#2569 - Bill Thompson

What It Covers

Joe Rogan and guest Bill Thompson — a military veteran and tech founder behind hunting app Spartan Forge — cover Tesla Roadster flight claims, elite driving techniques from military evasion training, archery psychology, pressure-forged resilience, fasted hunting rituals, Jungian dream analysis applied to real legal battles, and the evolutionary wiring behind hunting, fishing, and tribal behavior across a 173-minute conversation.

Key Questions Answered

• •Closed-Loop Shooting Framework: To eliminate target panic in archery, adopt what instructor Joel Turner calls closed-loop thinking — narrating every phase of the shot internally so the mind stays present rather than anticipating recoil or release. Thompson uses the military acronym STAB (Steady position, Trigger squeeze, Aiming, Breathing), silently cycling through it at full draw. This keeps the shot interruptible at any moment, preventing the runaway flinch response that costs accuracy at critical moments.
• •Pressure Inoculation as Skill: Performing well under pressure is not a personality trait — it is a trainable capacity built through accumulated high-stakes repetitions. Thompson argues that people who have never faced genuine pressure will panic when confronted with it, whether facing a bull elk at 40 yards or a courtroom. Deliberately seeking difficult experiences — jiu-jitsu, hunting, military training, demanding academic work — compresses the timeline to composure when real stakes arrive.
• •Counter-Intuitive Performance Driving: Military rally-trained instructors teach that fast driving requires the opposite of what movies depict. Never oversteer; if one hand crosses over the other on the wheel, technique has already failed. Feed the wheel hand-to-hand. Apply brakes through corners to front-load weight on interceptor-style vehicles. Keep tires in maximum road contact at all times. Draw the straightest possible line through any course. Drifting actively slows lap times by breaking traction.
• •Thermal Mapping for Hunters: Thermals shift direction based on temperature: cold mornings pull air downhill, warming afternoons push it uphill. Experienced elk and whitetail bucks use these thermal channels to scent-check entire mountainsides before moving. Spartan Forge is releasing a feature that maps thermals using high-resolution topographic data, canopy cover variables, historical wind speed, and sun incidence by slope aspect — allowing hunters to digitally scout scent-flow patterns before entering the field.
• •Fasted Hunting Protocol: Thompson and a group of five to six hunters run multi-day fasted hunts where food is locked in a Yeti cooler with a code held by one of their wives. The code is released only after photographic proof of a kill is sent. The group hunts on salt water alone, with the shortest fast lasting 36 hours and the longest reaching four days. The protocol deliberately recreates ancestral survival circuitry, producing a communal reward response Thompson describes as unlike anything else.
• •Serenity Prayer as Operational Framework: Thompson credits his mother's Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, attended from age nine, with installing a functional anxiety filter: only expend cognitive energy on variables within your control. In Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Africa, when situations deteriorated, he defaulted to identifying the two or three actionable levers available and executing them. He now teaches the same framework to his teenage daughter. The practical application is to categorize every stressor as controllable or uncontrollable before allocating attention.
• •Jungian Dream Analysis as Diagnostic Tool: Thompson documents dreams upon waking, then reviews them the following day as diagnostic feedback on his psychological state. A recent dream set on a train — where he fought an older version of himself named Bill, broke both the figure's arms in submission holds, and was guided by an anima character — mapped directly onto an ongoing legal battle. Jung's framework treats recurring dream imagery as the unconscious correcting conscious blind spots, with the anima figure representing relational intelligence the dreamer needs to integrate.