Bill Thompson — Retired senior Army warrant officer (CW4) who spent ~20 years in signals intelligence, offensive cyber operations, and mobile/media forensics, including work on the Osama bin Laden media. He now runs Spartan Forge, an AI-powered hunting app.
The gist
Joe Rogan and Bill Thompson open with a handmade traditional knife Bill crafted as a gift, then range across his upbringing doing 1840s-style 'rendezvous' reenactments, coming-of-age rites, and the value of discipline. The bulk of the conversation is Bill's expertise in offensive cyber and forensics: how phones, routers, and exploits like Pegasus work, why he distrusts Apple and Meta over data harvesting, and how to harden your devices. He frames modern AI as mere 'consciousness projection'—clever math with no real knowing or consciousness. The episode closes on a long civics argument that the 17th Amendment and Marbury v. Madison centralized power away from states and individuals.
Big reveals
- Bill gives Joe a handmade knife built from a bear he killed in 2017, with a blade from the 1860s, brain-tanned leather and porcupine-quill beadwork.
- Claims California spent $24 billion on homelessness that cannot be tracked and that audits were vetoed, while homelessness rose.
- Says he personally watched officers get 'dressed down' for NOT spending their full budget, because unspent money shrinks next year's budget.
- Reveals the organization he worked for did the forensic analysis of the Osama bin Laden media, spending millions reconstructing it.
- States flatly he does not trust Apple because they 'are more interested in monetizing people's data than providing capability.'
- Mid-conversation Perplexity is revealed as the episode's sponsor right after Bill praises it over ChatGPT.
- Argues the 17th Amendment created a 'redundant House of Representatives' and was a deliberate usurpation that gutted states' rights.
- Rejects Jensen Huang's AGI claim, calling AI 'consciousness projection' and 'really fancy clever math' with no knowing.
Things worth remembering
- Every animal has almost exactly the amount of brain needed to tan its own hide, the basis of traditional brain-tanning.
- Bill cites Gad Saad's concept of 'suicidal empathy' as a society-level failure mode.
- As a kid he built a battery-free crystal/coil radio from a Scholastic order form, powered only by electromagnetic radiation.
- FM sounds better than AM but travels less far; lower frequencies (bass) carry farther but hold less information.
- Pegasus spyware evolved from a click-based exploit to a no-click exploit and hid in non-standard areas of the phone.
- Bill says he was doing AI/neural-network work to map dynamic networks in 2011-2012, before it was a catchphrase.
- Pokemon Go players reportedly built a 30-billion-photo map later usable to train delivery robots.
- Security tip: never answer password-reset security questions honestly; record fake answers in a physical journal.
- CAPTCHA image grids partly exist to harvest human labeling to train neural networks on objects like traffic lights.
- Bill invokes Roger Penrose's Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) theory of consciousness via brain microtubules.
Recommended in this episode
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Spartan Forge
Bill Thompson
“it's spartanforge.ai. We're built on the rubric of individual freedom. I want people outdoors. I want people hunting.” — Bill Thompson 02:19:49Find it on Amazon
WireGuard
WireGuard
“you should run WireGuard on your phone... using something like WireGuard which is a a VPN that I use that's very good” — Bill Thompson 01:58:09Find it on Amazon
Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi Foundation (inferred)
“you should take something like a a Raspberry Pi and you should run WireGuard on your phone and you should route all of your internet traffic through” — Bill Thompson 01:58:09Find it on Amazon