From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is They call me Ben. We're joined with our super producer Paul Deckett. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. It's a little bit difficult for the three of us opening this show to not speak in a Transatlantic accent, which all of us love, and I would say the three of us are pretty good at it, although Paul might be the best so far. Yeah, you're really shining with that today, Paul, uh. Today's subject requires us to travel back in time, back to nineteen fifty seven, the dawn of what is called the Space Age, nineteen fifty seven year of space and spot Nick Dogs like a first space traveler, was ready for the takeoff. And here it is. At six hundred miles the Halftime satellite joined the meteors in outer space to orbit around the Earth at eighteen thousand miles an hour. With its passenger shocked, America attempted to launch a grapefruit size satellite on the Vanguard rocket, with disastrous results. In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and spot Nick, President Eisenhower, French Prime Minister Gaia, and other NATO leaders gathered in Paris to consider the peril their decision that three European nations would be armed with intermediate range missiles. The magic of President Eisenhower was a rallying force to an undecided conference and to give added impetus to its purpose, where it was received of the successful launching of the Atlas intercontinental missile, an answer in part, at least to Russia's space supremacy. In the rocket's fiery wake was America's sober realization that the battle had just been joined and that the work of self preservation was at hand. In ninety eight, the dawn of the space eight. Okay, so what we heard there was the story of the first dog in space that we know of, like the first living creature to orbit Earth for a time. This so the first satellite ever again that we know of Soviet sate like launched on October four in nineteen fifty seven, Sputnik one later that year, in November, I believe, of nineteen fifty seven, like a has launched on Sputnik two and has a tragic end that was covered up for a long time. But in this period of time during the Cold War, the US was less concerned about the fate of one Soviet dog, and they were instead in a massive panic over the idea of being beaten out of the space race. That was the thing of most high import don't be beaten in the space race, because whoever controls space, as we've learned from both land and sea and the universe, that's it. That's it. It's just the next battlefield. At least that was it was thought as that, and it seems like the thinking has returned to that place with our current administration. Space space. It's simultaneously yea and oh god, well we don't we have a space force, isn't it called NASA. It's it's a confusing thing. NASA is a little more peaceful. They're not really a force. They're more just like neutral. They just kind of go check things out, poke around in space. The space Force, you know, ideally will have space weapons, space missiles. What if they just add force to the end of NASA and it's NASA force. It doesn't have the same ring as Space for fill out a comment card, then for NASA or for Space the administration. We'll just yeah, we'll we'll tweet them. I'm sure that will work. Right. It's true though, the nation was in a panic, and rightly so, and we are kind of returning to these fears in the modern day. The results of the reaction to the Soviet launch of Sputnik one and Sputnik two was the formation of things like NASA and the formation of what we today call DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects A Agency. This is real life mad Science. If you're a longtime listener to the show, then you have doubtlessly either heard us examine this mysterious entity or you have found it in your own personal research. Um. It was originally just called ARPA, just Advanced Research Projects Agency, but then they added defense to it because it's not about offense, guys. And as it turns out, Al Gore didn't invent the Internet at all. It was it was ARPA, the arpanet, Isn't that right? It was a military did have a hand in it. Then you really, I don't want to take away anything away from Mr Gore. Well, I mean, surely he didn't single handed, right, he didn't single handed with the thick of the mouse. But it's it's a great point because ARPA or DARPA now is responsible for so many technological innovations that we the public probably won't learn about until several years after they've figured them out. So let's let's maybe talk a little bit about where DARPA comes from. It starts in nineteen fifty eight, right, Yeah, and then it all goes back to Spotnick. That's what it's all about. We just had to find a way to the military had to find a way to respond as quickly as possible and as innovatively as possible to any kind of threat to national security as we could, and also we could respond to any advancements by let's say, our enemies as quickly as possible, exactly, And in the late nineteen sixties, ARPA provided funds and oversight for this project that would become known as ARPA net. In nineteen seventy two, the network had grown to thirty seven computers, which sounds small now, but it was a huge deal. And they were all over the place too. It wasn't It wasn't as though their networks in a building, you know, or something like that. It was across the country, and around this time in nineteen seventy one, that's when ARPA got changed to DARPA. So you might hear some people call the early Internet DARPA nets. But again, they have these name changes back and forth. The idea of adding defense to any government property or institution already strikes people as a little bit orwellian. So they went back and forth, changed the name, changed it back, and as of going forward, it's still DARPA. They get tons and tons of credit from people who were impressed by the bold achievements of this institution, but they get no small amount of criticism from opponents and journalists who say, hey, this is weird, this top secret technology. Perhaps there are some things man was not meant to know, And maybe there are, But you know, they they have other notable programs as as you said, dol, they made the Internet. That's kind of big. I mean, that's the reason we have jobs. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We talked about the UM in another episode, the Corona satellite system that they set up where it actually took physical pictures, actual film pictures of the Earth, and then would send the canisters down was really really cool program. And the Showtime Rotisserie Chicken Machine. I did not know that. Yeah, yeah, that that that that first it started there. It all started at Dark Monk forget it. They did um satellites for essentially what became GPS. Isn't that nice? Well, it's nice that we finally have access to it. We can use it for our MENI a little you know, Aaron running. Who would we do with that? Or would I do without it? I don't know. I would go nowhere, you would just take I have a horrible sense of direction. So thank you Dark by allowing me to live in all productive life. And all we had to do is give up any vested your privacy. Yeah, exactly, have it, and we can go back through to other things. We talked about the Vela incident, remember this, guys, where they're detecting whether or not a nuclear explosion has occurred somewhere on Earth. They figured that out, and right after that they figured out the computer mouse, the very first computer mouse. Oh that's right from our Stuff of Genius days. Exactly. Yeah. Stuff of Genius is a short animated program that you can find on YouTube on stuff of Genius dot com. And so on and you can search for Douglas Inglebart. That's his name. I don't know why. I love that name. It's kind of like Ingelbert Humperdink or something, or Benedict Cumberbatch. These are just fun names to say. DARPA also did a lot of innovative work with stealth aircraft tons and they launched the first, as you said, Matt, dedicated satellite or weather satellite in this case, Tiros one awesome, and that was way back in the day to sixty Yeah, yeah, April one, nineteen sixty. So today's episode is not so much about that stuff in the past, which you can find very easily. Today's episodes about the question that should be on everyone's mind when we are dealing with the US is genuine mad science department. It's not what have they done? It's what are they doing now? Yeah? What's coming up? The answers might surprise you and they should definitely frighten you. Here's where it gets crazy. We're getting crazy already, Ben, Yeah, we're gonna be here for a while time. So the biggest, the biggest thing, which I think is easily predictable, right, is the push for AI artificial intelligence. What our friend Damien Williams likes to call machine consciousness. Yeah, it's in intense stuff here, and we've got I'm gonna read some portions here of a public relations release from DARPA, and they're talking about in the nineteen sixties they shaped the first wave of AI technologies. And that's really just them talking about systems runing narrowly defined tasks. Right, we kind of understand that that's what computers do. But it says that these systems were fragile and limited. Then in the nineteen nineties they ushered in this second wave of AI machine learning that actually started looking at statistical pattern recognizers from large amounts of data. So taking a ton of data and going, okay, I understand patterns here, understand patterns here. Um, of course the uh the computer talking at this point. Um. Then it says the agency's funding of natural language understanding, problem solving, navigation, and perception technologies led to the creation of things like self driving cars, personal assistance, and near natural prosthetics. But then Darker goes on to say that these early AI technologies had a lot of issues, most notably that they can't provide the person actually using it with any kind of explanations of the results that they're getting. There's no understanding there. It's just put stuff in, get stuff out. And so they say they're going to address the ease by exploring new theories and applications that that it could make it possible for machines to adapt like on the go to changing situations. For example, in the field, if you're you're in the field of battle, it can make decisions and changes as the situation changes. That's what they're talking about. This level of AI. It's a lot closer to the you know, any biological thing that has an operating system i e. A brain, like a human being able to actually on the fly make those decisions. So not just something that can ask how, something that can also ask an answer why? Yeah? I guess what could go wrong? Yeah? Well, guess what. They just announced a multi year investment of more than two billion with a B dollars for new and existing programs and they're calling it the AI Next campaign. Isn't that exciting? Perfect with the sound of shooting into the brave, new, terrifying future, and then of right after about it's no, I'm sorry, Matt, I can't allow that, right, Yeah, when I first. When we're first reading about this, I thought it said al next, said Ai next, and I was just thinking, oh, man, I hope whatever they end up creating is its actual name is al next. So there you go, DARPA, if you're listening, they're also they're also working on UM this strange program to disabled boton nets. We all know what boton net is. Uh, there are some of the most important voters in a lot of elections nowadays. Unfortunately, or at least, they're one of the very influential factors in a lot of elections. Yeah, they're a butt block, but at least they're they're attempting to influence votes. And they're called boton nets because a single person or a small group of people can run hundreds or thousands of these things that appear to be individual actors. Yes, so it's sort of like fingers on a hand look separate depending on the angle, but they're all still part of the same larger thing except for their ring finger. It's like a turret of a finger. Yeah, can you pop yourself? I don't think a lot of people can independently. I have to forcibly hold down my other fingers to embarrassing. It's embarrassing to humanity, just to us. Uh so botan nets dark. On August thirty this year, they awarded a one point two million contract to a private company named Packet Forensics. And what they're attempting to do is find these hidden online armies and hitting them before they can start to react, you know what I mean, Suppress news, influence social media, and so on. And they've gotten pretty far in a spookley small amount of time during phase one of this project, and all have three phases. Packet Forensics is building a technology capable of scanning about five percent of all the IP addresses in the world, Yeah, and then detecting bought nets with eight percent accuracy. By the end of the program, they think DARPA will be able to analyze eight percent of the entire Internet and correctly spot bought nets. At the time. That's not in itself scary, right, that's a good thing, But the problem is that level of access. I'm just gonna be scanning all the IP addresses, but they're just making sure you're not a bot. It's cool, right, that's cool. Yeah, if you've got another in hide, what are you? What are you? So worried about you can do a capture, right, Yeah, that's what's That's all they do. They look at the IP address, then they make it, they force it to do a capture. That's what I always like to think about. If it's the end of the world and you know, we're in a terminator situation, might actually work out what will be like a god in this new civilization because I'm the only one that could do a capture. You know what I can't do is I always mess up on it. Doesn't like show me the squares where there's not a car, where there's not a road sign. I just I'm like, it seems like there's a corner of a road sign in this one. I don't know, there's like the bumper of the car is in this other square. And I read something somewhere that increasingly humans captures are becoming more difficult for humans to do and less difficult for computers to do because they're yeah, they has to be has to get harder and harder because they were getting smarter and smarter and we're getting dumber and not the film the situation, it is interesting that that might be some kind of I don't know, Trump card in a way if you walk around with a big sign that it's broken up into eight different pieces and some of them have stairs and some of them don't, and you're just like, I think I know what I'm gonna be for Halloween. Be Captain, brilliant, Guys, don't steal that. Let's link up. Let's because I want to do that too. Let's link up and we'll do different version and then I'm committed to another series of costumes. But I want you guys to know, support this. This is great. Like don Quixote, I got some stuff, I got some stuff, but I support this. I'll tell you, but i'll tell you off Mike after we take a word from our sponsors. Let's do it. Oh that's a great costume. They would be so surprised. I feel bad that you guys don't know. It's on the level of the capture. But I think the capture is an awesome idea. Just a follow Follow Ben on Instagram and you will probably see pictures somebody else posting them probably who knows, who knows? We don't. We don't want to spoil it. But speaking of strange segues, you know what else we don't want to spoil the human body. Yes, the body is if people wounded in war or other mishaps, DARPA is developing treatments that literally slow down the body's biochemical reaction. You guys have heard the stories before about maybe a hiker who gets stranded in snow, or they fall all of a sudden into freezing water, and their body functions drastically, like the activity of their body drastically reduces, almost in a state of suspended animation or their hibernating. And the weird thing is often have given the right circumstances, these people can come back even if they haven't been you know, breathing ostensibly for a long time. That is, I mean, it's incredible. So what if we could do that on purpose? What if if someone were seriously wounded, we could stop the clock, stop time and their body essentially until we can get them to hospital or a medical professional. You mean, like well Walt Disney did, but not just the head, the whole thing, okay, sort of sort of like the cry asleep from the Alien movies. Yeah, yeah, it's quite Yeah. So their their motto is slow life to save life. Which is it that creative? But they're doing cool stuff. What's the science behind this, ben This is this is pretty solid stuff. We were attempting to replicate processes that already exist in other organisms on Earth. For example, water bears, which are some of the toughest things we know of, also called Tarte grades, can survive all kinds of crazy stuff, extreme radiation, freezing, dehydration, and they do it by entering this cryptobiosis state in which all of their metabolic functions appear to cease circulation, muscle movement, electrical activity. But you know it doesn't stop. What's that They're cuteness, that's forever. I don't know. Man, As long as their microscopic I'm fine with them. But I imagine somewhere out in space, if other life exists, they are gigantic ones span galaxy. You don't think Tartar grades are adorbs, no fair enough to each their own. Hey, more's Tarta grades for you, man, I'll take them off there your real pokemon. I'm gonna start a ma Nagarie of Tarte grades. I like the name that has a ring to it. Nae Trade. That's a new darker program is trying to make the human body at least degrades so First, the scientists working on this are trying to figure out how to slow things down on a smaller scale, certain cells, certain tissues, and eventually they want to be able to stop a entire organism. So the treatment is going to be successful if it slows down all biological functions within a system and most importantly doesn't damage this l's or the processes when they're back at normal living speed. That's important because in a lot of cryogenic stuff. You know the stories we hear about people with a terminal disease freezing their body and hopes that down the down the was I gonna say, down the yardstick, that makes no sense, down the yellow brick road, there we go, There we go. Somewhere somewhere in the bold, amazing future they will be unfrozen and treated with amazing medical breakthroughs, saving their life. However, the problem with that is that water expands when it freezes, and our bodies are mostly water, so there's potentially tremendous cellular damage. But but if the Tarte grades can figure it out, says Darka scientists, and you know what, so can we? Yeah, it's I really I agree with them. I think there is probably an answer there, but that whole micro macro problem just things don't function the same way at different sizes. You might not scale up. Maybe maybe it does, but I think it could also be the point of being that small, like the evolutionary from an evolutionary perspective, like why they survived for so long at that level? Ah, and that size. I have a I have an ethical question for you guys. All right, there's not really a correct answer for this. This an opinion. I just want to see what you think. So do you all have fit bits? Do you, guys, ever use those? I do not. I do not either, but I use the fitness tracking capabilities of my phone, which is probably admittedly less precise, but you know it does a decent job. Do you sleep with it under your pillow on your bed? Yeah, it'll track sleep if you put it next to you and some friends who track sleep. You may also get a dose of radiation a little extra, but who cares? Yeah? Maybe. But the reason I ask is because these things are really valuable. We can get instant feedback through our phone own or through an app on our phone about our life, things that you might not expect, like your mean body temperature, the phase of sleep you're in of course, your heart rate, the number of steps you take, et cetera, and so on. What if you could have that feedback occur instantaneously in real time through an implant an implantable health tracker, would you do it? Would you be comfortable with that? I guess the the idea for this to make sense for Darker, for some defense purpose, it would have to be sent like sending signals constantly back to whatever command wherever that is, so they know where every soldier is. I mean not only because you easily put GPS in there too, where the soldier is, what the soldier is doing, if the soldier is feeling stressed out, because it does it have anything beyond the standard fitbit like yes, okay, what else does it gather? So it gathers what it calls relevant bio markers, which include things like stress hormones so it can monitor cortisol compounds and signal inflammation like histamine, so you could see if a soldier has been injured. Essentially, if there's any inflammation in that way, does it track their XP? It probably does because it will say the rank there, So you have to know. I don't think that it's I don't think there's a reason for them to anonymize that data. If we're talking about soldiers, they've already given up a lot of their rights, and surely there's a way to gamify this whole system and allow them to win you know, achievements and stuff and like shoot for that. You know, yeah, that level up. We know people do that. So there's another thing. Um, they want to monitor nutritional bio markers to track diets, and they wanted to see how they could use this data to conduct new medical studies since they're going to have so much just raw information. They want to see how people's genes impact physical ability. They want to manipulate eight cellular mitochondria to boost the body's energy levels. They want to make bubermensch. That's what it sounds like. I mean, all of this is toward that area. So the question is I think about how this might roll out in the public sphere. So in the US, UH, privatized insurance companies are the gatekeepers of most medical care. This is a country where this is a developed country, where people will die of easily curable conditions because they didn't have enough money. And that's that's not an opinion, it's not controversial. It's just the state of affairs. So what if private insurance company that he gave you coverage wrote to and said, we'll take x percent off of your bill and it's a significant percent off your policy or whatever. If you and your dependence agree you to have one of these trackers implanted, would you do it? How much money would it have to be? It has to be a lot of money. So if they were like, we'll take fift off your insurance MM, if you and if you and your you know what another in your child to get these Oh, this is tough because I know I would never sign up for it, But I am positive and she can check me on this if she wants to. But I'm positive that my wife would would go for that because she uses She had an Apple Watch with all that stuff on it for a while and she loved having the data, and I feel like she would like this too. What about you know, would you uh? Would you take that bargain? I don't know it would it would probably tell them things about me that I didn't want them to know and make them my make my insurance premiums go there we go. Yeah, that's a concern too. Plus we imagine you have no control over who sees this and they're going to sell it back and forth. Well, it's the same thing with like the idea of a pre existing condition, right, Like, as soon as you get diagnosed with something um then it's like on your like permanent health record. And this is just an escalation of that, right And that could in a in a world be a problem for some people getting insured. Like right now it's on the books that you can't get messed with for having a pre existing condition, but that could change, you know, right right, And that was a pretty recent change, very recent change, and a very divisive change. And so in this like great unknown future of ours, how can we depend on the kindness of big government? It has not shown us to be a thing in the past. How can we depend on the kindness of big anything exactly? That's a good point, big pharmacy, big whatever. You know, everyone's guide incentives and reasons and they're not always looking out for you and your actual best interests. So I don't know, I don't know that that's a lot, Ben, that's a lot asking a lot to just jack into the network like that. And it's like, what are they gonna put you up on a leaderboard, Like, are you all of a sudden gonna be like ranked by your physical stamina and your stats? And then you would have to pick one weirdly specific thing if you wanted to get to the top of the leaderboard, you'd have to be like most reliable cortisol emissions. At the very least, I picture some sort of mission control or like air traffic control hub where it's just dozens of screens with like all of the you know, if we're talking specifically a military use, all of the soldiers in the field and being monitored and such. But if it was expanded beyond that, then why then why then there's one crazier step. There's one there's one step further, one step beyond, and it's something that you will hear speculation about, but you won't hear you won't hear a lot of concrete admissions into this sort of research. It's so now we're at the point where we can monitor these processes. This means that it's not impossible for us to take the next step and create or influence certain bodily reactions, meaning that in the future, someone fighting in the war could have their hormone levels remotely control maybe even you know, like increase the heart rate, usual acuity, you know, or less sleepy. Now it reminds me of a if you've ever played StarCraft, a remote stimpack kind of thing where somebody at command could activate the stimpacks on a whole battalion or something who's about to go in on the ground, and now they're just hyped and ready to go in and war. Right, And I know how sci fi and dystopian that sounds, but we have to realize that multiple countries have done and will do stuff like this. World War two was in some ways fueled by methamphetamine. Right, And even if I if I recall, even fairly recently, long range pilots on some military craft did take stimulants to stay awake during these tremendously long flights. So I don't know. That's the thing. If you agree to be monitored, are you are you required to get a hardware update? Is it in the terms of service that the next time they decided to get something that does influence bodily processes it might just be firmware. You never know, just scan your arm and update the software essentially, Yeah, stuff, Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Do you think there's like a button or that you could like make somebody poop themselves. I'd be cool. I'm sorry, I'm just taking this to the playground. No, no, I think it's I mean, of course you could do that, it's not It wouldn't be that hard to make someone evacuate their back. I think that's the whole play It's like, you know, in theory, you could tap into these systems in a way that you could do all kinds of different things. Imagine a hack in a country where this system is in place and just tens of thousands of people crap themselves at once. But surely just a device that was designed exclusively for monitoring couldn't just be flipped using only technology and electronics. It would have to be like surgically hardwired in in a way that it actually touched all these systems and could you know, affect the levels of these brain chemicals. It would have to be a different dad. Probably. Well, here's the thing, guys, there's another DARPA project that has to do specifically with the mind being able to control various pieces of hardware and software, basically using the mind as your keyboard and your mouse. Which there are already some rudimentary versions of this in early stage, you know, early levels of being able to do this, where you are strapped into a big piece of machinery that you know has a bunch of wires that go from sensors on your on your head, your skull into a big supercomputer and then it's crunching all the numbers as as it's reading essentially your brain waves and activity within sectors of your brain. Well, what DARPA wants to do is have essentially a helmet, a system that goes inside a helmet for every soldier and or pilot and or just whoever whoever else is out on the field where they could control systems not only possibly hardware systems, but also just seeing software and having visuals of what they're what they're looking at. Essentially, um, if you if you ever hit option when you're playing a first person shooter and you go to the map and look at the overlay, they really want to be able to do that for every soldier, and why wouldn't you? And then also imagine this is this is getting um muddied because you'll see a lot of these programs at some point do converge merge. So imagine a soldier that uses this brain computer interface to orchestrate the movements of drones. So a single soldier with their own retinue of U, A V. Different sizes and stuff, and you just you sick Fido or the raptor or whatever on the target, or you send it out to get a look around the corner for you. I mean, obviously that's a great idea. If yeah, if you're in charge, and you're the one with all the guns and the drones and the brain interfaces, and now you know. Of course, the next question is when does that go to the public. Are children in the future going to grow up with drones that are their pet drones similar to the way kids grow up with cats and dogs today. It's possible. But but the one thing that it is currently being used for a lot of this technology is to control something like a prosthetic limb, like if you've got a full arm amte amputation or an injury where you've lost your arm, you and you've got a prosthetic on there. Through using some of these systems where it can actually sense parts of your muscles, like where there's a a neurochemical signal being sent for your brain down to your shoulder or something. You can you can both see those at the brain level when it's being sent and then when it reaches your shoulder, and when you connect to those two signals up, you can actually teach your arm and your brain to control an entire limb that you could not be able to do without just using your brain. It's pretty incredible. This it's crazy cool. But then you extrapolate that to something like an exoskeleton, or go really crazy, go to like the Pacific Rim kind of thing where it's a giant yeager, Like, yeah, exactly, a mech. I mean for real though, And I know that's it's kind of silly to even imagine that, but that's just one of the first steps to get in. The word you're looking for is awesome. I loved Pacific Rim. Oh, I know regrets. I know it's a big dumb movie, and I love both of them. I hope, I hope they make a third one. I liked Vultron too. Well. It's not as neat as the Drown because they can't wow spoilers. They don't have a giant laser sword and they're all in like what were they wolves or something like, I forget what they were. They're different panthers, right, they're panthers, I think, right in And let us know, while we're on the subject of drones, let's examine an assumption that a lot of people have made myself included, at least whenever the subject comes up. That's the idea that drones are all aerial airborne. They're not. We'll be back after a word from our sponsor. Man, are we talking about awkwad drones? We are, we are, No, we are talking about submarine killers. DARPA is aiming to build a fleet of unmanned ships called anti submarine warfare continuous trail unmanned vessels to be pronounced active for short, and they built a prototype of it. Active, they sure did. The very first prototype was meant to demonstrate the potential of what would become an entire fleet of these unmanned ships called antisubmarine warfare Continuous trail Unmanned Vessels UM beautifully to be pronounced active for short. So these thirty two ft long vessels UM were able to reach top speeds of twenty seven knots. That's during a test in Portland, Oregon. And uh, we'll be ready for the open seas this summer, and apparently they're going to launch them from the California coast And it looks like it was actually christened on April seven, And the Navy is pretty stoked about the potential for of an unmanned quote unmanned vessel optimized too robustly track quiet diesel electric submarines. That should be an acronym too. It's true, It's true. This is stuff you can set out on the open ocean and just program it with a couple of commands that it will follow and yikes, yikes, that's a good way to put it. They're just out there like a like a blue whale just is in the ocean. It's just there. They could do other things too. They can supply other ships. They can search for undersea minds. Uh. They can aid in really complex situations like oil exploration would be one right, deep sea investigations. It's much less of a tragedy when a disaster occurs on board an unmanned submarine. So how long can these things be out on the ocean? Get this three months? Three months? It's doing pretty well in initial test. The submarine killing drone, the prototype at least track a submarine from a kilometer away, and the Pentagon says this is a major improvement in technology. We have a quote from Rear Admiral Frank Drennan, the commander of the Naval Mine and Anti Submarine Warfare Command, picking up the quiet hum of a battery powered diesel electric submarine in a busy coastal water is like trying to identify the sound of a single car engine in the din of a major city. Matt, that was a really good Rear Admiral Frank Drennan impersonation. I have to give you credit from them. It wasn't even really doing a voice, but I liked it. Matt does a lot of research into the characterization of any quote. He's sort of the Daniel day Lewis of podcast quotry, and he handles it with respect and dignity. If I should have done it like this, peeking up the quiet hum of a battery powered Decel electric submarine in a busy coastal waters is like trying to identify the sound of a single car engine in the din of a major city. Is that? I love that guy. I like that guy gives like he's a wizard. It sounds like he's he gives crumpled butterscotch candies the people on the street. I could see that. Man, what are those wethers? Original? Y? Yeah, Grandpa always had those. And then while we're on the subject of drones, why stop at one drone? Why not build a swarm? But yeah, the oh no, I've heard about these. So they want to take a C one thirty giant plane, huge, huge plane and have it launch and recover swarms of drones. By some point in twenty nineteen. They're calling it the Gremlins program, of course, named after the imaginary mischievous imps that became good luck charms for British pilots in World War Two and got a lot of national recognition in the Twilight Zone. That's really nice because there was a Gremlin on the plane, was on the wing or was there. But what they're attempting to do is lower the cost of the previous platforms. Once they're dispatched, these drones can accomplish any number of things, electronic warfare, surveillance, signals, intelligence, and even what you're called kinetic effects a K. Offensive capabilities. Yes, they're so offensive those capabilities and when they complete their mission, they fly back to that aircraft that retrieves the mid air and carries them home where they could be carries them back to their headquarters where the human ground crew for now will prepare them for their next use within twenty four hours. It's crazy. They are videos of these gremlin swarms that you can see, and it really it looks like a refueling of let's see an F fourteen or whatever when it's going to get refueled by a jet and this just has to dock, right, the two planes have to dock these things. They look like missiles essentially to have a small wingspan on them, and they just automatically through their internal systems, fly up and they attach themselves to this plant to the other see one thirty or whatever it is that's capturing them, just pulls them right in and it just continues to do that, and it can do it with I forget how many it can fit in one see one thirty. But it was, like you said, a swarm of these things that can be deployed and then just brought right back. Yeah. They each have a range of three hundred miles while carrying a sixty pound payloads. So these aren't the same, you know, like QT drones you can buy as a stocking stuffer. No, no, no, no no. And the crazy thing about them is that they all work in concert. It is literally a swarm what what all of them? All of the information gathered by all of them is sent back to essentially as a single user or set of users that are looking at all of this stuff. So it's almost like a hive mind or something it is. And what they'll use them for is to circle an area of operations and and you basically have an overview of the entire area. Is it almost like a three dimensional map or something that they can generate or I guarantee you what I've seen online is not a representation of what is actually being viewed by the operators because you wouldn't want to share that for security reasons. But it looks intense. It's such a there's such potential for a cartoonish comic book level supervillain like the Drone Man. No wait, we need a met her name better than Drone dude, doctor Drone doctor. Oh Yeah, that's it, that's the doctor Drone. Let's make a T shirt with Dr Drone. So it's quite possible that in the future, one person, one human being could be with UM with assistance from some computers right and SME algorithms, one person could control multiple drones with a very high level of sophistication. And their big goal is to make each of these drones cost less than five hundred thousand dollars. Ah, so fun as we know. There there you go, so nice. So Dr drone also has to be pretty well off. I mean that's like a million for two drones. Well, yeah, all you need to do is maybe start stashing a couple trillion dollars over the course of a couple of decades dr drone, you know, just like the d O D did the Pentagon trillions of dollars. I can't find the money on the books. We just lost the palettes. Oh my god. So yeah, exactly. And we're they're working on keeping a human body alive after death. They're working on all of these advanced technologies to control AI. There they are going to turn themselves into super some things, let's call them villains for now that will live forever. They're building. Dr drone never dies, only sleeps. And you know what you need when you've got a bunch of reconnaissance drones overhead that are giving you the main macro view of everything that's going on. What do we need? You need some tiny little spies they can give you the micro view. That's correct. Yes, robot insects spies. When I think of swarm, that's what I think of, you know. Yeah, and that's this would not be difficult to pull off. Either episode of Black Mirror in the most recent season where there were like tiny robot insect drones that did things. Is that the season before? Yeah, it was in the second season. Uh, and it was the long one. It was almost like feature length. It was I remember this, and that's very much we're talking about here, only a different application. Uh. They've tested several different sorts of insects as part of the program they call high mems, and they've tested with flying moths and beetles, and they found that this this okay, this it's cracked to the implantable medical tracking device. The research shows that it is possible, through the use of implants to control where these creatures fly. So you're not just letting them out and then having a tiny camera report back. You are able to force their movements and the creepiest part about this is that through research, they found that you cut a pupa in half. If you're talking about a moth slash butterfly, you cut the pupa in half. After it's been like a larva and everything, it gets to the stage where it's about to metamorphosize into uh, the next version, the moth or the butterfly, and you put the implant in there at that stage, and then the butterfly or moth develops with this implant attached to it. Right. It is so creepy in insane looking and imagining that because it makes you it makes you imagine implanting a child maybe or something at a certain stage, a human child that would then grow into their implant. And here's the thing, we don't know if these bugs, these robobugs are actually out in the field now or exactly where the research has gone. You know, no, even Snope said it's true and false. Right, Yeah, there's a report from sixteen on inverse dot com that has some news about this. I believe the research on something like this began all the way back in the nineteen forties. They just later said, hey, insects already have this figured out, so they may be a real thing. They may be coming to a battlefield near you and maybe you'll notice, so let us know. If you see any bug with really strange looking electronics on it, please send pictures. What you probably will not see is the blimps, the airships. Remember those in their disaster, etcetera, etcetera. Uh. The problem with airships is that they are quite vulnerable. So despite being a really cool way to surveil in area, or even just a cool way to get around, the fear of an attack on a blimp has prevented them from becoming more common. It just takes a little bit of a flaku cannon aimed in the right spot, right right. So DARPA has taken over this plan and they are building very high altitude giant, giant giant airships. They want to make these airborne aircraft carriers, and you will likely not see them. You will likely not know they exist unless you get in the way of someone. It is be because they're talking about, like you said, carrying an entire battalion of troops and all the medical supplies, all the supplies needed for setting up a base, all the supplies needed for even some heavy weapons, and all these other things all in this giant blimp, like you said, like an aircraft carrier that just hangs out way up there ready to deploy, and you can imagine, I don't know, treating it like a base, essentially a mobile base where they're just stationed there for a certain amount of time until they're deployed, like the Helly Carrier or what's it called in Marvel Marvel movies. I know you're talking about. I don't know the name of it. Where like in a BioShock the second BioShock, I didn't know the third BioShock game, the one where with with all the blimps, is that the Americana one there were a lot of blimps deploying little fighter jets. Yeah, it's like that, but in this case it's a giant city. I guess it was kind of like that kind of the other thing. That's cool. Um, if we're doing pop culture references, do you guys remember that film, UH want Sky Captain in the World of Tomorrow? Oh no, I don't want to remember that one. Are you talking about the one? Wait? Okay, I never saw a movie. I need to see that movie. It's gorgeous from a uh cinematography design perspective. I think it's got really cool aesthetic. Sky Captain, for sure, they had a lot of big blimps though, I think too it did. Yeah, but you said wanted, You mean like with Angelina Jolie. This is the she was in Skycaptain. Too cool eye patch if I recall. Yeah, so like spinning the bullet or whatever you I forget what they called it. Yeah, I don't remember what they called it. The comic book adaptation holds up a little bit better. I think, right, self guided bullets in the film adaptation Wanted, the assassins are able to use the powers of their mind to change the direction the trajectory of a bullet after or it's fired. Pretty neat, Yeah, weirdly specific superpower. DARPA is working on it. DARPA is working on making that in real life, building ammunition with a guidance system to keep it on target. Right now, the specifics about how that works are classified and probably will be classified of and it might be a situation where we don't learn that this technology exists until we hear reports of it being used in war or in a conflict. Yeah, kind of like we didn't really know that people had stealth helicopters until one crashed. Dude, there is a thing. There's it's a website called futurism dot com and they're purporting to have a video of what they're calling exact oh uh, the Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordinance. And it's a system that they're demonstrating where it's showing a guided bullet. Whoa, And it's pretty crazy. So I don't know if I believe this. Yeah. So it's showing a red line which is the trajectory of where the bullet as it's being fired and sent down towards this target. It shows you where it would be, and then it shows the moving target way in the distance, and it shows the bullet change directions and follow the target and actually hit the target. That's crazy, that's insane, I don't. I mean, it's from DARPA TV. It's from their their actual YouTube channel, so they'll show it in action, but they won't tell you how the nuts and bolts of how it works. How is this technology much different from like guided missiles for example, or like you know, heat heat seekers or whatever. It's just more micro technology. Oh you're talking about the bullet. The bullet, Yeah, I mean that's essentially what it is. There are some bullets you can get that are considered rocket bullets essentially that actually shoot out exhaust as they're firing, being fired through the air. UM. So it's kind of like this. It's just somehow there is a either a small CPU or something that's guiding it, like that's actually inside the piece of metal that you're firing from a weapon, uh, working with some other system that's tracking whatever the target is. Um. It's just it seems so futuristic. And these are just a few of the fascinating, frightening, sometimes inspiring things that DARPA is working on. We do wanna be clear that a lot of what DARPA does is just facilitate independent researchers. Yeah, it gives you money. It gives you money, it gives you support, and it gives you direction. Right, yes, But it is one of those things where you can see all of these varying, compartmentalized programs where perhaps purposefully DARPA makes it uh unknown to the left arm with the right arm is doing and all of that situation, because if you add up some of these programs, you're not only getting super soldiers. You're not only getting dr drone dr drone. But it's it genuinely creeps me out just thinking that a single force or a country or power will have access to these things at some point in the future. But there's another argument to be made here, which is dangerous. It's kind of sticky. The argument is if we don't do it, says insert country here, then someone else will. It's too good of an argument. We either build the bullets or we get shot by them. Yeah, and it's I mean, it's kind of a zero sum equation way of thinking, but it is it does have some validity to it. And the truth is that Dara is very uh p diddy about this. Can't stop, won't stop, you know what I mean. It's a it's this feedback loop of research, success and investment, and it is an important thing. We can't stress enough. They're tremendous medical innovations that occur because of this sort of research. But it goes hand in hand with these other goals a nation state would have, I mean, to summon up when we talk about what DARPA is working on, we don't know what we don't know, but we can guess, as you said, Matt, we can put pieces together. You can write to DARPA directly and ask them. They have a great PR department, but they're very clear when they're like, well, some things have to be classified because it's a matter of national security. That does not automatically mean they're devious, but it does mean that there is stuff they don't want you to know. But they are working with a ton of independent contractors. So maybe you could get more information from someone on that lower tier and just saying good, good information on everyone. Indeed, so let us know what you think is dark, bad, balance a good thing. Do you think that there are some programs that are so secret that no one knows about them? There's got to be I'm sure there's something, but I wonder what it is. You know, maybe the real secret is just not what they're doing, but how far along the research has gone, right that I can totally see that, And I could also see the big secret being how the systems are working together or how the projects are fitting together. That's like the lowest levels of the secret basis. So we'd like to hear we'd like to hear your opinion. I also want to recommend darpast podcast. The podcast, Yeah, it's pretty interesting. And there are some great explanations by various scientists and project man. And they called the DARPA Cast because that's a missed opportunity. If it's not, is it just the dark pap podcast. Come on, guys, Yeah, it's just the DARPA podcast. You should write to them, say DARPA Cast, a lot of comment card, maybe a comment card. Maybe they'll join this stuff media network. Maybe we can bring them in. I would love to hear that. 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