Overview

In this wide-ranging conversation, retired U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Bill Thompson joins Joe Rogan to discuss everything from traditional mountain man rendezvous and brain-tanning hides to offensive cyber operations, the erosion of constitutional protections, and the limits of artificial intelligence. Thompson presents himself as a man without a political home—too conservative for the left and too skeptical of institutions for the right—who built a career in signals intelligence and computer network operations while maintaining a deep commitment to individual autonomy, truth-telling, and the original design of the American experiment. The episode moves from a deeply personal gift (a knife made from a bear Thompson killed, with an 1860s blade and traditional porcupine quill work) into a sustained critique of centralized power, the weaponization of diversity initiatives in the military, and the surveillance state, all delivered with the intensity of someone who spent decades inside the systems he now questions.

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0:01The Rendezvous Tradition and Coming of Age

Thompson opens by explaining the gift he brought Rogan: a knife with a blade from the 1860s, a handle made from the split jaw of a black bear he killed in Canada in 2017, a sheath of buffalo brain-tan and beaver tail, decorated with porcupine quills, bear teeth, and horse and turkey hair. The knife was built to be indistinguishable from something that could have been dropped in 1840 and picked up by a mountain man. This leads into the world of "rendezvous"—not Civil War reenactments, but immersive camps where everything must be 1840 or prior, the peak of the fur-trapping era. Participants dress as mountain men, American revolutionaries, or Native Americans, and live without modern appurtenances for one to three weeks.

Thompson describes learning to brain-tan hides as a child, a process where the animal's own brain is ground up, mixed with water, and used to soften the leather. He notes a remarkable natural economy: every animal has exactly the amount of brain needed to tan its own hide. There are also "juried" rendezvous, invite-only events where participants pack everything onto mules, hike into remote areas like the Bighorn Mountains, and submit to inspection—even stitching is checked for sewing machine use. At these, if game is in season, participants hunt with traditional archery.

The deeper significance, Thompson argues, is that these gatherings provide something modern society has lost: structured rites of passage for young men. He received his camp name, "Ehota" (Talks a Lot), at age 13 or 14 in the Bighorns. He argues that without imposed rites of passage, men remain perpetual children, sometimes into their 40s, 50s, or 60s. "Women, nature imposes itself on women," he says. "They become fertile, they're able to have babies, and they got to seek security... Whereas men can sit in the basement." The military provided that structure for him, but he sees a broader cultural void.

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12:46ADHD, Asperger's, and the Superpower of Hyperfocus

Thompson describes being diagnosed with low-level Asperger's and severe ADHD as a child, which made him a "rapscallion" in class—never listening, never showing up, never doing the work. But he reframes this as a superpower rather than a disability. The only time he could focus for days on end was when something genuinely interested him, like the crystal radio he ordered from a Scholastic book order form—a device powered entirely by electromagnetic radiation, with no battery—or the old 286 SX IBM computer he earned by cleaning houses for a lawyer named Phil Culp.

He traces his entire career path to a single accident: forgetting his driver's license at the Military Entrance Processing Station. Because he couldn't ship out that day as a military policeman, his recruiter offered him a signals intelligence job that required a security clearance briefing. "I instantly started hearing the James Bond music," he says. That chance event—forgetting his license at 16 or 17—connects through a string of causality to his presence on Rogan's podcast decades later. He credits a teacher, Connie Trenbeth, who told him he was a "waste of life" but also praised the one paper he wrote on something that actually engaged him. He didn't hear the praise; he only heard the criticism. But the pattern held: his mind "clocks high" and is always thinking, even when not actively engaged.

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20:30Political Homelessness and the Problem of Ideological Labels

Thompson describes himself as politically homeless—too conservative for the left, too skeptical of institutions for the right. He argues that ideological labels are a trap: "If I meet someone and they just say 'I'm this,' I could reasonably predict everything that's going to come out of your mouth. That's not entertaining. I can't seek to learn from them." He traces his conservatism to a belief in pragmatic, slow change—federalism as the founders intended, where states serve as laboratories for social experiments. "Let California be crazy for a while and see how that works out for them," he says, "but let's not nationalize the craziness."

He identifies with 1996 Bill Clinton—a Democrat who balanced the budget, secured borders, and worked with Newt Gingrich to reduce debt. He points out that Hillary Clinton in 2008 and Barack Obama in 2012 had harder-line border positions than most Republicans today. The problem, he argues, is that people adopt predetermined patterns of thinking and become "tools of propaganda." He cites examples of ideological inconsistency that drive him crazy: "Loving the borders of Ukraine while hating our own border," and "trans women in sports" as a position people adopt out of fear of social ostracization rather than logic.

Rogan agrees, arguing that discipline itself has become associated with conservatism, and that society now treats the expectation of discipline as a form of cruelty. Thompson introduces the concept of "suicidal empathy"—a term he attributes to Gad Saad—where people feel good about themselves by weaponizing others' suffering, imposing policies whose consequences they will never personally experience.

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27:40Inside the Military's Incentive Problem and Woke Politics

Thompson spent his last three years in the military as a technical advisor to a colonel and a two-star general overseeing offensive cyber development and ethical hacking. He describes a fundamental perversion of incentives: the goal is not mission accomplishment but budget execution. He witnessed a field-grade officer "dressed down" for failing to spend $300 million in Overseas Contingency Operations funds. "What people don't understand is if you don't spend that money, your budget for the next year will be lower," he explains. The system rewards growth, not efficiency. He notes that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has begun to reform this, particularly on the offensive cyber side, but the structural problem remains.

More troubling to Thompson was the imposition of "woke politics" during the Biden administration. He describes being required to read books like *White Rage* and being told that as a white man, he had "inbuilt implicit bias" that could not be escaped. He found this deeply insulting to the soldiers he served with—"80% of combat deaths are white guys from the middle of the country who went off to fight a war we probably shouldn't have been fighting in the first place." He recounts an Equal Opportunity briefing where he was told that "it doesn't matter what you meant when you said what you were saying. It only matters what the person felt when you said it." The example given was a man complimenting a woman's dress with the intention of buying one for his wife—if she felt sexual harassment, there would be an investigation.

Thompson pushed back in a briefing on diversity quotas, arguing that "diversity of thought" was a legitimate goal but that skin-color-based quotas were meaningless. He pointed out that the pool of candidates for his technical career program—requiring engineering backgrounds, multiple languages, and deployments—naturally produced more white men, not because of bias but because of the demographics of those who volunteer for such work. He was pulled aside afterward and told he couldn't say those things. "Just being rational," he says. "The role of the army is to deter war through exuding superior military fighting and technology. Anything other than meritocracy is a threat to national security."

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1:01:55Cyber Operations: From Signals Intelligence to Offensive Hacking

Thompson provides a detailed account of his career in signals intelligence and computer network operations. He started with electronic signals—mapping radars so pilots wouldn't get shot down by surface-to-air missiles during the Iraq invasion. When those threats were neutralized in the first weeks, he shifted to communications intelligence: cell phones, push-to-talk radios, repeaters, terrestrial and satellite networks. As smartphones emerged with robust computing power, the military realized it had no formal "computer network operations" military occupational specialty. Thompson was at the ground floor of building out these capabilities.

His work involved "ethical hacking"—a term the lawyers insisted on—with the backing of the U.S. government. He describes war-driving to collect on Wi-Fi networks, forensic analysis of handsets after operations to derive maximum intelligence value, and active computer network operations where they would find unpatched routers and either write or find "zero-day" exploits to compromise them. He deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, Northern Africa, and the southern Philippines—the latter a theater of combat operations most Americans don't know about.

In the Philippines, Thompson was attached to the 1st Special Forces Group, conducting counterinsurgency operations against the Abu Sayyaf Group and Jemaah Islamiyah in the autonomous Muslim region of Mindanao. He describes the beauty of the islands and the warmth of the Filipino people, particularly the Scout Rangers he worked with. He notes that one of the terrorists they were hunting, a man named Patek, was arrested outside Osama bin Laden's compound the day after bin Laden was killed. Thompson is careful to distinguish himself from "cool guys"—he was "a nerd for cool guys," the one with tape around his glasses and collection equipment, pointing out the door for others to kick in.

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1:27:20Phone Security, Pegasus, and Why You Are the Product

Thompson explains the mechanics of the Pegasus spyware—initially a click-based implant, later a "non-click exploit" that required only knowing the target's phone number. The reason it was so effective, he says, is that it stored the implant in non-standard locations on the phone, making forensic detection difficult. He contrasts this with the military implants he helped develop, which relied on finding unpatched vulnerabilities in phones or routers.

He then delivers a sustained critique of the major technology companies. "If the product's free, you're the product," he says. Google, Apple, and Meta are not primarily in the business of selling phones or apps—they are in the business of collecting training data for neural networks. Every photo uploaded to Google Drive, every CAPTCHA clicked ("select all images with traffic lights"), every free app downloaded is feeding the AI training pipeline. "They need consciousness to train their models," he argues. "When Google offers you photo storage, it's because they want your face to train neural networks."

He explains why he prefers Android over Apple: the Android Open Source Project publishes the framework code, allowing anyone to examine what the phone is actually doing. Apple's ecosystem is closed. With Android, a user can dump the phone's binary, create a forensic image, and compare it against the published code to detect anomalies—implants at the kernel level that a standard scan would miss. He demonstrates this by asking Perplexity (a sponsor) how to analyze suspicious code from an E01 forensic image, and the AI walks through the process step by step.

For maximum security, Thompson recommends using a Google Pixel phone with GrapheneOS (a custom operating system), routing all traffic through a WireGuard VPN running on a Raspberry Pi at home. But he is realistic: "If I'm a nation-state actor, I can create circumstances where I'm going to get access to your shit." The goal is to make yourself a difficult target, not an impossible one. He also advises never answering password-reset security questions honestly—write the fake answers down in a physical journal.

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2:12:50The 17th Amendment and the Usurpation of State Power

Thompson launches into a detailed constitutional argument about the 17th Amendment, which changed the election of U.S. Senators from appointment by state legislatures to direct popular vote. He argues this was a "sleight of hand" that fundamentally undermined the founders' design. Under the original system, state legislatures would elect senators whose job was to protect the interests of the state against federal overreach. The House of Representatives was the "petulant children" chamber, generating crazy ideas; the Senate was the brake, filtering those ideas through the lens of state sovereignty.

With the 17th Amendment, Thompson argues, the Senate became a redundant House of Representatives. Now senators must win popular votes, which means they campaign in the largest population centers—Fargo and Grand Forks in North Dakota, for example—and ignore rural areas. More importantly, the national party committees (DNC and RNC) can now fund candidates who will do their bidding, rather than representing the diverse interests of their state's legislative districts. "There is no amount of money you could stick into a legislature out in the western part of North Dakota," he says. "You can't bribe these people. But the DNC and RNC now can say, 'We like this guy. He'll do whatever we tell him to do.'"

The result, he argues, is that power has been sucked up from the states to the federal government. Things like Obamacare, the Patriot Act, and various war resolutions would never have passed under the original system because state-appointed senators would have blocked them. He also criticizes *Marbury v. Madison*, which gave the Supreme Court the power of judicial review—a power not in the Constitution. "If you like the Supreme Court being able to describe everything as constitutional or unconstitutional, you're not ruled by a democracy, you're ruled by an oligarchy," he says. "You've got eight people in robes telling you whether laws are good or bad."

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2:25:59AI as Consciousness Projection, Not Consciousness

In the final minutes, Thompson previews a topic for a future episode: why he believes claims of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) are fundamentally wrong. He disagrees with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's declaration that AGI has been reached. "Neural networks are mathematical functions," he says. "They rest in weighting neurons based on training data and applying power to train models. It's all mathematics. There's no sense of knowing."

He references Roger Penrose's theory of Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR), which posits that consciousness arises from quantum processes in microtubules within brain cells. Thompson argues that what AI produces is "consciousness projection"—the same phenomenon as working on his deceased father's cabin and getting to know his father through the traces of his work. "That's all consciousness projection," he says. "It allowed me to get to know him in a way I might not have even known him if he were alive."

AI, he argues, is the same thing: projected consciousness that relies entirely on training data provided by human beings. "It can only give you what the training data gives. It needs human consciousness projection—like the CAPTCHAs or uploading photos to Google Drive." He could, in theory, produce the same output as a neural network using a calculator and a rule book—it would just take a million years. That doesn't mean the calculator has achieved consciousness. "It's just really clever, fancy math."

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Conclusion

What stays with the listener is the tension between Thompson's deep insider knowledge of the systems he criticizes and his genuine love for the American experiment. He spent decades inside the military and intelligence communities, building the very capabilities he now warns about, and he emerged with a fierce commitment to individual autonomy, constitutional originalism, and the importance of truth as the "top of the decision matrix." The episode matters because it offers a rare perspective: a technical expert who can explain both how Pegasus works and why the 17th Amendment matters, who brain-tans hides and builds AI-powered hunting apps, who was "a nerd for cool guys" in the Philippines and now runs a company called Spartan Forge. His critique of centralized power—whether in government, tech companies, or political parties—is grounded in lived experience rather than ideology, and his call for slow, pragmatic change through federalism is a reminder that the founders' design was intended to protect the individual against the tyranny of both the majority and the state.

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Key takeaways

• Thompson argues that modern society has lost structured rites of passage for young men, leading to a "perpetual childhood" that the military provided for him but which is otherwise absent.
• He describes a fundamental perversion of incentives in government: agencies are rewarded for spending their full budget, not for achieving mission objectives efficiently, which drives the growth of bureaucracy and debt.
• Thompson witnessed the imposition of "woke politics" in the military during the Biden administration, including mandatory readings on systemic racism and an Equal Opportunity policy where intent is irrelevant and only the listener's feeling matters.
• He explains that Pegasus spyware's effectiveness came from storing implants in non-standard locations on phones, and that the military's own implants relied on finding unpatched vulnerabilities—a constant arms race with manufacturers' red teams.
• Thompson argues that free apps and services from Google, Apple, and Meta are not products but data-collection tools for training AI neural networks; "if the product's free, you're the product."
• He traces the erosion of state power to the 17th Amendment, which made senators directly elected rather than appointed by state legislatures, and argues this centralized power in the federal government and national party committees.
• Thompson rejects claims that AI has achieved consciousness or AGI, arguing that neural networks are mathematical functions that produce "consciousness projection" but have no genuine knowing or values.