Joe Rogan Experience #2473 - Bill Thompson
Joe Rogan (host), Joe Rogan (host), Joe Rogan (host), Bill Thompson (guest), Joe Rogan (host), Joe Rogan (host)
In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan Experience #2473 - Bill Thompson explores frontier reenactment, military cyberwarfare, and skepticism toward institutions and AI Thompson describes “rendezvous” camps where participants live with only pre-1840 gear, using them as a way to disconnect from modern life and transmit practical skills and rites-of-passage to younger men.
Frontier reenactment, military cyberwarfare, and skepticism toward institutions and AI
Thompson describes “rendezvous” camps where participants live with only pre-1840 gear, using them as a way to disconnect from modern life and transmit practical skills and rites-of-passage to younger men.
He explains traditional craftwork behind a gifted knife (bear-jaw handle, quilling, brain-tanned hides) and uses it to illustrate how immersive historical practice can feel authentically “of the era.”
The conversation shifts to culture and politics: both criticize ideological tribalism, argue for discipline and accountability, and discuss how “suicidal empathy” and normalized divorce can undermine communities and children.
Thompson outlines how bureaucracies (military and civil government) optimize for budget growth and self-preservation rather than mission outcomes, tying this to debt, fraud, and the “homeless industrial complex.”
Drawing on signals intelligence and offensive cyber operations experience, Thompson discusses phone/OS security trade-offs, distrust of Big Tech data monetization, Huawei/ZTE concerns, Pegasus-style exploits, and why “unhackable phones” are marketing fiction.
Key Takeaways
Immersive “constraints” can be a powerful antidote to modern overload.
Thompson frames rendezvous (no modern gear in camp) as a deliberate environment reset where people stop checking phones, re-learn practical skills, and quickly “forget” ambient stress from news and social media.
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Hands-on traditions can substitute for missing modern rites of passage.
He argues that formal transitions—where elders explicitly start treating a boy as a man—are culturally absent today, and that structured experiences (military, martial arts, demanding communities) can fill that gap.
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Institutional systems often optimize for inputs (budget, headcount) rather than outcomes.
From Pentagon budget execution to civic spending programs, he claims organizations are rewarded for spending allocations and expanding scope—creating perverse incentives even when “mission” metrics get worse.
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Ideological identity can turn people into predictable “propaganda tools.”
Both argue that self-labeling as strictly left/right leads to adopting positions that don’t fit reality, primarily to avoid ostracism; this crowds out useful ideas from the “other side.”
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Phone security isn’t one answer—it’s a threat model and trade-offs.
Thompson says the “most secure” device depends on who you are and who might target you; most people face low risk, but public figures and journalists should assume higher sophistication attackers.
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Android’s openness enables deeper verification, but convenience drives most choices.
He prefers Android partly because AOSP is inspectable and supports custom OS options (e. ...
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Big Tech “free” features frequently monetize users as training data.
He claims cloud photo storage, CAPTCHAs, and social platforms are incentives to harvest behavior and imagery for model training; even when not “nation-state” motivated, it expands surveillance-like capability.
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Notable Quotes
“Everything in the camp has to be 1840 or prior.”
— Bill Thompson
“It’s amazing after a week… you really forget about the world, and you… don’t even know you’re supposed to be stressed out about things.”
— Bill Thompson
“A society can suffer from suicidal empathy.”
— Joe Rogan
“The incentive is not the output of their purported mission. The incentive is the growing of the organization and the execution of budget.”
— Bill Thompson
“If the product’s free, then you’re the product.”
— Bill Thompson
Questions Answered in This Episode
On rendezvous: what specific ‘pre-1840’ rule is hardest for newcomers to follow, and why?
Thompson describes “rendezvous” camps where participants live with only pre-1840 gear, using them as a way to disconnect from modern life and transmit practical skills and rites-of-passage to younger men.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Brain tanning: what’s the best scientific explanation for why brains soften hides—fat content, enzymes, lecithin, or something else?
He explains traditional craftwork behind a gifted knife (bear-jaw handle, quilling, brain-tanned hides) and uses it to illustrate how immersive historical practice can feel authentically “of the era.”
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You argue rites of passage are missing—what would a modern, non-military rite look like that avoids toxicity but still enforces standards?
The conversation shifts to culture and politics: both criticize ideological tribalism, argue for discipline and accountability, and discuss how “suicidal empathy” and normalized divorce can undermine communities and children.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
When you say ‘suicidal empathy’ drives policy failure in places like California, what concrete policy changes would you implement first for homelessness or addiction?
Thompson outlines how bureaucracies (military and civil government) optimize for budget growth and self-preservation rather than mission outcomes, tying this to debt, fraud, and the “homeless industrial complex.”
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
From your military advisory experience, what single reform would most improve ‘mission outcomes’ over ‘budget execution’ incentives?
Drawing on signals intelligence and offensive cyber operations experience, Thompson discusses phone/OS security trade-offs, distrust of Big Tech data monetization, Huawei/ZTE concerns, Pegasus-style exploits, and why “unhackable phones” are marketing fiction.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music]
What's up, Bill?
How you doing, Joe?
Good to see you, brother.
Good to see you.
This is, this might be one of the coolest things anybody's ever given me. So you gave me this knife. [laughs] Explain all this.
All right, so I mean, there's a larger explanatory reason behind this. My brother and I grew up... My father died when I was five. My brother and I grew up doing, um, these things called rendezvous. Have you ever heard of them?
Um, in what way? What is a rendezvous?
So there you go. So what a rendezvous is, is it's not... You know, you go to those like, uh, where I don't even know what they're called, but people do like reenactments.
Oh, okay. Like Civil War reenactments?
It's not like that.
[laughs]
So that's the closest thing, approximation to probably what it is. You get invited to them, or these days they're easier to get to, but my stepfather, my, the guy my mother remarried, brought us to them. All you do is camp, but you're only allowed to camp, and no one comes to the camp, or sometimes they might have people at the end, but while you're in the camp, everything in the camp has to be 1840 or prior. So there can be no modern appurtenances, nothing like a, you know, refrigerator, nothing like that.
1840. Why that year?
18... The end of the fur trapping. At the end, like that, that was considered like Jeremiah Johnson time, like peak fur trapping.
Oh.
So there's people, you know, they dress like either, you know, revolutionary, like American revolutionaries, or they dress like mountain men, or they dress like Indians.
How'd you guys dress?
Mountain men. So, uh, while we're there, you learn all kinds of stuff while you're reenacting. Like I learned how to brain tan hides. I learned how to traditionally ar- or do traditional archery, stuff like that. So anyway, this knife was a knife I had actually started working on with my brother a while ago. I do more of like the brain tanning, tomahawk quilling.
And when you say brain tanning, you're talking about using brains to tan animal hides, right?
Yes, yes.
Using animal brains.
Yeah.
What, what, what does brains do? Why does brains work?
It softens the leather in a natural way, and what's cool about it is every animal, no matter what animal you kill, has the exact amount of brain needed in order to tan the hide.
Oh.
So you don't need any additional... Like, people use egg yolks or mayonnaise or something like that. All you do is you take the brain out of the cavity, you grind it up, you mix it into some water, and then after you've, after you've cleaned the leather and you've scraped it clean, you stretch it. I usually use like a dull shovel. You stretch it over the dull shovel, and then you soak it in the brain water mixture, and then you just keep repeating that pattern, and the leather gets like a really nice soft, um, uh, feel to it.
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