May 30, 2025 • 63 mins
While it may sound like science fiction, human militaries throughout history have always sought for an edge over their enemies -- and, in this search, ethics quickly go out the window. In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel explore the latest updates in the creation of a modern "super soldier," from technological breakthroughs to designer drugs... and levels of genetic modification that may leave a soldier less human than before.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
They call me Ben.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
We're joined as always with our super producer Andrew the
try Force Howard. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
You are here.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
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
(01:02):
astonishing for this conversation.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Sure, should we go one word at a time? Round
Robin And I'm just kidding. I think I think you
should read it.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Ben. You found you're back, You're back from your travels.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I insist you should do it.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
Can you do it in German?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
No?
Speaker 4 (01:19):
No, almost anyway, this this quote is the following. My
measure of success is that the International Olympic Committee bans
everything we do.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Cool cool understood.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Yeah, I don't understand what DARPA's activities has to do
with the Olympic Committee.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Remember you mean the steroid Olympics Olympics?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (02:06):
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
(02:28):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:40):
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
(03:01):
majorly slippery slope and scary.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
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
(03:24):
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,
(03:46):
not to build new diseases.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
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
(04:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
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
(05:15):
going to come back. I think Doomsday is going to
be good.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
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.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Movie Universal Soldier.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Guy's got his he's got skills, he doesn't need a suit.
What is his power? Perfect aim something along most.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
It's not a power, it's just really good you guys.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
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,
(06:46):
very clever, very and dystopian and clever.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
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
(07:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
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.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
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.
(08:13):
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.
(08:35):
Bayonets are an example, horses, But of course, you know,
nukes for sure.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
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
(09:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (09:21):
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
(09:41):
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.
(10:04):
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
(10:26):
on psychoactive substances and such.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
The dude for whatever reason, just to freak people out right, right,
they're beyond pain, right, They're like the urlu Kai.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
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,
(11:03):
Isaiah Now, I'm just getting you lost me a Captain
Isaiah Bradley.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
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.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
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
(11:55):
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?
Speaker 3 (12:15):
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,
(12:36):
the idea of giving that edge to good old uncle Sam. Right.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
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
(13:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
Yeah, yeah, it's agreeable, right, like the public and the
private thing that's a conflict.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
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.
Speaker 4 (14:35):
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
(15:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
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,
(15:40):
was looking for.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
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,
(16:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Yeah, this one was new to me.
Speaker 4 (16:24):
Yeah, tell us about it, man heat pills.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
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
(17:13):
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,
(17:33):
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?
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Or more human than human?
Speaker 4 (17:52):
More human? Where's that from?
Speaker 3 (17:54):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:10):
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
(18:35):
we talked about exoskeletons, maybe we start there. I feel
like that's the most plausible thing to see deployed in
the near future.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
UH.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
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,
(19:28):
you know, giant heavy shells into other war machines.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Is an alien right, sort of like that that loader
thing in the Alien Zone.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
But less less of a footprint on it.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
I thought you were going to say, take a load off,
Annie shout out.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
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
(20:35):
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
(20:57):
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
(21:18):
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,
(21:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
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.
(22:37):
We're helping with conditions like multiple sclerosis. That's where that's
where we see a lot of the research really germinating.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
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
(23:22):
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,
(23:42):
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,
(24:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
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
(24:39):
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
(25:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
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
(26:07):
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?
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Would you know?
Speaker 4 (26:24):
What I mean?
Speaker 3 (26:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
Guys, where did they find that?
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Why would we do all of this to out the
soldiers when we could just have a machine in the
first place?
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Exactly, Yeah, that's a question that comes to mind.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
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
(27:27):
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,
(27:49):
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
(28:11):
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?
Speaker 2 (28:34):
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
(28:56):
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.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
Yeah, but it's still part of a suit. It's still
part of the uniform. The battle dress.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
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,
(29:35):
a group of soldiers operating together.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
I think that's right. I think I think squad's appropriate.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
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
(30:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
What are the suits called in the game? Power Power,
Power Power? Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
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.
Speaker 4 (30:56):
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
(31:19):
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
(31:41):
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,
(32:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Yeah, it's way better than just commanding a murder of
crows like you're able to bend.
Speaker 4 (32:21):
Uh, it's too too kind. That's too kind and too weird.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Let's take a quick ad break and we'll come back
and talk all about it.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
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?
Speaker 4 (32:43):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Search that up really quick.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
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
(33:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
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
(34:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
And we're talking cloak like visually, not just from radar
and certain sensors, or we're talking like predator style cloaking.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
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
(35:21):
on those zebra stripes. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, ztellar just
a zebra.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
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.
Speaker 4 (35:39):
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
(36:03):
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
(36:26):
himself in mud to mask his thermal sake.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
That's right to click his the heats the hates s
hture exactly.
Speaker 4 (36:31):
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
(36:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Like.
Speaker 4 (37:18):
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?
Speaker 3 (37:39):
Definitely one of the top wish for superpowers. You can
do a lot with that one.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
In visit crime.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
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.
Speaker 4 (37:59):
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
(38:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
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.
Speaker 4 (38:58):
And then of course people were you know, hitting a
tie stick and other more dangerous substances were being consumed.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
But then say that gives you much of an edge,
I'm curious that.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
I mean, it makes you graded appreciating music.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
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.
Speaker 4 (39:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
The line, not to mention addiction.
Speaker 4 (39:49):
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
(40:11):
a symptom, it does not cure the underlying condition.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Well, that's why you take the sleeping pills so you
can get four.
Speaker 4 (40:34):
That's how Elvis did it. Yeah, that's how Elvis did it.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
That's what remember we heard, we heard from several people
who've written in the.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
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.
(41:02):
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
(41:24):
be like taking a potion in a video game, right
that improves your speed or your strength for whatever the
window of time is.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
Yeah, you get a temporary buff.
Speaker 4 (41:35):
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
(41:55):
solve problems beyond the scope of drugs and technology. And
before we continue, I gotta say this creeps me out.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
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
(42:29):
like having hearing aids of some sort. But but imagine
if you could just give somebody at their genetic level
superhering or super psite.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Yeah, or like the ability to breathe underwater, you know,
let's take.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
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
(43:07):
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
(43:29):
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
(43:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah not you you come on, you know it.
Speaker 4 (44:09):
You know it can't be you, right?
Speaker 3 (44:11):
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
(44:31):
not mistaken, that guy kind of did do the thing,
you know with his mind he did.
Speaker 4 (44:35):
Yes, he is genetically not uh.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
He is not.
Speaker 4 (44:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
It can unity champus with brain scans, right, mm hmm.
Speaker 4 (45:05):
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
(45:28):
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
(45:48):
some of those abilities to other people? Question one? Would
these people?
Speaker 3 (45:54):
One?
Speaker 4 (45:54):
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
(46:15):
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?
Speaker 3 (46:29):
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.
Speaker 4 (46:41):
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
(47:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
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.
Speaker 4 (47:33):
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
(47:55):
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
(48:19):
another person.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
Sounds delicious, I mean.
Speaker 4 (48:22):
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.
(48:43):
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
(49:05):
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
(49:26):
pulled a chimera and it worked.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
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.
Speaker 4 (49:40):
So you don't think it happened.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
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.
Speaker 4 (49:51):
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?
Speaker 2 (50:09):
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
(50:31):
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,
(50:52):
I mean that would be crazy. You could have humans
flying around in space you just need oxygen.
Speaker 4 (50:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (51:04):
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.
Speaker 4 (51:17):
It's wild.
Speaker 3 (51:18):
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.
Speaker 4 (51:25):
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.
(51:46):
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
(52:10):
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.
(52:34):
And exposure.
Speaker 3 (52:35):
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
(52:55):
of genetic makeup. And to the point earlier too, about
trotting out this technology before fully understanding the big rushures.
Speaker 4 (53:03):
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
(53:24):
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
(53:44):
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
(54:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (54:16):
Yeah, but when I hear the expression accelerated cell growth,
doesn't that scream kind of cancer in.
Speaker 4 (54:23):
A way as well?
Speaker 3 (54:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (54:57):
There.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
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,
(55:20):
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
(55:41):
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
(56:03):
the best mech which feels even more sci fi to me.
Speaker 3 (56:08):
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
(56:29):
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.
Speaker 4 (56:41):
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
(57:03):
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
(57:25):
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
(57:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (58:06):
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.
Speaker 4 (58:24):
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,
(58:45):
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
(59:07):
we're going to hear a lot about this one, and
I look forward to it. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (59:10):
Same now. I think this is a fascinating topic and
certainly ongoing.
Speaker 4 (59:14):
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
(59:35):
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
(59:55):
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
(01:00:17):
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.
You can call us on a telephonic device, or you
can hit us up on the lines and the social
needs thou might sip.
Speaker 3 (01:00:34):
Indeed, you can find this at the handle conspiracy Stuff,
where we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group here's
where it gets crazy, on YouTube where we have video
content glor for you to enjoy, and on xfka, Twitter,
on Instagram and TikTok where conspiracy Stuff show.
Speaker 4 (01:00:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
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
(01:01:24):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:01:43):
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
(01:02:03):
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.
(01:02:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
They call me Ben.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
We're joined as always with our super producer Andrew the
try Force Howard. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
You are here.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
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
(01:02):
astonishing for this conversation.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Sure, should we go one word at a time? Round
Robin And I'm just kidding. I think I think you
should read it.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Ben. You found you're back, You're back from your travels.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I insist you should do it.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
Can you do it in German?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
No?
Speaker 4 (01:19):
No, almost anyway, this this quote is the following. My
measure of success is that the International Olympic Committee bans
everything we do.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Cool cool understood.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Yeah, I don't understand what DARPA's activities has to do
with the Olympic Committee.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Remember you mean the steroid Olympics Olympics?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (02:06):
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
(02:28):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:40):
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
(03:01):
majorly slippery slope and scary.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
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
(03:24):
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,
(03:46):
not to build new diseases.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
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
(04:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
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
(05:15):
going to come back. I think Doomsday is going to
be good.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
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.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Movie Universal Soldier.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Guy's got his he's got skills, he doesn't need a suit.
What is his power? Perfect aim something along most.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
It's not a power, it's just really good you guys.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
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,
(06:46):
very clever, very and dystopian and clever.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
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
(07:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
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.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
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.
(08:13):
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.
(08:35):
Bayonets are an example, horses, But of course, you know,
nukes for sure.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
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
(09:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (09:21):
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
(09:41):
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.
(10:04):
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
(10:26):
on psychoactive substances and such.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
The dude for whatever reason, just to freak people out right, right,
they're beyond pain, right, They're like the urlu Kai.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
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,
(11:03):
Isaiah Now, I'm just getting you lost me a Captain
Isaiah Bradley.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
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.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
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
(11:55):
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?
Speaker 3 (12:15):
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,
(12:36):
the idea of giving that edge to good old uncle Sam. Right.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
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
(13:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
Yeah, yeah, it's agreeable, right, like the public and the
private thing that's a conflict.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
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.
Speaker 4 (14:35):
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
(15:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
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,
(15:40):
was looking for.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
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,
(16:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Yeah, this one was new to me.
Speaker 4 (16:24):
Yeah, tell us about it, man heat pills.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
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
(17:13):
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,
(17:33):
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?
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Or more human than human?
Speaker 4 (17:52):
More human? Where's that from?
Speaker 3 (17:54):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:10):
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
(18:35):
we talked about exoskeletons, maybe we start there. I feel
like that's the most plausible thing to see deployed in
the near future.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
UH.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
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,
(19:28):
you know, giant heavy shells into other war machines.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Is an alien right, sort of like that that loader
thing in the Alien Zone.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
But less less of a footprint on it.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
I thought you were going to say, take a load off,
Annie shout out.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
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
(20:35):
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
(20:57):
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
(21:18):
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,
(21:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
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.
(22:37):
We're helping with conditions like multiple sclerosis. That's where that's
where we see a lot of the research really germinating.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
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
(23:22):
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,
(23:42):
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,
(24:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
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
(24:39):
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
(25:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
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
(26:07):
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?
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Would you know?
Speaker 4 (26:24):
What I mean?
Speaker 3 (26:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
Guys, where did they find that?
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Why would we do all of this to out the
soldiers when we could just have a machine in the
first place?
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Exactly, Yeah, that's a question that comes to mind.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
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
(27:27):
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,
(27:49):
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
(28:11):
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?
Speaker 2 (28:34):
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
(28:56):
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.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
Yeah, but it's still part of a suit. It's still
part of the uniform. The battle dress.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
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,
(29:35):
a group of soldiers operating together.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
I think that's right. I think I think squad's appropriate.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
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
(30:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
What are the suits called in the game? Power Power,
Power Power? Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
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.
Speaker 4 (30:56):
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
(31:19):
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
(31:41):
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,
(32:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Yeah, it's way better than just commanding a murder of
crows like you're able to bend.
Speaker 4 (32:21):
Uh, it's too too kind. That's too kind and too weird.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Let's take a quick ad break and we'll come back
and talk all about it.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
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?
Speaker 4 (32:43):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Search that up really quick.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
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
(33:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
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
(34:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
And we're talking cloak like visually, not just from radar
and certain sensors, or we're talking like predator style cloaking.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
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
(35:21):
on those zebra stripes. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, ztellar just
a zebra.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
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.
Speaker 4 (35:39):
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
(36:03):
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
(36:26):
himself in mud to mask his thermal sake.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
That's right to click his the heats the hates s
hture exactly.
Speaker 4 (36:31):
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
(36:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Like.
Speaker 4 (37:18):
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?
Speaker 3 (37:39):
Definitely one of the top wish for superpowers. You can
do a lot with that one.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
In visit crime.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
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.
Speaker 4 (37:59):
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
(38:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
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.
Speaker 4 (38:58):
And then of course people were you know, hitting a
tie stick and other more dangerous substances were being consumed.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
But then say that gives you much of an edge,
I'm curious that.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
I mean, it makes you graded appreciating music.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
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.
Speaker 4 (39:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
The line, not to mention addiction.
Speaker 4 (39:49):
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
(40:11):
a symptom, it does not cure the underlying condition.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Well, that's why you take the sleeping pills so you
can get four.
Speaker 4 (40:34):
That's how Elvis did it. Yeah, that's how Elvis did it.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
That's what remember we heard, we heard from several people
who've written in the.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
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.
(41:02):
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
(41:24):
be like taking a potion in a video game, right
that improves your speed or your strength for whatever the
window of time is.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
Yeah, you get a temporary buff.
Speaker 4 (41:35):
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
(41:55):
solve problems beyond the scope of drugs and technology. And
before we continue, I gotta say this creeps me out.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
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
(42:29):
like having hearing aids of some sort. But but imagine
if you could just give somebody at their genetic level
superhering or super psite.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Yeah, or like the ability to breathe underwater, you know,
let's take.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
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
(43:07):
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
(43:29):
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
(43:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah not you you come on, you know it.
Speaker 4 (44:09):
You know it can't be you, right?
Speaker 3 (44:11):
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
(44:31):
not mistaken, that guy kind of did do the thing,
you know with his mind he did.
Speaker 4 (44:35):
Yes, he is genetically not uh.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
He is not.
Speaker 4 (44:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (45:01):
It can unity champus with brain scans, right, mm hmm.
Speaker 4 (45:05):
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
(45:28):
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
(45:48):
some of those abilities to other people? Question one? Would
these people?
Speaker 3 (45:54):
One?
Speaker 4 (45:54):
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
(46:15):
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?
Speaker 3 (46:29):
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.
Speaker 4 (46:41):
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
(47:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
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.
Speaker 4 (47:33):
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
(47:55):
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
(48:19):
another person.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
Sounds delicious, I mean.
Speaker 4 (48:22):
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.
(48:43):
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
(49:05):
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
(49:26):
pulled a chimera and it worked.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
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.
Speaker 4 (49:40):
So you don't think it happened.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
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.
Speaker 4 (49:51):
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?
Speaker 2 (50:09):
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
(50:31):
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,
(50:52):
I mean that would be crazy. You could have humans
flying around in space you just need oxygen.
Speaker 4 (50:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (51:04):
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.
Speaker 4 (51:17):
It's wild.
Speaker 3 (51:18):
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.
Speaker 4 (51:25):
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.
(51:46):
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
(52:10):
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.
(52:34):
And exposure.
Speaker 3 (52:35):
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
(52:55):
of genetic makeup. And to the point earlier too, about
trotting out this technology before fully understanding the big rushures.
Speaker 4 (53:03):
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
(53:24):
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
(53:44):
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
(54:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (54:16):
Yeah, but when I hear the expression accelerated cell growth,
doesn't that scream kind of cancer in.
Speaker 4 (54:23):
A way as well?
Speaker 3 (54:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
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.
Speaker 4 (54:57):
There.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
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,
(55:20):
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
(55:41):
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
(56:03):
the best mech which feels even more sci fi to me.
Speaker 3 (56:08):
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
(56:29):
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.
Speaker 4 (56:41):
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
(57:03):
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
(57:25):
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
(57:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (58:06):
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.
Speaker 4 (58:24):
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,
(58:45):
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
(59:07):
we're going to hear a lot about this one, and
I look forward to it. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (59:10):
Same now. I think this is a fascinating topic and
certainly ongoing.
Speaker 4 (59:14):
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
(59:35):
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
(59:55):
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
(01:00:17):
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.
You can call us on a telephonic device, or you
can hit us up on the lines and the social
needs thou might sip.
Speaker 3 (01:00:34):
Indeed, you can find this at the handle conspiracy Stuff,
where we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group here's
where it gets crazy, on YouTube where we have video
content glor for you to enjoy, and on xfka, Twitter,
on Instagram and TikTok where conspiracy Stuff show.
Speaker 4 (01:00:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
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
(01:01:24):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:01:43):
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
(01:02:03):
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.
(01:02:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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