Modern WisdomEx-Military Hacker: The Secret World Of Government Surveillance - Bill Thompson
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
80 min read · 16,060 words- 0:00 – 3:35
Why Bill Doesn’t Trust Apple
- CWChris Williamson
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- 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 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
The 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, BTSs, 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
of it.
- CWChris Williamson
How much do you think... I've heard the people bring up 9/11, Patriot Act, after that, surveillance, NSA.
- BTBill Thompson
FISA.
- CWChris Williamson
All of the... FISA?
- BTBill Thompson
F- Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, right. I thought you meant the fucking-
- BTBill Thompson
Which has its-
- CWChris Williamson
I was like, how is Big Pharma involved in this?
- BTBill Thompson
No, I'm sorry.
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs] I was like, "She said got their fingers in everything." I knew it was the COVID vaccine.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Loop it round.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, FI- 5G. Um, uh, FISA is a Foreign Intelligence Security Act, which is a kangaroo court that sits near Fort Meade, Maryland. And when there's classified work going on, this is all, you can Google this, I'm not giving the ca- 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, 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, a-
- 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 US government again because 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 US 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 a, uh, placement, access, and, and, uh, uh, motivation, susceptibility, um, and, uh, accessibility. So when you're lo- looking at a source, someone you want to 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
- 9:13 – 11:21
Can Humans Keep Up With Technology?
- CWChris Williamson
It's gotta be hard when technology's able to move as quickly as it does to be able to keep up as well. Legislation just takes so long.
- BTBill Thompson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
And, and even working out, okay, what is the strategy we want to implement-
- BTBill Thompson
Hmm
- CWChris Williamson
... let alone can we get it past the appropriate hurdles-
- BTBill Thompson
Yes
- CWChris Williamson
... legislatively to get it brought in.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah, the staffing of that legislation and then the voting and the pork and-
- CWChris Williamson
And presumably the talent is always going to be on the side of the people building the technology, not legislating against it. Like, in order to be, to be able to legis- at least begin to understand how we want to compensate for this new type of technology, you need to understand the technology.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But the people understanding it from the government side are never going to 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.
- 11:21 – 17:05
Why Companies Hack Their Own Systems
- 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 case, in case, break glass in case of emergency.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- 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 hack, 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 that they want 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 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 [laughs] is the unfortunate moniker.
- CWChris Williamson
Ha-ha.
- BTBill Thompson
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, when it comes to getting access to information systems, how often is it a software hack and a, 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, 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, uh, 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. Then 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-
- CWChris Williamson
That's always cheaper than trying to hack the technology?
- BTBill Thompson
95% of the time it's cheaper. It, 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, a, you know, a... 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 would 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
That's more cal- Yes, exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. 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-
- 17:05 – 20:48
The Biggest Exploitation Hack
- CWChris Williamson
what are some of the gnarliest exploits or information hacks that are publicly available and you can talk about but not enough people know about?
- BTBill Thompson
I mean, Pegasus is probably the king of that. Um, it, it's basically a persistence, persistent implant that lives on the phone, um, that in its earliest iterations required you to click some type of link. So there would be a phishing element to it where, you know, you're getting an email or you're getting a text where, you know, I might, you know, conduct some exploitation on your phone and figure out you text a lot with person A. And then so now I'm going to, 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
Hmm.
- 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've wanted to do on it. I read some papers. I talked to some friends who were 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
Hmm.
- 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 a 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 3,000-
- 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. Uh-
- 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, 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 s- 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
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- 20:48 – 25:17
Why Threats Are Constantly Changing
- CWChris Williamson
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, um, pressure triggers. 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 l- 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 the most 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-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... with a bit of plastic explosive-
- BTBill Thompson
The DJI's
- 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 a l- 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-
- 25:17 – 32:03
Is DOGE Really a Mess?
- BTBill Thompson
time, so.
- CWChris Williamson
It's been an interesting loop to watch, uh, Elon's arc over the last, what, like two years or so.
- BTBill Thompson
Oh, very much so.
- CWChris Williamson
As with DOGE, right?
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Because I think it's this weird Ouroboros eating itself of, uh, we shouldn't have trillionaires because they're able to evade tax. We need to take more taxes. A lot of rich people say, "I want to pay taxes." I think the top, like, 1% of earners pay 30% of the taxes already. But the main concern of most rich, high tax paying people is look at all of the fucking waste and fraud that this is being spent on.
- 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 Corcos, 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, 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... 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... My experience was my last job when I left the military was I was advising, um, the, the, a two-star general and a full bird colonel who were in charge of all 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, their, 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.
- 32:03 – 36:58
How AI Is Supercharging Hacking
- CWChris Williamson
What's the role of AI in hacking now?
- BTBill Thompson
Uh, well, I mean, AI right now with, uh, you know, the code generation piece is getting robust. Uh, I don't think it's as robust as everyone else thinks it is. I mean, it's very good. There's a lot of, um, pluses to it. I, I'm obviously using it inside of our companies because it will-- The mundane code or the, the less, um, elegant code, um, that's been written a million times over, you can generate very quickly. It can be integrated. Someone can review it in your GitHub. The branch gets committed, and now you've got code that would've otherwise taken a week or two to develop, you get it developed in an hour. 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, uh, 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-" Like, "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, 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- 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- Now, 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. [chuckles]
- 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 d- 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, uh, m- 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 th- largely those are the three things, 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 guardrails on it.
- BTBill Thompson
Without... Yeah, I'm, yeah, they wouldn't... Yes. That 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 in betting. There's a lot of it in betting.
- 36:58 – 47:15
Do Intelligence Operators Know You Better Than You Do?
- CWChris Williamson
What do intelligence operators understand about human behavior that most civilians don't, do you think?
- BTBill Thompson
So I'm not, uh, uh... 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 comes to, uh, what other... Well, you ask 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?" And, 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, very-
- BTBill Thompson
The 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 want to be associated with him. Maybe we could be friends. And da, ba, ba, ba, 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- especially in the military, now when I was dealing with the CIA or I was dealing with 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, uh, 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 3, Cat 4, 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 3, Cat 2, Cat 1. Cat 1 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- BTBill Thompson
... 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, a- and, and, and rigorous... 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, uh, 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 to be able to navigate the 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 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 at 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.
- 47:15 – 54:39
Who is the Most Surveilled Person in the World?
- BTBill Thompson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Who do you think's the most surveilled human on the planet?
- BTBill Thompson
Elon Musk I'd probably say. At least... There, there's a laundry list of people that I would want to recruit, and he would be one of them.
- CWChris Williamson
Who else would be on it?
- BTBill Thompson
Uh, some of them I know, so I don't want to say their names. Um, who else would I be going after?
- CWChris Williamson
It'd be an interesting list that you're gonna give us of people who you don't know.
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah. Who I don't know.
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- BTBill Thompson
Um, uh, let's see. Uh, family of Trump would be another one I would be looking at.
- CWChris Williamson
It's a 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, 7 billion, whatever it is now, 8 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
Right
- 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, 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 were nefarious, crazy things going on over there. Clinton's not a person I'd ever want to recruit. Clinton would be a nightmare of a target to try to manage or a source to try to manage. He's not someone you recruit. He's also not someone you leverage. You, 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-
- 54:39 – 1:03:59
Is the Bad Outgrowing the Good?
- BTBill Thompson
going.
- CWChris Williamson
A lot of people have this same issue with Big Pharma.
- BTBill Thompson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- BTBill Thompson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, it's the same, it's the same-
- BTBill Thompson
Keep you fat
- CWChris Williamson
... it's the same dynamic. Yeah, so we can-
- BTBill Thompson
Big Pharma wants you taking Type 2 diabetes shots in your stomach, or whatever you have to do for Type 2 diabetes. They won't tell you to fast. They won't tell you to lose weight. You got heart problems or cholesterol problems, they're not gonna tell you to lose weight and go on a clean diet. They're gonna give you statins.
- CWChris Williamson
This i- the interesting thing here is, uh, just changing the incentives or coming up with a better solution. Like, this is why it's cool and, and, and noble, and I love when people want to kind of flip the entire system over. But I don't think that it's as realistic as just coming up with a better alternative that aligns the incentives toward what you want. For instance, 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?
- BTBill Thompson
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
It, 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, 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 are these 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 peop- 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, I don't consider myself one either.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh-
- 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-"
- 1:03:59 – 1:13:16
How Bill Built Spartan Forge
- CWChris Williamson
checkout. Can you take me through what your app does? Have you got it on your phone?
- BTBill Thompson
Oh, yeah. So, um, my applica- you know, my, my, uh, co-founder, um, co-founders were like, "Hey, you were on Rogan. You didn't mention our app until the very end."
- CWChris Williamson
Oh.
- BTBill Thompson
And I was like, "Sorry, I don't think about those things until it's time."
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. I'm in a fucking fun conversation.
- BTBill Thompson
Uh, so the app, the app is called Spartan Forge. Um, again, uh, there's, there's many things. God, there's so much into this. Um, I, I wanted people to get outdoors and, and I, I did this work while I was in the military. So while I was in the military, I was, you know, essentially my job was variable analysis for commanders. 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 sixteen, 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 thi- 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, [chuckles] had a blank check to just prosecute war, and I had a great amount of meaning and, from it. And, you know, I did-- Looking back on the Iraq War, I wish we were never there, but certainly Afghanistan, the work I did in Africa, the work I did in 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. 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 call our 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 d- 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, a hundred times better than Google Maps. Um, you can see down to the ground.
- CWChris Williamson
Zoom in more. 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 my gosh.
- BTBill Thompson
And then I can go back in time too. I can go back to, to where-
- 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 try selling 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 Blue Force 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.
- 1:13:16 – 1:15:28
Where to Find Bill
- CWChris Williamson
you fucking rule, man. Where should people go to check out everything you're doing?
- BTBill Thompson
Spartanforge.ai is our website. You can sign up there or you can download us through the app store. We're on Instagram. I said this on Rogan's podcast and I did, I did regret it, but I'll say it here too. When you have questions about the app or complaints or gripes, I, as the product owner, I see that as my bigger role than CEO. I answer all of the social media every morning. I spend about two hours. So when people say, I wish the app did this or it didn't do this or I didn't like this or hey, we did this hunt, you're dealing with me. Now, if you have a problem that needs a technical solution, I'll usually farm that off to our QA team, but otherwise you're dealing with me. So you got questions about the app. You don't know how to get into bow hunting and you want to get into it. You want to learn through our cyber scout or through our app how to be a better hunter or just-
- CWChris Williamson
Joe, can you quickly grab the gift that I got today from outside 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 about a month.
- CWChris Williamson
You're a fucking glutton for punishment, dude.
- BTBill Thompson
Took me about a month and a half.
- CWChris Williamson
You should work for Zendesk. You know, that could be your new, you know, I could go and work for Accenture and do the whatever, whatever. I got to say thank you as well, man. Like this gift-
- BTBill Thompson
Yeah. So-
- CWChris Williamson
... that you got me is so fucking amazing.
- 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. My buddy Tyler, I think you've met Tyler from Archery Country and, and, and Dialed Archery. My friends Taylor and Jordan run that, you know, American made and great companies. And I work with all of them. And I, I was, 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 going to go tune you up with this at Archery Country. And then like three days ago, I saw a post where you had a bow.
- CWChris Williamson
Got a bow, but this is, you can never have too many bows as I've been reliably told by Cam Hanes.
- BTBill Thompson
No, that's true.
- CWChris Williamson
Dude, you're awesome. I appreciate you very much.
- 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.
- BTBill Thompson
Good.
- 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: 1:15:30
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Transcript of episode cx4e3FaInA4
