Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2473 - Bill Thompson
Uploaded: 2026-03-25T17:00:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2473 - Bill Thompson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-03-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2473 - Bill Thompson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-03-25. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2473 - Bill Thompson

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
What's up, Bill?
How you doing, Joe?
Good to see you, bro.
Good to see you.
This might be one of the coolest things anybody's ever given me.
So, you gave me this knife.
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 these things called rendezvous.
Have you ever heard of them?
In what way?
What is a rendezvous?
So, there you go.
So, what a rendezvous is, it's not, you know, you go to those, like, 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.
So, that's the closest thing, approximation, to probably what it is.
You get invited to them, or these days are easier to get to, but my stepfather,
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 or nothing
like that.
1840?
Why that year?
At the end of the fur trapping.
At the end, like, 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, 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 art, 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 filling.
And when you're saying brain tanning, you're talking about using brains to tan
animal hides,
right?
Yes, yes.
Using animal brains.
Yeah.
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.
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 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
feel to it.
What is it about the brain?
Is it the fat?
It breaks down the leather.
I'm not sure if it's the fat, or I haven't gotten that deep into it, but it
breaks down
the leather and just makes it feel really soft, really nice.
So, anyway, this knife here, I started, I killed that bear, so the jaw is made
out of two bear
jaws, or out of one bear jaw split in half.
So, that was a bear I killed in Canada in 2017.
It was my biggest black bear.
And so we split the jaw, put that together.
It's Irish linen threading.
Then that's a knife that my brother picked up that was from 1860.
It was totally rusted.
We had to grind it back, or he had to grind it back down.
And then the sheath is traditional.
Like, you know, you could, the cool thing about doing rendezvous, and the cool
thing about
this is, you could have a DeLorean and drop that in 1840, and somebody would
pick it up
and think it was made yesterday.
And so, everything on there has been done traditionally, from the quilling on
the beadwork is made from
porcupine quills.
The backing is buffalo brain tan.
And then the front is beaver hide, or beaver tail, I'm sorry.
And then the sides are horse and turkey hair hanging off of it.
And these are bear teeth?
And those are bear teeth, yep.
Wow.
From the same bear.
So, when I was thinking about what I was, because I wanted to give you
something for inviting
me on, because it's still a shock to me that you did it.
Even though we've been talking for so long, I just never imagined a scenario
where you'd want
to have me on here.
Well, you're an interesting dude.
I thought, what could I give this guy that, you know, money or people or
whatever couldn't
get you?
And so, I thought, this is the right thing to do.
So, it went from a me project to a you project.
And my brother, Aaron, helped me out with it tremendously.
So, how'd you find this knife from the 1860s?
Well, he found it.
My brother is even more esoteric and odd than I am, believe it or not.
And he collects this kind of stuff.
I mean, the guy who dated it said 1860 to 1890 is what they figured.
And you can tell by the way that like around the hilt and the way that it's the
pitting
on it and stuff like that and the way that it was made that it fits that era.
I mean, it could have been somebody redid it in 1900.
But it's definitely that old, like the type of steel and the way that it was
worked and
the way that it is around the hilt around the bottom there.
Wow.
And so, it's at least, you know, 130, 140, but most likely 160, 170.
It actually fits my hand perfect.
Yeah.
So, that's also something my brother and I talked about, about how long it was
going to
be and we made some educated guesses and put it all together.
So, yeah, I mean, like I said, not something you can just go pick up somewhere
or something
that will, you know, hopefully mean something.
Not saying it's practical, like it's not something you'd be gutting an elk out
with, but.
Well, if we get attacked by zombies in the studio, it's a good thing to have on
the desk.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're going to make a last stand, you know, that's a pretty good,
that's a pretty
good knife to make your last stand with.
That's a good way to go out.
Yeah, exactly.
That's awesome, man.
Yeah.
So, the rendezvous, we did those from.
How long do they last?
They vary from a week and then some go up to three weeks.
And what do you do for food while you're out there?
So, inside of your, so there's two types of rendezvous.
At most rendezvous inside of your lodge, you can have a cooler as long as it
doesn't leave
the lodge.
So, I have like a 20-foot teepee that I take to these things.
And inside of my teepee, you can have a cooler.
Oh.
And some modern appurtenances.
Did they have any kind of coolers in the 1800s?
I mean, they had ice boxes and like steel ice boxes and that type of thing, but
nothing
like we have today.
You know, stuff was getting dug out, buried in the ground, or put into the
ground, like
cool areas of the ground or dig outs.
And they dried everything.
So, pemmican would have been the, you know, everyday thing to eat.
That's just dried.
So, did you bring your own food or did you have to hunt for food?
Well, so you bring your own food, but there are other rendezvous that are kind
of invite
only.
And I don't even think a lot of people who do rendezvous knew about these, but
there's
ones that I think they're called, I think I might be speaking out of school.
Somebody might send me an email after this, but I'm going to talk about it
anyway, because
I never got read the right act.
They're called juried.
I think they called them juried Southerns, and I've only been to one of those.
And that's where everything in the camp has to be pre-1840.
You meet down in a parking lot, you put everything on the back of a mule, and
when I did mine,
it was up in the, I think it was the Bighorns.
So, you know, you talk to a rancher, get everything packed up, you go into the
back of
the Bighorns, and everything in camp has to be pre-1840, as close as it can get.
They'll even look at your stitching and say, oh, that was sewn with a sewing
machine.
You got to take that off, and it's always these weird, like, eccentric history
teachers
that run them, like guys who, you know, teaches history at Berkeley or
something like that,
or other places, and they just really enjoy living like this.
And at those ones, if they're in season, you can hunt whatever's in season.
You're hunting with traditional archery, and it's really good for kids.
Like, the internet wasn't a problem as much when I was a kid.
I was certainly into computers.
I have been since I was a child, but you could just detach.
Everyone's running around, crazy, sitting around the campfire at night.
People are singing with, you know, songs and the guitar.
You're learning how to do things like this.
You're learning how to brain tan.
You're learning how to live traditionally.
And it's an eccentric cult, kind of.
It's not a cult.
It's an eccentric group of people.
It's a lot of fun.
People take it very seriously.
People take it very seriously.
There's more advertising surrounding it now than there used to be, because
numbers are kind of dwindling.
But I did my last one last year with my brother.
So if you go on my Instagram, there's a picture of my brother, my son, and I
doing, I think, our second rendezvous together.
And we're just dressed like, you know.
I've actually got an awesome war shirt.
I can show you the picture.
I've got an awesome war shirt that a friend of mine went to war with.
He was half Native American.
His grandfather was Ojibwe or something, Chippewa, something like that.
And he was, I don't remember what his role was.
But anyway, we deployed to Iraq together.
And his grandpa made me this war shirt.
Oh, there you found it.
Jamie?
He pulled it up.
That's my lodge.
How much do you enjoy a shower after you get out of here?
I mean, as long as you keep, you know, they have showers in camp.
They've got a showering area where it's just like pallets.
That's the inside of my lodge.
So there's a cooler at this one.
This is not a juried rendezvous.
And so you can shower while you're in.
Some of them, they call them hooters.
They'll be like a latrine and a shower area in camp.
But also, like, some of them, I don't do it at all.
This is wild.
And so there's no reenactment.
Like, there's not like civilians walking around.
It's not like renaissance figure.
Yeah, exactly.
It's just more like I want to act like it's 1840 for a couple of weeks and not
look at my phone one time and not worry about the news.
It's amazing.
After a week here, you really forget about the world.
And you're like, don't even know you're supposed to be stressed out about
things.
You're just out there doing your thing for a couple of weeks.
And you just cook over open fire.
Everything gets done traditionally that way.
And did you bring your own meat and everything?
Yeah, you bring your own meat and stuff in the cooler.
And then there's also cooking classes where they teach you, like, all the
recipes to do with, like, a Dutch oven.
Like, an old cast iron oven.
And they do gambling at nights.
So you'll walk into, like, a huge, they call them marquees, but it's, like, a
huge 100-foot square lodge.
There'll be three gambling tables in there, girls in, like, the low-cut shirts
and dealing cards and smoking cigars and just having an amazing time.
And you go by camp names while you're in there.
Nobody uses their real name.
Well, some people use their real name.
I'd say 60% of people don't use their real names.
What was your camp name?
This is embarrassing.
It should be.
Yeah.
So I got my camp name.
I got christened with my camp name in the bighorns when I was 14 or 13.
And it was Talks-a-lot.
Talks-a-lot.
Yeah, in Sioux, it was pronounced I-a-ota.
Just because you talk a lot?
When I was a kid, I talked a lot.
Actually, as an adult, I don't talk that much unless I know you.
But as a kid, I would never shut up.
I had really bad ADHD.
They kind of diagnosed me with having some low-level version of Asperger's.
And I was a rapscallion in class, just never shut up, never listened, never di