Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: the podcast that looks at the future and says, take
Speaker 1: a look at the invisible girl here. She is clear
Speaker 1: as the day. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick,
Speaker 1: and our other host, Lauren Vogelbaum is not with us today.
Speaker 1: She is under the weather, but we hope that she
Speaker 1: feels better soon and she will join us again in
Speaker 1: our next session. Yes, indeed, so she's missing out on
Speaker 1: a great topic, right. You know. The other option is
Speaker 1: she might be here and we don't even know about it.
Speaker 1: That is true. She could be sitting immediately to my right,
Speaker 1: your left, Joe, just to peek behind the curtain there
Speaker 1: for those of you out there in podcast land. She
Speaker 1: could just be in her normal spot. But she could
Speaker 1: be undetectable to the naked eye, right because she has
Speaker 1: been granted a helm of darkness by the goddess Athena,
Speaker 1: or perhaps a cloak that she's inherited from her father
Speaker 1: who went to wizarding school, or perhaps a suit made
Speaker 1: out of some kind of bizarre nano material that that
Speaker 1: renders you invisible to the naked eye. No, I was
Speaker 1: going to go with the one ring, but that's way
Speaker 1: more realistic. Okay, So yeah, we're gonna talk about wait, wait, no,
Speaker 1: I got a better one predator. That's the ultimate technological invisibility, right,
Speaker 1: because then you become like late eighties early nineties computer effect. Yeah, which,
Speaker 1: that's that's all I ask for. Really, I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't demand perfect invisibility. In fact, I want just near
Speaker 1: perfect invisible. Right. You want little ripples where they can
Speaker 1: see the outline of your wrist spikes. Yeah, the same
Speaker 1: sort of thing that you had see in some of
Speaker 1: the Star Trek films, right, because because if you had
Speaker 1: perfect invisibility, it's hard to convey a sense of terror
Speaker 1: when you just have a you know, calm looking environment.
Speaker 1: You folks are so lucky that didn't just go down
Speaker 1: the path of making hollow man jokes. But anyway, it
Speaker 1: should be obvious that we're talking about invisibility tech today.
Speaker 1: What is the future of invisibility? We know the past,
Speaker 1: which is that everybody wanted to be invisible. It shows
Speaker 1: up in folklore. There is, as I mentioned, their Greek
Speaker 1: myths about you know, a helmet you can put on
Speaker 1: to become invisible. Um, there are other sort of invisibility
Speaker 1: capes and magical cloaks and things like that. There are
Speaker 1: there are entities that are capable of disappearing to mortal man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it goes way back the desire to disappear,
Speaker 1: And that's not really all that surprising because it actually
Speaker 1: goes back further than humans. You don't even have to
Speaker 1: look to folklore. You can look to nature because it's
Speaker 1: inherently great to become invisible because it provides you an advantage.
Speaker 1: It's pretty simple. It's easy to get to drop on
Speaker 1: somebody if they don't know where you are, but you
Speaker 1: know where they are. Or it's easy to evade someone
Speaker 1: getting the drop on you because you're able to hide
Speaker 1: away and the the the potential predator that would have
Speaker 1: doubled you up is none the wiser and just continues
Speaker 1: on its predatory path. So yeah, there there are certainly
Speaker 1: advantages to being able to blend in with your environment
Speaker 1: and fade into the point of invisibility. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: that's pretty clear now with us humans. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of it tends to be power fantasies, but but
Speaker 1: let's set that aside, right, Maybe at the end we
Speaker 1: can talk a little bit about the actual ethics behind
Speaker 1: invisibility technology. What are we talking about here? What would
Speaker 1: invisibility technology entail? Well, you won't hear the term invisibility
Speaker 1: a lot in people among engineers and researchers investigating this,
Speaker 1: they tend to speak more in terms of quote cloaking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I think that's a little more it's a little
Speaker 1: more realistic, sort of accurately conveys more of what they're
Speaker 1: trying to do. They're trying to somewhat shield your detectability,
Speaker 1: not so much make you invisible like the folklore. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: and especially since cloaking gets around, uh, the the belief
Speaker 1: the invisibility is all about the visible spectrum. Invisible, You've
Speaker 1: got the word visible there. Cloaking can be about making
Speaker 1: a device or or structure undetectable from very specific means
Speaker 1: as opposed to, or or even more general means as
Speaker 1: opposed to something like the visible spectrum. So a cloaking
Speaker 1: device might be effective for something that is outside the
Speaker 1: visible spectrum, meaning that we would be able to see
Speaker 1: it with our naked eye, but using other means we
Speaker 1: would be unable to detect it, right, say if we
Speaker 1: sensed things by heat or something, or microwaves or radio waves. So,
Speaker 1: for example, stealth technology can be considered at least on
Speaker 1: a certain level as cloaking technology. It's just as you
Speaker 1: can see a stealth bomber. But that's not really what
Speaker 1: they care about. They care about radar, right because I mean,
Speaker 1: you're the chances of you spotting a a stealth fighter
Speaker 1: or stealth bomber in the air are very low because
Speaker 1: they fly very high and they move very quickly. So
Speaker 1: they're really worried about being detected by by artificial means,
Speaker 1: by radio means, and that's where the clothing homes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I assumed radar, maybe some other kind of means too.
Speaker 1: I'm not up on all that military tech. It's really
Speaker 1: radar because it's all about beaming out of a frequency
Speaker 1: of radio waves and waiting to hear back the echo.
Speaker 1: And if you never hear the echo, then you just assume,
Speaker 1: all right, there was nothing there. And so stealth stealth
Speaker 1: technology is all about either absorbing or redirecting those radio
Speaker 1: waves so that they don't bounce back to a receiving
Speaker 1: station and then therefore they have no idea where you
Speaker 1: could be. Yeah, okay, so let's back way up and
Speaker 1: start with the simplest idea, which is camouflage. Okay, Camouflage
Speaker 1: is basically biommetic. I know this is always in danger
Speaker 1: of turning into the bio memetics podcast, but that really
Speaker 1: is the future. People look into nature because nature has
Speaker 1: got a lot of good stuff going on. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: it's like being one of those animals that can blend
Speaker 1: in with its surroundings. So in this method, the goal
Speaker 1: is to appear such that a landscape with you in
Speaker 1: it doesn't look much different from a landscape without you
Speaker 1: in it. You want a predator to be able to
Speaker 1: look at you without realizing you're an object distinct from
Speaker 1: your surroundings. So how do you do that? Well, the
Speaker 1: easiest form would be passive camouflage. This is the kind
Speaker 1: of camouflage. You know that your cousin Wardrior wedding and
Speaker 1: that they sell an army surplus stores. It's the kind
Speaker 1: of camouflage most common in the animal kingdom too. You
Speaker 1: can tell that that Joe and I are both from
Speaker 1: the South, where I didn't link an eye at the
Speaker 1: idea of my cousin wearing camouflage to my wedding. No
Speaker 1: cousin of mine actually wore camouflage to my wedding. I
Speaker 1: was that was a legit. I didn't invite my cousins.
Speaker 1: So well, good idea. So let's think about maybe, uh,
Speaker 1: not so much the gray or the green and brown
Speaker 1: army camouflage, but say, like like a polar bear or
Speaker 1: an Arctic fox, they have white fur which comes in
Speaker 1: handy if you're trying to stalk prey on the snowy
Speaker 1: tundra or out on an ice sheet. So animals can
Speaker 1: passively blend in with their surroundings by color patterns or
Speaker 1: maybe by physical structures, say think of the phasmatodia, right sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: or a combination of both of course, right yeah, you can.
Speaker 1: Even there are animals that have patterns on their hides
Speaker 1: that help them blend in with their surroundings. It helps
Speaker 1: break up the shape of the animal, especially like something
Speaker 1: in the savannahs of of Africa. You know, you have
Speaker 1: these these animals that have different shapes that help them
Speaker 1: kind of blend in, uh, And it breaks up the
Speaker 1: outline of the animal shape itself, thus cutting down on
Speaker 1: the chance they'll be spotted by a predator. Um, so
Speaker 1: there's not like just a single approach to passive camouflage.
Speaker 1: But this particular type of camouflage tends to only be
Speaker 1: really effective in specific geographic regions. Yeah, or maybe even
Speaker 1: only in specific parts of those geographic regions. Like, passive
Speaker 1: camouflage might work really well on tree bark, but then
Speaker 1: if you crawl onto a leaf, it doesn't work so
Speaker 1: well because it doesn't change. So the Arctic fox wanders
Speaker 1: onto green grass or onto an asphalt parking lot, it
Speaker 1: sort of loses its edge. Got a great example of
Speaker 1: this polar polar bear found on a tropical island. Lost.
Speaker 1: So that's not a great form of camouflage. Scary and
Speaker 1: certainly raises some questions that I think are never sat answered. Spoiler,
Speaker 1: are never answered. That's exactly right. But what if the
Speaker 1: fox could change the color of its coat to blend
Speaker 1: in with its surroundings. Well, actually a fox sounds more
Speaker 1: active than passive there. Yeah, a fox can actually do
Speaker 1: that on a slow time scale. So when the seasons
Speaker 1: change in the snow melts, the Arctic foxes coat changes color.
Speaker 1: It gets darker during the warmer months, so it can
Speaker 1: blend in with rocks and grass and dirt and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. But it turns white again next winter. That's nice,
Speaker 1: but of course that's not very useful minute to minute
Speaker 1: or second very gradual we were talking. If we want
Speaker 1: to talk about an animal capable of hiding its presence
Speaker 1: as it moves from one environment to another, or at
Speaker 1: least the environment itself has a gradation of different colors,
Speaker 1: you need to take something a little more drastic than
Speaker 1: a gradual change of your your coat's color. Right, So
Speaker 1: now it's time to look into things like cephalopods. Okay,
Speaker 1: so now we're looking at your your critters like a
Speaker 1: like your octopus, and same things that are capable of
Speaker 1: changing the color of their of their skin or their
Speaker 1: outer surface and a very uh well like in real time. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean this is truly nature's active camouflage. It's not passive.
Speaker 1: Their skin dynamically changes to respond to their surroundings. I
Speaker 1: don't mean that all speak sees of these families of
Speaker 1: animals do that in the same way. But within these
Speaker 1: groups there are animals like that. So if they suddenly
Speaker 1: need to vanish against the pebbly texture of the sea floor,
Speaker 1: they can or if they need to blend in with
Speaker 1: a pile of rocks, they can do that too. They're
Speaker 1: pretty amazing. In fact, if you just want to have
Speaker 1: your mind blown and you've never seen this before, go
Speaker 1: to YouTube and just type in camouflage octopus and sit
Speaker 1: there and watch it over and over again. You won't
Speaker 1: be able to stop. It's unbelievable. This isn't really camouflage either,
Speaker 1: but the mimic octopus also does something really interesting. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've ever seen this. It doesn't just
Speaker 1: blend in with its surrounding it. It actually mimics other animals,
Speaker 1: so it'll pretend to be a poisonous sea snake or
Speaker 1: something like that. Um, and I think that's also really interesting.
Speaker 1: But there are technological ways to mimic the moment to
Speaker 1: moment dynamic camouflage of these animals. Your Yeah, there are,
Speaker 1: And the question is how good are they? Okay, well,
Speaker 1: let's let's start by talking about what they do, and
Speaker 1: then we can critique how good they are at doing it. Okay,
Speaker 1: I think we should start with the one you're probably
Speaker 1: sitting there imagining right now. Okay, I ask you to
Speaker 1: design a system for active camouflage and give you a
Speaker 1: few hundred bucks to put it together. What do you
Speaker 1: do well, I mean, with a few hundred bucks, I
Speaker 1: probably scoff in your face. But what I would have
Speaker 1: to bucks, okay, whatever, what I would attempt to do
Speaker 1: is I would want to set up a projector and
Speaker 1: a camera. All right, Let's say, let's say, for argument's sake,
Speaker 1: that I want to make James Bond's car disappear, and
Speaker 1: you've only given me a few hundred bucks. So I
Speaker 1: would pretty much have to coat the car with something
Speaker 1: that would make it act like a screen, retro reflective
Speaker 1: material that would be preferable. I don't know that I
Speaker 1: can manage that with a couple hundred bucks, but we'll
Speaker 1: see what we can do. Maybe it's just a tarp,
Speaker 1: but well, we'll try. And then I would set up
Speaker 1: a camera behind the car are pointing at whatever happens
Speaker 1: to be behind it. From the perspective of the person
Speaker 1: who's going to be looking at this vehicle in front
Speaker 1: of the car, I would set up the projector so
Speaker 1: the feed from behind the car would go directly to
Speaker 1: the projector, which would project that feed onto the car.
Speaker 1: So from the perspective of someone looking at it from
Speaker 1: behind where the projector is. It would just like a
Speaker 1: projector that's shooting out light at nothing. The idea being
Speaker 1: that that the the images behind the car would be
Speaker 1: projected onto the car, so it would be as if
Speaker 1: the light were passing straight through. Right, And so, video
Speaker 1: equipment has reached a point of sophistication where you can
Speaker 1: legitimately do this pretty well. You can get a high resolution,
Speaker 1: real time feed with no significant delay, run it through
Speaker 1: a computer projected onto a reflective surface. This is pretty
Speaker 1: much doable, but there are a few problems with it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Number one, I mean what if I stepped to the side. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just ruined everything, Joe, you gave me a couple
Speaker 1: hundred bucks? What do you want? No, No, that This
Speaker 1: is exactly the issue. Right. The the illusion is broken
Speaker 1: if you are viewing it in any plane other than
Speaker 1: the one that has been set up specifically for this purpose.
Speaker 1: So you need to be looking directly in the way
Speaker 1: that the image is being projected, right. Yeah, So if
Speaker 1: I'm coming at it from the side, I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: see the set up with the projector and the camera
Speaker 1: and the the car with the retroflective material draped over
Speaker 1: it in the center, and to me, there's gonna be
Speaker 1: I'm just like, well, uh, I could see what you're
Speaker 1: trying to do. But that's the problem is I can
Speaker 1: see it. And so in order to make this a
Speaker 1: realistic illusion from all angles, you would have to have
Speaker 1: something that's really impossible to achieve practically. You would have
Speaker 1: to have cameras from every conceivable angle, uh, and and
Speaker 1: projectors from every conceivable angle, and also the rest of
Speaker 1: the equipment that would be used to facilitate this, to
Speaker 1: support it um and all the power and all this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. It just quickly becomes uh impractical. You know,
Speaker 1: even if you could possibly do it, where from any
Speaker 1: given angle, you wouldn't be able to see the car.
Speaker 1: You'd see all this equipment everywhere, and you think something's
Speaker 1: going on here. I don't know what. Maybe they're setting
Speaker 1: up for another like a matrix movie where they want
Speaker 1: to get that sixty degree panning thing going on, but
Speaker 1: otherwise I'm not really sure what's what's supposed to be
Speaker 1: happening here. Yeah, there's another problem with it, which is that,
Speaker 1: in addition to the fact that you have all this
Speaker 1: bulky equipment and things like that. If you've ever seen this,
Speaker 1: because people have made systems like this years and years ago.
Speaker 1: It was covered in an early house stuff works article. Um,
Speaker 1: there was a I believe a group at the University
Speaker 1: of Tokyo that built a system like this, which I
Speaker 1: don't want to as usual, I don't want to downplay
Speaker 1: their achievement. It was good work that they did. But
Speaker 1: you can see that this is not necessarily going to
Speaker 1: be invisibility as much as it's sort of helps you
Speaker 1: blend in a little more. Yeah, I mean it could.
Speaker 1: You can still see somebody wearing a cloak like this.
Speaker 1: You can tell there's a person there wearing a cloak.
Speaker 1: They just have projected on their cloak what's behind them.
Speaker 1: It could be really cool for specific non strategic purposes,
Speaker 1: like for for a marketing thing, it could be really
Speaker 1: neat or if you if you actually know, like if
Speaker 1: you can control the perspective at which people are going
Speaker 1: to be viewing something, then it could be effective. So
Speaker 1: it might be effective as another additional means of camouflage
Speaker 1: for a stationary U exhibit or stationary uh you know, uh,
Speaker 1: like a base or something. But it would again you'd
Speaker 1: have to be really good at at expecting where people
Speaker 1: are going to be viewing this set up from Yeah,
Speaker 1: one way, maybe you could get around this is looking
Speaker 1: at instead of doing just standard two dimensional projection if
Speaker 1: you had a way of creating dynamic holography, so projecting
Speaker 1: a more three dimensional image onto a surface. Maybe maybe
Speaker 1: have you ever seen any of the three D mapping
Speaker 1: technology where uh, it's it's it's used just really for
Speaker 1: publicity steak, but it's uh it's a technology where a
Speaker 1: team will come out and project an image against a
Speaker 1: three dimensional object that's been digitally mapped specifically for that projection,
Speaker 1: and it ends up making the object look like itself
Speaker 1: is interactive. It's usually used against enormous buildings, so the
Speaker 1: effect is that you can see things like the bricks
Speaker 1: in the building appear to fall down or or start
Speaker 1: to twist in place. It's really an interesting effect, and
Speaker 1: you could use something like that as a means to
Speaker 1: project against it whatever is behind that object, making that
Speaker 1: object seem to disappear. But it would be a lot
Speaker 1: of effort for something that would again only work if
Speaker 1: you were standing in the right spot. If you were
Speaker 1: unless you had mapped every side of that object, and
Speaker 1: you had a really good coverage of it. It would
Speaker 1: not be effective for someone who happened to be coming
Speaker 1: from the opposite side. So um. I have, however, seen
Speaker 1: a really cool implementation of this that was not meant
Speaker 1: for cloaking, but it was meant for a costume effect.
Speaker 1: So I saw a guy who was dressed up as
Speaker 1: a zombie and he had mounted a like a go
Speaker 1: pro style camera on his back, on the small of
Speaker 1: his back, and then on his stomach. He had mounted
Speaker 1: essentially a tablet device and the feed from the went
Speaker 1: to the tablet, so that way it looked like he
Speaker 1: had a gun shot, like a shotgun wound in the
Speaker 1: middle of his torso, and you could see through it
Speaker 1: because of the live feed from the camera behind him.
Speaker 1: It's pretty good. Yeah, it was really clever, But but
Speaker 1: that was not obviously not cloaking or invisibility. It was
Speaker 1: just a cool costume trick. All right, let's talk about
Speaker 1: flexible optoelectric camouflage skin. Well that sounds promising, Joe, but
Speaker 1: what is it? So let's go back to the cephalopods. Okay,
Speaker 1: how do they do it? I mean, an octopus has
Speaker 1: to have. It's not magic. It has some physical structure
Speaker 1: that allows its skin to mimic what's below it and
Speaker 1: project that image onto the skin. It doesn't need external
Speaker 1: projectors anything like that. Right, um, so why don't we
Speaker 1: just look at how they do it and try to
Speaker 1: mimic that. Well, have you ever tried to interrogate an octopus?
Speaker 1: Those suckers are really tight lepped. They are actually very
Speaker 1: crafty and sneaky. Even if you've ever heard of somebody
Speaker 1: who tried to keep an octopus as a pet. You
Speaker 1: cannot keep these things contained. They're so smart and nimble.
Speaker 1: They will find a way out of your house and
Speaker 1: you find them again. They're running a con operation somewhere downtown.
Speaker 1: It's usually it's usually three card Monty because they're really
Speaker 1: good at that, right, but bad card Monty. But now
Speaker 1: they we are we are making fun of it. But
Speaker 1: they are quite uh, quite good at problem solving and
Speaker 1: there and their skin is just as smart as are
Speaker 1: basically so. Researchers including Kunjong You of the University of
Speaker 1: Houston and John Rodgers of the u of Illinois published
Speaker 1: some findings in a paper in p N A S
Speaker 1: this past August, and the paper was called Adaptive opto
Speaker 1: Electronic camouflage Systems with designs inspired by cephalopod skins awesome biommetics.
Speaker 1: I love it so looking at how cephalopod skin works.
Speaker 1: They designed a system of thin, flexible material they can
Speaker 1: match the color patterns of its environment automatically without projectors.
Speaker 1: The sheets have essentially three layers. The top layered displays
Speaker 1: color to the observer. This is done with pixelated temperature
Speaker 1: sensitive material that changes color based on heat. The middle
Speaker 1: layer does the work of changing the top layers color
Speaker 1: by way of electrical actuators. So it supplies some electric
Speaker 1: current that changes the temperature of the top layer and
Speaker 1: it's color changes. And the bottom layer is the sensor layer.
Speaker 1: This contains photosensitive elements that react to external light signals
Speaker 1: and tell the actuators what to do. So this is
Speaker 1: the layer that's actually sensing what the color is of
Speaker 1: the surrounding environment. Right, So it's it's essentially uh, an
Speaker 1: input layer, oh do in the work layer, and an
Speaker 1: output layer. That's really awesome. Yeah, And it's very thin,
Speaker 1: very flexible. It apparently works like a charm, except the
Speaker 1: prototype is only in black and white so far, and
Speaker 1: it's not very large, but it demonstrates that the principle works.
Speaker 1: The researchers said they could potentially upgrade it to provide
Speaker 1: more surface area and more color diversity. And I think
Speaker 1: that's really interesting. So the black and white, you don't
Speaker 1: mean that it's just going to be either a solid black, right.
Speaker 1: And also if there's a pattern, it'll pick up that
Speaker 1: pattern on the black and white. Oh yeah, exactly. So,
Speaker 1: so if you had a pattern of squares and circles,
Speaker 1: it's going to match that pattern of square. Yes, it's
Speaker 1: really really neat. I would love to see that stuff
Speaker 1: in action. There's a video you can look up. It's
Speaker 1: out there on YouTube. You can google the names of
Speaker 1: the researchers I mentioned and and it will come up
Speaker 1: on YouTube. All right, well, we'll definitely link to that
Speaker 1: as well on our our website and on Twitter, because
Speaker 1: this is something I've got to see and share. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but sometimes camouflage won't cut it. Yeah, because even advanced
Speaker 1: optical camouflage has limitations. It might require bulky equipment or
Speaker 1: probably only work in one directions, just hard to look convincing. Basically,
Speaker 1: it may take time for it to make that change,
Speaker 1: Like it may not be so instantaneous. If you are
Speaker 1: in motion, then clearly, you know, even wearing camouflage, you're
Speaker 1: going to break up that that scenery that someone's looking at,
Speaker 1: and then they're going to see that something is there,
Speaker 1: even if they can't immediately recognize what that is. That's right.
Speaker 1: So with camouflage, remember you're not disappearing. Even if your
Speaker 1: camouflage works really well. The observer is still looking at you.
Speaker 1: They're seeing you. They're just not recognizing that you are
Speaker 1: what you are, that you're separate from the environment that
Speaker 1: you're in. What if you actually wanted to literally disappear,
Speaker 1: to to appear as if there was nothing there at all,
Speaker 1: the light just passes straight through you. So, Joe, I
Speaker 1: have a feeling, especially since I'm looking at my notes
Speaker 1: and I see how it's laid out, that you want
Speaker 1: to talk about meta materials. Meta materials they're one of
Speaker 1: those magic things in current engineering. Yeah. I never met
Speaker 1: a material I didn't like, Joe, but thank you. So
Speaker 1: meta materials are synthetic. Let's get that all the way first.
Speaker 1: These are synthetic materials that have been made by man.
Speaker 1: You are not going to find them anywhere in nature. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh. And it's the interesting thing about meta materials
Speaker 1: is that it doesn't so much matter what they're made
Speaker 1: out of, as it matters the structure, the actual physical
Speaker 1: structure of the tiny elements that make up the overall
Speaker 1: whatever material you're making. So in other words, like if
Speaker 1: I have a gold bar, it's going to have certain
Speaker 1: properties because it's gold, right, Well, the reason gold looks
Speaker 1: like gold, the reason has the color it has is
Speaker 1: the chemical properties of the molecules and atoms that make
Speaker 1: it up. Yep. And so that's the way it is
Speaker 1: with most materials we come into contact with. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it. It behaves a certain way, it tastes a
Speaker 1: certain way, smells a certain way, looks a certain way
Speaker 1: because of what elements or compounds make up that material.
Speaker 1: But that's not the case with meta materials. No, it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter so much what the individual materials are, it's
Speaker 1: how they're put together. So we're talking about tiny structures
Speaker 1: on the nanoscale or sometimes even on the atomic scale,
Speaker 1: and we're talking about structures that are repeating over and
Speaker 1: over again. And if you want to kind of visualize this,
Speaker 1: imagine scaffolding. So if you've ever seen scaffolding up against
Speaker 1: the building. Think of that, but think of it repeated
Speaker 1: in three dimensions. So it's not just the height and
Speaker 1: width of the structure you're looking at. It builds outward
Speaker 1: as well. So if you want to think about you
Speaker 1: can also think. You know, if you've ever watched a
Speaker 1: building being constructed and it has that that just that
Speaker 1: skeletal structure first before anything else has been laid out.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like that, but on a nano scale. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So what happens when you look at something, say it
Speaker 1: is a brick or a gold bar, You're not actually
Speaker 1: seeing the thing. You're seeing light rays that are scattering
Speaker 1: off of it. Yeah, so it's just photons hitting this object,
Speaker 1: bouncing off of it and hitting your eyes. Your your
Speaker 1: eyes are detecting those photons, and that's what eventually, uh,
Speaker 1: and it ends up activating some some different systems in
Speaker 1: your brain that ultimately your brain says, hey, that's a brak, right.
Speaker 1: And so if you can manipulate what these photons do
Speaker 1: when they hit an object surface, you can potentially manipulate
Speaker 1: the way we see some thing, or if we don't
Speaker 1: see it at all. Right, So how could this how
Speaker 1: do meta materials come into manipulating photons. So all right,
Speaker 1: we have to talk about electromagnetic radiation. Visible spectrum of
Speaker 1: light is part of the full electro magnetic spectrum, which
Speaker 1: is much larger than just the visible spectrum of light.
Speaker 1: That's just a tiny slice right all the way from
Speaker 1: these big long radio waves up to gamma waves. So
Speaker 1: and that that's exactly it. That's the whole spectrum there.
Speaker 1: So visible spectrum is just one tiny little bit of this,
Speaker 1: with infrared being on one side of the of the
Speaker 1: visible spectrum outside of it, and ultra violet being on
Speaker 1: the the shorter ridge of it also outside of it.
Speaker 1: Everything in between that is the visible spectrum from the
Speaker 1: good old ROYGBIV with red being the longer waves and
Speaker 1: violet being the shorter waves. So, uh, your meta materials
Speaker 1: are able to interact with electromagnetic radiation in different ways
Speaker 1: than what our traditional materials are. Electromagnetic radiation has two
Speaker 1: different components to it. There's an electric field and a
Speaker 1: magnetic field. Now, most stuff in nature tends to only
Speaker 1: react to the electric field. Stuff some of it does
Speaker 1: react to the magnetic field as well, but not a
Speaker 1: lot of it. Stuff like magnets that would be one
Speaker 1: of them. Uh. So many materials can have the potential
Speaker 1: of acting with either one or the other or both,
Speaker 1: giving you a lot more options. And depending upon the
Speaker 1: size of those structures. I was talking about those repeated structures,
Speaker 1: you can interact with those electro magnetic waves in very
Speaker 1: interesting ways. So you may have you may be familiar
Speaker 1: with this, Joe, you know that uh antenna radio antenna.
Speaker 1: Do you realize that the length of the radio antenna
Speaker 1: is very specific. It's made so that can pick up
Speaker 1: specific frequencies of radio waves. Yeah, so the length of
Speaker 1: your antenna is dependent upon, in part, the length of
Speaker 1: the radio waves you're trying to to pick up. Many
Speaker 1: materials are kind of similar. They have to be the
Speaker 1: essentially smaller than whatever wavelength you're trying to manipulate. Now,
Speaker 1: you can create meta materials that will allow wavelengths to
Speaker 1: pass through them as if nothing were there. And we've
Speaker 1: done this with microwaves largely. So what are we talking
Speaker 1: about in sort of a model form here? The way
Speaker 1: I've heard it explain, and I think this makes pretty
Speaker 1: good sense, is try to imagine that you have a
Speaker 1: rock in a stream, and so when the water comes
Speaker 1: to the rock. It doesn't splatter off the rock and
Speaker 1: go back in the opposite direction, but it flows around
Speaker 1: the rock right and then reforms on the other side
Speaker 1: as if there's not a rock and before it's if
Speaker 1: you're further down the stream and you're just looking at
Speaker 1: the way the water is flowing, you would never be
Speaker 1: able to tell that that rock was further up the stream.
Speaker 1: It would just seem as if there was nothing that
Speaker 1: had interrupted the waters flow in the first place. And
Speaker 1: and I think that's basically the idea behind how a
Speaker 1: meta material cloak might deal with light waves hitting an object.
Speaker 1: Instead of allowing the photons to scatter off the object
Speaker 1: and shoot back towards you, they would gather all those
Speaker 1: incoming light rays and guide them smoothly around the outside
Speaker 1: of the object and to pass along back out the
Speaker 1: other side. So from an observer, it would seem as
Speaker 1: if the light is just moving straight, that it never
Speaker 1: bent in the first place, and so you would clearly
Speaker 1: see things that are on the other side of the
Speaker 1: object and not be aware that there's an object there
Speaker 1: at all. And if you had constructed the metal materials
Speaker 1: properly and arranged them properly around the object, the person
Speaker 1: could do a full three sixty degree walk around of
Speaker 1: this and it would seem the same from every angle
Speaker 1: that you would just have a clear view straight through
Speaker 1: whatever it was that was being cloaked. Right, So that's
Speaker 1: the idea in principle, But we don't have anything like
Speaker 1: that yet. No, I mean we we've seen some work
Speaker 1: with very long frequencies and the visible range, and by
Speaker 1: very long we're talking no, I'm talking there's been a
Speaker 1: little bit into the the red range, but it's very
Speaker 1: specific and that it doesn't go beyond that. And also
Speaker 1: there's not been a lot of paperwork to actually suggest
Speaker 1: that it was a success. I'm talking about there's been
Speaker 1: some experimentation that in that arena. Now, the again, like
Speaker 1: I said, the red waves are the longest of the
Speaker 1: the the visible spectrum wavelengths Infra red has had more
Speaker 1: work done in microwaves are where most of the work
Speaker 1: has been done because that's where the longer wavelengths and
Speaker 1: this electromatic spectrum are until you get to the radio waves. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: I believe we have working meta material cloaks for microwaves.
Speaker 1: So imagine if you were a creature that saw in
Speaker 1: microwaves instead of saw invisible life. You we could create
Speaker 1: a pretty functional invisibility cloak for that creature, and that
Speaker 1: creature will be bumping into stuff all the time. It
Speaker 1: would be really irritated. Uh. Yeah. They can build meta
Speaker 1: materials that go around, like a little rod or something
Speaker 1: in a lab, throw microwaves at it in the sensor
Speaker 1: on the other side doesn't really see it well. And
Speaker 1: they've talked about using that for radio telescopes things that
Speaker 1: would uh end up having interference otherwise. And so that
Speaker 1: if you have it tuned to a very specific frequency
Speaker 1: and you don't want other frequencies interfering, and you make
Speaker 1: it out of this stuff, those other frequencies just pass
Speaker 1: right through and then you ignore it. Uh. So there
Speaker 1: are applications for this, but when you get down to
Speaker 1: visible range, it gets trickier because you have to build
Speaker 1: those structures smaller and smaller, and when you're talking about
Speaker 1: the wavelengths of visible light, you're talking about nanometers, and
Speaker 1: it's gets increasingly hard to build something with that kind
Speaker 1: of precision on the nano scale with especially without running
Speaker 1: into other problems in the nano scale. And then once
Speaker 1: you're able to build that structure scaling it up so
Speaker 1: that you can build something that's actually usable and three
Speaker 1: dimension right, yeah, nano scale you're talking about like if
Speaker 1: you're talking about a line of something on the atomic scale,
Speaker 1: you're essentially talking about one dimension. You don't even have width,
Speaker 1: you just have length. In that case, scaling that up
Speaker 1: so that you're talking about three dimensional object is not
Speaker 1: a not a not an easy challenge. I've got another
Speaker 1: problem for you. Hit me with it, okay, So right
Speaker 1: now we can't build meta materials that are small enough
Speaker 1: to take advantage of visible light. We also might have
Speaker 1: a problem covering enough of the spectrum to fool our eyes.
Speaker 1: So right now, meto materials, mostly in the past, have
Speaker 1: been able to attack a very narrow frequency of light waves,
Speaker 1: so they can get a narrow frequency of microwaves and
Speaker 1: bam invisible to that. But what would this look like
Speaker 1: on the visible spectrum. Let's say you could get just
Speaker 1: red light. I try to imagine this. You're wearing a
Speaker 1: cloak that guides red light straight around your body, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't work for green light and yellow light an
Speaker 1: orange light. Well, first of all, I mean that that
Speaker 1: would be very strange. So I think of it the
Speaker 1: shadow of this thing would be read the red light
Speaker 1: was the red light would pass through, so you would
Speaker 1: get red light going through this object. So anything directly
Speaker 1: behind the object, assuming that you have assuming your light
Speaker 1: sources behind you, and you are looking at the object,
Speaker 1: if you had someone hold their hand up behind the object,
Speaker 1: their hand would appear to be reddish in color because
Speaker 1: the red light would be passing through it. Everything else
Speaker 1: would be bouncing back off of it, so you wouldn't
Speaker 1: have any red hues in whatever it was you were
Speaker 1: looking at. It would be all orange and beyond. So
Speaker 1: the color of the object would look off to you
Speaker 1: because all the red color would be out of it.
Speaker 1: So think of it like if you were think of adjusting,
Speaker 1: say a display, and you're playing with the different levels
Speaker 1: of red, green, and blue, Like if you've ever played
Speaker 1: with that just to kind of see like the different
Speaker 1: the different levels, then you know you're like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: now now I look green and blue instead of like
Speaker 1: a human colors. I was trying to imagine what it
Speaker 1: would be like and wondered if it would be sort
Speaker 1: of like when the weather man walks in front of
Speaker 1: the green screen with the wrong color tie and and
Speaker 1: it kind of fades in. Well, it probably probably not
Speaker 1: like that. That seems too clean. Well, yeah, because you
Speaker 1: would you would actually be seeing through in that case, right,
Speaker 1: You wouldn't see through this thing. You would just you
Speaker 1: would because all the other colors, unless unless you had
Speaker 1: made something that was perfectly red so that all the
Speaker 1: color just goes straight through anyway, then you'd be you know,
Speaker 1: then I guess you can make it invisible. But if
Speaker 1: it's any other color, like if any other uh wavelengths
Speaker 1: would bounce off of it, you're gonna get those wavelengths
Speaker 1: and you're gonna see that something is there that's so interesting. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there are big challenges in creating meta material cloaks, but
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean people aren't trying. And I have some
Speaker 1: confidence that with some of the smartest people working on this,
Speaker 1: this might actually be a doable thing. Yeah, we may
Speaker 1: not ever get the full visible spectrum, but we might
Speaker 1: get some really interesting uh uh you know applications of it. Right,
Speaker 1: I'm at least very interested to see where it goes.
Speaker 1: But let's be optimists for a comments and just assume yeah,
Speaker 1: we've done it. The meta material cloak for the whole
Speaker 1: visible spectrum. O, what what does this entail? Okay, well,
Speaker 1: first of all, here's the mind bender. And this was
Speaker 1: a question that was posed to us by a forward
Speaker 1: thinking fan when we had the video of invisibility go up,
Speaker 1: and they said, all right, let's say that you've got
Speaker 1: this mat of material working and you're inside the structure.
Speaker 1: So so you've got you've got all the man materials
Speaker 1: surrounding you, so that you are in effect invisible. Would
Speaker 1: you be able to see anything because it's bending, but
Speaker 1: you must be blind? Yeah, because if it's if it's
Speaker 1: bending all the light that comes at you so that
Speaker 1: it continues through and goes out the other side, thus
Speaker 1: giving the the perspective of someone who's looking at you
Speaker 1: as if there's nothing there. Wouldn't that also mean that
Speaker 1: all the light that normally would be going to your
Speaker 1: eyeballs is being bent around you, so you are in
Speaker 1: perfect darkness. I'm not talking that it's dark. I'm saying
Speaker 1: there's no light, no light at all unless you have
Speaker 1: a light inside, like you've turned a light on inside,
Speaker 1: which I don't know how that would look at anybody outside.
Speaker 1: I tried to imagine. Okay, so what if you just
Speaker 1: cut out a little people to look through, and then
Speaker 1: you'd be a pair of floating eyes. Yeah, maybe you
Speaker 1: could manufacture it in such a way where some of
Speaker 1: the light that was coming in was being bent into
Speaker 1: the center so that you could see. But if that's
Speaker 1: the case, where does the light go right? So let's
Speaker 1: say that you are in a let's just say a
Speaker 1: parking lot. You are in the middle of a parking
Speaker 1: lot on a nice some reason, in the middle of
Speaker 1: a parking lot, because you don't know how you got there.
Speaker 1: It's flat and you can see a lot of different Well,
Speaker 1: if it's in Georgia, there's not for some reason, it's
Speaker 1: because it's hot and humid. But no, the the parking
Speaker 1: lot examples just so that you can have a nice
Speaker 1: clear field of view around you. All right. But if
Speaker 1: you're in the parking lot and you've got this on you,
Speaker 1: and you this the structure of meta materials around you,
Speaker 1: and it's bending light around, and it's bending some light
Speaker 1: into the center, presumably you don't want that light to
Speaker 1: be able to escape again, because then if it could,
Speaker 1: it's going to reflect some of what you are to
Speaker 1: somebody looking outside. It might not look like a person,
Speaker 1: but you might think that's really weird, so you wouldn't
Speaker 1: you would want that light to stay inside. But if
Speaker 1: the light is staying inside and it's just getting absorbed
Speaker 1: over and over and over again, nothing is Eventually nothing
Speaker 1: is allowed to reflect out. It's just essentially becoming a cooker.
Speaker 1: That light is just coming in and it has to
Speaker 1: be absorbed. It can't be reflected. You're absorbing more and
Speaker 1: more light energy you would cook in there. Now, maybe
Speaker 1: there's a way around that. Maybe I don't, but I
Speaker 1: don't know. And this is, by the way, is completely
Speaker 1: based upon me thinking about the question. There could be
Speaker 1: experts out there shaking their head saying he's got it
Speaker 1: all wrong, and that's very very likely. But this is
Speaker 1: just me kind of puzzling it out in my mind.
Speaker 1: You know. Questions like this get me thinking that, Okay,
Speaker 1: I start to wonder that even if you had a
Speaker 1: pretty good cloak that worked along these lines, I don't
Speaker 1: know if it would actually translate as invisibility. It might
Speaker 1: translate instead as something that doesn't look like a person
Speaker 1: standing there but does look very odd. That might be uh,
Speaker 1: you know. Oh, HP Lovecraft's dreams have come true once more,
Speaker 1: and now the the unspeakable things that that Lurk did
Speaker 1: his imagination have come alive and are walking around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or what what I'm just imagining is that you've got
Speaker 1: a person with a cloak on standing in the corner,
Speaker 1: and instead what you see is this strange, shadowy mass
Speaker 1: that's kind of like different shades from what's around it.
Speaker 1: It's it's definitely an interesting thought experiment. Whether or not
Speaker 1: we ever have something practical to look at and just
Speaker 1: see if it works, that's another question. But yeah, as
Speaker 1: a side note, though, I don't think that people should
Speaker 1: get the impression that this is all meta materials are
Speaker 1: useful for. Meta materials are a whole other field in
Speaker 1: materials science that's fascinating and highly useful, and there's some
Speaker 1: really cool research about it going into interacting with stuff
Speaker 1: that's in waves that has nothing to do with electromagnetic radiation,
Speaker 1: because it's possible that you can build meta materials that
Speaker 1: can interact with physical waves in uh in different interesting ways,
Speaker 1: including waves in the ocean. So the U. S. Navy,
Speaker 1: for example, is looking into using meta materials to create
Speaker 1: vessels that can pass through water without leaving awake. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, it's it's as if the water can
Speaker 1: just flow flow around, as if there's not something there,
Speaker 1: And that would be very useful if you didn't want,
Speaker 1: you know, a reconnaissance aircraft to notice the wake of
Speaker 1: a giant vessel that happens to have sailed through in
Speaker 1: the last you know, hour or so, then that that's useful.
Speaker 1: But it's also useful for things like a ship stability. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there's also been talk of of meta materials for
Speaker 1: seismic waves as in earthquakes, So you can help make
Speaker 1: a building more earthquake resilient by letting seismic waves pass
Speaker 1: through it as if it's not there, which I can't
Speaker 1: even imagine. I mean, I don't know what that would
Speaker 1: be like. Yeah, I don't know either. If you can,
Speaker 1: you imagine, like walking by looking outside the window, you
Speaker 1: see like people falling over for no apparent reason because
Speaker 1: you're you're in a building that's perfectly steady. That's hard
Speaker 1: for me to imagine. Maybe it protects the building but
Speaker 1: not the people inside. Yeah. Maybe, But if you really
Speaker 1: are curious about meta materials, you want to hear more.
Speaker 1: Lauren and I did a text stuff episode about it,
Speaker 1: and it was published on July six, fourteen. It's called
Speaker 1: tech stuff gets meta parentheses, material in parentheses. Everybody give
Speaker 1: that a listen. Yeah, but I want to transition away
Speaker 1: from meta materials real quick and get meta about invisibility.
Speaker 1: Let's do it. I think there is a real question
Speaker 1: to ask here, not saying we shouldn't pursue this technology,
Speaker 1: but at least in considering the implications of it, are
Speaker 1: there actually good, peaceful uses for invisibility or should we
Speaker 1: be thinking about the development of invisibility as if it's
Speaker 1: essentially the same as developing a weapon. I think it
Speaker 1: all depends upon, again, the definition you're using. If you're
Speaker 1: talking about invisibility as an invisible to the visible spectrum, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's tricky. I could see it being very useful for
Speaker 1: something like observing a natural habitat without having any kind
Speaker 1: of visible presence there, so that you can get as
Speaker 1: much of a natural the idea of what's going on
Speaker 1: as possible. But maybe if you want to cover up
Speaker 1: a nature documentary camera, Yeah, yeah, exactly, if you wanted
Speaker 1: to get a real look at how wildlife interacts with
Speaker 1: its environment without detecting you, then that would be obviously
Speaker 1: some A good a good use for this. I think
Speaker 1: most of the cloaking technology is going to be used
Speaker 1: for things that are outside the invisible spectrum anyway, and
Speaker 1: again that could involve things like making sure radios are
Speaker 1: more attuned to the frequencies they need to and are
Speaker 1: avoiding interference that kind of thing. I see that as
Speaker 1: being really useful, potentially really useful for things like space
Speaker 1: exploration in ways that we can't necessarily anticipate. Not again,
Speaker 1: not the cloaking device of the cling on bird of
Speaker 1: uh the bird of prey or the or the Romulan
Speaker 1: bird of prey, which I think preceded the cling on one,
Speaker 1: but rather just again for communications sake. But when it
Speaker 1: comes to the visible one, there are only a few
Speaker 1: very specific applications I can think of that are that
Speaker 1: either that don't come across as either a weaponized use
Speaker 1: of technology or a super creepy use of technology basically
Speaker 1: weapons or criminal usespige. Yeah, espionage would be a big one,
Speaker 1: which you could argue is not criminal at least it's
Speaker 1: not criminal for the nation that you know that that
Speaker 1: trained this spy, but it might be criminal and whatever
Speaker 1: nation the spy is working in. But yeah, it's it's definitely.
Speaker 1: I mean, surveillance would be a big one. But again,
Speaker 1: these are these are more you know, gray areas, if
Speaker 1: not outright unethical areas, depending upon your your own uh
Speaker 1: you know, kind of touchstone for that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: It definitely like it kind of says something about us
Speaker 1: that this is one of the future technologies that people
Speaker 1: get really excited about. Yet it's also one of the
Speaker 1: hardest to imagine non illegitimate uses. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine something that wouldn't be catering to some
Speaker 1: of the less noble human traits, right, So it's it's
Speaker 1: one of those where I think if we were to
Speaker 1: achieve it technologically, that would be astounding because it would
Speaker 1: show that we have a full understanding of something that
Speaker 1: is incredibly complicated, and I think the achievement would be phenomenal.
Speaker 1: But yeah, like you said, I don't think the applications
Speaker 1: lend themselves to the more noble pursuits. Okay, one last questions,
Speaker 1: Sure hit me. You get to pick one of two superpowers.
Speaker 1: You can fly or you can be invisible. Fly. It's
Speaker 1: always been fly. It's always been fly for me. That's
Speaker 1: as a kid, I always love the idea of being
Speaker 1: able to fly. Well, they say you're one of the
Speaker 1: good people if you pick that. Yeah, the nice people
Speaker 1: pick fly, the creepy people pick invisibility. Now, I gotta
Speaker 1: also say that there's a third superpower that I would
Speaker 1: pick over either of those in a heartbeat. But it's
Speaker 1: a major superpower that doesn't often come up because if
Speaker 1: you give it to your character, your character immediately becomes overpowered,
Speaker 1: which is time control. Time control, time control wins out
Speaker 1: over everything else. That's boring. That's just to the point
Speaker 1: of you know why, I'd say, I tell you why
Speaker 1: because I like do over. The best superpower I've always
Speaker 1: thought this is teleportation because it can essentially mimic any
Speaker 1: other superpower. Yeah, I guess like you can. If you
Speaker 1: can teleport to anywhere at any time, you can simulate flying.
Speaker 1: Now you can't. Are you able to tell other things
Speaker 1: besides just yourself? Yes, that's a very specific power because
Speaker 1: you know that in in in good old comic book lore,
Speaker 1: there is the ability to teleport yourself, and then there's
Speaker 1: the ability to teleport other things, and then there's the
Speaker 1: ability to do well, if I couldn't teleport other things,
Speaker 1: you'd show up everywhere you went naked and thus terminator style, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I mean if you uh what I'm talking about
Speaker 1: being able to teleport something without teleporting yourself. So in
Speaker 1: other words, in other words, are you able to teleport
Speaker 1: like someone's double parked and you're like, okay, well guess
Speaker 1: what your Porsche is now on Saturn's moons in pieces,
Speaker 1: So good luck with that. I think we've sort of
Speaker 1: gone off the rails maybe a little. But the takeaway
Speaker 1: is invisibility very interesting. Don't know about the implications of
Speaker 1: it for practical uses, but I still like the technological angle.
Speaker 1: It's really cool science. Yeah, and again, we we learn
Speaker 1: even if we never get to a point where we
Speaker 1: have an invisibility cloak, and and frankly, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of people who who feel that that is the
Speaker 1: most likely scenario. Again, like we always say, we learned
Speaker 1: so much along the way. We learn everything from more
Speaker 1: about how electromagnetic radiation works, to engineering to manufacturing processes,
Speaker 1: lots of stuff that can benefit us in ways beyond
Speaker 1: we were we were able to make an invisibility cloak.
Speaker 1: So I'm full in favor of the pursuit um and
Speaker 1: mostly because I don't think we're ever going to achieve it,
Speaker 1: so I don't have to worry about someone you know,
Speaker 1: spooking me. So uh, I think this is a fun conversation, um,
Speaker 1: and it makes me want to talk about superheroes. So
Speaker 1: it's too bad that that's not really the the the
Speaker 1: subject that we cover here on Forward Thinking, Though, we
Speaker 1: got a listener request for an episode about about technology
Speaker 1: that mimics the various powers of the X Men, and
Speaker 1: I think we should do an episode on that challenge accepted,
Speaker 1: we will do an episode. Do not make that the
Speaker 1: episode that you and Lauren recorded. I will be so
Speaker 1: disappointed if I come back and find out you've done that.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, if you guys out there have any
Speaker 1: suggestions for us, Maybe you've got a suggestion like that one.
Speaker 1: There's something about the future you've wondered about. Maybe is
Speaker 1: there a technology that can give us this thing that
Speaker 1: we've heard about in literature, or maybe it's just you know,
Speaker 1: I'm curious what the future of I don't know Mexican
Speaker 1: food is gonna be. I'm saying that because I'm hungry.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're saying it because you really want to know.
Speaker 1: Ask us we will look into it and we will
Speaker 1: cover it on the podcast. So if you want to
Speaker 1: get in touch with us, you can drop us a
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