From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer Andrew the try Force Howard. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Now, Guys, we always include, just for ourselves a little inspirational or tangential quote at the top of our notes, and usually this is you know, a thing just for us. But I suggest we read this quoteation allowed because it is astonishing for this conversation.
Sure, should we go one word at a time? Round Robin And I'm just kidding. I think I think you should read it.
Ben. You found you're back, You're back from your travels.
I insist you should do it.
Can you do it in German?
Uh?
No?
No, almost anyway, this this quote is the following. My measure of success is that the International Olympic Committee bans everything we do.
Cool cool understood.
That is not from Dan Harmon, although that was a cool conversation. That is instead from a guy named Michael Goldblatt. Uh, the former head of DARPA's Defense Science's Office.
Yeah, I don't understand what DARPA's activities has to do with the Olympic Committee.
We'll see, we'll see. Shout out, shout out to our buddies. Uh, who oh, who is that guy who just proposed was the no holds barred Olympics a while back?
Remember you mean the steroid Olympics Olympics?
Yeah?
Yeah, it was like do whatever you want. Yeah, yeah, that feels like a billionaire move. It's no secret right that humanity is known for pushing the proverbial envelope, and we were thinking about this earlier. Right now, human and technically non human research is inventing technology that human civilization does not understand. Have we all seen the studies where a bunch of boffins come out with something that they are not fully cognizant of, like the AI figured it out?
Yeah, well that. But I also saw some former tech magnate it was either Google or Twitter. I want to say it was a Google former Google person basically saying that technology AI is getting so advanced that it's going to eventually start inventing things and creating things that we fully cannot understand. Yes, and that is when it becomes majorly slippery slope and scary.
Absolutely, And then we'll get to a point where perhaps AGI starts inventing things that just help itself, right, quite a logical move. Humans increasingly not part of the conversation. But this is this is weird. We're on the precipice of great discovery as a society and civilization is at the same time leveraging new innovations, inventions, and discoveries to experiment on individual humans. And I think we've all heard this. You know, it always gets sold to the public in
terms of social and scientific benefit. Right we're doing this, Oh, we're doing a gain of function research to eradicate disease, not to build new diseases.
Right, well, I mean we certainly know even like you know, under the Third Rete, for example, they would have liked to think of their troops as super soldiers. And that was largely fueled by amphetamines, which was a technology of a kind.
Yes, yeah, And then we'd say, oh, we're pursuing so called AI or quantum computing to create more efficient computational power. Oh, we're doing this other research to make sure that air and water and food stay clean. But to your point, Noel, there's a dirty secret, right, there's a badger in the bag and it needs a bath. A lot of this research is coming from military funding and for military purposes. However, it's sold to the public. That's often just a knock
on side effect. That's a nice thing to have.
It's often the case, right, we always seem to find out about this kind of tech way later, or once it has sort of either outlived its usefulness or become perhaps dated in the military circles. Only then do we start to see it sold to the public or the public union becomes aware of it.
Yeah, and we are talking about super soldiers. We have some stuff to explore about super soldiers this evening. Of course, the concept became popularized again in the West with the Rain and Fall of Marvel movies. Right, I think they're going to come back. I think Doomsday is going to be good.
People say that that Thunderbolts one's pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I liked it, And they said I'd sort of got that Guardians of the Galaxy vibe, which was the last franchise from that world that I found charming. But yeah, I'm happy to hear you know what. It makes me think of the ben As the movie, the Jean Claude van Damn.
Movie Universal Soldier.
Universal Soldier certainly was a golden age in the nineties where super soldier kind of stuff was very much floating around the zeitgeist. And that is the one. There's also a demolition Man another one with thes but that was sort of a super soldier kind of sitch, right.
The Starship Troopers, like the Halo movie that was created this concept of an entire exoskeleton suit that makes each individual soldier and basically an army of their own.
Arguably Iron Man biggest plot hole in Marvel Universe was that this guy can build suits whenever he wants, and he doesn't bother to give Hawkeye a suit, you know what I mean, kind of a move a little bit.
Guy's got his he's got skills, he doesn't need a suit. What is his power? Perfect aim something along most.
It's not a power, it's just really good you guys.
Remember there was a bit in the Fallout games. I want to say it was in maybe Fallout three was the one before New Vegas, which I forget what number it was, but there were these that's right, there were these basically like super soldiers that died in their supersuits, and when you encounter them in the world, they're skeletons that are continuing to walk around in their supersuits. Yes, very clever, very and dystopian and clever.
Yes, and that's we'll see, not just clever and dystopian, but arguably prescient. Yeah, will super soldiers become a reality the things we see in fiction? If so, what will these future fighters look like? And what does that mean for the world ahead? This is our cold, open, icy icy cold, icye hot. Here are the facts. We've talked about this before. We have to be broken records here, but not broken arrows. All war creates an arms race, War and conflict are huge drivers of innovation.
It's true. Well, yeah, another fall out line war war never changes. I think I've always dropped that one, But it's true because the fundamentals of war us versus them, and the nature of it needing to be an ongoing thing in order to fuel this military industrial complex and keep the money flowing definitely never changes.
Yeah, We're talking physics, medicine, chemistry. You scroll through the book of human endeavors, and the odds are that whatever discipline you land your finger on, you will find that some of the greatest breakthroughs in that field came about as a direct result of war and the horrors involved. You know, like a lot of stuff would have languished in peacetime labs, but all of a sudden, your favorite military or your favorite government pulls out all the stops.
They throw money at the problem. They push these things into service, even when they are unproven, so long as it gives a potential battlefield edge radar is a good example. Bayonets are an example, horses, But of course, you know, nukes for sure.
I guess I've got the Cold War on my mind because I was just in Berlin, and I was I went to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and they had a
lot of weaponry on display there. I just found out for the first time that the Berlin Wall actually had like automatic, like unmissed weapons that would shoot people trying to escape, shoot to kill, and not to mention, I believe these things that were called cluster bombs that were very good at wiping out huge crowds, but also would leave behind unexploded ordinance that would cause problems for years
and years to come. So it's a great example ben of technology that solves a problem but maybe isn't thought through in its entirety in terms of the knock on effects.
Yeah, one hundred percent, because especially in the sensitive time windows of war deployment, right, you don't have you don't have the privilege of saying, let's wait till this thing is one hundred percent and definitely good. You have to do your best to stem the tide, right of whatever
the invading horde may be. And we also see with this in step to that point, we see a long long history of nations that push to provide their soldiers with individual advances weapons or new material for weapons, better and better armor horses of course shout out to the Khanates. Other modes of transport, and drugs. I recently re listened to our episode on the Viking Berserkers. Do you get
from that? Yes, that was the one where the idea was that this somewhat elite fighting force got dosed up on psychoactive substances and such.
The dude for whatever reason, just to freak people out right, right, they're beyond pain, right, They're like the urlu Kai.
And this idea then of a super soldier, we could argue, is surprisingly ancient. We could even say we see it throughout literature in the form of Demi Gods, right, Hercules is a super soldier not even fully human. And then of course superheroes Captain America, Agent Walker, Bucky, the Flag Smashers, Isaiah Now, I'm just getting you lost me a Captain Isaiah Bradley.
Yeah, I think Achilles is a really good version of that, because it is kind of the pursuit of everyone out there attempting to create exoskeletons for you know, quote, super soldiers, to create different technologies that would be worn by a soldier that makes them better than human is to remove that one those tiny little places where a soldier is most.
Vulnerable, the parable of Achilles. Heel, Yeah, I think I agree with that, you know, and we see real world examples too throughout history where better or superior training and equipment can wildly tip the scales between otherwise evenly matched fighting forces. Obviously, we've got a lot of veterans in the audience tonight, and thank you for tuning in. This trend never stopped. We could argue that the search for increasingly powerful super soldiers only accelerates in the modern day.
And that's where we give our big shout out to DARPA. What of our first audio episodes, what are the early ones?
Yeah, that's right. Nineteen fifty eight, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA was founded as the central research and development organization for the DoD Starting in the late eighties and early nineties, they started really focusing a lot of their energies on exactly what we're talking about today, the idea of giving that edge to good old uncle Sam. Right.
Yeah, Especially in the late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties, they started, like you're saying, no, focusing on better in their minds, better preparing soldiers, sailors, folks in the Air Force four conflict, even if that meant in theory, upending established precedents for war right, or sometimes even theoretically transforming these individuals themselves. This is where we get this stuff like the much lauded Future Soldier twenty thirty projects.
Have you guys heard the SoundBite from Trump where he's kind of bragging about like oh, you have no idea what weapons we have. We've got weapons that you wouldn't believe that you don't know anything about. It was a little bit of tip of the hand there, but I thought that was very interesting and telling oh.
Yeah, yeah, it's agreeable, right, like the public and the private thing that's a conflict.
We'll get together and we I don't know if you guys remember seeing some of the video I was going to call it propaganda, the video presentations of the advancements for the Future Soldier twenty thirty projects that were things like headsets and heads up displays and other technologies displayed.
Yeah, this was stuff for like controlling unmanned quote unquote weapons like drones and things like that, and this stuff that was sort of tried it out or that's sort of being you know, discussed. Here is more advanced kind of almost like vrfication, right, video gamification of these kinds of weapons.
Well, yeah, yeah, it's part of like the Talos project and stuff like that, where it well the new one is the ho project, but the Talos project that's trying to build a full on exoskeleton like that every soldier that goes out would where this lightweight thing, this tactical assault light operator.
Suit that is cybernetic interface possibly aided by spark drugs, which we'll get into, the ability to translate languages in real time. And it is I think that point about gamification is really solid. It is eerily like what you
may see in some of your favorite video games. Now, the specific initiative Future Soldier twenty thirty, it did get largely shelved by twenty fifteen, late twenty fifteen, but I would argue it instead sort of decentralized to other more discrete projects pursuing a narrow scope of the larger ambition.
And before it's turned right into the tactical Assault light Operator suit project, and it got turned into the hyper enabled operator project, which is this whole new thing that is exactly what you're talking about, Ben. How do we make sure we are the dominant side that makes informed decisions faster And that's ultimately what SOCOM, what Special Operations Command, was looking for.
I think, yeah, I'd agree with that. Yeah. This is also not to say that the US is the only crew in the game here past or present. We already mentioned it. Nazi and Allied forces alike. World War two administered drugs to create what we could call temporary super soldiers. Germans, to your point, NOL proudly dosed their forces with pervetent, which is a terrible name and also an amphetamine with
terrible effects over long term. Well, we got to talk about the one that may not be familiar with a lot of people in the West Russia and their heat pills.
Yeah, this one was new to me.
Yeah, tell us about it, man heat pills.
I believe a substance called two four dina trophanol got that, which is actually used as an herbicide, a weight loss drug, and also an explosive. Yeah, but if you take it, it apparently keeps you from getting too chili in the brutal cold of the Russian tundra. Yeah, or at.
Least feeling too cold right until until the effects wear off. And nowadays, the biggest other name in the superhero or soldier game, I should say, is China. And we'll see why in just a bit. I think maybe we end this here are the facts aspect by acknowledging something we
alluded to earlier. The tricky thing with a lot of this research is that a significant amount of it remains classified until after it's been perfected or deployed in combat, because giving away the secrets also gives away the edge, that's their perspective on any side of a conflict. So, with the fact that we're working with publicly available information, what we found paints of fascinating and frightening picture. What will the next generations of super soldiers look like after
a certain point? Will they still be considered humans?
Or more human than human?
More human? Where's that from?
That is white zombie? But I believe that is I believe it is the catchphrase of the company in Blade Runner that refers to the replicants being more human as a selling point, not as something weird and creepy at all.
Yeah. Yeah, oh my gosh. And we may not even need to get into cloning because there's a lot to cover here. Here's where it gets crazy, gentlemen, I suggest that we begin by grouping these potentialities into three rough categories technological augmentation, biochemical augmentation, true story, genetic modification. So we talked about exoskeletons, maybe we start there. I feel like that's the most plausible thing to see deployed in the near future.
Yeah, these you can see recent news even as of February of this year, where there are photos being taken by the US military specifically and the Chinese military as well as I believe it is UH in Taiwan.
UH.
The military there, they are all putting out these photographs for news stories of their soldiers in a version of an exo suit, different types of exo suits. Almost all of them though right now at least that are being shown in all of these different countries are exosuits that are they're used for moving heavy equipment, for loading howitzer shells, you know, giant heavy shells into other war machines.
Is an alien right, sort of like that that loader thing in the Alien Zone.
But less less of a footprint on it.
Yeah, it's nothing like the big metal things or anything like that. These these are pieces of different materials that are like strapped to knees and to backs into arms to help lift. So you it's literally to take the load off of general logistics.
I thought you were going to say, take a load off, Annie shout out.
To the band. I mean, yeah, it's sort of like a plused up version of the kind of back races that you'll see like ups people wearing.
It's in power yeah, it's imagine a suit of armor that literally gives you super strength. In addition, it can process or waste fluids, so no more having to stop and pop a squat. It can supply nutrition and water for limited time, and it can do a lot more stuff. We owe well. The initial United States experiments in this owe a lot to a four star general named Paul F. Gorman. He retired in nineteen eighty five, if generals could ever be said to retire, and he wrote this paper that
was incredibly prescient. He pitched the idea of what he called a super true exoskeleton, and he said, this will protect you against well the re And he was inspired to look into this is because he found that battlefield fatigue was a leading cause of injury and death for soldiers. You know, think about it, You're carrying all this heavy stuff.
You don't know what's going on. It's already heavy if you're on a regular walk, and now you're in conflict and you can't lose any of that gear ideally, but the wrong biochemical weapon, a fifty caliber bullet, it can end you very quickly, especially if you're tired and not alert. So his pitch was something that protects against all of this, along with audio visual sensors, touch sensitive sensors, haptic sensors,
thermal imaging, classic predator sound suppression, internal climate control. Really cool stuff and incredibly, I think again, incredibly forward looking to describe all of this in the nineteen eighties.
Yeah, but none of that has been achieved yet. It sounds awesome, But he's describing the Iron Man suit, right, I mean, basically it's like an ultimate ultimate exoskeleton.
But no flight. I don't think he ever proposed flight for these That might have been a bridge too far for him. The I mean, I love the point too about the research that was in the civilian world to your point, Matt, about helping people with mobility issues, right, helping people who cannot walk gain more agency in their lives. We're helping with conditions like multiple sclerosis. That's where that's where we see a lot of the research really germinating.
Yeah. There certainly are like technological advancements in artificial limbs, for example, right like that that do use a lot of this haptic stuff in order to be a proper extension of an individual.
Yeah, but what we are seeing is a lot of these companies that start out getting a grant to work on the Talos project, which ran from twenty thirteen to twenty nineteen. They the company start trying to make prototypes for soldiers, but then they realize, oh, it actually works better for Amazon workers, or for people a USPS, or
you know, people in car manufacturing. And so there they're prototype suits, you know that specifically are to support the back and the shoulders when you're lifting above your shoulders. They can sell way more to those industries than they can to the military, because the military ended up scrapping the Talos project in twenty nineteen and they realized, oh, well, actually these exoskeleton suits, they don't work the way we
want them to. Because they realized, this is a quote, an exoskeleton requires power on par with a small motorcycle if you wanted to do it the kind of the way. In nineteen eighty five, yere is being described like a powered suit, you need some kind of battery that's super heavy, right, or an engine that's super loud. You don't want that. Also, if it's an engine, it's probably got explosive materials on it. So now your soldiers are walking around with a bomb strapped to them. A sentis.
It's the battery weight problem. You know, you have to find the cost benefit of what or the tipping point, right, the inflection point, at what point does the efficacy of an exoskeleton outweigh I'm choosing the word perfectly. They're outweigh the expensive weight of the battery, right, because it would almost certainly have to be a battery, and solar power is not to the point where it could be dependable
in that regard. So even if you are US soldier in a war zone now, as Reuter's notes and a fantastic article in twenty eighteen, you're deployed in a war zone, you're bogged down by heavy gear that again you can't get rid of body armor, night vision goggles already. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this could weigh anywhere from ninety to one hundred and forty pounds, which is well over the recommended limit of fifty pounds, and a battery is going to be heavy
at this point. That's again, that's so much to carry on a normal hike, right, yeah.
But theoretically, if you are even you know, if you are wearing that huge battery and you are carrying one hundred and fifty pounds around with you. Theoretically, what that exoskeleton suit would do is take all of that weight off of you basically, and it would be lifting it for you. But the best that they were able to come up with all the way up until twenty nineteen was they reduce the effects of that weight on your body.
Right to mitigate, now to completely solve, And that's going to be an important concept later on too. I mean, this leads logically to the next step, the possible partial autumn of an exoskeleton. What if your exoskeleton has a limited degree of autotomy. What if we solve for the weed issue and you are now wearing a battle suit that automatically removes you from harm's wave if you're wounded or immobilized. Now it turns into just a running version of a car. How far does that go?
Would you know?
What I mean?
Which is sort of what those super soldiers in the Fallout universe are all about. Basically, people have died inside the suits and the automaton elements of the suit just kind of keep on going exactly.
Yeah.
But then for the what is the it's the US Armies. There's another organization that was looking at this combat capabilities Development Command or devcom is the name of it. They're looking at all that stuff, trying to figure out all those things, and guess what they found.
Guys, where did they find that?
Why would we do all of this to out the soldiers when we could just have a machine in the first place?
Exactly, Yeah, that's a question that comes to mind.
Yes, yeah, yeah, that's the immediate question. Would this automation lead to a world where you don't actually need a person in the suit. And this gets us to another aspect of it. We talked about HID or a HUT, a heads up display AI partnership implants. So much of recent warfare research and breakthroughs center on you know, not
bayonets proverbially, but communications, surveillance intelligence. If you were a soldier in say the eighteen hundreds, were in the Civil War, you would be astonished with the sophistication of wireless communication, the info that can be transmitted to an individual in real time, automated targeting assistance, which is only going to become increasingly sophisticated. I mean, there's the realm of biohazard protection.
You've got fall out of my head now, little imagine a helmet that's a gas mask, a command center, a homing beacon, a GPS, a multi spectrum light laser and thermal sensor, and like a pit boys, like a pit boy in your head all at once. And I know I sound like I'm doing a made for TV commercial, But wait, there's more. As Billy Mays was wont to say, what if this also gives you control of a drone swarp?
Yeah, I mean it's potential. So the hyper Enabled Operator, which is a thing that is happening right now, that is a program that SOCOM is operating for soft operators, guys special operations forces. They want to have a soldier that has all the things we're describing here, but they want to do it with technology, and they don't want to do it with like a suit to the wearing.
They just want like little sensors and stuff that you wear, like bracelets and stuff across your chest that give you all of those things you're talking about, Ben.
Yeah, but it's still part of a suit. It's still part of the uniform. The battle dress.
Yeah, for sure, it's a battle dress, but it's not this kind of exoskeleton like the way we've been talking about it before. Right, that helps with movement and all those things. It's just it's simply to make the soldier be able to sense everything. So like if somebody in a let's say a squad, what do you call this, guys, a group of soldiers operating together.
I think that's right. I think I think squad's appropriate.
I don't know. Somebody on your team gets shot, right who's operating with you? You would get a heads up display that the team member X got shot, and here is where they are on the map, like where you are, and you'd have a look down they call a look down display where you actually look down and you can see it, or you can look up and you can see it on your display. Like that kind of stuff
is insane. And to be able to sense actual enemy combatants on the field as you look out with these kinds of things that again it fallout is the best way to imagine it if you've been inside one of those suits, because it looks to me like that.
What are the suits called in the game? Power Power, Power Power? Yeah, yeah, for sure.
So then imagine if you have all that stuff that is in development right now in a real project, and as Ben says, you've also got drones you've also got the little robot dogs that are carrying equipment behind you. You've also you know, you've got all this stuff and you can control it all from your suit. That would be astounding.
Well, and to the point about some of this stuff sort of trickling out into the public, you certainly see in safety systems of modern cars sort of like a lower tech version of some of this stuff with like haptics, like your steering wheel will vibrate if someone's about to pass you on the left, et cetera.
Right, yeah, one hundred percent. Now imagine now and if you are a cyber truck or you're Tesla Model three also had a swarm of drones. This is where we see that hyper real time information loop right now, we could probably, I would argue, we should record an entire episode about the ongoing drone arms race. A soldier of
the future ideally never really travels alone. Instead, this future soldier theoretically would be orbited by a small crowd of network drones, all reporting in real time and all linked to the other soldiers. Swarm of drones maybe even capable of launching remote attacks. It's kind of like how in Marvel Comics falcon has his drone on his back. You know what's it called red Wing? He launches. He launches
red Wing when he's flying around. So a future super soldier could integrate drones in an unprecedented fashion, making each fighter an actual quote one man me get this though, what if all that did happen Despite the nasaers and the people, the soldiers active, there were also invisible. I feel like I have to say it in the silly ways. It's so weird.
Yeah, it's way better than just commanding a murder of crows like you're able to bend.
Uh, it's too too kind. That's too kind and too weird.
Let's take a quick ad break and we'll come back and talk all about it.
And we've returned, guys, before we jump in, just one last thing on the suit, because I think the invisibility thing ties into it. Have you seen images of the rat Nick three combat suit?
Yes?
Search that up really quick.
Ooh looks like it looks a lot like Power Armour Russian military combat suit and incorporates powered exo skeleton designed to enhance strength, speed and endurance. Oh, it's got some sort of like nano material hexagonal armor plating. And webbing actuators little mini motors between the pieces of armor. Right.
Yeah, so this is Russia's counter to the Tallos program in the US, and these images are mostly from twenty eighteen, when there was a huge publicity push for this, again probably as a response to the Taalos program which ended in twenty nineteen. It's just interesting to look at these, specifically this version because of the way the hexagonal plate
armor plating looks. I think it's designed to look futuristic rather than actually be operational and to function in the way we want it to or like as a you know, as a military mind. This may not function the way we want it to, but for these pictures, for this announcement, it looks like it does. It sures heck does.
It's not that far off from like Tesla and their robots that look away but in actuality are controlled remotely, you know, in their current state. It's more about optics than it is about actual function. There's an article I think you're probably referring to, you mount on Forbes, the Hype and Reality of Russian exoskeleton technology for the Russia Ukraine War by vikrum Mittal, again from Forbes.
Yeah, there's a defense one article I was looking at that's just really interesting. It talks about the arms race that the US and Russia are in, or we're in back in twenty eighteen there, and it is just it's one of those things. So you just imagine a lot of the stuff we're encountering is pr and it is meant to send a message to everybody, Hey, we've got
this brand new, amazing tech. But what if there really is stuff that both DARPA and every other research agency for every other country is developing that has potentially the ability to cloak in some way.
And we're talking cloak like visually, not just from radar and certain sensors, or we're talking like predator style cloaking.
Yes, that's a great analogy. All this sounds positively sci fi or Harry Potter fantasy land, But when we think about it, true invisibility or the attempt to achieve that is only the next logical progression of camouflage itself already in ancient art. Please check out our Ridiculous History episodes on those zebra stripes. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, ztellar just a zebra.
It's pulled from nature. It's these particular patterns that from a distance create an optical illusion wherein like warships kind of blend in to the horizon. It's not high tech at all, it's literally paint.
Yeah. And now research into this concept of invisibility is made Bonker strides in recent years in public and private initiatives. The everything we see in the public sphere with invisibility is right now in what we could more or less call the proof of concept stage, meaning you can see the principle or the principle at play. You could go to places like Canada's hyper Stealth Biotechnology. In twenty nineteen they filed a patent for what they call quantum stealth materials.
It's bending light around a target to make it seemingly disappear. And yes to the predator question, this solves the problem Arnold Schwarzenegger has when he faces the predator. Memory covers himself in mud to mask his thermal sake.
That's right to click his the heats the hates s hture exactly.
And then the predator is confused for a moment and says, whatever, my guy, and switches his sensors. I can't remember if it's the same film. He switches his sensors to ultraviolet or some other spectrum of light. This quantum stealth stuff and other related proof of concept ideas. They can also bend ultraviolet infrared, shortwave infrared and if it works. Now again to that earlier point made about propaganda and press release. If it works, these companies argue they have created what
they call a broad band invisibility cloak. I don't know if we have time to think about this, but I it feels important for all of us listening at home to consider what happens.
Like.
We give the National Invention Secrecy Act a hard time, rightly so because it is a violation of inventor rights. But if you were the people in charge, would you want a world where anybody can buy a true visibility cloak? How would you regulate that?
Definitely one of the top wish for superpowers. You can do a lot with that one.
In visit crime.
You know, it'll have to be military grade kind of thing, right. It would have to be like with certain firearms in the US that you just can't buy them if they have certain specs, or you can't you can't own them unless you meet certain requirements.
Kind of have to be yeah, regulated heavily right until someone figures out how to do their own homemade versions, you know, and there's a new era of terrorism. It's it's weird, and it's a pickle that I think we'll return to again and again. But to maybe you could make the argument for us to really understand that we would need to do new tropics and cognitive enhancing substances, just like the mentats in the Dune series. Drugs. Drugs are still so big. We're not talking about snarfing and
edible and chilling. I can't remember if we talked about this, but you guys probably heard. Vietnam is often called the first pharmacological war or the Vietnam War, not the country.
Yeah, yeah, that's what because of certain substances that the US military was consuming. But were they were they actually given these by the government or was okay, yeah, they were given some.
And then of course people were you know, hitting a tie stick and other more dangerous substances were being consumed.
But then say that gives you much of an edge, I'm curious that.
I mean, it makes you graded appreciating music.
Sure, And next, there was so much testing in that era of military personnel that had no idea what they were doing, and they would just sign you signed up, and you signed away your rights to not be tested on.
So kind of gross and not great shadows of World War two. You know, painkillers, methamphetamine. In almost every historical case of state sanctioned drug use for soldiers, the individuals experimented on or dosed with this stuff, they encountered debilitating consequences to their physical and mental health down.
The line, not to mention addiction.
Yeah, that's one of the dangerous ones. Yeah, the vast majority of these drug based initiatives, they weren't seeking to cure things. There were temporary band aid solutions. Let's give someone enough speed to keep them running, to keep them awake, Let's give them enough painkillers to fight through an injury. And that's like giving insulin to a diabetic. It mitigates a symptom, it does not cure the underlying condition.
Well, there's also diminishing returns, especially with the speed stuff, where you know you do need the sleep. It is a fact. So if you're staying up for days or whatever, you know, on amphetamines, you are eventually going to lose your ability to make rational decisions.
Well, that's why you take the sleeping pills so you can get four.
That's how Elvis did it. Yeah, that's how Elvis did it.
That's what remember we heard, we heard from several people who've written in the.
That's exactly right, Yes, exactly, And this I think gives us another another look into the very dangerous side effects. Your body then becomes pushed past its natural limits. An injury you encounter me indeed be worsened because you kept going. And then on the horizon the ever present threat of addiction, which haunts people even today. And we know sanctioned drug
use will inevitably continue for now in some form. There will be increasingly sophisticated, more efficient or more efficacious, less dangerous drugs, but they'll still be temporary. It's going to be like taking a potion in a video game, right that improves your speed or your strength for whatever the window of time is.
Yeah, you get a temporary buff.
I think, a temporary buff. That's it. That's you nailed it all. And that means that the real golden goose here, the holy Grail is not band aid solutions. It's not changing what that warfighter in jest. It's changing the body of the soldier themselves. Genetic manipulation proponents argue this can solve problems beyond the scope of drugs and technology. And before we continue, I gotta say this creeps me out.
Yeah, oh yeah, I mean just thinking about instead of making tech to improve things like a soldier's hearing. So one of the things in the Tealis project, which I thought you guys would find really funny, is that they wanted to give soldiers three D audio, like basically enhanced binurmal audio. But ultimately that's just human ears. So it's like having hearing aids of some sort. But but imagine if you could just give somebody at their genetic level superhering or super psite.
Yeah, or like the ability to breathe underwater, you know, let's take.
It, yeah yeah, or the ability to pee through your skin, which shuts and skates do. Just you know, hear me out, We're gonna do it at breaking. We've returned genetic improvements, all right. As you can tell, this is one of the most exciting and perhaps disturbing possibilities, and it is way less sci fi, way less comic book than it
might sound. At first, guys, I was thinking about our series on real life superpowers, which I look back on with such fondness because we found We went into it skeptical, yet we found multiple instances of proven genetic abnormalities that I don't love that word that granted some individual's abilities beyond that mortal kid. You know, these were like rare
lottery winds of evolution. I remember seeing the study about this anonymous three or four year old who was absolutely jacked, and they had to, you know, hide the kid's identity because a three or four year old can't consent to being you know, displayed as kind of a freak show little buff boys. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very much so. But without the body suit, this kid was just ready for a goose suit. Y.
Yeah not you you come on, you know it.
You know it can't be you, right?
You know? It also makes me think of uh, that was like I win huff. We talked about, yes, regulate his body. A lot of this stuff can be achieved without genetic mutation, just by like crazy amounts of discipline and mental manipulation of oneself and meditative kind of properties. Again, I think people are skeptical about that. But if I'm not mistaken, that guy kind of did do the thing, you know with his mind he did.
Yes, he is genetically not uh.
He is not.
Manifesting or exhibiting any sort of rare percessive trait. It is training and as you said, meditation, self regulation, sort of the way that black cab drivers in the UK have managed to increase their spatial memory and indeed the physical size.
It can unity champus with brain scans, right, mm hmm.
Yeah, And that's why the knowledge is a crazy hard test. If you happen to have taken the knowledge, let us know. We'd love to pick your brain. We also know. Okay. For a long time, these were considered sort of genetic lottery winners, these one offs, right, these people have these limited, often narrow scoped, extraordinary abilities. But then the rise of Crisper came and as it like before, it went to
the public sphere. Honestly, militaries already began saying, well, you know, what if we found some of these this league of extraordinary people, and what if we could transmit or translate some of those abilities to other people? Question one? Would these people?
One?
Would it work too? Would these people have to be biologically related? Right? Would be a matter of turning a recessive gene into like expressing it. The goal was to create this in non biologically related organisms, in this case human beings one of the favorites. All right, we know this lowering sleep requirements makes sense. You know you're a pilot, you're a flying a spy plane for a long time, you're behind enemy territory. You know you're running and gunning.
Wouldn't it be awesome if you only had to sleep three hours?
I just saw a thing. I think it was a study. Basically, there are genetic mutations that allow certain individuals to function highly with very, very very limited sleep.
I'm thinking specifically of some work published by the National Institutes of Health. Multiple studies have confirmed that there is a gene that causes people to naturally sleep less than about six hours per twenty four hour cycle, importantly, with no negati of side effects, nothing. You know, the world record for sleep days without sleep or time without sleep is something no one should attempt. It will give you hallucinations,
it will have damaging health effects. But these folks, some of them with this gene, they need even less sleep per twenty four hour cycle.
And this was a new study that was published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences genetic variant is one of a handful that have been identified in people who don't need a lot of sleep. They're able to mutation link to thriving.
With little rest ad RB one gene correct and there's a lot of research on this because it sounds too
crazy to be true, but it is solid. So what if we could take crisper precise gene editing techniques and say, oh, let's find someone who naturally doesn't sleep that well or doesn't need to sleep that much at all, and then let's find someone who also has increased bone density, right, and then let's find one of those jacked toddlers, someone who has increased muscle mass, and we'll pick and choose, you know, just like a buffet or just like picking
the ingredients of your burrito at Chipotle, and then we'll put them into you know, the flower tortilla skin of another person.
Sounds delicious, I mean.
It means, for better or worse, we're not that far away from a real life Captain America. But this gets us to the weirdest one. And Matt, I know you have read up on this as well. It's the tartar grade question. As far back as twenty twenty, US intelligence officials said, look, they went public. There's propaganda, there's signaling here.
They went public and they said, look, everyone, fellow folks in the United States, the world entire the nation of China is conducting human testing on members of the PLA, the People's Liberation Army. You can read the full op ed in Wall Street Journal. It's John Ratcliffe, who was
the Director of National Intelligence at the time. He didn't disclose specifics, so maybe it was saber rattling until about twenty twenty two, when the PLA Academy of Military Sciences announced that they had successfully inserted a gene from tartar grades into human embryonic stem cells. They did it. They pulled a chimera and it worked.
That's I yeah, yeah, okay, okay, I'm going to say that. I'm going to say it. Okay, sure you did, sure you did.
So you don't think it happened.
I think they did it maybe and it didn't go well, but they still put it out because it sounds scary to anybody who would oppose them.
Now, and the ethical argument, which we'll get to, is they said, look, we synthetically created these stem cells. Therefore, it's not a problem everybody all other scientists, but maybe we talked about why the tartar grade is such a big deal. What were they trying to do well?
Tartar grades can exist in places where most biological life cannot. But one of the reasons they can is because they're so dang teeny and tiny, which you know. They they can exist under pressures like in outer space, like like the zero pressure kind of thing where humans, you know, and other biological things just kind of go pop if you're out there in space. They can also exist way down at the bondo of the ocean where there's tremendous pressures.
If a human could somehow transfer those properties into their skin and tissues and organs and all that stuff, then yeah, I mean that would be crazy. You could have humans flying around in space you just need oxygen.
Then, also known as the water bear or get this, the moss piglet. That was a new one for me. It's a cute little fellas.
When I toil boy and they're so powerful, they're like godlike, I mean, it's crazy. Do you think that they are? They like the closest thing to alien species with their abilities that we kind of have a little bit of a line on.
It's wild.
And I know that they are organically generated in sure on Earth, but man, oh man, the way they can live in those dormant states out in space and stuff, it's fascinating.
Smaller than a one millimeter, right, so small that the English measurement system had to go metric to explain that takes a lot. So for a tiny guy, he is mighty. There have been years of testing on this reproducible results. You can play along at home with the right equipment. We're talking surviving negative two hundred degrees celsius. Throw them in boiling water and they're fine. It's just a jacuzzi
to them the vacuum of space. So the goal of the side, explicitly stated was to evaluate whether you could take a specific gene from a tartar grade and use it to create soldiers resistant to radiation. In other words, folks who could survive nuclear fallout important note not a direct nuclear blast. They could still get mushroom cloud vaporized. Yeah, but if they came in afterwards they would not suffer or they would have mitigated consequences for acute radiation poisoning. And exposure.
And this is actually gene therapy, right, This isn't gene manipulce is not just like like a vaccine or some kind of drug that people could be. It's not bandaid to your point, pen and this is like change. But have we talked about the ethical ramifications of this kind of stuff. I know we sort of hinted at it as we've been going along, but it seems like it's real slippery once you get into changing people's entire kind
of genetic makeup. And to the point earlier too, about trotting out this technology before fully understanding the big rushures.
Yeah, that's a great point, and I think that's where we start to end. Because this transplanted gene, per these studies, if these studies can be believed, the transplanted gene, when it exists naturally in the tartar grade, it allows that life form that moss Pilot, to create shielding proteins that
harden it against dangerous emissions like radiation. The team claims that this was successful that after transplanting this gene, the human embryonic cells showed a vast improvement toward radiation exposure, and they found a bonus power. They found a combo meal at this Chipotle. Not only did the new cells behave normally so no self destruction, no cancer, et cetera,
but they also demonstrated accelerated cell growth. So if you put these water bear man cells or whatever in new blood cells, you could achieve something amazing, a clean transfer of that ability to a human subject, so long as you don't worry about the ethics, because just like military drugs, this is a minefield. Dude.
Yeah, but when I hear the expression accelerated cell growth, doesn't that scream kind of cancer in.
A way as well?
Yeah, Like I mean in terms of like what is how accelerated and what happens is over a long enough timeline, you know, is it going to cause really really negative you know, impacts on the human on human cell growth, et cetera.
That would be freaking crazy. If you could grow and train the human in a third of the time that generally it takes to build a soldier, right to have a from birth to soldier timeline or something like that, and especially if you could clone them right.
There.
Yeah, yeah, truly, Again, all of that stuff ends up getting kind of it's super useful. But when there are machines that do the same thing. They're really expensive, right, and you know, special operations forces have this saying like
the human is more important than the hardware at all times. Sure, but ultimately, if you take the human out of the situation, then almost everything we've talked about today is possible because you just need integrated sensor systems and then you can do all of these things, including the cloaking, including you know, existing in and operating in other spaces to be resistant
to radiation, all of that stuff. It's freaky to me to think that we It feels like the militaries across the world wanted this stuff because that was the most viable way to have an edge when you're talking about a singular soldier on a battlefield. But now, how with the way tech has moved, it just becomes who's got the best mech which feels even more sci fi to me.
Noah, it really is. The stuff of it is, you know, that's why sci fi is so important. They tend to nail stuff way, way way beforehand. And I'm sorry, just really quickly because I think I just I thought maybe I was tripping. But cancer is about accelerating cell growth it's just has accelerated beyond control. So to me, this is like, yeah, okay, that sounds cool when you're describing MAD. This whole like accelerated growth, you know, period. But it
also seems like unchecked. Maybe there's some future ramifications that we don't know about yet.
This is why I argue it's mission critical to walk through everything else aside, it's mission critical to walk through the ethical concerns about this. That's what I meant when I said ethical minefield. First, your point, noal society and humans don't know what those consequences will be. It's primarily because, as you know, when you flip a gene, right, you're not flipping one light switch, You're flipping a light switch that affects a bunch of other light switches in unpredictable ways.
So improving bone density may lead to other less desirable mutations. We don't know. If it just turns everybody's eyes green and their hair blue, right, we don't know what will happen. We don't know if it leads to chronic medical conditions or of course, to cancer, which could take time to spot. Second, this is something people need to think about more often.
We don't know whether these modifications result inheritable traits. If a gene like this or you know, tartar grade gene, for example, if it could be inherited, then the children born with those genes have no right to consent to this purposeful human experimentation. Their soldier parents signed up for it. They did not. We see similar arguments alleging that medical conditions have already been inherited due to exposure to toxic substances, you know what I mean. So there's a heavy question there.
I guess. I guess with all of this in the sci fi angle of it, my mind immediately pictures like server farm sized facilities with just like fetuses, you know, in tanks, like breeding you know, humans for soldiering purposes. You know, that's sort of the most dystopian version of this, right.
And we don't have any understanding of how this tactic or this methodology would affect a soldier's reintegration into peacetime society. Can superhumans have the same rights as non modified people? What happens when some inevitable social media lunatic activists starts saying, hey, these are not people at all. One of the brutal sort of USSR Soviet answers to this would be to also program in a limited time window of life for
these people totally, which is you know, evil. But I don't know, there's so much more to the story, guys. Do we have any concluding statements here? I feel like we're going to hear a lot about this one, and I look forward to it. Yeah.
Same now. I think this is a fascinating topic and certainly ongoing.
Well, folks, we have decided to consider this the beginning of a conversation that can go in many directions. We're sort of at the point of Schrodinger's soldier with this research, and we again, we have a lot of veterans in the audience. We are grateful for your time. As so many of us know, a lot of new technology gets
rolled out before it's perfected, sometimes with disastrous consequence. We would love to hear your experiences with any of the concepts we explored today, and we would especially love to hear your thoughts, your objective, honest thoughts on which of these things may actually become reality and how they may roll out. So that's it for us tonight. We're often
the doctific. The trickiest thing here is the public cannot tell how far the real research has gone to the earlier point about propaganda, to the point about national security, to the point of classic military paranoia. Whether it's due to what or more of these factors. The truth is that a lot of super soldier research is still the stuff they don't want you to know. So tell us your thoughts. You can give us a good old fashioned email.
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I missed you on this one, man, because when you were out I would just try to like sum it up real quick. But you know you're nailing it. I think you're a choice sum on it. I summon demons with that with those words.
Oh yes, shout out to Colonel Alex McCalman. McCalman, I believe is how you would say it. He was the chief engineer of the Tealis project, and you can watch a YouTube presentation that he put out on June sixteenth, twenty nineteen, titled Tealos Project Transition to the Hyper Enabled Operator SOFIK twenty nineteen. It is fascinating. If you want to call us about anything we talked about today, our number is one eight three three std WYTK. It's a
three minute voicemail. You can say whatever you want. We do appreciate it if you give yourself a cool nickname and let us know within the message, if we can use your name and message on the air. If you want to send us an email, we are the entities.
That read every piece of correspondence we receive. Be well aware, yet's unafraid. Sometimes the void writes back. Give us your thoughts, however brief, however long. Identify yourself as you wish given the content of this episode. Please let us know if you need to remain anonymous, and we will do our best to make it so. We also want to recommend in the ethics conversation we had at the end here the following conference report, look it up the ethical and
legal significance of super Soldiers. This was presented by the Center for Ethics and Rule of Law, Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Shout out to Major Kyle Brown. This is an excellent summation of the serious questions at play. Let us know your thoughts, and hey, man, if you think screw it, no holds barred, Let's just roll the dice and see what happens to civilization. Tell us that too. Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
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