they get there, so that they can download an offline map and get disconnected and go out there and create some... You know, my favorite time as a CEO is on our social media, a father and a son will message me and say, "We've been targeting this buck for, like, three years. We'd never saw it, this whitetail buck, and my son and I, we're using your app. We use the neural network. We use the prediction. We use the high-quality mapping, and we figured out a spot. We got in there, and we killed a deer." And there's a father and a son holding a buck together that they're gonna eat dinner over or, you know, put on a wall and make a permanent memory. That is my favorite part of running this one company, is that experience right there, is just people going out and reconnecting with nature and being in it, but also buying down risk and, like I said, paradoxically through an app. But you can drop pins and tell your wife where you're gonna hunt, and if you're offline, if you fall from a tree stand or whatever, break your legs, they'll know where to send the, the people to go and help you out and, and all of that type of stuff. Um, so, you know.
- CWChris Williamson
Jesus fucking Christ. You're kind of a terrifying human. I'm very glad you are on our side.
- BTBill Thompson
What, what do you mean?
- CWChris Williamson
Just th- this, like, y- five-centimeter map data. Oh, by the way, also, I'm able to basically be Q from James Bond for a bunch of, like, scenarios.
- 1:13:16 – 1:14:54
Where to Find Bill
- BTBill Thompson
I'll usually farm that off to our QA team, but otherwise you're dealing with me. So you got questions about the app, you don't know how to get into bow hunting and you want to get into it, um, you want to learn through our Cyber Scout or through our app how to be a better hunter or just-
- CWChris Williamson
Joe, can you quickly grab the gift that I got today from outside?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Just while we're winding this up.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah, so they can find me there, and I'm happy to interact with people. After I did Rogan, I think I had 3,500 messages of people, and it took me-
- CWChris Williamson
You're a fucking glutton
- BTBill Thompson
... about a month.
- CWChris Williamson
Glut- glutton for punishment, dude.
- BTBill Thompson
Took me about a month and a half.
- CWChris Williamson
You should work for Zendesk.
- BTBill Thompson
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
You know, that could be your new... You know, you've, uh, could go and work for Accenture and do the whatever, whatever. Uh, I gotta say thank you as well, man. Like, this gift-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah, so-
- CWChris Williamson
... that you got me is so fucking beautiful.
- BTBill Thompson
Hoyt and Archery Country and Dialed Archery made that possible. They're all friends of mine. The guys at Hoyt, Tom from Hoyt's amazing. Uh, my buddy Tyler, I think you've met Tyler from Archery Country. Um, and, and, and Dialed Archery, my friends, um, uh, uh, Taylor and Jordan run that, you know, American-made. And, um, th- these great companies, and, uh, I work with all of them. And, uh, I, I, I was up- I was so upset because I thought, "Oh, he doesn't look like he has a bow." And then so I got all, ordered all this stuff, got it all put together, and we're gonna go tune you up with this at Archery Country. And then like three days ago, I saw a post where you had a bow.
- CWChris Williamson
Got a bow. But this is... You can never have too many bows, as I've been reliably-
- BTBill Thompson
No, that's true
- CWChris Williamson
... told by Cam Hanes. Dude, you're awesome. I appreciate you very much. And, uh-
- BTBill Thompson
Thank you for having me on
- CWChris Williamson
... I look forward to firing this, this sucker with you soon.
- BTBill Thompson
Awesome.
- CWChris Williamson
All right. Goodbye, everyone. Dude, yes. Lovely.
- SPSpeaker
Good? [outro music]
- CWChris Williamson
Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, another one that I know you'll love is just here.
Episode duration: 1:14:56
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode cx4e3FaInA4
