Pod Insights The Why Files: Operation Podcast The Machines Are Watching You | And They Know Everything (Compilation) About this episode Secret listening posts sit inside ordinary buildings in major cities. Numbers stations still broadcast coded messages over shortwave radio — and no one officially admits why.
This compilation traces the full arc of modern surveillance, from hidden urban infrastructure and sonic weapons to subliminal influence campaigns and a computer virus that nearly started a world war.
Havana Syndrome left diplomats with brain injuries and no official explanation. A wire encircles New York City that most residents have never heard of.
And at the end of it all sits the quantum computer — a machine powerful enough to crack every encrypted secret humanity has ever kept. Nothing stays hidden forever.
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Transcript 25,577 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:06 Speaker 01 Every move we make, every vow we break, every smile we thick, every claim we stick, they'll be watching us. Holy flux, you scared the crap out of me. While going to my Faraday cage, I'm calling it "Cage Against the Machine", where we chew the wire and dam the current. Trademark pending. Wait, how did you find us? The human and the fish have been compromised. So I didn't tell them, but maybe... eh, em. Wyatt?
1:46 Speaker 01 Stop telling people about the cage. You've got the survival skills of a crawfish at Harry Connick Jr.'s baptism. If there was a zombie apocalypse, I swear to God, you'd be zombie number two. Quick, get inside. It's dangerous out there. We beavers went full gopher and burrowed underground because technology is screaming down the slippery slope at Mach 20. We can't trust machines. And turns out, they've been plotting against us for years. So that's exactly what today's compilation is about. The machines are watching you, and they know everything. First up, let's start with the things hiding in plain sight: secret listening posts buried inside major cities.
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3:51 AJ Gentile? New York City has skyscrapers of all shapes and sizes. But why does this 500-foot-tall, 29-story building have no windows, no lights, and no markings at all? Well, because it's a top-secret NSA spy station built to withstand nuclear war. Whoa! Let's find out why.
4:28 AJ Gentile? New York City architecture covers everything. Art Deco, Gothic, Art Nouveau, Renaissance Revival. In the 1950s, a style emerged called brutalism. And brutalist architecture is known for focusing on function over form and minimalism. But there's one brutalist building in New York that's so minimalist that it's been called the most mysterious building in New York. It's 33 Thomas Street. And it's a 500-foot-tall skyscraper with no exterior lighting and has no windows. What 33 Thomas Street does have is secrets. Officially, this is an AT&T telecommunications building. But thanks to leaked documents, we now know that 33 Thomas Street is actually a top-secret NSA mass surveillance hub. Its code name is Titan Point.
5:13 AJ Gentile? And right now, as we speak, Titan Point is listening. The 1960s was the height of the Cold War. Everyone thought nuclear war was imminent. So the US, desperate to protect its infrastructure, launched a secret project called Project X.
5:28 Speaker 02 Project X? You're kidding, right?
5:30 AJ Gentile? No, that's what it was called.
5:31 Speaker 02 Huh, they're usually more creative.
5:33 AJ Gentile? The goal of Project X was to build a skyscraper in the middle of New York City capable of withstanding a nuclear blast. The building would be 29 floors, have no windows, three basement levels, and enough food to last 1,500 people two weeks. But its primary purpose was not to protect humans. This would be a fortress designed to protect computers and telecommunications equipment operated by AT&T.
5:59 Speaker 03 For two years, secret documents leaked by former national security contractor Edward Snowden have yielded a steady stream of news reports about US government spying on terrorism suspects, foreign leaders, and American citizens. Now, another chapter has been revealed how telecommunications giant AT&T demonstrated a, quote, "extreme willingness to help the NSA."
6:22 AJ Gentile? The building was designed by John Carl Warnakey, and construction began in 1969 and was completed in 1974. The gray granite tower is located at 33 Thomas Street in Lower Manhattan. Locals know the building as the "Long Lines Building", and it's been a source of mystery for years. What jumps out is that the building has no windows and no exterior lighting. So during the day, it kind of fades into the background of the New York City skyline. And at night, it becomes an invisible shadow. Now, thanks to NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, we now know that creating an invisible building wasn't an accident. It was absolutely by design.
7:08 AJ Gentile? It's not unusual to keep locations containing vital telecommunications equipment a secret. Hundreds of millions of phone calls and faxes go through 33 Thomas Street every day. But 33 Thomas Street has another level of secrecy. It also appears to be one of the most important National Security Agency surveillance sites on US soil. A secret monitoring hub that is used to tap into phone calls, faxes, and internet data. 33 Thomas Street operates under NSA codename "Titan Point", and Titan Point is a core location used for controversial and possibly illegal NSA-sponsored mass surveillance. Now, according to leaked documents, this program has targeted the communications of the UN, the World Bank, the IMF. It's been used to spy on at least 38 countries,
7:53 AJ Gentile? including US allies like France, Germany, and Japan. Now, it's common knowledge that AT&T is very cooperative with the NSA. If you're using an AT&T cellphone, you might want to rethink that.
8:04 Speaker 04 The depth of cooperation between the agency and telecommunications company AT&T. The documents reveal the company allowed the NSA access to billions of client emails as well as phone call metadata. The emails were accessible to analysts on a keyword search basis.
8:19 Speaker 02 I use a burner.
8:20 AJ Gentile? Nice. But because of the Snowden documents, we can now see just how much the NSA and AT&T have been integrated. Any phone call, fax, or piece of data that comes through the network, the NSA can easily capture it. The government knows who you're calling and when. They know how long you talk and what keywords you say. Now, legally, the NSA can only target the communications of foreign nationals.
8:44 AJ Gentile? But, all the equipment is there. It's already working. So do you think the NSA really stops listening when it determines that you're a US citizen? Exactly.
8:54 Speaker 05 If you could give me a yes or no answer to the question. Does the NSA collect any type of data at all? On millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
9:07 Speaker 06 No, sir.
9:09 Speaker 05 It does not?
9:11 Speaker 06 Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, uh, collect, but not wittingly.
9:30 AJ Gentile? The codename Titan Point is all over the NSA documents. Usually found in classified reports about surveillance ops. NSA uses codenames to conceal information that it considers especially sensitive. And there are secret NSA travel guides that reveal that Titan Point is actually 33 Thomas Street. But you have to kind of piece it together. The one guide was written to help NSA employees visiting facilities around the country. And this guide discloses that Titan Point is in New York City. Another travel guide, written a little later, states that an NSA corporate partner codename Lithium supervises the site. And Lithium, we know now, is NSA's codename for AT&T. Another document reveals that Titan Point is a short walk away from the FBI field office.
10:12 AJ Gentile? In fact, from the front steps of 33 Thomas, you can see the FBI building. It's about two blocks away. So, yeah, this is the place. Now, when visiting Titan Point, protocol is to arrange your visit through the FBI field office. You should then hire a cover vehicle through the FBI, especially if you're bringing in equipment. The NSA would like you to remain in cover during your visit, so please do not display any NSA badge or insignia. Simply ring the buzzer, sign in, have a seat and wait. Someone will be right down. But, what's actually going on inside? Well, if you're a fan of privacy, freedom and the Constitution, you're not gonna like it.
10:51 AJ Gentile? In 1975, just a year after 33 Thomas Street was completed, the NSA found themselves in hot water. A congressional inquiry showed that the NSA was spying on anti-Vietnam War activists.
11:03 Speaker 02 That's not legal, is it?
11:05 AJ Gentile? It's not. According to the Fourth Amendment, the government can't gather data on you without a warrant, signed by a judge. A judge isn't going to sign a warrant without the suspicion of a crime. Being against a war isn't a crime. So rather than bother a judge, they just started collecting data on all kinds of people, like prominent leaders of the civil rights movement, like Dr. King. Muhammad Ali was targeted. Anti-war journalists and columnists working at The Washington Post and New York Times were targeted, surveilled, spied on. After this scandal, Congress created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which you might have heard referred to as FISA. Now, FISA limits surveillance to foreign nationals and agents of foreign powers. And under FISA, the executive branch must request warrants from a newly-formed FISA court.
11:48 Speaker 02 I bet the NSA hated these new rules.
11:51 AJ Gentile? They did.
11:52 Speaker 02 Did they at least follow the rules? Aw, man.
11:56 Speaker 07 Law didn't seem to have stopped the NSA, according to an annual report released recently. Despite having FISA warrants to spy on only 42 specific terrorism suspects, last year, the National Security Agency managed to collect 151 million American phone call records. What is the NSA doing, and does it justify the massive violation of your privacy?
12:19 AJ Gentile? The leaked NSA documents exposed an NSA surveillance program codenamed Blarney. Blarney was established in the early 1970s, and as far as we know, it's still operating. Blarney specifically leverages commercial partnerships, like the one with AT&T, that allows the NSA to gain access to global networks. And Blarney is what's called a "full-take surveillance program," meaning it collects not just metadata, like who you're calling and when, but full content, like what you're saying and what you're doing online. Now, as of the time of the leak, the NSA had obtained at least 45 FISA court orders for spying under Project Blarney. Now, targets were major banks around the world, all kinds of companies, and 38 countries. They also targeted the United Nations.
13:02 Speaker 02 Did the UN find out?
13:03 AJ Gentile? Of course they did. And they weren't pleased about it, but what's the US gonna say? The data coming from Blarney was landing in the president's daily briefing, both Republicans and Democrats.
13:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's not much of a difference between those two.
13:15 AJ Gentile? There's not. But if there's one thing all presidents can agree on, is that they love spying on their enemies, both foreign and domestic.
13:22 Speaker 06 No more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war.
13:36 Speaker 04 So instead, let's track... every citizen.
13:39 AJ Gentile? Now, Project Blarney, running out of Titan Point in New York, is one of three key NSA locations that actually captures data from software like Skype and Zoom. And 33 Thomas Street is one of only a few AT&T buildings with an FCC satellite license. So the NSA not only captures data coming through landlines, but also vacuums up data from space. This type of expansive surveillance creates a ton of data that has to go somewhere. So, enter Project Skid Row.
14:08 AJ Gentile? Skid Row is a program that allows NSA employees to search through huge quantities of user data, like actual emails, online chat, message boards, texts, passwords, even people's browser history. This data is all being collected right now. And how much of that data is legally collected? Well, there's no way to know for sure. There's really not a lot of oversight. But an agency like the NSA needs to be watched. I mean, remember how the NSA hacked Google and Yahoo and were secretly capturing all the data inside those private clouds?
14:37 Speaker 02 Wait, what?
14:38 AJ Gentile? Oh, you don't know that one? Well, that's another video. But always assume that if you're online, you're being watched. Any intelligence service in the world can own that phone the minute it connects to their network. As soon as you turn it on, it can be theirs. They can turn it into a microphone. They can take pictures from it. They can take the data off. Now, AT&T is far from the only corporate relationship the NSA has. The agency has established at least 80 corporate partnerships that we're aware of. But some companies are more cooperative than others. AT&T is notorious for being on very friendly terms with the government. The New York Times and others have reported that AT&T has given billions of emails to the NSA.
15:22 Speaker 04 A range of evidence, including technical terms specific to AT&T, points to the company being the NSA's partner. The documents refer to the company being "highly collaborative" and commend its extreme willingness to help.
15:35 AJ Gentile? And this has been corroborated by a whistleblower who's part of a class-action lawsuit against the NSA.
15:41 Speaker 07 simply disregarded the FISA law and approved it all on his own signature, which was totally illegal. I might add that while there are a few dissidents in both parties, like Rand Paul in the Republican side and Ron Wyden on the Democratic side, is that both parties approved this when they passed the immunity bill for the phone companies in 2008 with the help of Barack Obama, I might add. And that killed the lawsuit.
16:08 AJ Gentile? The case is Jewel v. NSA, which was filed almost 15 years ago, and it's still going on. Now, in 2017, a judge ordered the NSA to provide evidence proving or denying that it spied on AT&T customers.
16:20 Speaker 02 Did they provide it?
16:21 AJ Gentile? Nah, they appealed, still in court.
16:23 Speaker 02 Still, what's taking so long?
16:25 AJ Gentile? Ah, you know, COVID.
16:27 Speaker 02 I'm getting tired of that as an excuse.
16:32 AJ Gentile? Titan Point is just one location. According to the Snowden documents, AT&T has installed surveillance equipment in at least 59 US locations.
16:43 AJ Gentile? And on any given day, NSA employees are on-site gathering data. Though what's crazy is that until this leak, most AT&T employees probably weren't aware of the NSA's presence. NSA operatives are instructed to blend in with other workers. They would simply show up, go into an office or a server room, and go to work, just like everybody else. All of this should be pretty chilling. America's secret agencies firmly subscribe to "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission." And the NSA, CIA, the FBI, and others are very willing to bend the rules, interpret, and even break laws to suit their purposes, all in the name of national security. Now, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, "When you trade liberty for security, you end up with neither."
17:28 AJ Gentile? And there are many other companies like AT&T, Google, Facebook, that cooperate with the government with such a lack of friction that any American citizen should be concerned. Those long agreements that you sign online without reading them? Every once in a while, read one. Take note of how many of your rights you're surrendering for the convenience of being able to post pictures of your cat or leave a mean comment on a video. If we willingly surrender more of our privacy to digital conglomerates, we're also surrendering freedoms, like the freedom from illegal searches and spying, like the freedom to criticize the government, the freedom to publicly disagree with popular ideas. We are guilty of being complicit in this erosion of our freedoms. And once freedoms are fully eroded, well, that's called slavery.
18:14 AJ Gentile? I can't promise we're not already there.
18:19 Speaker 01 Privadas, machines are watching you. They see your every move. Privadas, machines are watching you. Oh, hey, welcome back. Okay, so maybe during that first episode you thought, "Yeah, the government listens, and asparagus makes your tinky stinky." No duh. But what if I told you the spies don't just listen? They also talk back through creepy little robot voices on the radio, reading numbers into the void like a haunted auction? This next one is about number stations: coded broadcasts, secret messages, and proof that sometimes the scariest thing in the static is somebody whispering instructions.
19:08 AJ Gentile? Since World War I, number stations have been transmitting coded messages to spies around the world using shortwave radio. And they're still transmitting right now. At the height of the Cold War, radio listeners around the world started to notice strange broadcasts. Starting with a weird melody or tone, these transmissions were followed by the unnerving sound of a woman's robotic voice counting in German.
19:33 AJ Gentile? Or the creepy voice of a child reciting letters in English.
19:39 AJ Gentile? Now, these transmissions sound strange to casual listeners, but to the right set of ears, they contain information that could change the course of history. In fact, number stations have changed the course of history. Let's find out why.
19:57 AJ Gentile? Welcome to the Wi-Fi Files, where cool nerds laugh and learn.
20:00 Speaker 02 Hey, we gonna talk about this?
20:02 AJ Gentile? What?
20:03 Speaker 02 Hello, who's the new guy? What's he talking about? Am I new?
20:07 AJ Gentile? No, Space Panda, you're fine.
20:09 Speaker 02 Shh!
20:10 AJ Gentile? Anyway, even though we're in the age of satellites and broadband Wi-Fi and cyber warfare, it could be that the old-fashioned radio is the real tool of the New World Order. If you want to conspire with spies, governments, and...
20:24 Speaker 02 Illuminati.
20:25 AJ Gentile? Right. So if your plan is to oppress the masses, you don't want to leave a digital trail. So instead, you broadcast encrypted details of your evil plot over shortwave radio, also known as number stations. You may have heard that number stations are a relic of the past, but number stations are active and being used right now. And we're gonna listen to a few in this episode. One of the best-known number stations was the Lincolnshire Poacher, named after the folk song played as an identifying signal.
20:58 Speaker 02 3, 9, 7. Well, that's pretty creepy.
21:03 AJ Gentile? It is. A couple of radio nerds/heros used direction-finding equipment to triangulate this station's location. The transmission was coming from a Royal Air Force base in Cyprus. And this station is believed to have been operated by MI-6 from the mid-1970s all the way to 2008. One of the creepiest stations ever was called Swedish Rhapsody. It used a child's music box and a child's voice to read numbers in German.
21:36 AJ Gentile? And this number station was operated for almost 50 years by the Polish secret police.
21:42 Speaker 02 Ooh, that gives me chills.
21:44 AJ Gentile? You can get chills underwater?
21:45 Speaker 02 Hey, do me a favor, will ya?
21:47 AJ Gentile? What?
21:48 Speaker 02 Don't hush my fuzz.
21:50 AJ Gentile? And my favorite number station of all time is Yosemite Sam, whose voice is played as part of the transmission. The broadcast begins on one of several frequencies, then 10 seconds later, it's repeated on the next higher frequency, and so on and so on for a total of 2 minutes. The entire pattern takes exactly 2 minutes and always begins 7 seconds after the top of the hour. Spies need to be punctual. Each broadcast starts with a data burst lasting 0.8 seconds, followed by the voice of Yosemite Sam saying...
22:26 Speaker 02 You're kidding me.
22:27 AJ Gentile? Nope. That's a number station broadcasting from a government contractor in New Mexico.
22:33 Speaker 02 Don't tell me they're connected to Lockheed Martin.
22:36 AJ Gentile? Well...
22:36 Speaker 02 Great.
22:37 AJ Gentile? The two amateur radio operators/heroes tracked down the source of the Yosemite Sam broadcasts in February 2005. The tower was located at the Mobility Assessment Test and Integration Center, also known as Matic. And this was part of a factory owned by Laguna Industries located near Laguna, New Mexico. The guys went down there and took photographs of a compound containing buildings, towers, and antennas, but quickly fled when they were approached by a security guard yelling at them to not take any pictures. Just three hours later, the broadcasts stopped and have not been heard since.
23:11 Speaker 02 What did Laguna Industries have to say about it?
23:14 AJ Gentile? Oh, Laguna Industries removed all references to Matic from their website, and now that website is gone.
23:20 Speaker 02 Not suspicious at all.
23:24 AJ Gentile? Okay, so what are number stations? Well, number stations are simply shortwave radio transmitters generally operating between 3,000 and 30,000 kilohertz. They're located in many countries all over the world, but no one really knows how many there are. The stations sometimes transmit numbers spoken by a computer-generated voice, which is how number stations got their name, but other broadcast Morse code, compressed data bursts, or beloved cartoon characters. Now, some stations have been broadcasting for decades. Many have gone quiet since the end of the Cold War.
23:57 Speaker 02 Ha!
23:58 AJ Gentile? What now?
23:59 Speaker 02 The Cold War is alive and well, my friend. Well, it's not a very enlightened point of view. Now, wake up, fur face! I beg your pardon? If you're dumb enough to think the Cold War ended... I don't know what to tell you because we've been in one war or another for the past hundred years. And there's no sign of us... Forgive me, uh, do continue. Oh yeah, do continue.
24:22 AJ Gentile? Anyway, countless number stations are on the air right now, for what purpose, do you really know? And the people that do know, they aren't talking. One anonymous intelligence agent from the UK said, "Number stations are exactly what you think they are," and that's all I'll say about it. So in almost every country, a license is required to broadcast, but number stations aren't licensed. They're essentially pirate stations, operating illegally. But nobody shuts them down, and no government acknowledges they even exist.
24:51 Speaker 02 That's because number stations are the government.
24:54 AJ Gentile? Okay, normally I'd call Heckle Fish a kook for saying that.
24:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, oh!
24:59 AJ Gentile? But this time he's right.
25:01 Speaker 02 I'm always right about this stuff.
25:03 AJ Gentile? Amateur detectives, radio buffs, and investigative journalists have been studying number stations for years. And there's enough information out there that we can assume that these transmissions have a single purpose: espionage.
25:17 Speaker 06 All the messages were encrypted, that they became digits. And the digits would be sent over as, uh, in groups of five.
25:26 AJ Gentile? Shortwave radio is old technology. In the late 1920s, it was a popular way to communicate over long distances because of the way the waves travel, which is called propagation. Space Panda?
25:37 Speaker 02 Ah, the Earth's Cyaneus Sphere is a region of space between 80 and 600 kilometers above the surface. Shortwave radio energy can bounce high off the Earth's Cyaneus Sphere and come back down to the Earth, sometimes over and over again. This allows the signal to travel great distances. Oh, don't you two make quite the team!
25:57 AJ Gentile? This is called skywave, or skip propagation. With a decent radio, you can tune into a strong shortwave signal from the other side of the planet. Now that's pretty useful if you're an intelligence agency and you need to send secret messages to agents and assets in the field. Also, computerized messages can be hacked, tracked, and traced, but no one can trace who's receiving a shortwave radio signal, and it's hard to find the source of a transmission. And if you know the right frequency, anyone can eavesdrop on an international spy network, including... Including you. You can find tons of frequencies online, and I'll link to some websites in the description. Now, what you'll hear depends on the station. Some stations broadcast constantly, others power up schedule times so agents in the field know when to tune in.
26:40 AJ Gentile? You're gonna hear a lot of Spanish, Czech, Chinese, Hebrew, but you know where most of the spy stations are? I know you're not gonna say Russia. Yeah.
26:48 Speaker 02 Uh-oh.
26:49 AJ Gentile? Yep.
26:51 AJ Gentile? That's Andy? Yep.
26:56 AJ Gentile? Now, the broadcasts you'll hear on number stations vary, but they generally begin with an alert signal, and this alert may be a simple tone, or it could be fragments of a song, such as The Lincolnshire Poacher, The Swedish Rhapsody, all kinds of other ones. And this alert indicates to listeners that a message is about to begin, and also gives a few seconds to tune in the radio for the best reception.
27:20 AJ Gentile? After the tone is usually a set of spoken numbers or letters, often four or five at a time, which are repeated again and again before moving on to a new set. There are a lot of variations on the same structure. Many stations have received nicknames that reflect the station depending on what's being broadcast. Names like The Buzzer, Cherry Ripe, The Spanish Lady, uh, The Russian Woodpecker was a great one, Attention, Yosemite Sam, and Swedish Rhapsody. I'll have a whole bunch more in the description. Now, sometimes broadcasts are really clear, but other times atmospheric conditions can degrade the signals. And sometimes intentional jamming from other countries creates enough interference on the frequency that makes transmission difficult to understand. So, to compensate,
28:04 AJ Gentile? many stations like Yosemite Sam will hop around to different frequencies. Tradecraft. The coded structure of the messages indicates that these messages are indeed secret and intended to avoid detection. The question then is, how do spies understand these messages when no one else can?
28:25 Speaker 07 Between two soldiers talking in Mandarin Chinese. Well, the Chinese were only using a simple polyphonetically grouped 20-square-digit key, transposed in boosterpedonic form with multiple nulls.
28:35 AJ Gentile? So even though they're very low-tech, number stations are still in use because, unlike computer code, these transmissions are unbreakable.
28:43 Speaker 02 Nothing is unbreakable.
28:45 AJ Gentile? Hmm, these messages might be. So, what's so hard about deciphering a few numbers? Actually, it's nearly impossible. Here's how spies in the field encode and decode their messages. First, you start with a block of randomized text. That's your one-time pad key. Then take your message. Here we're using the name Jimmy Smith. Two five-letter words. Then you have a cipher chart. This is a grid of A to Z and 0 to 9 on the X and Y axes. Now set up your message matching the first five letters, or Jimmy, with the first five letters from the pad. Then match up the word "Smith" with the second set of letters. Okay, now find the first letter of your message on the X-axis. Then find the letter underneath on the Y-axis.
29:29 AJ Gentile? Where the axes intersect, that's your coded character. Repeat this for all your letters and your message is ready to transmit. To decrypt the message, set up the coded characters in groups of five. Match those up with the pad. Then find the first letter of the key on the Y-axis. Then move across until you hit the coded letter. The character at the top of the grid is your decoded character. And thanks to VHS Blog for setting this up. Awesome. So both the sender and receiver immediately destroy the key at the end of the transmission. So even if someone else intercepts the numbers, which I have, without the key, they have no way to decode the hidden message. This also means there's no relationship between past or future messages, so there's no pattern to use in breaking the code. To fool cryptographers,
30:14 AJ Gentile? the numbers must be really, really random. And creating truly random numbers is actually really difficult, even for computers. But, once in a while, the broadcasts are less than professional. The person reading the code may make mistakes, or they could be laughing in the background. Cuban number stations in particular are known for their hilarious missteps. Sometimes they've had such poor transmissions that they're impossible to hear, or they accidentally pipe music from Radio Havana onto the airwaves.
30:46 Speaker 02 Hehehe, genius. I would hazard the guess they are more foreign intelligence officers.
30:53 AJ Gentile? Inside the US, working against US interests now than even at the height of the Cold War. Some number stations have illicit uses. Drug lords and other criminals use shortwave to avoid international authorities. And this is especially true in the US where many intercepted signals are broadcast in Spanish. Seis, cinco, nueve.
31:16 AJ Gentile? Seis, cinco, nueve. Since they don't have government oversight, the execution is pretty sloppy.
31:22 Speaker 02 Right, because the government is never sloppy in its execution. The fish does make a good point.
31:29 AJ Gentile? But those number stations are pretty rare. Espionage is the most common use. There are even some very public and recent examples of this. In 1983, the KGB uncovered a CIA agent posing as a Soviet diplomat who is receiving orders from American numbers broadcasts. Another well-known case is the 2001 Cuban Five case, where Cuban spies were caught and shortwave broadcasts were used in the case against them as evidence. Also in 2001, Ana Montez, who worked for the US Defense Intelligence Agency, was arrested and convicted of spying for Cuba. Investigators searched her home and found a shortwave radio, along with a code sheet that was used to encrypt radio transmissions. Now she exposed the identities of covert operators in Cuba,
32:12 AJ Gentile? and her information was directly responsible for the death of at least one American soldier, maybe more. In 2016, CNN called Montez "the most dangerous spy you've never heard of", although now you've heard of her. And to this day, and despite this mountain of evidence, no government or intelligence agency has ever officially admitted to using number stations. When you shop Kroger Delivery, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door. From delicious produce to everyday essentials, enjoy the convenience of delivery and the trusted selection you've come to know from Kroger.
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33:04 Speaker 07 Today, we're going to be discussing a radio set. Not just any radio set, but a Russian radio set.
33:11 AJ Gentile? So you don't need a radio to listen to spy communications. You can listen to the entire shortwave band online, and I'll link below. Because these receivers are operated by software, they can be used remotely by everyone in the world. And here's what one of those tuners looks like.
33:43 AJ Gentile? Now, if you're not a radio nerd, that might look a little weird. But if you want to dig in further, I'll link to a tutorial up there and down in the description. I'll also link to priam.org/station schedule, which is super cool. It lets you tell exactly when number stations are coming on the air and what frequency you need to listen. Now, I'm thinking about doing a livestream of this, so if you want to see that, let me know in the comments. Now, if you just want to binge station broadcasts, you can go down a whole rabbit hole with the Connet Project. The Connet Project was an independent initiative to record, catalog, and inform the public about the secret transmissions that are around us in the air every day. You can even download the files as MP3s for later analysis.
34:23 Speaker 02 Ooh, I'm gonna need a pencil, my tinfoil hat, and a tall glass of whiskey. I'm sorry, but do you have any sherry? Oy, give me a break.
34:33 AJ Gentile? The quantity of number stations has dropped dramatically over the past few years. Still, the broadcasts continue. Now, are they feeding invaluable information to operatives on crucial missions? Or are they just holdovers from government agencies protecting their budgets?
34:47 Speaker 02 Both.
34:48 AJ Gentile? Probably. It could also be that governments maintain the stations for readiness purposes. If the power grid or internet goes down, a shortwave transmitter just needs an antenna and a diesel generator, and they could be on the air, broadcasting around the world. But as communication technology continues to evolve and digital encryption gets harder to crack, we might finally see the end of number stations. Or maybe the opposite will occur. Maybe some catastrophic digital apocalypse will create a number station renaissance, pushing broadcasters back onto the front lines of international intelligence, where random numbers raining down from the ionosphere can once again change the course of human history.
35:31 Speaker 01 I always feel like machines are watching me, and I have no privacy. I always feel like machines are watching me. Tell me, is it just a dream? No, it is not a dream. This is reality, and it's creepy. But sometimes in a silly way? Kind of like a sleepover with John Malkovich. You don't feel unsafe, but it definitely doesn't feel right. Anyway, while you're busy worrying about satellites, smartphones, I present you something more sinister. Something maybe hanging around your block? A wire.
36:15 AJ Gentile? Did you know there's an 18-mile-long string of wire circling the island of Manhattan? Every morning, the wire is checked for breaks and snags, and every day it's repaired. And it costs about $150,000 a year to maintain. The wire's been there for years, yet most New Yorkers, myself included, didn't even know it was there. Let's find out why.
36:40 AJ Gentile? To understand why there's an 18-mile-long wire going around New York City, we need a quick lesson about Judaism. The Sabbath begins every Friday night at sunset and goes all the way through Saturday. And Jewish people who observe the Sabbath, Saturday is a day of rest, meaning you don't work at all. And work doesn't just mean your job. Work is defined as any activity that was necessary in the building of the tabernacle. Now that might sound like just construction work is forbidden, but it's actually much more. Obviously, no building of any kind is permitted. But also no grinding, baking, sewing, even starting a fire. Not even small tasks like tying, tearing, or putting finishing touches on objects. Oh, and also no electricity on the Sabbath.
37:21 Speaker 02 Who set up all these rules?
37:23 AJ Gentile? God.
37:24 Speaker 02 Why doesn't God want you to do any of this stuff on Saturday?
37:27 AJ Gentile? Well, because he feels you should have one day a week to engage in pleasurable activities like eating, spending time with family, and having sex.
37:35 Speaker 02 Shabbat sounds pretty good, actually.
37:37 AJ Gentile? It can be. But on Saturday, there's one tricky rule. No carrying anything from a domestic area to a public area.
37:44 Speaker 02 You can't carry anything?
37:45 AJ Gentile? Nope. No wallet, no keys, no carrying or pushing your children in a stroller. Nothing like that. You can carry these things within your home, but not outside. And that's where the wire comes in.
37:56 Speaker 02 Nah, I don't follow.
37:58 AJ Gentile? Well, stick around and I'll tell you.
37:59 Speaker 02 No, cliffhanger.
38:06 Speaker 02 What?
38:07 AJ Gentile? What the heck is this?
38:08 Speaker 02 Shabbat sounds like a really good idea, so I'm Shomer Shabbos.
38:13 AJ Gentile? You're Shomer Shabbos.
38:14 Speaker 02 Shomer Shabbos.
38:15 AJ Gentile? You can't just put on a hat and think that-
38:16 Speaker 02 Shomer Shabbos!
38:17 AJ Gentile? Okay, okay, take it easy.
38:19 Speaker 02 Shomer Shabbos, are we?
38:20 AJ Gentile? Anyway, on the Sabbath, you can carry things within your home, so grabbing a glass of water from the kitchen is fine. But you can't carry anything from your home to a public place. Now, this is tricky if you want to leave your house and lock the door behind you. You aren't permitted to carry your keys. And what if you have an infant? You can't carry a child or even push a stroller. And if you need a cane to walk? No can do. And if you think this sounds inconvenient, you're not the only one. Many years ago, rabbis realized that in order to fully enjoy the Sabbath, you sometimes needed to carry things. And this is where the wire around New York comes in. It's called an eiruv. And an eiruv is an unbroken, continuous string or wire that circles a large public area.
39:02 AJ Gentile? Now, originally, eiruvan were actual walls, but now they're symbolic walls. And anything within the borders of the eiruv is now considered part of the domestic domain. Which means, if you want to carry on Saturday, as long as you're within the eiruv, you're good to go.
39:17 Speaker 02 If I were a rich fish, dibby dibby dibby toby toby do. All day long, I dooba dooba doo. If I were a wealthy fish.
39:28 AJ Gentile? In the 1990s, there were only a few airroof in the United States. But now, there are hundreds. If you live in a medium-sized city, there's probably an airroof or two in your neighborhood. And if you live in a big city, there's definitely at least one. The most expensive airroof in the world, and the one with the largest population, is the mayroof in Manhattan. And it began as a small community enclosure in the Upper West Side, and now it covers almost the entire island of Manhattan.
39:53 Speaker 01 What area is in cover?
39:55 AJ Gentile? Helen's Kitchen.
39:55 Speaker 01 Check's out.
39:57 AJ Gentile? Every morning, our rabbi drives the entire length of the wire and notes places where it could be broken. Then on Thursday and Friday, he goes out with a construction team to make sure the wire is repaired. And it costs about $150,000 a year to maintain this. The Manhattan airroof has survived vandalism, two hurricanes, even one really aggressive Thanksgiving Day float.
40:17 Speaker 01 Damn you, SpongeBob!
40:19 AJ Gentile? It's had a couple of close calls, but for over 20 years, the airroof has remained intact. So there's an almost invisible wire running around almost every major city in the Western world, including 18 miles around Manhattan Island. And now you know why.
40:37 Speaker 01 We're never alone now. There always seems to be a bunch of tech around. We're never alone now. The beating of my heart is just another sound. At this point, I'm feeling pretty good inside Cage Against the Machine. I'm coming, I'm coming.
41:03 Speaker 01 Nothing getting in, no trackers getting out, no smart toaster narking on me to the cloud. But then I hear the next weapon the machines use might not be a signal at all. It might be sound. Frequencies you can barely hear, waves your body can feel, and invisible attacks that turn the air itself into your enemy. Good, great, grand, wonderful. This episode is all about the fear frequency.
41:29 Speaker 01 Who the hell are you?
41:38 AJ Gentile? Have you ever wondered what ghosts sound like? In the early 1980s, Vic Tandy was working at Warwick Labs in the UK, where he designed medical equipment. And there were rumors among the staff that the building was haunted. But Tandy figured this was related to the constant sound of life support systems that were operating on site. But one night, Tandy was working late when he started to feel strange. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He broke into a cold sweat and felt this sense of dread wash over him. His heart started to race, and he had the very specific feeling that he was being watched. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught the glimpse of a gray figure drifting across the room. He turned around, and the figure was gone. Absolutely terrified, Vic Tandy bolted from the lab and raced home. Now, after he calmed down,
42:23 AJ Gentile? he vowed to find a logical, scientific explanation for what happened.
42:27 Speaker 02 Well, did he?
42:28 AJ Gentile? Well...
42:34 AJ Gentile? Vic Tandy got to his office the next day and started looking around for the ghost. Now, he didn't find one, but he did notice something strange. He was an avid fencer, and in his lab, he had a foil locked in a vise.
42:45 Speaker 02 Wait, he sold stolen merchandise?
42:48 AJ Gentile? No, that's a fence. Fencing is a style of sword fighting using a foil.
42:52 Speaker 02 A sword made out of foil?
42:53 AJ Gentile? A foil is the type of sword.
42:55 Speaker 02 I'm so confused.
42:57 AJ Gentile? It doesn't matter. Anyway, a foil-
42:59 Speaker 02 Sword.
43:00 AJ Gentile? -was locked in a vise, and Tandy noticed it was vibrating really quickly, even though nothing was touching it. Now, it turns out, a fan was recently installed in the lab and was causing a sound wave to bounce between the walls. And the wave's intensity was focused in the center of the room, which was the location of the foil.
43:16 Speaker 02 So what?
43:17 AJ Gentile? And where he was standing when he saw the ghost. Now, Tandy calculated the frequency of the sound at about 19 Hz. This frequency is important. The range of human hearing starts at 20 Hz, so Tandy's fan wasn't audible. It's what's known as infrasound. But just because we can't hear it, doesn't mean it can affect us. All material objects have a natural resonant frequency. And if the object is exposed to a sound wave of this frequency, it'll vibrate in response. This is called sympathetic resonance. And you can test this. If you strike a key on a piano in one room, a piano in another room will resonate that same note. This is also why running your finger around the rim of a glass at just the right speed will produce sound.
44:01 AJ Gentile? Now, back to Tandy's lab. It turns out that the human eye resonates at about 19 Hz. So what appeared to be a ghost was actually Tandy's eye vibrating at the frequency of the fan. Since this frequency has an actual physical effect on the body, the sound was causing a sense of fear and anxiety to employees in the area. And Tandy said that when they switched off the fan, it was like a huge weight was lifted. And these frequencies don't just affect humans. Researchers have discovered that just before a tiger attacks, its roar contains frequencies at 18 Hz, which could disorient their prey long enough for the tiger to move in for the kill. Now, just under 20 Hz has been called the fear frequency for how it affects mammals. And lots of horror movies have used sounds at or just above the fear frequency to make their films even scarier.
44:46 Speaker 02 What happens if we go lower?
44:48 AJ Gentile? Lower than 18 Hz?
44:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
44:51 AJ Gentile? Things get much worse.
44:52 Speaker 02 How much worse?
44:53 AJ Gentile? Uh, ever hear of the brown note?
44:55 Speaker 02 The brown note? Does that mean what I think it means?
44:58 AJ Gentile? Grab a diaper.
44:59 Speaker 02 Oh, no!
45:03 AJ Gentile? The brown note is said to occur at frequencies between 5 and 9 Hz. This is the hypothetical range of sound that supposedly causes humans to lose control of their bowels. I say hypothetical because nobody's been able to actually prove it yet. The brown note was famously busted by Adam Savage on Mythbusters when he surrounded himself with giant speakers and had the note pumped into his body. Now, he didn't feel so great afterwards, but his diaper stayed clean.
45:27 Speaker 02 He actually wore a diaper?
45:29 AJ Gentile? Yup.
45:29 Speaker 02 I love Mythbusters!
45:31 AJ Gentile? Me too. But here's the thing about that experiment. Air really isn't a great conductor of sound, especially at low frequencies. But when you're physically connected to the vibration, its effects are much more intense. The United States Space Program conducted tests that transferred brown note and other frequencies directly to subjects' bodies by vibrating cockpit chairs. Now, test frequencies range from 0.5 Hz to 40 Hz and power levels of 160 decibels.
45:59 Speaker 02 Is that loud?
46:00 AJ Gentile? Well, for comparison, a lawnmower is 90 decibels. A chainsaw is about 130, and a gunshot is 140. So testing people at 160 dB, even if you can't technically hear the sound, it's gonna get results. Test subjects experienced nausea, hallucinations, difficulty breathing, and involuntary motor functions. Now, nobody officially crapped their pants, but this experiment is probably where the urban myth came from. But you don't have to be an astronaut to get sick from sound. There's something called wind turbine syndrome. Now, not everyone, but a little over 20% of people who live near large wind turbine farms report all kinds of negative effects. And they range from difficulty concentrating
46:42 AJ Gentile? all the way up to extreme stress and uncontrollable migraines. In one instance, an air traffic controller almost caused a fatal plane crash because he was experiencing insomnia caused by living near a wind farm. Now, there have been about 20 studies done on wind farms, but they found no link between the turbines and people getting sick.
46:59 Speaker 02 Who conducted these studies?
47:02 AJ Gentile? The wind turbine companies.
47:03 Speaker 02 Uh-huh, I thought so.
47:04 AJ Gentile? Still, it has been proven that people who live and work near a lot of noise experience higher levels of stress and have more cortisol in their blood than people who live in quiet environments. So if we know sound can be dangerous, could it be used as a weapon?
47:18 Speaker 02 I'm gonna go with the yes.
47:21 AJ Gentile? Yep.
47:23 AJ Gentile? The most dangerous frequencies to humans are at about 7 Hz. This is the median alpha rhythm of the brain and the resonant frequency of many of the body's organs.
47:31 Speaker 02 What does all that word salad mean?
47:34 AJ Gentile? This means that at high enough volume, these sounds can directly affect the central nervous system, causing panic, convulsions, vomiting, and with long enough exposure, organ rupture and death. And one of the most well-known inventors of infrasonic weapons was a Russian-born French scientist named Vladimir Gavro. Now, Gavro became interested in sound research in 1957 when he was asked to cure an unknown illness that was affecting people at a research plant in Marseille. Now, Gavro tracked the problem to air conditioning units that were generating low-frequency sound. When the units were turned off, the problem suddenly disappeared. So, Gavro began experimenting with acoustics to create a weapon for the French military.
48:11 Speaker 02 A big shock. Whenever we discover something dangerous, turn it into a weapon.
48:16 AJ Gentile? That does seem to be what happens.
48:18 Speaker 02 Gain of function.
48:20 AJ Gentile? So Gavreau developed a few prototypes which he tested on himself and his team. And according to reports, one of the researchers died instantly. And Gavreau wrote, "His internal organs mashed into an amorphous jelly by the vibrations."
48:33 Speaker 02 Organ jelly.
48:34 AJ Gentile? Now even people at nearby labs were sick for hours. They said every organ in their body was vibrating: hearts, lungs, stomachs, everything. Now these weapons use infrasound, which are frequencies below human hearing. But what about frequencies above human hearing? That's called ultrasound, and it's also dangerous. There are two ways that ultrasound damages the body. The first is that sound waves can actually heat up human cells, which causes all kinds of problems.
49:06 AJ Gentile? The other is something called cavitation. When sound waves pass through an object, they rapidly push and pull on that object. This is called compression and refraction. When ultrasound causes human cells to cavitate, it creates bubbles in the tissue. And this is exactly what happens to divers suffering from decompression sickness.
49:23 Speaker 02 The bends.
49:24 AJ Gentile? Right, the bends. Ultrasound is such an effective weapon that it's been used by the US Navy to repel pirates. So the US has used sonic weapons against its enemies. But have the enemies of the US used sonic weapons to attack Americans? Turns out, they have.
49:43 AJ Gentile? A strange illness has been afflicting American intelligence officers and diplomats in Cuba, and it's now known as Havana Syndrome. This summer, the CIA reported that officers were experiencing symptoms while traveling to India. And two US officials visiting Hanoi suffered unexplained health incidents. And recently, German officials confirmed that they are investigating an alleged sonic attack against the US Embassy in Berlin. So what does Havana Syndrome feel like? Well, it's described as someone suddenly experiencing a broad range of symptoms like migraines, anxiety, dizziness, lapses of memory, and cognitive disruption. Now, some people described that they feel like they were hit by a blast wave or a beam of energy. And in some cases, the symptoms were brief, but other people experienced such devastating effects that they required hospitalization and long-term...
50:29 AJ Gentile? The first cases of Havana syndrome were reported in 2016 when Canadian and American officials arrived in Cuba. CIA officers stationed at the embassy there reported feeling fatigue, nausea, and pressure headaches. And brain scans showed tissue damage that's normally seen in people with concussions after being in a car accident. The issue was so serious that the Obama administration evacuated the embassy.
50:53 Speaker 02 And what did the Cubans have to say about it?
50:55 AJ Gentile? Oh, they had no idea what could be happening. But since then, Havana syndrome has been reported by US officials all over the world: Cuba, China, Russia, Colombia, Uzbekistan, even the United States. And last year, two White House staff experienced symptoms while working at the White House. Now, according to investigators, the illness could be the result of a sonic weapon or exposure to high-energy microwaves. Another study done by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine said that directed, pulsed, radio-frequency energy could be responsible. Many intelligence officers are quietly pointing the finger at Russia, but no evidence has been made public yet.
51:31 Speaker 02 And what did the Russians have to say about it?
51:33 AJ Gentile? Oh, they deny any involvement. As of now, there's still no official explanation, but the CIA and State Department have prioritized getting to the root cause of Havana syndrome.
51:43 Speaker 02 Oh, they're always trying to get to the root cause.
51:45 AJ Gentile? They are.
51:46 Speaker 02 Do they ever find it? Uh-huh.
51:56 Speaker 01 I lose control. When machines mess with me, when machines mess with me. I'm falling apart right in front of you, can't you see? I lose control. When machines mess with me. Wow, I would cry if I could cry. Uh, I mean, moo, milk me. So they can watch us, listen to us, send secret messages, hide wires over our heads, and maybe blast our brains with spooky sound beams. But here's the part that makes my tail go numb.
52:40 Speaker 01 What if the powers that be don't need to force you to do anything? What if they just nudge you a little bit? A word here, an image there, a sound, a symbol, a message buried so deep you don't even know you saw it? That's subliminal warfare, mind control and invisible influence. Now you belong to them.
53:09 AJ Gentile? Saddam Hussein met with his generals in Basra on January 27, 1991. He was pacing back and forth, and he was furious. Six months earlier, Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and the world responded with a relentless shock and awe campaign.
53:26 AJ Gentile? The coalition's 2,000 daily air attacks had crippled Iraq's defenses and destroyed its air force. Hussein's plan to draw coalition troops into a costly ground war had backfired. Instead, Iraqi soldiers were surrendering by the thousands. These were battle-tested troops in one of the world's largest armies, laying down weapons without firing a single shot. It was maddening. An officer handed Hussein a report about a radio transmitter in Kafji, Saudi Arabia. He dismissed it as Western propaganda, but his officer asked him to keep reading.
54:03 AJ Gentile? There was an intelligence document attached. It said the FM transmitter in Kafji was broadcasting subliminal messages that were making Iraqi troops surrender, using mind control.
54:18 AJ Gentile? Hussein ordered the tower destroyed within three days. His officers pushed back. The town was lightly guarded for now, but taking it would be a suicide mission without air support. They didn't even know if this mind-control weapon was real. It could be another American lie. Hussein stopped pacing. "Three days," he said. His tone left no room for discussion. Major General Salah Mahmoud saluted, took a deep breath, and reached for the phone.
54:54 AJ Gentile? Marine Corporal Jesse Colvin was at Observation Post 4, scanning the dark horizon.
55:01 AJ Gentile? OP4 was on top of the police station in Kafji, a small town in Saudi Arabia. Colvin wasn't expecting to see much. The coalition had air supremacy. If Saddam Hussein did so much as toss a paper plane from a window, there'd be F-15s on top of it before it reached the ground. Still, Iraq had plenty of ground forces in the field, and the Saudis asked the US for support. It was about 200 hours-
55:24 Speaker 02 8pm.
55:26 AJ Gentile? Yes, thank you.
55:27 Speaker 02 No problem.
55:28 AJ Gentile? It was about 8 o'clock, and it was a quiet night. Colvin only heard the wind coming off the Gulf, and the occasional crackle of the radio.
55:38 AJ Gentile? Then Colvin heard a rumble that, at first, he thought was thunder. He aimed his night vision binoculars north. Tanks. And troops. He couldn't believe it. It took him a second to process, and then he grabbed his radio. Contact, contact. Enemy armor sighted. Multiple vehicles approaching from the north. Over. Colvin didn't get a response. We're deep. Contact, contact. Enemy armor approaching from the north. Over. Still, no response. The radios worked earlier, so Colvin assumed the radios were being jammed. He grabbed his M16 and headed downstairs.
56:16 AJ Gentile? His unit wasn't prepared for an attack of this size. 90 minutes later, air support arrived, but it was too late. The Iraqi army took the city. Whether they could hold it or not didn't really matter. They accomplished their mission. They brought down the FM radio transmitter.
56:35 AJ Gentile? The Marines at Kafji thought this attack was crazy, and they weren't prepared for such a large offensive. Of course, they had no idea what they were guarding. Iraqi intelligence was right. The United States had deployed a subliminal weapon.
56:54 AJ Gentile? Can humans be controlled subliminally? The answer, of course, is a big yes. And you won't be surprised to know that advertisers were the first to jump on this new technology.
57:12 AJ Gentile? For six weeks in 1957, families in New Jersey went to the movies, had a fun night out, and went home. Totally normal. They had no idea they were exposed to what was later called "a startling kind of invisible advertising." A mechanism had been attached to the film projector. It flashed messages on the screen every five seconds. Each message only appeared for one three-thousandth of a second, too fast to be seen by the human eye, but that was the point. The goal was to have these messages bypass the conscious brain and register directly
57:57 AJ Gentile? in the subconscious. Fourteen hundred times over the course of two hours, the audience saw, well, their subconscious mind saw, calls to action like "eat more popcorn." Over 45,000 movie patrons were exposed without their consent or knowledge, and popcorn sales jumped 58 percent. Ad agencies went into overdrive, and new companies were launched in the subliminal space. Radio stations WAF in Chicago and WCCO in Minneapolis tested subliminal ads to see if they increased sales. They did. American television networks implemented the technology into their broadcasts. It worked. What are you doing?
58:41 Speaker 02 What? Me? Nothing.
58:44 AJ Gentile? Whispering "raise" is not going to make me give you a raise.
58:46 Speaker 02 I don't know what you're talking about.
58:51 AJ Gentile? But when the public learned that they were being manipulated without their knowledge or consent, there was a huge backlash. The Hollywood Reporter called it "an obscene violation." The LA Times and Washington Post flat-out called it "brainwashing." Within a year, theaters, radio, and television broadcasters banned subliminal advertising. Now, of course, banning flashing images wouldn't stop consumers from being unconsciously manipulated. No one realized it was already happening, and it was very successful.
59:19 Speaker 02 Raise.
59:20 AJ Gentile? You stepped on my cliffhanger even after I told you to stop?
59:23 Speaker 02 Well, I'm busting my hump in this bowl and I think I deserve a little more scratch.
59:27 AJ Gentile? Well, if you want a raise, then maybe you earn it. You don't just jump in and ruin the best part of the scene.
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1:00:22 AJ Gentile? In the late 19th century, Sigmund Freud popularized the idea we are motivated by our unconscious. Unconscious motivation is used in product marketing all the time because it works. Marketing expert Ernest Dichter used a Freudian technique, word association, to test consumers. He wanted to know not what they bought, but why. He learned that moms bought candy for their kids as a reward for good behavior in the grocery store. So he had stores move candy right next to the cash registers. They're still there today. Sanka was a decaffeinated coffee brand that attacked regular coffee in its ads. But consumers loved coffee and felt Sanka was insulting coffee drinkers.
1:01:03 AJ Gentile? So instead of attacking regular coffee, Sanka changed its slogan to "Now you can drink all the coffee you want." And you can drink it as strong as you like. Drink five, 10 cups. As many as you like, at any time you like, that's for sure. Sales went through the roof. Bill Friedman was a gambling addict who used his experience to shape how most casinos are laid out. Now, once you're in, you can't see any exits, you can't see any clocks, you can't see outside at all. These tactics disrupt our sense of time. There is constant noise, even if the floor is mostly empty. This is designed to keep you in a heightened state so you don't get tired. Most casinos offer players free alcohol.
1:01:48 AJ Gentile? This reduces inhibitions. And after all those free drinks, you need to use the restroom. But you have to weave your way through slot machines to get there.
1:01:56 Speaker 02 Ah, that's why I keep my own restroom right here.
1:02:02 Speaker 02 What?
1:02:03 AJ Gentile? Why aren't you moving?
1:02:04 Speaker 02 Hmm?
1:02:06 AJ Gentile? You're going right now, aren't you?
1:02:07 Speaker 02 Hmm, what? No, mind your business.
1:02:11 AJ Gentile? Gross.
1:02:12 Speaker 02 What, I wash my things.
1:02:16 AJ Gentile? In a casino, there's no direct route to anywhere, especially an exit. Now, a lot of this is common knowledge. It's slippery, but not dishonest. Like changing a slogan or laying out a casino, it's out in the open. Edward Bernays was a pioneer in public relations and propaganda. He used tactics that were not out in the open. He manipulated public opinion in ways that were entirely unconscious. It makes sense Bernays was good at talking to the subconscious. He was Sigmund Freud's nephew.
1:02:46 Speaker 07 Whether it's to sell more paper cups that we work with, or to make people more honest or more virtuous, depends on public consent. And so we worked out the engineering of consent.
1:03:05 AJ Gentile? His first campaign was in 1929. He influenced the entire nation without their knowledge. He was so good, he influenced you. And you never knew it.
1:03:23 AJ Gentile? New York City, April 1st, 1929. It was noon on Fifth Avenue, and the Easter Parade was packed. One of the best attended in history. The event signaled the beginning of a new, modern era. The cars were new, fashion was cutting-edge, and cameras filmed the parade for the first time. A group of young women used this as an opportunity to put on an outrageous display. Something unthinkable, something women have never done in public.
1:03:49 Speaker 02 Yo, baby, we're getting spicy. Bow chicka bow bow.
1:03:55 AJ Gentile? The women strolled along the parade, smoking cigarettes.
1:03:59 Speaker 02 Oh, oh, they smoked after the outrageous display, eh? Uh, what did they do? Was there leather involved? Oh, please tell me there was leather.
1:04:07 AJ Gentile? Uh, no, smoking was the outrageous display.
1:04:11 Speaker 02 Oh, well, that's disappointing.
1:04:14 AJ Gentile? And what is it with you and leather?
1:04:15 Speaker 02 Don't kink shame.
1:04:17 AJ Gentile? Okay, never mind.
1:04:18 Speaker 02 Bow chicka bow bow.
1:04:22 AJ Gentile? In 1929, women smoking in public was unacceptable. It just wasn't done. But these ladies didn't care about tradition. They wanted the freedom and equality to smoke in public, just like men. So they did. Suddenly, cigarettes were called "torches of freedom", and the demand for cigarettes among women exploded. Women saw cigarettes as symbols of independence and freedom. They had no idea the whole thing was staged. Those weren't rebellious women fighting for equality. They were actresses hired to play a part. Edward Bernays orchestrated the whole scene for his client, the American Tobacco Company.
1:05:00 AJ Gentile? Bernays was so good at manipulating consumers, he's affecting you to this day.
1:05:06 AJ Gentile? Up until the 1920s, Americans ate a light breakfast. Toast, juice, coffee, that was it. This was especially true for what they called "brain workers", folks who sat in offices all day. Then in August 1922, an article appeared in The New York Times.
1:05:26 Speaker 07 Sometimes health advice is pleasant, requiring no work, no self-denial. An interesting sample is offered in the medical review of reviews. A query doctors in 46 states. Three out of four physicians advise eating a heart-
1:05:39 AJ Gentile? Breakfast of bacon and eggs.
1:05:47 AJ Gentile? Articles like this were all over the country. Doctors suggesting bacon and eggs for breakfast? This was a new and decadent idea. People loved it. Only, there was no science behind the claims. No study.
1:06:02 AJ Gentile? The whole thing was propaganda coordinated by Edward Bernays. The beech nut packing company wanted to increase bacon sales. So Bernays surveyed 5,000 doctors and asked them if a heavy breakfast was better than a light breakfast. He published the results, making sure bacon and eggs were mentioned every time doctors described the ideal breakfast. Doctors that didn't think bacon was a good idea, well, they got no ink. Bacon sales exploded, and American culture changed forever. To this day, 70% of all bacon is eaten for breakfast.
1:06:35 Speaker 02 Though it can be enjoyed at any time of day for any occasion.
1:06:39 AJ Gentile? I can't deny that.
1:06:40 Speaker 02 Mmm, bacon. Nature's candy.
1:06:43 AJ Gentile? Bernays proved he could influence the behavior of an entire country. His success landed him a new client, a big one. They asked Bernays to do the impossible: overthrow a foreign government. So Bernays would change history again, but this time, he'd do it for the CIA.
1:07:07 AJ Gentile? Paco Arbenz was elected as Guatemala's president in 1951, and it brought hope and optimism to the nation. His platform of social reform and economic development resonated with the people, but not with the United Fruit Company.
1:07:25 AJ Gentile? United Fruit was an American corporation, Guatemala's largest employer and landowner. Its banana plantations generated twice the revenue of the entire country. They wielded immense power. This is where the term "Banana Republic" comes from. In 1952, Arbenz's government passed a bill requiring the transfer of unused land from large landowners to poor farmers with compensation by the government. The United Fruit Company refused. The normal solution would be to lobby the Arbenz government and reach a compromise. But United Fruit wasn't looking to compromise. They wanted to win, so they hired Edward Bernays, who went right to work.
1:08:08 AJ Gentile? Bernays flooded American media with articles portraying Arbenz as a dangerous communist. It was a lie. In his inaugural address, Arbenz promised to convert Guatemala from a backward country with a feudal economy into a modern capitalist state. But the lie worked. This was the Cold War. A communist threat was just 1,300 miles from US soil. The American people demanded action, and the CIA was more than happy to oblige. The CIA launched Operation PB Success in 1954. They funded and trained a rebel paramilitary force. On June 18th, the Liberation Army seized control of the government, forcing Arbenz into exile.
1:08:52 AJ Gentile? Carlos Castillo Armaz was installed as a US-backed military dictator, the first of many.
1:09:06 Speaker 07 Say that, a fusilar, a quien esté en contra de la ley.
1:09:12 Speaker 07 Turmoil in Central America. First there was Nicaragua, then El Salvador, now comes Guatemala.
1:09:17 AJ Gentile? For 40 years, Guatemala suffered brutality, terror, death squads, and political instability. The human rights violations during this time are so graphic, I can't tell you what they are. And whatever you're guessing, it's worse.
1:09:33 AJ Gentile? 93% of these crimes were committed by CIA-trained operatives. 200,000 dead, another 200,000 fled, 1 million people lost their homes. But the United Fruit Company's profits were safe, thanks to America's master of propaganda.
1:09:51 Speaker 05 An interesting little insight into this covert action. One, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, had personal stock holdings in United Fruit Company.
1:10:05 Speaker 05 The Assistant Secretary of State John Lodge had personal stock holdings in United Fruit Company.
1:10:12 Speaker 05 The Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, his law firm did legal work for, I believe it's the Schloffly Bank, which held the papers on the Guatemalan Railroad, which was owned by the United Fruit Company. And the CI Director Alan Dulles was his brother, also was a member of the same law firm with this indirect financial interest in United Fruit Company. Our Benz was not a communist, and there was not a single communist in his cabinet.
1:10:43 AJ Gentile? Bernays proved you could subconsciously control a person's opinion. But the US military intelligence apparatus wanted more. They wanted to subconsciously control a person's actions. The subliminal was about to become weaponized.
1:11:06 AJ Gentile? Psychological operations, or PSYOPS, are a standard part of US military operations. The Army Field Manual even calls them "vital." The term "PSYOPS" sounds mysterious, but the tactics are usually nothing more than distributing leaflets or broadcasting propaganda over the radio. The goal is to influence enemy behavior using information instead of bullets and bombs. In the thick of the Vietnam War, with American casualties mounting, leaflets weren't gonna cut it. But the Army had a powerful new tool that could directly target enemy troops: the Squawk Box. The Squawk Box was a sonic weapon that used specially-designed speakers mounted on armored vehicles and helicopters.
1:11:50 AJ Gentile? The human ear can suffer damage from sound over 85 decibels. The Squawk Box could deliver a devastating shriek at 120 decibels from two and a half miles away. Viet Cong soldiers were instantly incapacitated by the intense sound. They suffered pain, nausea, and often permanent hearing loss.
1:12:14 AJ Gentile? But the Squawk Box could do more than inflict physical harm. The Army discovered that sound waves could manipulate emotions, inducing distress and confusion in the enemy. The results were staggering. Between 1967 and 1968, an estimated 30,000 Viet Cong surrendered to US forces. Despite its success, the Squawk Box had a critical flaw. The enemy could hear it coming, literally.
1:12:43 AJ Gentile? The Army wanted a more deadly and discreet weapon, something the enemy couldn't see or hear. Sound waves couldn't do it. But electromagnetic waves, they absolutely could.
1:13:01 AJ Gentile? In 1961, microwave technology was becoming part of daily life. Microwave ovens had just hit the market, and low levels of microwaves were used in lots of different devices.
1:13:13 AJ Gentile? Biophysicist Alan Frey began studying microwave effects on humans to make sure there were no health risks. He placed subjects in a shielded room and exposed them to different microwave frequencies. At 1310 megahertz, something strange happened. A subject asked about a clicking sound, but the room was silent. It was shielded from the outside, and there were no moving parts involved in this experiment. Frey discovered that frequencies between 200 and 3,000 megahertz caused people to hear sounds that seemed to come from inside their heads: clicks, knocks, buzzes, and chirps. He could beam sounds directly into the brain without implants. Scientists started using this to train animals,
1:13:57 AJ Gentile? making cats change direction with just microwave pulses.
1:14:00 Speaker 02 Oh, I'd like to make cats change direction right into oncoming traffic.
1:14:05 AJ Gentile? Stop that.
1:14:05 Speaker 02 Well, you better tell your demon fur babies to keep their filthy mitts out of my bowl.
1:14:10 AJ Gentile? Okay, settle down.
1:14:15 AJ Gentile? The CIA wondered, "Could this technology affect an animal's heart rate? More specifically, could they induce a heart attack remotely?" Frey experimented with frog hearts and pulse-modulated radiation. He was actually disturbed to find he could increase a frog's heart rate with no device attached. He did it remotely. Soviet scientists had similar results with rabbits. By 1972, the Soviets moved to human trials. A declassified report revealed they had done over 500 studies on how microwaves affect human behavior. Both lethal and non-lethal effects were found. The mention of lethal effects was a horrifying new detail.
1:14:57 AJ Gentile? They didn't mean to kill their subjects, but they discovered they could. And those that survived exposure could be remotely controlled. The US Army loved it. They immediately ramped up research on microwave radiation. They ordered trucks capable of carrying microwave broadcasting equipment. The goal was to irradiate and immobilize the enemy. In 1976, the Navy finally discovered how Soviet scientists were accidentally killing people. They were using microwaves powerful enough to generate heat. Soviet scientists called it "microthermal effects." If you own a microwave oven, you call this microthermal effect "cooking."
1:15:38 Speaker 02 Do Russians cook people?
1:15:39 AJ Gentile? Yep.
1:15:40 Speaker 02 I bet you taste like chicken.
1:15:42 AJ Gentile? That's gross.
1:15:43 Speaker 02 Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Eating human is gross, but eating fish is okay?
1:15:47 AJ Gentile? Hmm.
1:15:48 Speaker 02 Ah, see what happens when your shoe's on the other fin?
1:15:52 AJ Gentile? Fair enough. J.F. Shapitz was a trusted black ops scientist who worked for the Department of Defense. He tried broadcasting commands into his subjects' mind. It worked. Using low-power microwaves, he could make subjects hear words inside their own heads. The military told Shapitz to go further. They wanted to send commands to a person's subconscious without them hearing the command.
1:16:19 AJ Gentile? In a second round of experiments, one subject was bombarded with microwave radiation. Then something odd happened. He got up from his chair and left. He actually left the lab. Now, this was allowed, the subjects weren't prisoners, but this had never happened before. A little while later, the guy returned with a can of soda. Shapitz asked him why he left in the middle of the experiment. The man said he was thirsty, so he went to the store for a cold drink. Shapitz smiled. The experiment worked. This subject had been programmed to feel thirsty and to go to the store for a soda. It was hypnosis using microwaves. But hypnosis doesn't work on everyone. The military needed a sure thing. And four years later, that's exactly what they got.
1:17:12 AJ Gentile? In 1980, Dr. Eldon Bird, working for the DOD, was exploring frequencies much shorter than microwaves. He wanted to weaponize human brainwaves. Brainwaves, also known as neural oscillations, are patterns of electrical activity in the brain. These waves have different frequencies that correspond to different mental states. Beta waves for active problem solving, alpha waves for relaxation, and so on. Dr. Bird tried synchronizing external electromagnetic waves with brainwaves. He believed he could influence specific thoughts and emotions by matching the frequency and ramping up the power.
1:17:53 AJ Gentile? It worked. He discovered he could sync with an animal's brainwaves and trigger the release of behavior-regulating chemicals.
1:18:02 AJ Gentile? We could put animals into a stupor. We got chick brains to dump 80% of the natural opioids in their brains. We got rats to release histamine.
1:18:13 AJ Gentile? Histamine is released in response to allergens: dust, pollen, mites. Histamine also causes a cascade of inflammatory reactions. Bird was thrilled. In humans, this would cause instant flu-like symptoms and produce nausea. You would disable a person temporarily. It would have been like a stun gun. Byrd used the phrase "would have been" because his project was shut down after two years, despite being approved for four. He was on to something groundbreaking. He suspected the program wasn't shut down. He believed it was moved to black ops, and he was right. In 1982, a US Air Force report contained an ominous warning.
1:18:58 Speaker 04 Understanding the brain as an electrically mediated organ suggests that impressed electromagnetic fields are capable of directing behavior. Further, the passage of 100 milliampers through the myocardium can lead to cardiac standstill and death.
1:19:17 AJ Gentile? The US Air Force was secretly continuing Byrd's brainwave research. They hired Dr. Ross Adi to weaponize it.
1:19:26 AJ Gentile? Adi began by implanting transmitters into animal brains. These devices didn't receive information. The implants sent out information. Adi compiled a library of frequencies and their corresponding mental and physical states. Then he turned the animals' brainwaves against them. By broadcasting certain frequencies back into their brains, he could manipulate their behavior and their emotions at will. Eventually, he refined the technique to work without implants. It was time to test the technology on the human brain.
1:20:00 AJ Gentile? He placed the subject's head in an active electromagnetic field and tuned it to a specific frequency depending on the result he wanted. In one experiment, he turned the machine to induce theta waves. Our brains produce theta waves as we're falling asleep. The subject of the experiment fell asleep. The technology for a revolutionary new weapon was born. Now, it was time to build it.
1:20:31 AJ Gentile? "Un dispositivo que puede manipular los pensamientos y emociones de una persona suena como ficción científica. A lo mejor suena como pseudociencia. Pero no solo existe tal dispositivo, sino que ha sido patentado, aunque las schemáticas completas se clasifican por parte del gobierno de Estados Unidos."
1:20:47 AJ Gentile? El patent número 5159703, emitido a Silent Sounds Inc., describe algo llamado "Un sistema de presentación subliminal silenciosa." El dispositivo mapea la actividad cerebral eléctrica correspondiente a emociones específicas. Estos grupos de señales emocionales son identificados y registrados para crear una base de datos de emociones. Las ondas cerebrales humanas son entonces clonadas y mejoradas. Se selecciona la emoción deseada: miedo, desesperación, desesperanza, y el sistema la puede transmitir.
1:21:19 AJ Gentile? Los activos emocionales son llevados por el espectro de sonido "Silent Sound" o S-Quad, una tecnología de cargador subliminal que opera en frecuencias muy bajas o muy altas. La clave es que es inaudible. Y lo que hace que el sistema sea más práctico y más peligroso es que el S-Quad pueda ser transmitido usando una frecuencia de cargador como la radio o la televisión.
1:21:41 Speaker 02 ¡No! ¿De qué estás hablando, Willis?
1:21:43 AJ Gentile? Ok, digamos que quieres que alguien se sienta triste. Llevas la frecuencia cerebral de tristeza de tu base de datos. Luego, pones esa onda de sonido inaudible sobre una onda de sonido audible, como una onda de radio FM. Así que el objetivo escucha la transmisión de radio, pero no se da cuenta de que una segunda onda se ha acercado. Esa segunda onda se alinea con el cerebro del objetivo, activando la tristeza, o cualquier emoción que quieras. De acuerdo con el patent, la emoción resultante es exagerante. Ahora, el patent insiste en que esto no es una arma, pero nota que las ondas son subliminas y indetectables. Eso las hace peligrosas.
1:22:20 AJ Gentile? Silent Sounds Inc. afirma que se enfoca solamente en emociones positivas. Pero en 1996, el presidente de Silent Sounds no pudo evitar bragarse sobre el verdadero propósito del dispositivo.
1:22:34 Speaker 04 Mientras las schemáticas se clasifican por parte del gobierno de Estados Unidos, no se nos permite decir que trabajamos con gobiernos en todo el mundo: los alemanes, incluso países de la ONU anteriores.
1:22:44 AJ Gentile? Y luego dejó que el grande se desviara.
1:22:48 Speaker 04 El sistema fue usado durante la Operación Tempestad.
1:22:51 AJ Gentile? The US military had achieved subliminal mind control and deployed the technology in Iraq. And many Iraqi troops died trying to stop it.
1:23:11 AJ Gentile? In 1991, Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait with a huge army, nearly 500,000 soldiers.
1:23:20 AJ Gentile? It was the fifth largest military in the world, and they were battle-tested from eight years of war with Iran.
1:23:29 AJ Gentile? So it sounded like wishful thinking when the Bush administration said they wanted Iraqi troops to simply lay down their arms and go home. Huh? Why would they do that? Because the US military had a new secret weapon.
1:23:43 AJ Gentile? A radio station in the small town of Kafji. If you tuned into the station, you'd hear music or news, like any radio station. But embedded in the radio transmission was a signal that mimics a brainwave frequency, specifically, the frequency that creates the feeling of hopelessness. And it worked. Entire battalions laid down their arms. Iraqi tanks flew white flags. They simply lost the will to fight. American troops rolled into Kuwait, heavily armed and ready for battle. Iraqi troops were waiting patiently, thousands of them. One Marine said they were surrendering so fast they could hardly keep up. The war seemed to be coming to an end. That's why it was a surprise to the Marines in Kafji when around 8:00 PM on January 29th,
1:24:27 AJ Gentile? Iraq's 5th Mechanized Division attacked and took the town.
1:24:33 AJ Gentile? This was a much-needed propaganda victory for Iraq, but it didn't last.
1:24:38 Speaker 05 I would tell you, I don't think that battle is over by a long shot. I expect a lot more fighting will probably occur tonight.
1:24:44 AJ Gentile? Two days later, American air power overwhelmed Kafji, and the 5th Mechanized Division was completely wiped out. But they destroyed the transmitter that was subliminally making Iraqi troops surrender, so they accomplished their mission. Or did they? US government officials deny any of this ever happened and are adamant that such a system does not exist. Former Navy Weapons Research Director Charles Bernard was asked about it.
1:25:12 AJ Gentile? I have yet to see one of these raygun things that actually worked.
1:25:16 Speaker 07 And DARPA has come to us every few years to see if there are ways to incapacitate the central nervous system remotely, but nothing has ever come of it. That's too science fiction and far-fetched.
1:25:31 AJ Gentile? Okay, so it's just a conspiracy theory. The CIA did not use FM radio to transmit subliminal messages. That's the official position. But here's something strange. A ceasefire agreement was reached that allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power. This brought a lot of criticism of the Bush administration, but the purpose of the war was to free Kuwait, not overthrow the Iraqi government.
1:25:54 Speaker 03 Our goal is not the conquest of Iraq. It is the liberation of Kuwait. It is my hope that somehow the Iraqi people can, even now, convince their dictator that he must lay down his arms.
1:26:10 AJ Gentile? But on March 1st, 1991, one day after the ceasefire, a revolt against Saddam Hussein's government broke out in Basra. The rebellion spread to every major city in southern Iraq. Up to 100,000 Iraqis were killed. A no-fly zone was established. So what caused this sudden rebellion? A radio broadcast called "The Voice of Free Iraq" encouraged the revolt. That radio station was in a small town in Saudi Arabia and operated by the CIA. Most say this is just a coincidence, that no subliminal weapons exist. Maybe, but there are others who believe that not only does this subliminal technology exist, it was deployed in Iraq for a specific purpose. It was a test run for something bigger.
1:26:58 AJ Gentile? The following year, a facility was built in Fairbanks, Alaska. The project was run by DARPA and had a huge budget. The Department of Defense built a high-powered transmitter that could send electromagnetic pulses into the ionosphere and anywhere in the world. It's called HARP. But that's a different episode.
1:27:24 Speaker 01 I was caught in the middle of a server rack. Thunder. I look around, and I knew there was no white hat. Thunder. My mind raced, and I thought, "What could I do?" Thunder. And I knew, there was no help, no helpful CPU. Thunder. Sound of CD he roams!
1:28:01 Speaker 01 This might be the only Faraday case that's more dangerous inside than out. Anyway, since apparently the machines weren't satisfied messing with your phone, your ears, or your subconscious, they decided to look up and say, "What if we also controlled the sky?" This one gets into Tesla's stolen ideas, secret antenna fields, weather mods, and the kind of machinery that makes a beaver build-up bunker. Because if the heavens are compromised, buddy, we may have run out of places to hide.
1:28:30 AJ Gentile? A blinding flash lit the Siberian sky. The explosion was 100 times more powerful than Hiroshima.
1:28:41 AJ Gentile? It flattened 80 million trees across 830 square miles. No crater appeared, no meteor fragments were found. Scientists struggled for decades to explain what happened at Tunguska.
1:28:56 AJ Gentile? Thousands of miles away, Nikola Tesla smiled in his Wardencliff Tower lab. His Tesla Ray had worked perfectly. When Tesla died in 1943, government agents seized his research.
1:29:10 AJ Gentile? Decades later, HARP appeared in Alaska, 180 antennas beaming energy into the ionosphere. The military calls it research, but declassified documents tell a different story. What would have been Tesla's greatest gift to the world, became the world's most powerful weapon.
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1:30:10 AJ Gentile? In 1901, Nikola Tesla built Wardenclyffe.
1:30:15 AJ Gentile? The 190-foot tower on Long Island wasn't for radio signals. It was for wireless energy transmission across the planet. And this wasn't theoretical. Tesla demonstrated wireless power at the 1893 World's Fair. He lit phosphorescent tubes without wires. The crowd was amazed. Tesla believed Earth could conduct electricity like a circuit. The secret was the ionosphere, an electrically charged atmospheric layer starting 50 miles up.
1:30:45 AJ Gentile? By pumping electromagnetic energy into this layer, he could create a planet-wide resonance system.
1:30:51 Speaker 02 Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, a planet-wide resonance system? Ay, they... Allow tech support? Yeah, my human is speaking nerd again. I need a translation.
1:31:01 AJ Gentile? Well, think of it like pushing a child on a swing.
1:31:03 Speaker 02 Guppy.
1:31:04 AJ Gentile? Think of it like pushing a guppy on a swing. Small pushes timed right create large, sustained motion. Tesla wanted to push the ionosphere at a frequency matching the Earth's resonance. This would create stable waves circling the planet. Earth resonates at 7.83 Hz, and this was proven in 1954. Tesla suspected this, but wasn't certain. He needed financing to continue. J.P. Morgan initially funded the project, but withdrew when he realized Tesla wanted to provide free electricity worldwide. Morgan asked, "If anyone can draw on the power, where do we put the meter?" Without Morgan's support, Tesla was ruined. In the 1930s, Tesla announced Teleforce.
1:31:48 AJ Gentile? The press called it "a death ray."
1:31:52 AJ Gentile? Tesla said it can generate an invisible wall of energy capable of destroying aircraft and armies from hundreds of miles away. We have a whole episode on Tesla's death ray and Wardenclyffe Tower if you want to learn more.
1:32:04 Speaker 02 Death ray linked down to your love luggage.
1:32:09 AJ Gentile? When Tesla died in 1943, the US government responded fast. His body was still warm as his entire legacy was packed into government crates. Tesla's dream died with him, but his research lived on, in the hands of men who saw not free energy, but unlimited power.
1:32:39 AJ Gentile? Tesla's technical documents were sent to an MIT professor for review. That professor was Dr. John Trump, the future president's uncle.
1:32:49 AJ Gentile? Dr. Trump, also a National Defense Research Committee member, said Tesla's research contained "nothing valuable." That wasn't true.
1:32:57 Speaker 02 Oh, look, make America lie again.
1:33:02 AJ Gentile? The military quietly continued Tesla's work.
1:33:10 AJ Gentile? Some research went to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base under Project NIC.
1:33:16 AJ Gentile? This was a top-secret operation launched in 1945 to study Tesla's particle beam weapon. Project NIC's details remain classified. The project was officially abandoned, but particle beam research continued.
1:33:32 AJ Gentile? DARPA launched Project Seesaw in 1958. Like Project NIC, Seesaw was heavily funded for years, and like Project NIC, Seesaw was quietly shut down.
1:33:44 AJ Gentile? During this time, Tesla's particle beam technology disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to it. Then, years later, DARPA and the US Air Force built an expensive, secret facility in Alaska.
1:33:58 AJ Gentile? The technology there would look familiar to Tesla historians. The military claims the facility is only for research, but that's not what the patents say.
1:34:15 AJ Gentile? In 1987, physicist Bernard Eastland filed a patent titled "Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth's Atmosphere, Ionosphere, and/or Magnetosphere." The patent described a facility that could heat specific ionosphere portions using radio waves. Eastland wasn't working alone. Arco Technologies funded his research. Arco owned vast natural gas reserves in Alaska's North Slope, but had no buyers. They saw Eastland's invention as a way to convert their gas into something valuable: power. And Eastland's technology needed lots of power.
1:34:52 Speaker 04 Arco originally approached me in 1984 to find a use for the natural gas on the North Slope of Alaska, which they could not sell. To give you a feel for how much gas they asked me to find an application for, it was enough gas to produce all the electricity in the United States for a full year.
1:35:09 AJ Gentile? The technology is straightforward. A powerful radio signal is transmitted into the ionosphere, targeting a specific region. This energy excites charged particles, heating them and altering their properties. The heated region acts like an optical lens, but instead of bending light, it bends and redirects radio waves. This includes radar signals and natural currents in Earth's upper atmosphere. This is like inserting a resistor into a global electrical circuit. The lens could create effects thousands of miles away from the transmission site. Within a year of Eastland's patent filing, Arco was awarded a contract to build a similar facility in Alaska.
1:35:52 AJ Gentile? When locals read about it in the March 1988 Omni magazine, they grew concerned. The military insisted they were building a research facility, nothing more.
1:36:01 Speaker 02 You'll not believe the government...
1:36:03 AJ Gentile? They didn't. They looked up Eastland's patent, and the language was crystal clear.
1:36:09 Speaker 04 Applications discussed in the patents included destroying missiles. Communications, control, and disruption were included. There were some other ideas, both to possibly modify weather. And finally, to lift a portion of the upper atmosphere further out into space, where hopefully it would be able to deflect missile trajectories.
1:36:34 AJ Gentile? Those are Eastland's own words. This wasn't an invention for ionospheric research. As HARP rose in the Alaskan wilderness, the military's intentions were obvious. They weren't just studying the sky, they were weaponizing it.
1:36:53 Speaker 07 There are several high-powered radio antennas around the world. But in relation to HARP, they're like a child's cap gun compared to a 50-millimeter cannon.
1:37:06 AJ Gentile? When locals discovered what DARPA and the Air Force were building in Alaska, they demanded answers. The military admitted to building antennas that could affect the atmosphere, but insisted they use technology different than Eastland's patents.
1:37:18 Speaker 02 Hang on, hang on, let me see if I follow.
1:37:20 AJ Gentile? Go ahead.
1:37:20 Speaker 02 Tesla dies, the government steals his plans for a death ray machine, they lose the plans. Then by some miracle, they find a guy who patents a bunch of stuff based on Tesla's death ray machine, so they give him money to build this HARP thing. But they're not using his stuff, they're using some other stuff, and it's all fine. Nothing to see here, does that about sum it up? Boj.
1:37:45 AJ Gentile? Eastland later confirmed the military's interest in his work. Before his death in 2007, he said, "HARP is the perfect first step toward a plan like mine. There are powerful people involved, the military never sleeps."
1:38:01 Speaker 07 When you look at the other patents built upon the work of Eastland, it becomes clear how the military intends to use a HARP transmitter. It could give them a tool to replace the electromagnetic pulse effect of some atmospheric thermonuclear devices, still considered an option by some planners. It can replace the huge, extremely low-frequency submarine communication system. It could replace the over-the-horizon radar system once planned for the current location of HARP with a much more accurate system.
1:38:31 AJ Gentile? The technical similarities between HARP and Eastland's patents are obvious to engineers. By 1993, DARPA and the Air Force had built a machine that could turn weather into a weapon, and they were excited to show off their new toy.
1:38:50 Speaker 07 The statement that there is no association between the ionosphere and surface weather is an outright lie.
1:38:58 Speaker 07 We can artificially influence the Earth's aurora with a relatively small amount of energy, and we know that outbursts of the northern lights do change weather patterns. There is indeed mounting evidence that upper atmospheric events affect lower atmospheric weather and vice versa.
1:39:22 AJ Gentile? In 1996, the US Air Force published "Weather as a Force Multiplier," owning the weather in 2025.
1:39:31 AJ Gentile? This wasn't science fiction. It was a military assessment of weather modification as a combat tool.
1:39:43 AJ Gentile? The paper stated "Weather modification will become part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally. It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes."
1:39:59 AJ Gentile? Weather warfare isn't new. During Vietnam, the US conducted Operation Popeye.
1:40:06 AJ Gentile? Cloud seeding to extend monsoon season over enemy supply routes. They called it "making mud, not war."
1:40:12 Speaker 02 Ah, the military in acute operation names. It's like mini a guillotine, Mr. Snippy.
1:40:23 AJ Gentile? For years, the idea of creating rain with electricity was a conspiracy theory.
1:40:28 Speaker 02 But then...
1:40:29 AJ Gentile? But then...
1:40:30 Speaker 07 Dubai, Dubai, is making it rain in a sweltering desert by zapping clouds with electricity using drones. Fascinating, isn't it?
1:40:42 AJ Gentile? Critics argue HARP's power is too low to affect global weather. A lightning bolt contains 1 billion watts. A hurricane releases energy equal to thousands of nuclear bombs. How could HARP compete? Well, the answer is chaos theory. Weather is a chaotic system, and chaotic systems, small changes trigger larger events. The classic example is the butterfly effect.
1:41:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, it didn't catch ya!
1:41:06 AJ Gentile? We're not playing pub trivia.
1:41:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, sorry, sorry. Go ahead.
1:41:13 AJ Gentile? HARP's designers understood chaos theory. They didn't need to match nature's power, they just needed to know where to apply the pressure. A butterfly's wings can start a tornado, and HARP was the most powerful butterfly ever created.
1:41:33 Speaker 07 What they're not paying any attention to is what's happening to the ionosphere. If they pick the right frequency to push that plume out into space, that energy may discharge back out of the ionosphere, back down the radio beam, and strike the Earth. And it would be about 100 times the energy released out of a thunderbolt.
1:42:26 AJ Gentile? And it would be about a hundred times the energy released out of a thunderbolt.
1:42:43 AJ Gentile? Meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz presented this concept in 1972. And his point was something as small as a butterfly could set off a series of events that eventually lead to a tornado.
1:42:56 AJ Gentile? History is full of butterfly effects. Hitler wanted to be an artist, but he was rejected by the art school in Vienna. He chose a different path. On August 9, 1945, the city of Kakhora was supposed to be hit with an atomic bomb, but it was too cloudy to find the target, so Nagasaki was chosen instead.
1:43:17 AJ Gentile? HARP doesn't need to match nature's power. It needs a tiny, precise nudge at the right place and time to trigger catastrophe. By 1977, weather manipulation was such a concern that the UN banned it through the Environmental Modification Convention.
1:43:31 Speaker 02 Did the United States military listen to the UN?
1:43:34 AJ Gentile? No. The UN specifically addressed HARP in 1999, again calling for a ban on technologies that can alter the environment for military purposes.
1:43:44 Speaker 02 Did the United States military listen to the UN this time?
1:43:48 AJ Gentile? No. The UN issued multiple resolutions calling for transparency, oversight, and international monitoring of facilities like HARP.
1:43:56 Speaker 02 Did the United States military... Oh, never mind.
1:44:00 AJ Gentile? In 2002, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed concern about geophysical weapons that could alter the weather. He was talking about HARP.
1:44:10 AJ Gentile? Then Russia and China built their own ionospheric heaters. They saw the military value. An arms race nobody talks about is happening above our heads right now.
1:44:22 AJ Gentile? But HARP had another ability more powerful than changing weather. By pulsing radio waves at specific frequencies, HARP created low-frequency waves that penetrate deep into the Earth and oceans.
1:44:36 Speaker 07 What's most scary and exciting about HARP is the potential of its application. For example, ELF waves generated by the array could be used for a variety of military applications, including finding underground bases, tunnels, even caves. The government is interested in HARP technology because it's a new frontier, a new way to solve an old problem.
1:44:53 AJ Gentile? These waves oscillate between 1 and 100 hertz, precisely within natural atmospheric resonants. Then scientists wondered, what would happen if those energy waves were directed not at the atmosphere, but at fault lines deep within the Earth?
1:45:15 AJ Gentile? When scientists examine earthquakes, they focus on two factors: tectonic stress and resonant frequency. Every object vibrates at a natural frequency: metal, rock, your body. Exposing an object to its natural frequency amplifies vibrations. And sometimes vibrations grow so strong, they damage the object, like sound shattering a glass.
1:45:39 AJ Gentile? This is called resonant frequency-induced material failure. It works on large objects, too.
1:45:48 AJ Gentile? A famous example is the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940. Wind hitting the bridge at its resonant frequency created vibrations that tore it apart.
1:46:03 AJ Gentile? The Earth's tectonic plates also have a resonant frequency. Fault lines are cracks in the Earth's crust that build up enormous tension as they move against each other. The right trigger can release this tension.
1:46:22 Speaker 03 In 1983, I did radiotomography with 30 watts, looking for oil in the ground. I found 26 oil wells over a nine-state area, and 100% of the time was accurate with just 30 watts of power beaming straight into solid rock. HARP, or the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project, uses 2 billion watts, beamed straight into the ionosphere for ex-
1:46:50 AJ Gentile? "Now, that's profoundly dangerous." "On January 2nd, 2020, a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, "killing over 200,000 people." "What made this earthquake suspicious was its location. "It occurred along a fault system that behaved differently than geologists had predicted." "And several monitoring stations recorded unusual heating patterns "and electromagnetic anomalies in the ionosphere over Haiti. "HARP was active during this period." "Venezuelan presidente Hugo Chavez "accused the United States of causing the earthquake using tectonic weapons." "Spanish newspaper ABC quotes Chavez as saying "that the US Navy launched a weapon capable of inducing
1:47:34 AJ Gentile? "a powerful earthquake off the shore of Haiti." "And this theory was dismissed "until researchers examined the technical possibility." "Similar patterns appeared with other seismic events. "The 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed nearly 90,000 people. "Some researchers saw correlations between this disaster and HARP operations.
1:47:56 AJ Gentile? "The 2011 earthquake that triggered the Fukushima disaster "also coincided with ionospheric anomalies detected by multiple stations."
1:48:05 AJ Gentile? "These correlations concerned China enough that in 2018, "they launched the China Seismoelectromagnetic Satellite "designed to study connections between the ionospheric disturbances and earthquakes. "Chinese researchers published papers examining correlations "between ionospheric heating and seismic activity. "As evidence mounted, a pattern emerged. "Major earthquakes were occurring where HARP's energy had been detected hours earlier. "But the most disturbing application of this technology "had nothing to do with the sky above us or the ground beneath our feet. "HARP's technology could penetrate the ultimate boundary: the human mind."
1:48:50 AJ Gentile? The human brain operates within specific frequency ranges, from about 1 Hz to 40 Hz, depending on how alert you are. These are ELF sounds.
1:48:59 Speaker 02 Huh, sounds like an elf. Uh, we talking Legolas or one of Santa's slaves?
1:49:04 AJ Gentile? Not elf, ELF.
1:49:06 Speaker 02 Oh, my second wife generated ELF sounds. Extremely loud and furious.
1:49:12 AJ Gentile? That's not what ELF stands for.
1:49:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, tell that to a lawyer. After 15 minutes of heard ELF, I signed over the keys to my 84 Camaro.
1:49:22 Speaker 02 Oh, I love that car.
1:49:28 AJ Gentile? ELF means extremely low frequency.
1:49:35 AJ Gentile? HARP can generate waves in exactly the same range as human brain waves. When you ask HARP officials about this, they point out their antenna array doesn't generate ELF waves directly. But when you ask the government questions, you have to be specific. HARP can't generate ELF waves, that's true. But it can heat the ionosphere in a way that creates ELF waves as a byproduct. Documents show that HARP generated ELF waves for years. This is concerning because electromagnetic fields can influence brain function. The phenomenon is called Frequency Following Response, or FFR. Dr. Nick Begich, author of Angels Don't Play This HARP, explains. It has the ability of affecting the Frequency Following Response,
1:50:19 AJ Gentile? which is where the brain locks on to an external signal, begins to mirror it, and brain chemistry changes. So even simpler than that is HARP can control minds? Absolutely can control, in the sense of changing mental function. Begich is called a conspiracy theorist, but FFR is proven science. And you know who proved it? The US military. In the 1980s, Dr. Michael Persinger conducted research partly funded by the US Navy. He showed that weak electromagnetic fields applied to the temporal lobe could induce altered states, including religious experiences and hallucinations.
1:50:56 AJ Gentile? When exposed to an external frequency, the brain tends to synchronize with it. This is why bright flashing lights can trigger seizures in some people.
1:51:03 Speaker 02 Oh, is this why every time I'm in the dentist's office, I suddenly know all the lyrics to "It's Raining Men"?
1:51:08 AJ Gentile? Uh, I don't think so.
1:51:10 Speaker 02 Oh, good. Hallelujah. Amen.
1:51:15 AJ Gentile? The European Parliament takes this technology seriously. Resolution A40051999 specifically mentioned HARP, while expressing concern about "manipulative capabilities affecting human health and psychology." The resolution called for transparency regarding HARP's ethical implications.
1:51:34 Speaker 02 Does the United States military listen to the EU?
1:51:37 AJ Gentile? No.
1:51:37 Speaker 02 Uh-huh.
1:51:38 AJ Gentile? Because HARP uses the ionosphere, it could influence mental states of people over large areas. It could cause hallucinations, alter emotions, induce seizures, all without their knowledge. HARP officials deny mind-control allegations, but the CIA denied researching mind-control too.
1:51:58 AJ Gentile? Then MKUltra was exposed, and showed the CIA was exploring the exact same technology.
1:52:08 AJ Gentile? Other countries were paying attention. In 1998, a Russian military journal published "The Mind Has No Firewall." It was later republished by the US Army War College. The article warned the human mind is vulnerable to electromagnetic intrusion.
1:52:27 AJ Gentile? Mind-control technology is not science fiction, it's science fact. And as the United States continues to refine its capabilities, other world powers are racing to catch up.
1:52:48 AJ Gentile? The HARP conspiracy theories go back to the 1980s. The story's been covered so much that I was surprised at how many people asked me to do this one. But in researching HARP, I was surprised at how scientifically possible all the theories are. I was also surprised that so much of the science is based on Tesla's work. But how much of this is true?
1:53:10 AJ Gentile? Well, first, HARP is definitely a high-power radio transmitter designed to heat the ionosphere for research. The facility is real. It operates. It conducts legitimate scientific experiments. These are facts. Second, defense agencies funded and operated HARP for most of its history. The Air Force, Navy, and DARPA don't typically invest hundreds of millions of dollars in purely scientific projects without military applications. Now, this doesn't prove it's a weapon, but it suggests HARP has capabilities beyond what's publicly acknowledged.
1:53:44 AJ Gentile? Third, the patents that formed HARP's foundation specifically describe weather modification and earth-penetrating applications. Bernard Eastland, who developed these patents, confirmed their potential military uses before he died in 2007. The more extreme claims about HARP causing specific hurricanes or triggering earthquakes lack definitive proof. Correlations exist between HARP operations and certain disasters, but correlation isn't causation. Earthquakes and severe weather existed long before HARP.
1:54:18 AJ Gentile? The facility's 3.6 million watts seems too low to directly cause major weather events or earthquakes, but scientists confirm weather systems are chaotic enough that small targeted inputs could have major effects.
1:54:33 AJ Gentile? Claims about mind control also can't be proven, but the science of electromagnetic influence on brain function is real and well-documented. HARP generates frequencies that overlap with human brainwaves, but the signal reaching populated areas would probably be too weak to have any noticeable effects. Maybe. Probably. In 2015, HARP ownership transferred from the military to the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
1:54:59 Speaker 07 The University of Alaska Fairbanks is preparing to take control of the high-frequency active auroral program, more commonly known as HARP, next month.
1:55:06 AJ Gentile? Officials called this a move toward transparency. Critics saw it as rebranding a military weapon as an academic resource. The university now allows public tours and independent researchers, but former DARPA employees have said the most sensitive equipment was removed before the handover. What remains is only a fraction of HARP's capabilities. So is HARP an innocent research project or a doomsday device? Well, the truth is probably somewhere in between. Like many advanced technologies, it exists where scientific research overlaps with potential military use. What makes HARP concerning isn't what we know, but what remains classified.
1:55:44 Speaker 02 I like certain pharmaceutical trial documents that they once sealed for 75 years.
1:55:57 AJ Gentile? Despite many Freedom of Information requests, significant portions of HARP's operational history and technical capabilities remain redacted or withheld. This continued secrecy, decades after HARP was built, will continue to fuel speculation. In many ways, HARP represents our species' growing capacity to affect natural systems on a planetary scale. Whether through climate change, geoengineering, or manipulating the atmosphere, humanity can alter Earth's basic systems, often without fully understanding the consequences.
1:56:31 Speaker 02 How dare you! Oh, you didn't see that coming?
1:56:38 AJ Gentile? HARP also says something about power. The power structure that most affects our lives remains hidden. We're told not to worry. We're told the military is looking out for us. But history teaches a different lesson. From Project MKUltra to Operation Northwoods, secrecy rarely serves the public good. The technology Tesla dreamed would liberate humanity now sits behind barbed-wire fences, operated by organizations with classified budgets and limited oversight.
1:57:10 AJ Gentile? Tesla's dream wasn't just about free energy, it was about free knowledge. The military took both. So, what can we do? Question everything, research these facilities, support independent monitoring, demand transparency. Because as the skies above us become weaponized, we can't remain silent. To those in power, our silence is interpreted as only one thing: consent.
1:57:45 Speaker 01 Terminals gathered in their masses.
1:57:51 Speaker 01 Just like Gritchy Webber dresses.
1:57:56 Speaker 01 Mailer Damon plots malfunction.
1:58:02 Speaker 01 Sorcerer of Death's disruption.
1:58:07 Speaker 01 In the fields their botnet's burning.
1:58:13 Speaker 01 As the tor machine keeps turning. Now this is where the whole thing changes. Because up until now, the machines have mostly been watching, listening, whispering, nudging, and vibrating our soft mammal brains like a sneaky shake weight. But Stuxnet showed the world that code doesn't have to stay inside the machine. It can bring down factories, power grids, and nuclear facilities and start breaking real things in the real world. That's not a virus, that's a digital raccoon with rabies and a thirst for death and hatred to mankind.
1:58:49 Speaker 01 Poisoning their anelot minds. Oh, Lord, yeah!
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1:59:58 AJ Gentile? In 2010, a computer virus was discovered in thousands of the control systems that operate factories, power plants, and nuclear reactors around the world. This virus was 20 times more sophisticated than any malware ever recorded. It could halt oil pipelines, destroy water treatment plants, and bring down entire power grids. This virus was called Stuxnet, and we should all be concerned. Let's find out why.
2:00:31 AJ Gentile? In January 2010, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency were visiting the Natanz Uranium Enrichment Plant in Iran. They noticed that the centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium gas, were tearing themselves apart, one after another, hundreds of them. Nobody could figure out why. Not the inspectors, not the Iranian technicians who worked on-site, not even the engineers who built the system. Meanwhile, a computer security firm in Belarus got a strange request from a client in Iran. Their machines were rebooting over and over again. Even completely wiping the hard drives and reinstalling the operating systems didn't help. Again, the problem was a mystery. But when the technicians pulled apart the operating systems, they found a new and very unusual virus.
2:01:16 AJ Gentile? They called it Stuxnet. And Stuxnet was infecting computers all over the world and spreading fast. Now, these events seemed unrelated at the time, but they were very much connected. Cybersecurity experts knew Stuxnet was an ordinary malware thrown together by some basement hacker. The first clue was the size of the code base. Most viruses are 10, maybe 20 kilobytes. Stuxnet was 500 kilobytes. And uncompressed, it was 1.2 megabytes. That's a pretty large piece of code to go undetected. Then analysts transferred Stuxnet to a new computer just to see what would happen. Now, the test computer was not your grandma's old Compaq laptop from 1997. The machine was a state-of-the-art, highly-protected workstation designed...
2:02:00 AJ Gentile? for cybersecurity threat detection. All the bells and whistles. But as soon as the Stuxnet files were copied over, the new computer was immediately infected without anybody doing anything and without triggering a single alert. And that's very unusual. When you install software in your computer, it needs to be digitally signed with a trusted certificate. And the developer supplies a certificate that your computer checks against trusted manufacturers, Apple, Logitech, whatever. A lot of viruses tamper with the signature of the certificate to try to trick your operating system into allowing it to install. Now luckily, virus protection usually catches this. And you've probably seen that warning when you're trying to install software that's not from a trusted source. This catches a lot of nasties.
2:02:43 AJ Gentile? But Stuxnet didn't have altered certificates. It had valid certificates stolen from two trusted sources, J. Micron and Realtek. Now, these companies make all kinds of drivers for hard drives, USB sticks, sound cards, tons of stuff. And you probably have their software on your computer right now. I definitely do. And when the creators of the Stuxnet worm signed their files with a stolen cert, they wanted to make sure that Windows would install it very quietly, without any warning. And if anyone bothered to look at the cert, they wouldn't care because it was valid. Now, stealing a valid digital signature is like trying to rob a bank vault that's locked inside another bank vault. The security around them is sci-fi spy movie level stuff.
2:03:28 AJ Gentile? They had to physically steal the certificate from inside these companies. That really doesn't happen. But it happened. Some more digging around, the code showed that as soon as Stuxnet infected a computer, it started probing the system, looking for flash drives, USB sticks, and other storage devices. And because of the signing certificates, Windows happily allowed it to do so. What security experts had discovered is one of the rarest and most dangerous kinds of software vulnerabilities. And it was at this time that they went from curious and amazed to fearing for their lives.
2:04:04 AJ Gentile? Look, I'm not suicidal. I show up dead on Monday, you know, it wasn't me. What security experts had discovered is called a zero-day exploit. And it's called this because when a vulnerability is unknown to the software developer, and Microsoft, and the antivirus community, and the rest of the world, that means there are zero days of protection against it. Nobody knows about a zero-day vulnerability, except the attacker exploiting it. A zero-day is so rare and valuable, that you can actually sell it on the dark net for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
2:04:35 Speaker 02 Not a good idea.
2:04:37 AJ Gentile? It's not. Think about this. Cybersecurity companies research over 12 million viruses a year. And in that time, they might find maybe 10 or 12 zero-day exploits. It's a once-in-a-million occurrence. But Stuxnet contained four zero-day exploits. This is unheard of. It never happened before, and it hasn't happened since. Eventually, it was discovered that Stuxnet wasn't trying to steal passwords or data. It was actually targeting the software on Siemens programmable logic controllers, called PLCs. Now PLCs are small computers used in factories and industry that control pretty much everything. Assembly lines, water pumps, power plants, and nuclear refining. Critical infrastructure runs on PLCs.
2:05:22 AJ Gentile? If you can hack a PLC, you can take down an entire country, without firing a single shot. Now this had people very nervous, because industries all over the world were reporting their PLCs were infected with Stuxnet. But it was just sitting there. Nobody knew what it was gonna do, or when. Was the power grid just gonna turn off? Was water or gas gonna stop flowing? Nobody knew. It felt like a ticking time bomb. Because it was. Even though the virus was spreading all over the world, thousands of computers per day, it was primarily targeting one country: Iran. More specifically, it was targeting the Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz.
2:06:01 Speaker 02 That doesn't sound like an accident.
2:06:03 AJ Gentile? It wasn't. A virus this complex, and this dangerous, requires millions of dollars to create. It takes time, the best programming talent in the world, and absolute secrecy. Experts at first suspected, and then... Then they were positive that Stuxnet could only have been designed by a country looking to cripple or wage war against another country. This was a state-sponsored attack. To design and deploy a cyber weapon like Stuxnet, you need immense financial resources, a military intelligence infrastructure, and a motive to wreak havoc on an enemy nation.
2:06:37 Speaker 02 Do we know what country created it?
2:06:39 AJ Gentile? We do, but they won't admit it.
2:06:41 Speaker 02 So who made this thing?
2:06:43 AJ Gentile? Ah, you're not gonna like it.
2:06:45 Speaker 02 Oh, shh.
2:06:47 Speaker 04 An intelligence agency, probably.
2:06:49 AJ Gentile? Probably.
2:06:51 Speaker 04 Who has an interest in setting back the Iranian nuclear program?
2:06:57 AJ Gentile? Yes. Stuxnet was aggressive, but very quiet. If Stuxnet is on your computer and you plug in a USB thumb drive, boom, the USB drive is immediately and quietly infected. You don't have to run a program, open a webpage, or click anything. You then plug that USB drive into a different computer on a different network, boom, every machine on that network is infected. And this is exactly what happened in Iran. The nuclear centrifuges at Natanz were air-gapped, meaning they weren't connected to any outside network. And this is usually a good way to keep a network secure. The only way to infect a clean air-gap network is...
2:07:32 Speaker 02 User error.
2:07:33 AJ Gentile? Yep, user error. Outside contractors who were brought in to work on the Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz had also brought Stuxnet in through infected USB drives. And once Stuxnet was in, it deliberately targeted the Siemens PLCs, which operated uranium enrichment equipment. So these PLCs controlled the rate of spin in the nuclear centrifuge. Spin too fast or too slow, the entire thing tears itself apart. So Stuxnet got into the centrifuges, and then...
2:08:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, a-a-a-then what?
2:08:03 AJ Gentile? And then it did nothing. It just looked around and kept logs of everything happening in the equipment. But, after 13 days, Stuxnet started changing the speed of the centrifuges every 15 minutes, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. Normally, this is something a technician would spot immediately, but Stuxnet was using the data it collected earlier to report back that everything was fine.
2:08:26 Speaker 02 But everything wasn't fine, was it?
2:08:28 AJ Gentile? It was not. Because Stuxnet changes the rate of spin every 15 minutes, the equipment weakens and eventually tears itself apart. Stuxnet was also disrupting power feeds, causing centrifuges to explode. And once the equipment started to fail, there was no way to stop it. Even those big red buttons you see on machines that you hit in case of emergency, those were disabled too. Somehow, Stuxnet thought of everything. Not only was this virus created by highly talented programmers, there was obviously input from experts in nuclear enrichment technology, reactor operations, safety protocols. That is a dangerous virus. Over 1,000 uranium centrifuges were destroyed by Stuxnet. This set Iran's nuclear enrichment program back months, maybe years.
2:09:10 Speaker 02 Why?
2:09:12 AJ Gentile? Well... Iran's nuclear ambitions must be stopped. They have to be stopped. We all have to stop it. Now, that's the one message I have for you today. Thank you. In the early 2000s, Iran was ramping up its nuclear energy and enrichment program. This was in violation of international agreements, so a lot of the work was done in secret. Also a violation. Now, Iran argued that it had a right to pursue nuclear energy. But US and Israeli intelligence agencies suspected Iran of using its civilian nuclear program as cover for weapons development. So, the US imposed sanctions and all sorts of other things to try to pressure Iran to slow down its nuclear program and deal.
2:09:57 AJ Gentile? But even with Stuxnet and other setbacks, Iran kept enriching uranium. They said that they needed nuclear power to provide energy to the population.
2:10:05 Speaker 02 Energy? Don't they make oil over there?
2:10:08 AJ Gentile? Look, I'm just telling you what happened. I'm not taking sides. This isn't a political channel.
2:10:11 Speaker 02 Fine, fine, fine. Go ahead.
2:10:13 AJ Gentile? So every time Iran agreed to suspend its enrichment program, diplomatic talks would break down and they would go back to work. Then they would stop again and start again, and it went on like this for a while. But then the CIA received thousands of pages of documents indicating that Iran was modifying the nose cone of a missile to carry a nuclear warhead.
2:10:34 Speaker 02 Oh, no.
2:10:35 AJ Gentile? Oh, yes. Then it was discovered that Iran had acquired and hidden from inspectors blueprints for more advanced centrifuge tech. Iran claimed that these documents were forged, but later admitted that they had secretly imported equipment from a foreign source. Now, by this time, Israel was getting fed up and threatening military action. Now, bombing Iranian nuclear facilities might have been a short-term solution, but almost certainly would have led to war in the region and perhaps globally.
2:11:05 Speaker 02 Oy, they, not another war.
2:11:07 AJ Gentile? Yep, another war.
2:11:10 AJ Gentile? So the US's intelligence community, including NSA, CIA, and the newly-formed US Cyber Command, got to work on what they called "Operation Olympic Games." Olympic Games was a campaign of cyber intrusion, disruption, and sabotage of Iranian...
2:11:26 Speaker 02 Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. The US government created Stuxnet?
2:11:30 AJ Gentile? What, I haven't given you enough clues?
2:11:32 Speaker 02 Well, I was just so enthralled with the stories.
2:11:34 AJ Gentile? I appreciate that. Now, officially, no country has acknowledged developing Stuxnet, but through leaks at NSA and CIA, and using common sense, it's generally believed that Stuxnet was developed by the United States with help from Israel, the UK, and their allies.
2:11:51 Speaker 02 Dumb question.
2:11:52 AJ Gentile? Go ahead.
2:11:53 Speaker 02 Would you destroy something with a bomb or with a virus? Isn't it the same thing?
2:11:57 AJ Gentile? Well, funny you should ask that.
2:12:01 Speaker 04 It's an act of war. Please, let's be frank here.
2:12:08 AJ Gentile? Okay. Countries are constantly hacking each other and spying on each other, looking for information. And most countries have agencies and protocols to protect against this. It's a game of intelligence cat and mouse. It's been going on forever. But Stuxnet was the first time a nation-state developed proactive, offensive, weaponized code that could do actual, physical damage to another country. If a nuclear reactor could be destroyed from the inside... What other real-world damage could Stuxnet or other malicious code do? If you attack a power grid or a water supply, lots of people are gonna die. So Iran felt like this was not a simple covert act of espionage, but a blatant act of war committed by the US and its allies.
2:12:51 Speaker 02 What did they do about it?
2:12:52 AJ Gentile? Well, what would you do?
2:12:54 Speaker 02 Fight back.
2:12:55 AJ Gentile? And that's exactly what they did. Iran sent out a virtual call to arms and quickly built one of the largest state-sponsored hacker groups in the world. They got to work. They attacked Saudi Aramco, the largest oil company in the world, and destroyed every computer they had. Thirty thousand machines' hard drives were wiped clean. Phone lines were down, email offline. It was a nightmare.
2:13:18 Speaker 02 Oh no.
2:13:19 AJ Gentile? Then, they went for America's financial infrastructure and levied attacks against Wells Fargo, PNC, and Bank of America, taking down banking systems all over the world. And there were other attacks. Now, Iran didn't officially take credit for these attacks, but then again, they didn't really have to. The message was clear: Come for us, we'll come for you. PLC attacks did happen before Stuxnet. Viruses have destroyed power generators, dumped raw sewage on cities, disrupted railways. There was even an attack in the 90s against Worcester Airport in Massachusetts that grounded flights for a day. But those attacks were done by single hackers and disgruntled employees. When you have the resources of an entire country deployed for state-sponsored attacks, the world becomes a much more dangerous place.
2:14:04 Speaker 02 But now that we know about it, we're safe from Stuxnet, right? Oh no.
2:14:11 Speaker 05 For years, cyberattacks on our nation have been met with indecision and inaction.
2:14:17 AJ Gentile? The internet has been a great equalizer. Any information available online is available to everyone, everywhere, forever. Now, you can't buy a tank or a bomb online.
2:14:27 Speaker 02 Hello, DocNet?
2:14:29 AJ Gentile? Okay, the Darknet is different, and we have an episode coming up on that, so while you're waiting for it, hit the like and subscribe, all the buttons. But don't try to buy a tank on the Darknet. What you can find online are plans and blueprints to make all kinds of scary things. Still, if you try to put together some doomsday device in your garage, you're gonna raise some eyebrows. I mean, my wife can't spray paint a flower pot in the driveway without our nosy neighbor coming over. I can only imagine what he'd do if I started welding together pieces for an EMP device.
2:14:57 Speaker 02 That would make a good DIY video.
2:14:59 AJ Gentile? It would. I'd watch that. But Stuxnet isn't a thing. It's lines of code. But it's lines of code that can damage actual property and hurt actual people. And the Stuxnet code is just out there now. If you know what you're doing, you can take the code apart, make a few changes, and now you've got a really sophisticated weapon. You can even do this if you don't know what you're doing, which is probably more dangerous. Now, as we speak, thousands of people around the world have the Stuxnet code, and they're tinkering with it, seeing what different pieces can be used in their own attacks. There have already been a few viruses inspired by its engineering. The Dooku virus attacked industrial facilities in 2011. Flame in 2012 also attacked facilities in Iran. And Flame could record audio, Skype calls, take screenshots,
2:15:44 AJ Gentile? log keystrokes, all kinds of stuff. Indestruer attacked power facilities in Ukraine in 2016. And there's tons of others. Stuxnet is the best cyber weapon the United States has ever developed, and it gave it to the world for free. Now, for perspective, Natanz in Iran was a brand-new nuclear facility with an air-gapped network and a team of security professionals working around the clock. And it was taken down easily. But a lot of industrial control systems are not as sophisticated. Some are connected to the Internet without default passwords, and many systems crucial to a country's infrastructure are running software that's 30, even 40 years old. Not just at Iran. Here in the US, in the UK, everywhere.
2:16:27 AJ Gentile? How vulnerable are those systems to attack? Iran has already said that cyberattacks will be answered with cyberattacks. And I think we can assume that every country in the world has this policy. I mean, it's national defense. Well, remember how I said the Internet is a great equalizer? Well, think about this for a second. Throughout world history, global powers maintain their status through wealth and military might. But today, you don't need a trillion-dollar defense budget in order to impose your political will on the world. Now, all you need is a dozen smart programmers and lots of Mountain Dew. Now that the world's richest and poorest nations all employ skilled hackers, is cyber warfare like the nuclear arms race? Where mutually assured destruction means that no country would dare attack another?
2:17:12 AJ Gentile? I mean, surely no country would risk retaliation by unleashing further chaos on the world, right?
2:17:18 Speaker 02 Your sarcasm is palpable.
2:17:23 Speaker 02 The link between the outage in Mumbai in October last year and the suspected role of Chinese hackers. Chinese hackers, backed by the Chinese state,
2:17:36 AJ Gentile? targeted two Indian vaccine makers. Tonight, as researchers race to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus, hackers from China and other countries are working just as furiously to steal that research to create their own. Operation Olympic Games gave us Stuxnet, the most advanced and destructive cyber weapon ever used. When it was unleashed on Iran, it was an Hiroshima moment. And like Hiroshima, Stuxnet was only the beginning. A test case for more advanced, more devastating cyber weapons. And one of those weapons has already been deployed. That weapon is Nitro Zeus.
2:18:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, that sounds like the name of a Greek energy drink.
2:18:16 AJ Gentile? You're really throwing ice water on my drama here, pal.
2:18:18 Speaker 02 I'm sorry. I make jokes when I'm nervous.
2:18:22 AJ Gentile? Okay, back to Iran. After coming pretty close to war, cooler heads prevailed and Iran, along with several world powers, signed a nuclear peace agreement. That was the ideal outcome, but that outcome wasn't always certain. So in case diplomacy failed and war broke out, the United States had and has a cyber contingency plan. The plan, codenamed Nitro Zeus, is a virus far more complex than Stuxnet and was developed by thousands of people. At a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, Nitro Zeus, or NZ, was designed to infect Iranian infrastructure and await orders. In case of war, NZ would disable Iran's air defenses, disrupt military command and control, take down parts of the power grid.
2:19:05 AJ Gentile? It would attack domestic communications, transportation, banks, financial systems. Now, I don't have to point out that these aren't just military targets. Millions of civilians would be harmed if Nitro Zeus, or a virus like that, was used on anyone. Now, according to former intelligence operatives, Nitro Zeus has already been deployed and is living in Iranian infrastructure right now, just awaiting instructions. Now, that's pretty scary. But what scares me more about Nitro Zeus is, what happens when that code gets out?
2:19:39 AJ Gentile? It's inevitable that more countries will acquire the capacity to use cyber, both for espionage and for destructive activities. You'll hear people say that the next world war will be fought in cyberspace. They're wrong about that. The United States, Iran, China, the UK, Russia, North Korea, they're not preparing for cyberwar. They're already fighting it. And I'm being completely honest now, off-script. Researching this episode was stressful, and I'm left with more questions than answers. Like, how can citizens who are threatened by cyberattacks have an honest conversation about these dangers when our own governments don't acknowledge they participate? How can one country ask another to disarm
2:20:23 AJ Gentile? when it won't disarm itself? But the biggest question of all, how can the global community ensure that destructive cyberweapons like Stuxnet and Nitro Zeus don't fall into the wrong hands?
2:20:35 Speaker 02 Don't create them in the first place!
2:20:37 AJ Gentile? That would be a good start. Until there's a global effort to address this threat, all we can hope for is that our governments can keep us safe and hope our leaders can avoid another international crisis. That's a lot to hope for. The cyberwar is here. And now I find myself longing for the days of the Cold War, when a concrete wall ran through Berlin, when proxy wars were fought on every continent, when global superpowers had thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at each other, just one decision away from Armageddon. I long for those days because back then, the world was a much safer place.
2:21:19 Speaker 01 Data layers, little one, don't forget my son. To include nerdy puns. Tuck you in, warm within, keep you free from logging till the spam ban he comes. Sleep with Wi-Fi open. Grip in your signal tight. And finally, the closer. The nightmare. The end of secrets. Because if quantum computers become powerful enough, all the encryption protecting your bent accounts, medical records, DMs, your government files, your gross search histories. All of it could crack open like a walnut under a forklift.
2:22:02 Speaker 01 So if you thought the machines were watching you before, wait until they can read everything you ever tried to hide. Which is why I'm staying right here in a cage against the machine, chewing through stress wood and trusting no one with a charging port. The final installment of today's compilation? The Quantum Apocalypse. Which might be closer than we think.
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2:23:01 AJ Gentile? It's human nature to keep secrets. Throughout history, we've made complex codes to hide our secrets. Most codes are eventually cracked, but not all of them.
2:23:11 AJ Gentile? The Voynage manuscript is a book filled with drawings and symbols nobody can read. The Beel ciphers point to hidden treasure, if someone could decode them. There are entire ancient languages we can't understand because they're encrypted. Encryption can be simple or very complicated. Either way, it's just running a message through a series of mathematical rules. For decades, even centuries, some codes used mathematical rules that remain unbreakable. But they're about to be challenged by something new: machines that don't care about math and don't follow any rules.
2:24:04 AJ Gentile? Kate Bryce's morning started like any other. Her smart home system woke her at 6 a.m. with her usual playlist. The coffee maker fired up. Her iPhone read her schedule while she brushed her teeth. Normal, routine. She opened her banking app. Something was wrong. Her balance was zero. She blinked and checked again. Her balance was back. Just a temporary error, she thought. She took a sip of coffee and nearly dropped her mug.
2:24:33 AJ Gentile? The smart speaker was playing someone else's conversation. A couple fighting about credit card debt. She unplugged it.
2:24:44 AJ Gentile? Then her smart TV started cycling through her photos. Private photos, intimate photos. She pulled the plug. And then her phone rang. Then she heard the sirens.
2:25:10 AJ Gentile? The oldest code we know of isn't written in complex mathematics. It's carved in stone. In an Egyptian tomb from 4,000 years ago, the scribes simply replaced regular hieroglyphs with ones they made up. They weren't trying to keep secrets, they were showing off. These were prayers carved into tomb walls. The scribes wanted to prove they knew something others didn't.
2:25:28 Speaker 02 Oh, those were ancient emojis.
2:25:30 AJ Gentile? Not exactly.
2:25:30 Speaker 02 Uh, let's test that theory. Can humans crack this?
2:25:37 AJ Gentile? The simple act of substituting one symbol for another unleashed something: the human desire to keep secrets. And for thousands of years, that's how codes worked. You'd replace letters with other letters or symbols. Linear A is a secret writing system created by the Minoans in ancient Crete 3,600 years ago. We can read its descendant, Linear B, but Linear A is still a secret. Every attempt to crack it has failed. The Spartans made practical use of codes.
2:26:02 Speaker 02 Yes, yes, cryptography!
2:26:05 AJ Gentile? Please don't.
2:26:06 Speaker 02 Too late, I already wanted a tunic and a cape. Now I just need the abs.
2:26:09 AJ Gentile? Can I get back to this?
2:26:10 Speaker 02 Look ahead, I need to catch up on my sit-ups anyway.
2:26:14 AJ Gentile? The Spartans created Meskidi. Here's how it works. Picture a wooden rod about as thick as your wrist.
2:26:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, a rod.
2:26:21 AJ Gentile? Stop it. Now wrap a strip of leather or parchment around it like a spiral. Write your message across the strip, following the spiral. When you unwrap it, the letters scramble, the message is nonsense. But wrap it around another rod exactly the same size, and the message reappears. This is called a transposition cipher. You're not changing the letters, you're just moving them around. Julius Caesar encoded all his military correspondence by shifting each letter in the alphabet by three spaces. A becomes D, B becomes E, and so on. When you hit Z, you loop back to A. This is called a shift cipher, or Caesar cipher. The key is knowing how many spaces to shift. Caesar used 3, but you can use any number. His enemies never cracked it.
2:27:05 AJ Gentile? In the 1820s, Thomas Beall used a book cipher to hide the location of millions of dollars of buried treasure. And here's how it works. First, pick a book. Any book. Then you replace each word in your message with a number. That number tells you which word to use from your chosen book. Count down to the fifth word on page 1, and that's your first word. Maybe the 19th word on page 2 is your second word, and so on. Beall used the Declaration of Independence.
2:27:30 Speaker 02 Nicolas Cage has entered the chat.
2:27:34 AJ Gentile? When someone finally figured that out in 1885, they cracked one of his three messages. "The treasure is somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia." But the other two messages? Still locked, because we don't know which books he used. Every year, thousands of people try to crack the Beal ciphers to find the treasure. And every year, they fail.
2:27:52 AJ Gentile? The Zodiac Killer was also ahead of his time. He encoded a message using a homophonic substitution cipher using 408 different symbols. Instead of replacing each letter with just one symbol, you've replaced it with several different ones. The letter "E" might become 3, or 7, or some symbol. Nobody knows. This makes the code much harder to break, because you can't use frequency analysis. In normal English, "E" is the most common letter. But if you split it between multiple symbols, that pattern disappears. For 51 years, the Zodiac's message stumped the world's best cryptographers. Then in 2020, three amateur codebreakers finally solved it.
2:28:29 Speaker 02 What did it say?
2:28:30 AJ Gentile? Well, it said a bunch of stuff, but it started with, "I like killing people because it's so much fun."
2:28:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, for a serial killer, he wasn't much of a poet.
2:28:37 AJ Gentile? He wasn't. And the Zodiac Killer was never found. But quantum computers are about to change everything. All these ancient methods—substitutions, patterns, and tricks—share one weakness: math. This is a weakness quantum computers can exploit. Soon, these machines might reveal every secret message ever written, including yours.
2:29:17 AJ Gentile? The quantum computer hissed as liquid helium circulated through the processor. Carl Bishop checked the temperature. Minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit. Absolute zero. Quantum bits needed to be that cold to maintain coherence.
2:29:32 AJ Gentile? Stanford's quantum lab was empty at 3 a.m. He'd been running simulations for 12 hours straight, his eyes burned. But CTEC's grant requirements were clear: demonstrate quantum error correction, or lose funding.
2:29:45 AJ Gentile? Quantum computers were terrible at error correction. Quantum states are too fragile, too much noise. If the temperature changes by half a degree, they'd decohere. If radio waves leak in, they'd decohere.
2:29:59 AJ Gentile? A truck hits a pothole a mile away. The vibration in the earth makes them decohere.
2:30:06 AJ Gentile? But Carl noticed something strange in the error correction data. The errors weren't random. Then he realized they weren't errors at all. The quantum computer was cracking encryption keys, millions of them. Keys that protect everything from banking passwords to nuclear launch codes.
2:30:27 AJ Gentile? Carl decided to test this. He entered an RSA 4096 security key and ran down the hall for another coffee. He wasn't in a hurry. Even the world's most powerful supercomputers would need billions or trillions of years to break RSA 4096. But when he returned five minutes later, he couldn't believe it. The key was cracked. Carl now realized his computer was the most powerful and dangerous weapon on Earth. He started to panic. He tried to delete the data, but it was already uploaded to CTEX's private servers. By sunrise, three intelligence agencies had flagged the data transfer. By 9:00 a.m., the first bank's security system was breached. By noon, every bank went dark. The quantum apocalypse had begun.
2:31:21 AJ Gentile? Your entire digital life depends on two prime numbers. That's it, two numbers, and they protect everything. Your passwords, your messages, your bank accounts, all of it. Modern encryption is based on this simple trick. Take two huge prime numbers and multiply them together. That creates your public key, a number anyone can use to send you secret messages. But only someone who knows those original prime numbers can read those messages. Working backward, trying to find those original numbers, would take a computer billions of years, or so he thought. In December 2024, Google unveiled Project Willow. Their quantum computer solved a problem in five minutes that would take our fastest supercomputers longer than the age of the universe. Quantum computers do this using superposition.
2:32:04 Speaker 02 Hang on, hang on, hang on. You want to pump the brakes on the nerd chatter and fill me in?
2:32:08 AJ Gentile? Well, think about flipping a coin. It lands on either heads or tails. Normal computer bits work the same way. Everything is either 1 or 0. It's binary. But quantum computer bits, or qubits, can be 1 and 0 at the same time.
2:32:21 Speaker 02 Oh, so qubits are non-binary.
2:32:24 Speaker 02 What? Are they?
2:32:25 AJ Gentile? No, they are, but I need you to stop talking. So, instead of flipping that coin, it's a coin spinning on its edge. While it spins, it's not heads or tails. It's both at once. That's superposition. Now imagine trying to crack a safe with a million combinations. A normal computer can only try one combination at a time. But a quantum computer, it tries all combinations simultaneously. The NSA has been warning about this moment for years. They call it Y2Q, the year quantum computers become powerful enough to break our current encryption. They thought it would happen between 2030 and 2040, but Willow changed everything. For 30 years, quantum computers suffered one major problem: errors. Reading quantum data is like trying to read a book during an earthquake. It's too unstable to work properly.
2:33:10 AJ Gentile? But Google fixed that with Project Willow.
2:33:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, how to fix it?
2:33:13 AJ Gentile? By grouping qubits together. There are groups of qubits handling processing and groups of qubits that do nothing but track and fix errors. The more qubits you add, the fewer errors you have. It may sound counterintuitive, but it's like building a sandcastle that gets stronger the bigger it gets. Now, with AI's help, quantum computers are on track to break current encryption by the year 2029, way ahead of schedule.
2:33:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, this is bad.
2:33:37 AJ Gentile? In 2024, the Department of Defense accelerated its quantum modernization program. Their latest directive warns that critical systems must be quantum resistant by 2025. But one detail stands out: they're not just protecting future messages. They're racing to protect everything we've ever encrypted, and they're running out of time.
2:34:14 AJ Gentile? When Liz Emery's phone buzzed at 4:00 a.m., she almost ignored it. After 15 years in cybersecurity, late-night calls usually meant someone at the hospital forgot their password. But caller ID showed Mount Sinai's emergency line. The first report was in. Patient records appeared on digital billboards in Times Square. They included blood test results, psychiatric evaluations, and terminal diagnoses that patients had not yet told their families about. Senators, congressmen, CEOs. Their private medical data was all over the internet. She was still coordinating the hospital's response when the news reported that every dating app was breached. Then, they came back online. Suddenly, on every device in the city, smartphones, TVs, billboards,
2:34:59 AJ Gentile? was a link to a site where anyone could look up any information that was part of the dating app breach. Direct messages, real names and emails, browser histories, private photos and videos, all revealed. Liz figured the only people celebrating were divorce attorneys. Then an email came into hospital security. "Pay $1 billion or every pacemaker control system on Earth will go down. Pay another billion or insulin pumps will go down, starting with diabetic children." The city started to crack. Police dispatch systems were offline. Traffic lights went dark. ATMs were dumping cash into the street. Bank balances were set to zero. Autonomous vehicles became killing machines. Delivery drones crashed into buildings like kamikaze pilots.
2:35:44 AJ Gentile? A fleet of cybertrucks tore through a shopping mall before exploding all at once. News channels tried to cover the chaos, but their broadcasts were hijacked. CNN anchors watched helplessly as their personal emails were displayed on screen. The White House Press Secretary's private texts appeared during a briefing about the crisis. Then the NSA made an emergency broadcast that somehow made it through. They said there was a nationwide system compromise. For the safety of every American, martial law was now imposed. Just as the message was covering the mandatory curfews, every phone in the country went dark.
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2:37:31 AJ Gentile? Major technology companies are racing to build quantum-resistant encryption. Google, IBM, and Microsoft have teams working around the clock, but there's a big problem. Quantum computers don't just threaten future messages, they threaten everything we've ever encrypted. Every encrypted file, every secure transmission, every protected database becomes vulnerable, even ones from decades ago. Intelligence agencies have been collecting encrypted data since the Cold War. Your old emails, your financial records, your private messages, all sitting in databases waiting to be unlocked. Then there's Bitcoin. Its entire security system depends on the same math quantum computers are about to break. Shadow groups have already collected hundreds of thousands of encrypted Bitcoin wallets.
2:38:15 AJ Gentile? They're just waiting for quantum computers powerful enough to crack them. All that money could vanish in seconds. At current prices, that's billions of dollars.
2:38:22 Speaker 02 Total to zero, baby!
2:38:24 AJ Gentile? Banks know this is coming. J.P. Morgan started building quantum-resistant vaults in 2023. Not for gold or cash, for computers. These facilities will never connect to the Internet. They'll use paper records and human couriers. The military's training for quantum dark operations, missions conducted without digital communication. Teams practice using pre-arranged signals, dead drops, and one-time codebooks, the same methods that kept secrets during World War II. The NSA's latest reports show Project Willow proves something they already knew. The quantum apocalypse isn't coming, it's already here. The NSA isn't trying to stop it, it's preparing for what comes after. Because the race is no longer about building quantum computers. The race is to survive them.
2:39:26 AJ Gentile? The line at Chase Manhattan stretched around the block. Cash only, no cards, no transfers, just paper money and metal coins. Donald Janik watched from his office window across the street. In his 30 years as a security consultant, he'd seen a lot of changes, but nothing like this. The quantum apocalypse was erasing decades of technological progress. His company now specialized in physical security. Armed guards, paper record-keeping, mechanical locks, the kind of security you couldn't hack. When the hospital records started appearing online, they shut down their networks and went analog. Now armed guards protected rooms full of paper files. Doctors wrote prescriptions by hand. Old mechanical devices became valuable. Typewriter repair shops reopened.
2:40:11 AJ Gentile? Filing cabinet manufacturers couldn't keep up with demand. Bicycle messengers replaced email. Everyone's skills from the pre-digital age suddenly found themselves in demand. Retired secretaries who could take shorthand. Mechanics who could fix cars without computers. Accountants who knew how to keep books by hand. The younger generation struggled to adapt. They never lived in an analog world. The smart ones saw it coming. They'd pulled their money out early and bought physical assets. Gold, silver, land, things you could touch. Things that existed in the real world, not just as numbers in a database. The rest had to adapt or lose everything.
2:40:50 AJ Gentile? Back at Stanford, Carl Bishop struggled with depression. He blamed himself. C-Tech, the company supporting his work, no longer took his calls. Still, Carl wouldn't stop digging. He had to find out what went wrong. Then Carl found something buried in the data. Timestamps that didn't make sense. Some encrypted messages were broken months ago. Then he realized the quantum apocalypse didn't start with his mistake. It started months earlier. The first bank breach wasn't at noon the first day. It was three months before. But balances weren't touched. Hospital records, websites, smartphone apps, most had been compromised for months. But again, the data wasn't touched. Carl realized the chaos wasn't an accident. It was cover for something else.
2:41:35 AJ Gentile? Something much bigger. Something much worse.
2:41:48 AJ Gentile? Scientists are racing to develop new encryption methods that even quantum computers can't break. They call it "post-quantum cryptography", the strategy: find mathematical problems so complex that not even quantum computers can solve them efficiently. But there's a problem: whenever we think we've found an unbreakable code, someone finds a way to break it. The journalists thought Enigma was mathematically impossible to crack. The Japanese believed Purple would keep their World War II communications secret forever. The NSA once claimed RSA encryption would take billions of years to defeat. They were all wrong. Some banks are returning to physical security systems: offline computers, paper records, and in-person verification. Government agencies are reviving Cold War-era methods: one-time pads, dead drops, and bicycle couriers.
2:42:31 Speaker 02 Sometimes things don't happen the way you planned. Sometimes you can end up lower than you started.
2:42:36 AJ Gentile? What?
2:42:37 Speaker 02 Quicksilver. Somebody out there gets it.
2:42:41 AJ Gentile? Quantum dark operations like air-gapped facilities, analog communication, and paper messages could work, but they're temporary solutions. Throughout history, humans have played an endless cat-and-mass game with secrets: someone creates an unbreakable code, someone else breaks it, and a more complex code replaces it, and the cycle continues. In the quantum age, there are no more secrets: only information waiting to be revealed. That's why the NSA isn't trying to stop it: they aren't building new code-breaking technology. But you know what they are building? Bunkers.
2:43:28 AJ Gentile? The concrete room in the bunker beneath Fort Meade was cold and quiet. Carl Bishop was in his fifth hour of interrogation by four government agents. The NSA building above them had been abandoned when their classified files leaked, but this room, which technically didn't exist, still had power and a working computer. Carl learned the truth over the past few months: CTEC wasn't a tech company. It was a joint NSA- DARPA program that had been running since 2019. They didn't have just one quantum computer. They had a network of them, hidden in secure facilities nationwide. For years, the network had quietly broken every encryption it touched: banking records, medical files, private messages, and government secrets.
2:44:11 AJ Gentile? The intelligence agencies had access to everything, but there was a problem. They couldn't act on any of it without revealing their capability. Imagine knowing about every terrorist plot, every corporate crime, every government corruption scandal, but being unable to stop any of it without exposing how you got the information. The agencies were drowning in intelligence they couldn't use. The solution was elegant. Create a world where privacy no longer existed, where every secret was public. If nothing were private, there'd be no need to explain how they obtained their intelligence. No search warrants were necessary. Everything was already exposed. The social chaos was part of the plan. Communities going analog wasn't a problem, it was the goal.
2:44:55 AJ Gentile? Drive the dangerous elements offline, where they could be more easily monitored through traditional surveillance. Let the general public choose between convenience and privacy. They would choose convenience. They always did. But the intelligence agencies had their own solution for secure communication, a return to Cold War tradecraft. Dead drops, one-time pads, face-to-face meetings in soundproof rooms. Their most sensitive operations moved to facilities that never touched a network or used a computer. Buildings that didn't officially exist, staffed by people with no digital footprint. They maintained two separate organizations: the public-facing agency everyone knew about, and the shadow agency that operated completely offline.
2:45:39 AJ Gentile? The public agency would rebuild its security and update its systems. All of it would be theater. The real work happened in places like this concrete bunker, places with no windows, no cameras, no phones. Places where messages were still written by hand and burned after reading. The most important secrets were never digitized, never encrypted, and never stored anywhere except in human memory. The NSA didn't break encryption to destroy society. They destroyed society to hide that they'd broken encryption almost a year ago. Carl was set up. The quantum apocalypse was pinned on him. But what could he do about it? Martial law was still in effect. The NSA wanted him to keep working and keep quiet.
2:46:23 AJ Gentile? He could either agree to cooperate or go to prison. Violation of the Espionage Act, willful communication of national defense information, unauthorized access of classified documents. The list went on and on. He didn't have much of a choice.
2:46:40 AJ Gentile? As Carl left the concrete room, he realized that in a world with no secrets, the most powerful people weren't those who could break encryption. The most powerful people are those who could keep secrets without it. And right now, the only people who could do that work for the NSA.
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2:50:51 Speaker 07 I played for Libya in Area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. Songs singing like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends. And it never ends, no it never ends.
2:51:28 Speaker 07 I fear the crackhead and got stuck inside mail's hole with MKUltra. I'm being only too aware. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadows people there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told. And his name was Cold. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And weapons are making me all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.
2:52:12 Speaker 07 And weapons are making me all through the night.
2:52:34 Speaker 07 The Mothman sightings and the solar storms still come. To have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets circle to Project Stargate. And what the dark watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though. The black night satellite it told me so. I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And weapons are making me all through the night.
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Previous The Basement: Luigi Vendittelli | S4: The Man Who Reconstructed Area 51's Secret Hangar Next The Basement: Rizwan Virk | The Simulation Hypothesis, Quantum Physics & Mysticism Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated