#2473 - Bill Thompson

**Jamie** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:12)
What's up, Bill?

**Bill Thompson** (0:13)
How you doing, Jeff?

**Joe Rogan** (0:13)
Good to see you, brother. 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.

**Bill Thompson** (0:22)
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?

**Joe Rogan** (0:36)
In what way? What is a rendezvous?

**Bill Thompson** (0:37)
So, there you go. So, what a rendezvous is, 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.

**Joe Rogan** (0:45)
Oh, okay. Like Civil War reenactments?

**Bill Thompson** (0:48)
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 him. 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, that can be no modern appurtenances, nothing like a refrigerator, nothing like that.

**Joe Rogan** (1:14)
1840, why that year?

**Bill Thompson** (1:16)
At the end of the fur trapping. Like that was considered like Jeremiah Johnson time, like peak fur trapping. 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.

**Joe Rogan** (1:30)
How did you guys dress?

**Bill Thompson** (1:31)
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 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 flying.

**Joe Rogan** (1:51)
And when you say brain tanning, you talk about using brains to tan animal hides, right? Using animal brains. What does brains do? Why does brains work?

**Bill Thompson** (1:59)
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.

**Joe Rogan** (2:37)
What is it about the brain? Is it the fat?

**Bill Thompson** (2:39)
It breaks down the leather. I'm not sure if it's the fatter. 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. 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.

**Joe Rogan** (3:51)
And these are bear teeth?

**Bill Thompson** (3:53)
And those are bear teeth, yep, 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.