Ep. 04: Now You See Me, Now You Don't
In this episode, we sit down with Guy Cramer, owner of HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp. In 2011, Cramer developed, ‘Quantum Stealth.’ This technology bends light around the target and will change the camouflage game. Take a listen to learn more!Transcript
Travis Bader: [00:00:00] I’m Travis Bader and this is The Silvercore Podcast. Join me as I discuss matters relating to hunting, fishing, and outdoor pursuits with the people and businesses that comprise of the community. If you’re new to Silvercore, be sure to check out our website, www.Silvercore.ca where you can learn more about courses, products, and services that we have to offer. As well as how you can join The Silvercore Club, which includes 10 million in North America wide liability insurance to ensure that you are properly covered on your outdoor adventures.
[00:00:45] In this episode, I get the privilege of speaking with Guy Cramer, CEO of HyperStealth Biotechnology Corporation. Guy is an entrepreneur and an inventor, and if you’ve worn Sitka clothing or have a camouflage firearm, there’s a high probability you’ve already seen his work. By questioning the norm, Guy pushes the boundaries of possibility into the realm previously thought only to exist in science fiction.
[00:01:10] Case in point, Guy has invented quantum stealth practical concealment technology, or for a lack of better words and invisibility cloak, which has practical applications far beyond hiding objects. Listen as we talk about this and more. So tell me Guy, when did you start HyperStealth?Â
Guy Cramer: [00:01:32] It was started in March of 1999 and the initial concept of the company was hyperbaric chambers. So one of my partners is an expert in that area. And something I had developed called a passive negative ion generator, which our company went on to patent. That product didn’t make a lot of money, we spent years trying to kind of get it out there, but it took almost an hour for me to explain to people the benefits and it sounded like a novelty item to most people.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:02:01] Right.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:02:01] So we kinda gave up on that technology and the hyperbaric chambers, the BC College of Physicians came in and changed the rules, and you could go down to Vancouver General Hospital and use their chamber for all those issues that they service.
Travis Bader:Â [00:02:19] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:02:19] So why would you go to a private chamber at that point? So there are still private chambers that are running, but we don’t know the benefits of the business model that they’re using. They keep that privy and we looked at it and said, yeah our model is not going to function anymore. So the name HyperStealth was actually.
Travis Bader:Â [00:02:38] From the hyperbarics.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:02:39] From the hyperbarics. And the passive negative ion generator had nothing to do with camouflage at that point.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:02:43] Okay.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:02:44] And in 2002, I started playing around with camouflage.
Travis Bader:Â [00:02:49] Yeah.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:02:49] And found that, I could take what the Canadians had done and I had critiqued them online with this webpage. I took what they had done and I had proved on it, in two hours and $100 graphics program.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:03:04] Really?
Guy Cramer: [00:03:04] And it was just me as a taxpayer saying, I seen how much they spent and how long it took them to do and I don’t see the value in what they did. Now I was pretty naive in my assessment, I wasn’t an expert at that point.
[00:03:18] And so I posted it and the King of Jordan’s cousin came across the page and the King was looking for a new camouflage for his Royal Guard Unit, and they hired me based on what they saw there. And I’m going, listen, I’m not an expert, as long as you realize that, I’m willing to work for you, but you need to know this is not my profession.Â
[00:03:40] And they go, well we like what we see, we think it’s better than what the US military currently has and so, well thank you very much. And I gave myself a crash course on camouflage and found out that the next potential leap forward was going to be with fractals, embedding fractals into camouflage.
[00:04:00] And a fractal is something that is a natural geometric shape found in nature. So a simple definition is a fern.
Travis Bader:Â [00:04:06] Like a snowflake, right?Â
Guy Cramer: [00:04:08] Yeah, a snowflake is, well they’re everywhere. But a fern and the small leaf of a fern are almost identical in shape other than scale. So that’s something that is a very basic but true fractal that most people have experienced out there. So what we do is we embed these shapes into the camouflage and that causes your subconscious to take longer to determine what it’s looking at.Â
[00:04:31] Because the subconscious actually picks up on those shapes in the camouflage and ignores it. As you go outside, you don’t want your brain reanalyzing everything over and over.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:04:42] Right.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:04:42] So your subconscious has collected these shapes and basically filed them. And so you go outside and your subconscious as quickly looking at a treeline, going seen it before, nothing important to look at.
Travis Bader:Â [00:04:54] Write it off, no threat.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:04:55] Yeah.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:04:55] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:04:55] And if we put that into camouflage, we found out that we can actually get a couple of extra seconds based on the testing that we’ve had done at West Point Military Academy on this.
Travis Bader: [00:05:04] So these fractals, they’re finite area, infinite perimeter, right?Â
Guy Cramer: [00:05:09] Well, they can be. There’s a few different, a Mandelbrot fractal.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:05:13] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:05:14] If you look it up online, there’s some great videos where it just zooms for infinity. Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:05:17] And goes and goes and goes.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:05:19] Yeah. A fractal of a leaf of a fern only goes one level.Â
Travis Bader: [00:05:22] Right. It’ll obviously have a finite perimeter.
Guy Cramer: [00:05:24] Yeah and so what we’re trying to do is find those natural shapes and embed them in. And the shapes have to be belonged within that type of an environment as well. So a Woodland fractal is not going to function properly in a desert or an arid area.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:05:41] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:05:41] So we have to look at all those aspects and very quickly, in 2004, as this program accelerated, and now it was no longer just to his Royal Guard Unit. It was his entire military, his police, his customs, you name it. Even the police and fire in that country wear a blue-gray camouflage, and that’s common in the middle East.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:06:06] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:06:07] It’s not just unique to the country of Jordan. So it ballooned into this millions of uniforms and when I had developed these patterns, I developed about 16 others that they’d never took. And I thought, well maybe there’s other countries out there. So it kind of ballooned after that but in 2004, I connected with, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy O’Neill, who is the world expert on camouflage.Â
[00:06:32] And initially in our weekend conversation back and forth email, he looked at what I had done and this was his territory, so he had that a defensive posture, what are you doing and why are you doing this?Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:06:47] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:06:47] And then when he learned, I had figured out the fractals and he verified it, he said, do not tell me how you put those into the camouflage because the US military will not use you unless you have something unique to offer, so do not share that with me. And we’ve been working together ever since, and I still haven’t shared with him how I embed them in, but we’ve worked together from 2004 tell the current time on camouflage patterns.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:07:14] So you had no background in camouflage prior to then.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:07:18] Other than playing paint ball, so I was on Canada’s top paint ball team.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:07:22] Okay.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:07:22] We placed third in the world and we had won the Canadian championships two years in a row when I was on the team. And I was wearing British camouflage and all the rest of my team were wearing American camouflage and they could not see me. And I knew how to do camouflage properly so I had gloves on, I had a hat that matched, I covered my face and I painted my mask to match.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:07:47] Right.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:07:48] And they could not see me if I stayed stationary out there, and yet I could see them if they were stationary. So this got me thinking there’s, even though the camouflage’s looked very similar, there’s something going on that’s unique about the one I’m wearing.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:08:03] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:08:04] And that got me very interested in, in looking at this. So I’ll take a step back, my grandfather invented the walkie-talkie just prior to world war II. He had.
Travis Bader: [00:08:13] That’s so cool.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:08:14] 56 different patents to his name. He was awarded a medal from the British empire and the order of Canada in 2001 so they had blacklisted him because he took the patent out the same day that Canada declared war. Like anything that gets developed in wartime becomes property of the Canadian government.Â
[00:08:34] So he took, at that point, it was King George, he took the King to court and was the first person in Canada to actually win against the King, but that blacklisted him to the Canadian military. And so it wasn’t until 2001 that Adrienne Clarkson actually came out and his health had deteriorated so much he couldn’t go to Ottawa to accept the medal.Â
[00:08:54] So it was a defining moment for him. He didn’t want people knowing what he did, he didn’t care if other people were claiming they had done it first. He was all about the science and so I worked with him for six years right out of high school and he taught me everything that he knew.
[00:09:13] And I’ll be honest, most of it went over my head. He was an electrical engineer who had very unique ideas about certain things and very unique ways of fixing things. So what I took away from that work with them cause he eventually kicked me out of the nest and said, I’ve taught you everything I can, go and apply this to whatever you can in life and just be smart about what you do out there.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:09:38] How old were you when that happened?
Guy Cramer:Â [00:09:40] I started with him when I was 18 years old.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:09:44] Okay.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:09:45] So it was six years from 18 to just six years later.
Travis Bader: [00:09:48] That’s a good education.
Guy Cramer: [00:09:49] It was and it was something that I couldn’t get anywhere else and so I jumped on it, but I wasn’t his first choice. My cousin Morgan was his first choice.
Travis Bader:Â [00:09:59] Sure.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:09:59] Who is an absolute genius and worked up at the Triumf Particle Acceleration Lab at UBC. So when I kind of volunteered, my grandfather was like, really are you sure? And I knew he was sitting there going, ah.
Travis Bader: [00:10:13] How do I say no? I guess I can’t.
Guy Cramer: [00:10:15] Yeah. And that was exactly it, and for the first year, I think I was in that part of what he believed my capacity was. And he quickly had me learning everything I could out of a university textbooks that were from the library. And he said, Guy, if you want to learn anything new, you don’t need to just understand biology or just chemistry or just physics. He goes, this universe operates in all sciences, all the time, all together.
[00:10:42] So he goes, you need a general understanding of all of them in order to start to get that comprehensive outlook on how things work and function. And he was completely right, that completely opened my eyes to the different possibilities out there. And at one point, it’s funny cause he had me studying something called the Quasi-Biennial Equatorial Oscillation, and that stands for wind that changes direction at the equator about every two years.
Travis Bader:Â [00:11:08] Okay.
Guy Cramer: [00:11:09] And when I was reading this, all of a sudden, things popped into my head and it was like the understanding legalities or a foreign language. At one day, it just clicked and I understood everything that I was reading, to a point.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:11:26] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:11:26] I can’t say that I was now Einstein, but it was.
Travis Bader:Â [00:11:29] Well you started absorbing everything and.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:11:31] It was kind of like immersing yourself in a foreign language.
Travis Bader:Â [00:11:34] Right.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:11:34] And so I began to challenge him on some of his ideas. And I could see the smirk come across his face like, my teaching is starting to have an effect. And so he, I was actually going down to New Zealand and Australia and we were studying air ions and he had this very special instrument that could detect these air ions. And so he had gone down to the Amazon on a previous trip and said, okay, this is how these air ions are interacting down there versus in Vancouver.Â
[00:12:06] So in Vancouver, we have a predominance of negative ions, which are beneficial for people and breathing in and in the Amazon they’re very positive, so he assumed the bottom part of the hemisphere was positive ions and the top half of the hemisphere was negative. And I said, no, I think it’s like a sandwich, I think below that it goes back to negative.Â
[00:12:25] And he goes, then you come up with the theory that tells me exactly where that’s going to happen and on your trip to New Zealand, I want you to go to that location to verify what you are going to theorize about this. So I said, well, at that time of the year, cause this zone moves, at that time of the year, it should be around Christchurch, New Zealand. So it’s me and my dad, and I made my dad drive 2000 kilometres down to Christchurch, and he used to work for my grandfather, so he understood and enjoyed the trip.
[00:12:55] And we get to Christchurch and within a hundred kilometres I verified my theory and I went back and showed him. And he goes, you’re right, you’ve learned well. And then we met with the head of a UBC geophysics department and the head of SFU for the geophysics department, and they looked at this and they said, do you realize what you’ve figured out here?
[00:13:18] And we’d done a stop in Fiji and I go, yeah. And they said, you discovered what causes wind and I said, yeah I know and they said, you don’t seem very excited about it. And I said, well we’ve got all these other discoveries that came about from that, that’s what I’m excited about.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:13:34] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:13:34] And that was very perplexing to them because for them, that would be like a career pinnacle. And then they asked me, they said, where’s your schooling? And I said, it’s with my grandfather and they refused to talk to me after that.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:13:48] Really?
Guy Cramer: [00:13:48] So because I didn’t have the letters behind my name, because I didn’t have the schooling, I wasn’t talking at their level and yet I was translating for my grandfather cause he was talking over their head and this.
Travis Bader:Â [00:13:59] Or perhaps in their mind, it diminishes the value of their own education.
Guy Cramer: [00:14:03] Possibly. It’s been frustrating, but my grandfather went through the same thing as, even when he was on loan to the defence department, he had people at sabotaged his testing of the walkie-talkie because he was so young. I think it was about 30 at the time and had no engineering degree and the general got involved in and said, I understand what’s happening here and they had him go out and take the test, and he was the first engineer to get his certificate without any postsecondary schooling.
Travis Bader:Â [00:14:33] Wow.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:14:34] And he blew everyone away on the test. So he was a very smart man.
Travis Bader: [00:14:40] And I’m sure things started changing for him after that, he probably got a little more respect.
Guy Cramer: [00:14:43] Yeah. Once you’ve got, and that’s kind of what’s happened with me now. Now that I’ve got kind of those life experiences behind me and have proven that I’ve been able to do these things, now those schooled people are now kind of accepting me into the fold for what I’ve done rather than the lack of letters behind my name.
Travis Bader: [00:15:04] Right. It’s easy to discount somebody who doesn’t have the education or didn’t come through the same path as you.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:15:10] Yeah. And that’s.
Travis Bader:Â [00:15:10] You see that a lot in life.
Guy Cramer: [00:15:11] And I get it, that’s generally like.Â
Travis Bader: [00:15:13] It’s human nature.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:15:14] Nowadays, karen on Facebook is the expert in all things.
Travis Bader:Â [00:15:18] Sure, sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:15:19] Right? Sorry for all those Karen’s out there, I’m just using that as an example but I mean, we run into it all the time now with trolls on these forums, where they watch a three second video and now they think they understand everything about it and everyone needs to listen to what they have to say about it.Â
Travis Bader: [00:15:36] And it’s usually something to cut down the person who’s actually created or invented it.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:15:40] That’s right.Â
Travis Bader: [00:15:41] The whole unscrewing someone else’s light bulb to make theirs shine a little bit brighter.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:15:45] Yeah.Â
Travis Bader: [00:15:45] Yeah. It’s like I say, human nature is just something I guess we have to deal with it. How do you deal with that? Cause I can only imagine from what I’m looking at, it looks like was August 30th, 31st.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:15:56] Yes.Â
Travis Bader: [00:15:57] That you finally brought this new technology and we haven’t even started talking about that technology is we kind of just rolled right into this.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:16:04] Yes.
Travis Bader: [00:16:05] To light, and you know, before we even talk about, let’s talk about camouflage in general. I’m a little bit interested because I know the majority of what we’re going to be talking about is going to be the HyperStealth, the quantum stealth technology.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:16:20] The light bending technology, yes.
Travis Bader: [00:16:22] It’s so cool.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:16:22] Yeah.
Travis Bader: [00:16:23] It is so cool. I got a chance to look at it and it is so cool. But before you got into that and you’re talking about, you’re in into paintball, you were looking at your camouflage pattern. You said you knew how to apply it properly, where’d you learn how to apply a camouflage properly?Â
Guy Cramer: [00:16:40] There’s a lot of information online, you just need to know where to look.
Travis Bader:Â [00:16:43] Okay.
Guy Cramer: [00:16:44] So the people like Timothy O’Neill, that’s how I knew who he was because when the Marines took out the patent on their they call it MARPAT, but it’s CADPAT, which is our Canadian pattern recoloured. So the US Marine Corps actually asks Canada for approval to use the pattern, and Canada offered it to them. And the general that was involved with this spoke to me years later and said, worst mistake we made was just handing it off to them, we should ask for a royalty.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:17:10] Oh yeah.
Guy Cramer: [00:17:11] But the Marine Corps then took it on the change the colours. The colours are very effective visibly, but near-infrared, the green shines like a light. So they didn’t do the homework that Canada did on their pattern in order to come up with something that was effective across a broader spectrum. So when you’re fighting at night and you’ve got an enemy that uses night vision, that’s a critical component of your camouflage.Â
[00:17:34] And even to this day, the american patterns lack that ability to function effectively at nighttime, where the Canadian patterns were designed to operate in both the visual and the near infrared.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:17:49] Right.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:17:49] So I looked at the Canadian research that went into their pattern, and I looked at the American research. So I looked at all the modern research and okay, what are the experts looking at? What did they do? How did they do it? And I self taught myself on camouflage and decided to kind of take what the Canadians had done and I would work backwards. I would work from the near infrared and then back into the visual rather than the other way round.
[00:18:13] So when the Americans design a pattern, they design it for the visible. Okay, how does it look on the table? Okay, that looks cool. And whatever it’s specked at in the near infrared was what they put in the military specification. There was no NATO number that they went off of to say, this is what it should be. And NATO does have those numbers out there saying this is what camouflage’s should be at.Â
[00:18:36] And the funny part is NATO is going away from that because all these new multi terrain tight patterns don’t meet that near infrared ability, so they just kind of ignore it now. Which to me, I shake my head and go, yeah, as more and more countries are getting access to the night vision, and actually just recently the Americans have found themselves ambushed by the Taliban and ISIS that are now using these night vision devices.
Travis Bader:Â [00:19:02] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:19:03] Whether they got them from. China or Russia, the black market, or even from soldiers from their own country that, we’re selling it to get some money in their pocket.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:19:12] Sure.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:19:13] Wherever it came from, it’s out there now. And what they thought was going to be an issue 10 years from now is here right now. And so the camouflage that they’re using, so if we look at multi-cam, it only has 13% separation between the brightest and darkest colour within, yes, it’s on your jacket there.
[00:19:33] Travis Bader: [00:19:33] There you go, I’m just looking behind it. So a multi-cam like that?Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:19:36] Yes.Â
Travis Bader: [00:19:36] Okay, so it’s got a 13%.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:19:38] Difference between the brightest and darkest colour at what we determine the standard frequency for military night vision, which is about 900 nanometers. So that would be like a new moon night when there’s no moonlight out there to kind of change that number. A lot of militaries won’t go out on the full moon because there’s so much ambient light out there. Even without night vision, the enemy can see you from quite a distance.Â
[00:20:00] So the military uses those tactics out there, but this is a key component now. And so the camouflage that we developed under the phase three competition for the US army, we were a finalist in that competition. The Congress and Senate, for some reason, two weeks before the winner was supposed to be announced, and this is like three years into this multimillion dollar program, they decided no new camouflage is allowed, and so we couldn’t win it at this stage.
Travis Bader:Â [00:20:26] What?
Guy Cramer: [00:20:26] And don’t ask me where this came from. Yeah. And Crye Precision, who does multi-cam, was the only group that was already existing, or had camouflage that was existing to the US military. So they defacto became the winner of this competition. And we knew we blew the night vision out of the water on that one because the military actually came back and said, we’ve never seen a camouflage that functions down, we were functioning all the way down at 1800 nanometers, which is your shortwave infrared.
Travis Bader:Â [00:20:57] Right.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:20:57] And that night vision is usually only used by the tier one special forces cause it can be like $40,000 per night vision device.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:21:06] Okay.
Guy Cramer: [00:21:06] Very, very expensive and the reason it’s so expensive is because all the bad guys show up as like bright lights out there cause camouflage typically doesn’t get picked up and it shows.Â
Travis Bader: [00:21:17] That’s just a passive material.
Guy Cramer: [00:21:20] That’s right.
Travis Bader:Â [00:21:20] That will. Okay.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:21:21] Yeah so.
Travis Bader: [00:21:22] And that’s just due to its design of the pattern or is it due to the?
Guy Cramer: [00:21:26] It’s due to the ink, the fabric, and the colours.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:21:31] Okay.
Guy Cramer: [00:21:31] So colours is probably the most critical, but if you really screw up on the fabric, it’ll reflect.
Travis Bader:Â [00:21:36] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:21:36] So nylon cotton typically works better than polyester in reflectance levels. The inks that most of the factories out there, don’t reflect in that zone but if you have a dye sublimation, so a hunting pattern.
Travis Bader:Â [00:21:52] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:21:52] That you can get at Cabela’s and a lot of those patterns are ours, we did the whole optifade line for.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:21:56] I know I was going to get into that.
Guy Cramer: [00:21:57] For Gore and Sitka. Those don’t show up in infrared at all. So you look like a glowing beacon out there, and we’ve actually talked to special forces that have used these patterns in missions and I’m sitting there going, why would you do that? And their reason at the start was, we’re not allowed to fire until fired upon and so if they see us and start shooting us, we’re now allowed to engage them. And I kind of shook my head and said, yeah that’s backwards thinking.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:22:27] A little bit.
Guy Cramer: [00:22:28] And I’m going back to them going, if you want that pattern printed properly, as long as I get permission from Sitka or Gore or whoever I’ve done these patterns for, I can print that for you or get that printed for you.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:22:40] So those patterns are visible in the infrared spectrum?Â
Guy Cramer: [00:22:43] They’re not visible.Â
Travis Bader: [00:22:44] They’re not visible.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:22:44] No, what you’re seeing is the white base material. So the optic looks right through the ink and sees this bright white non-natural thing in the shape of a human being. And you can see that from two yards or 400 yards.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:23:03] Do animals see in the infrared spectrum?Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:23:06] They believe that birds might be able to see in the infrared spectrum.
Travis Bader:Â [00:23:11] Okay.
Guy Cramer: [00:23:11] But some of the other nocturnal animals, I’m not an animal vision expert.
Travis Bader:Â [00:23:16] Sure, sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:23:17] And most of what I’ve done with animals has been in the visible spectrum, so I don’t want to sound like an expert here and.
Travis Bader:Â [00:23:25] No, no, of course not.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:23:26] Yeah, but I did work with an animal vision expert on the optifade patterns, but that was geared towards the visible spectrum of ungulate or hooved animals right. And so, and then we did one for birds. So we looked at the bird vision, which is different than our vision and different than the ungulate vision as well.Â
Travis Bader: [00:23:45] I’m seeing that Simms, they make chest-waders for fishing, they’re laying claim to making the very first camouflage chest-wader that’s camouflaged for fish eyes. Now in not entirely certain that’s.
Guy Cramer: [00:23:58] Yeah, there is a lot of misunderstanding about what fish can see, even from the experts out there. So when you see fish going up and grabbing, you’ll see them jump out of the water to grab a fly that’s on a branch. You’re sitting there going, okay, they can see and understand the refraction that’s going on in the water and they’re seeing things that a lot of experts didn’t believe they could see.
[00:24:21] So there, I think there’s still a way to go in understanding what fish see and don’t see. I can tell you right now, and I’m gonna let all your listeners in on this trick. They did a study of the spirit bear over on Vancouver Island and so these are black bears with almost an albino pigment to them.
Travis Bader:Â [00:24:41] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:24:41] But they were always larger and they were trying to figure out why are they larger? It turns out they’re eating more because they used abs and PVC pipe in the water to see what would happen and the black pipe, the salmon or the fish, trout, whatever they were looking at, wouldn’t get close to it. They put white pipe in the water and the fish would almost bump into it. So the spirit bear is just getting more fish coming up to it. So if you want to be a good fisherman wear white in the water.
Travis Bader:Â [00:25:12] Wear some white.
Guy Cramer: [00:25:12] So I just blew Simms thing out of the water. And there’s not a lot of money to be made in making an all white waders out there but.
Travis Bader: [00:25:20] No because you’re marketing towards a person and.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:25:22] Yeah.
Travis Bader: [00:25:22] They think, wow, cammo, that looks cool, that’ll be great. But completely forgetting that everything sees on a different spectrum.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:25:28] Yeah. So if you’re actually looking to hide from a fish above the surface, all white would be your best bet. Because they see clouds, the fish see clouds all the time, and so for them, that’s not an anomaly or a threat. Anything else that you wear, unless it matches the sky or the background that you’re standing in front of, they’re going to notice something’s there and it’s a survival mechanism right?Â
Travis Bader: [00:25:52] That’s a great tip.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:25:53] Yeah.
Travis Bader:Â [00:25:53] Of course, makes sense.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:25:55] So, yeah, there, we just lost all our royalties on that.Â
Travis Bader: [00:25:58] Damn. Thought we’re onto something here. So you started making camouflage patterns. You made it for, looking at the website, of course, when I read it, I saw that you had over 14,000 patents, and I’m thinking, holy crow, your patent lawyers must love you. I misread that you have over 14,000 patterns.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:26:17] Yes.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:26:19] You have over 6 million.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:26:21] Military issued uniforms.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:26:23] Wow. All over the world.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:26:24] Yeah. And it’s probably a lot more than that, but it doesn’t matter at this stage if there’s a bunch more yeah, it’s at least 6 million.Â
Travis Bader: [00:26:33] Wow. And that’s, and you have stuff in use by the US?Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:26:38] Yes. The snow pattern for the US Marine Corps, so we developed that under license to them so they own that pattern. But that is actually used by all four branches.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:26:48] Okay.
Guy Cramer: [00:26:49] And it’s actually used by federal law enforcement down there as well. So the FBI would use it in certain applications. And it actually proved to be very effective, and we thought they were trying to actually see how good Tim and I were in, okay, beat all white for snow. And you’re sitting there going, oh boy, this is a big test right? And we actually did that and in a flat snowy terrain, the all white and our pattern tested a little bit worse, but statistically it wasn’t enough to do any damage to our pattern. But most soldiers in combat won’t choose to hide in the open, they’ll choose cover.Â
[00:27:26] And so in those situations, we were much, much more effective then the flat panel out there. So when they looked at the statistics and the testing that Tim and I do is objective testing done at West Point Military Academy with, they test the cadets that they bring in. So the vision, they have all the proper vision levels, and then it’s run through a program and it’s actually tested on millisecond, on how quick they click their mouse over the target and figure it out, is the target facing left or right or.
[00:27:57] And the testing that the US military has done separate from me and Tim is subjective. So they put a rectangle in the middle of a square, simulating 40 yards distance, and you’re going, okay, it’s 56 pixels high, it’s in the middle of the square. So the question about where is it and what is at are removed, because where is it? It’s always in the middle of the rectangle. What is it? It’s a rectangle.
Travis Bader:Â [00:28:18] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:28:19] And so you look at that and you go, that’s not how you should be testing camouflage.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:28:22] No.
Guy Cramer: [00:28:23] Right, because you’re now really only testing colours and the actual pattern. So if you take multi-cam and shrink it down to 56 pixels, it looks like a digital pattern right?Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:28:33] Interesting.
Guy Cramer: [00:28:33] It doesn’t have those smooth edges anymore. So you’re going, you’re not even really testing the right pattern at that stage. So there’s some valid stuff that they can determine at testing, but there’s a lot that they’re missing.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:28:46] Okay.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:28:47] And because Tim and I were the only ones that did this, they haven’t been able to duplicate it.
Travis Bader:Â [00:28:51] Are there many other people out there developing, like what HyperStealth is?
Guy Cramer: [00:28:56] We’ve got a few competitors out there and that’s healthy to have competition. And you’ve got Kryptek up in Alaska, you’ve got A-Tacs Pattern. But between countries that are using the patterns out there, the only two that I know now, Crye is just a monster in the camouflage world. So there are patterns are, I think they’re in 26 countries and the problems arise because now our Canadian special forces are using it.
Travis Bader:Â [00:29:22] Right.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:29:22] You’re in Syria and you’ve got the Syrians using it, you’ve got the Russians using it, you’ve got Turkey using it, you’ve got the Canadians using it and you’ve got the Americans using it.
Travis Bader:Â [00:29:31] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:29:31] So you’re sitting there going, yeah. All sides are wearing the same thing. Is that not going to cause problems?Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:29:37] Right.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:29:37] And the answer is yes, absolutely.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:29:38] Of course.
Guy Cramer: [00:29:39] So what we do for militaries out there is every pattern that we’ve done is restricted to that country. We don’t allow it, we don’t commercialize it. Yeah, we could make tons of money by commercializing all of these patterns, but that’s not what we’re doing. We’re trying to get them a pattern that is very difficult for an adversary to come in and impersonate one of their groups. And you can only do so much cause in combat, troops get captured or killed in their uniforms get taken but.
Travis Bader:Â [00:30:08] Sure.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:30:09] That was the reason we got the Afghan contract in the first place was because the US Woodland camouflage was so easily found, I mean, you could go to your local surplus store in any city.
Travis Bader: [00:30:19] It’s everywhere.
Guy Cramer: [00:30:19] In the world and pick up this camouflage and that’s what they were doing. And they would dress as a platoon and go in and just annihilate a base.
Travis Bader:Â [00:30:27] Right.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:30:27] Dressed up as Afghani soldiers. So we get called, do you have something? And we just happened to have something that they ended up using out there.
Travis Bader: [00:30:36] So going back a number of years. Years ago in cadets, we were taught about camouflage and they had, I think it was five S’s and an M. And I always forget what those S’s are and tried Googling it ahead of time and it looks like a lot of other people forget as well, whether it’s shape and size and silhouette and shadow and last one’s movement.
[00:30:57] The camouflage, the dispersion pattern camouflage that you create essentially greatly relies on stationary people, stationary vehicles for it to be as effective as possible.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:31:11] Yeah we can mask some of that movement with the pattern, if the pattern is done properly, but it’s very difficult. I mean the ambient vision is great at detecting movement out there.
Travis Bader: [00:31:23] And that’s one of those, like you were saying earlier, just our instinctual brain. When you see movement, and animals are the same way, you see a movement, bang, you’re in high alert. What was that? Should I discount it? Yes, no, and move forward. But you’ve made something that I think movement is even further.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:31:41] Well we, before we jump into that, we actually developed this smart cammo so it’s a colour changing camouflage.
Travis Bader:Â [00:31:47] Okay.
Guy Cramer: [00:31:47] And we thought that this would be the next big thing. So I showed this video in 2010 at a symposium in Brussels. So there were about 50 experts out there from textiles, but it was all about camouflage. And a half the speakers were French or a foreign language and there was no translation so they were a little boring to sit through. You’d see four pictures up on the PowerPoint and not understand a word that anyone was saying.Â
[00:32:12] But Tim O’Neill actually, he was a US army representative and the keynote speaker at that. And so I didn’t tell him I was going to be showing this video and I showed the video and I’m looking out and okay, that’s weird. No real reaction from anyone and I sit down and the podium is right in front of me and the next speaker gets up, and Tim gets up out of his chair and comes down and sits beside me and he whispers in my ear, who have you shown that to?Â
[00:32:38] And I said, this is the first time he goes, you can’t show that video again. And I said, why not? He goes, because the military spending millions on this right now, and they’re not even close to what you just showed.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:32:48] Wow.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:32:49] And then he said, how much did that cost you? I said, it was about a thousand dollars for that prototype. And he just shook his head and he goes, you gotta be kidding. So we went to dinner that night and we’d been working together, so that dinner was going to happen regardless. And his wife was with them, and she’s a lawyer, and she was watching the interaction of the crowd and I said, that was a weird reaction, I thought I’d get more of a reaction.Â
[00:33:14] He stopped and he goes, that was a wow moment in science, he said, we were stunned, everyone in the audience was stunned that you had done that. So it’s funny because the key, or the speaker two people in, she was the expert in nanotechnology for the University of Austria, and as she’s speaking, she points to me three times during her speech and going, but he’s already done it.Â
[00:33:37] And I had ruined her presentation because of what I had shown in this video. So that’s a powered camouflage source and the reason I wanted to touch on it is we actually experimented with moving that camouflage to try and mask the movement. What we learned from that experiment was that the ambient vision would pick up that movement on the camouflage.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:33:59] Okay.
Guy Cramer: [00:34:00] So out of the corner of your eye, that movement that we’re trying to simulate, is actually drawing your attention. So that surprised us, we didn’t think it was going to do that.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:34:10] Interesting.
Guy Cramer: [00:34:11] Even if it’s kind of matching the background.
Travis Bader:Â [00:34:13] Bit of an adverse affect.
Guy Cramer: [00:34:13] It’s kind of like watching predator, right? The predator movie, and you can see something’s there from what you’re seeing so.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:34:21] Or like an ink fish, a cephalopod.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:34:22] Yes.Â
Travis Bader: [00:34:23] If you’re watching a squid or octopus as they move.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:34:25] Exactly, yes.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:34:26] Right, okay.
Guy Cramer: [00:34:27] And they’re the masters of camouflage out there.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:34:29] Yeah.
Guy Cramer: [00:34:29] So we thought that was going to be the pinnacle. And then I started working on something called quantum stealth, so it was an accidental discovery. I was thinking about the double slit experiment in quantum stealth, and I’ll make this simple for the listeners.Â
[00:34:42] If you put two slits in a piece of material and you fire a laser at those two slits and you have a wall, so a space between that material and a back wall. You’d expect you’re going to see two slits on that back wall.
Travis Bader:Â [00:35:00] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:35:00] You don’t. You see multiple lines on that back wall. And the reason for that, it’s like dropping two rocks in a pond and they’re creating this ripple and those ripples interact with each other. And that’s what we’re seeing on the back wall is that interaction of the light waves.Â
Travis Bader: [00:35:15] So that’s the disruption pattern.
Guy Cramer: [00:35:17] Yeah, well, it’s a interference pattern.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:35:19] An interference pattern?
Guy Cramer:Â [00:35:20] Yes.
Travis Bader:Â [00:35:20] Okay.
Guy Cramer: [00:35:21] And I started thinking, okay, could I capitalize on something as those waves spread out, to hide a target in kind of one of those points in between where the light is showing up. And that got me thinking about this lenticular lens material. So this is a material you find on the front of DVDs that have a 3D image or a movie poster, or your kid’s book. And the material has been out there since the 20s and I happen to have a piece without a picture behind it.Â
[00:35:50] And so it was only a small piece and so I had this little object. It was about six inches, and I put it on the couch and the coach had these horizontal lines running on it and the object disappeared and I could see the lines, but not the object. Then I thought, oh okay, there’s something odd going on here. If I wasn’t into camouflage, I may have dismissed what I was perceiving.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:36:10] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:36:11] And so over the next couple of years I scaled it up to the point that I could hide myself behind this material, so the video on hyperscale.com site, we’ve got over a hundred minutes of videos on there now of this new technology. So the patents were just published in June by the Canadian Patent office. Once they’re published, you have no reason to keep it quiet out there.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:36:34] Sure.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:36:35] So there was no reason for me to hold anything back and so these videos were released and they were released with a bit of a thud right. I’m sitting there going, okay, that’s odd, I don’t think people understand what they’re looking at here. And I was correct about that because now the news media is exploding over this. So I spent an hour, I woke up this morning and I spent an hour just copying and pasting to large media outlets out there trying to get access to our videos for their websites.
[00:37:06] And that’s what I was doing. And then I had a very large US group contact me just before I came to the show here. So yes, it’s starting to explode the way I anticipated. It just took a little longer to get off the ground so.Â
Travis Bader: [00:37:23] I got to think that people are just scratching our heads there. They’re either thinking you were either A, brilliant or B, they’re being hoodwinked here, because how could this be possible? You are pushing things to a scifi realm here essentially, most people thought it was impossible.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:37:38] They did. Most physicists thought it was impossible, and only a very small group of physicists at universities understood that in the last couple of years, it had become potentially possible. It was no longer theoretically impossible. And Professor Sir John Pendry out of London had been knighted for his work in bending electromagnetic waves.Â
[00:38:01] And the reason he was knighted for that, they called it the first invisibility cloak. But there was nothing on the visual spectrum it was doing, it was all about bending x-rays.
Travis Bader:Â [00:38:11] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:38:12] And recently microwaves. And if you can bend those waves, that means theoretically you can bend light waves, you just need to find the right medium. So they’ve been looking at nanotechnology and all these very expensive university type applications to solve that problem, when all along this material has been in front of them all this time.
[00:38:33] And so I just happened to capitalize off of it, and I’ve been able to not just utilize the base material to hide things, which you can’t patent it because it’s been out there for all these years. But I’ve manipulated this material into 13 different versions. So versions 2-13 are patentable, which is what we have applied the patents for.
[00:38:56] And a version two is simply putting two of these lenses back to back, and it provides a very different unique optical property. So before we started the show, I let you handle a material and see the material and verify it.
Travis Bader: [00:39:08] I got a chance. I got a chance to see them and use them and they work. There is no photo trickery. There’s no video magic that’s going on. It’s very cool.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:39:17] And really it’s just simple physics.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:39:19] It really is.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:39:20] There was a Russian scientist back in the late 60’s that had theorized that bending light was possible and his work was really unknown for many years after that, and never caught on until probably about 10 to 15 years ago when this professor kind of picked up the work and said, you know what, I don’t think he’s wrong about this, and started to work towards what he was envisioning.
[00:39:46] But within his theory he said, if we find a negative refractive index material, which is what our material is doing, if we can find that theoretical material, everything in the background should be backwards. So if, you’ve been in a restaurant and you’ve had a glass of water and you’ve had a straw in that water, it looks bent and it’s bent because light is.
Travis Bader:Â [00:40:06] Refraction.
Guy Cramer: [00:40:07] Refracting in the water, it’s going at a different speed. And he had theorized that that straw wouldn’t just be bent in that same direction. He said it will be bent in the wrong direction. So it’ll look like it’s on the opposite side of the glass. And he was correct about that because our version two demonstrates exactly what he was theorizing. And version three, we corrected that flip by putting another version two in front of version two.
Travis Bader: [00:40:33] You’ve basically flipped it a couple of times and so optically, when you’re looking at it, it’s back to where it should be.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:40:38] Yes, exactly. And so again, this was something that the current experts hadn’t even thought was possible. And so we’ve just leapfrogged over all these universities that we’re getting grants and we did it without any outside support. We didn’t go to the Canadian government and ask them for grants or tax money. I wanted to keep this quiet and I actually did not want this going into the public realm.Â
[00:41:03] I spent from, so I discovered the effect of this material in 2009, 2010 and started doing demonstrations in 2011 so my first demonstration was at special operations command in Tampa and I had 19 year recently retired US Navy seal that advises for me to, he brought me onto the base, sat with me in the meeting, but this was his first time of actually seeing the material.Â
[00:41:29] And as we’re driving off the base, he said, how does it work on shadows? And I said, what do you mean? And he goes, well when we’re swimming in the water coming up on a beach, we can have a great camouflage, but our shadow on the ocean floor gives our position away. If there’s a spotlight or if there’s sunlight it’s very noticeable. And I looked at him and I said, I don’t know I never thought to check.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:41:51] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:41:51] So I go back home and get a little sample and find, put it under the water and find there’s an 80 to 90% reduction of shadow.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:42:00] Wow.
Guy Cramer: [00:42:01] And I called him up and I let him know, and he said, based on that alone, you have not even on the camouflage ability, just on removing the shadow, you have a product that should be of interest to the US Navy. And yet they didn’t seem very intrigued by it. So 2012 I believe, I went down to, I was invited down to US Naval research lab in Washington, DC.
[00:42:24] And there were five PhDs in the room, so four of them were Navy, and one of them was army and they were blown away when they saw this material. So people always go, well, they’ve got something else. Well, I could tell from the body language and their reaction, they hadn’t seen anything like this before, and I was only showing them version one.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:42:43] And you have version 13 now.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:42:44] Yeah. Which and actually up until last year, I only had version two and that was my fail safe. And I would tell them when I would go into these meetings, listen, I’m not going to show you the better version two because I’m showing this to you without a patent in place. So if you told a friend or a family member and they ended up taking out this patent, you know, that’s my fault for showing it to you, even though we’ve got an NDA in place and you’ve signed us.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:43:06] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:43:06] Yeah. People talk and version two makes version one obsolete, in almost all cases, so that’s why I’m not showing it to you. And I found out actually just recently that’s part of the reason the Canadian government got upset at me, is I wouldn’t show them version two right?Â
Travis Bader: [00:43:21] Did they just turn their nose up and said, fine, we don’t want to look at.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:43:23] Well, according to the person, the individual that commented and he doesn’t speak for everyone that was there.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:43:29] Of course not.
Guy Cramer: [00:43:30] That, he’s claiming that was the reason. It really doesn’t matter what the reason was, right? They weren’t perceiving or didn’t understand what this was going to do, and yet at all these demonstrations, I was trying to get them to understand, you do not want this material out there. You don’t want to fight against this material, let alone have it in an available to the general public.
[00:43:51] My concern is what the criminal elements going to be doing with this in 10 years. And so my whole premise of going to the military was buy it and bury it or buy it and use it sparingly, so that the enemy doesn’t know what you’re doing. I met with Delta Force, the US army tier one group, and I said to them, can you guys make it through a room right now that’s got motion sensors and heat detectors? And they all looked at each other and said, no. And I said, well, now you do so.Â
Travis Bader: [00:44:21] So that passive infrared defeats the PIR motion sensor, laser, possibly?
Guy Cramer: [00:44:27] Laser. Yes and no, because we’ve been experimenting with lasers. That’s another patent that we’ve got, and that was my initial premise was to come up with a counter measure for this material.
Travis Bader: [00:44:38] So I’ve got a quick question on that, which is, one of our locations we had, instead of having bulletproof glass installed, we had a eight mil laminate out of Israel placed on the inside. And what that did was if someone were to try and break in, or if they fired a projectile at the glass, that energy would be dispersed over a larger area, bullets wouldn’t go through.
[00:44:59] But if you fired back from the eight mil lam side, you could actually, all your rounds would go through. So with the light bending material that you have here. I’ve played around with magnifying glass before, and I think that’s probably the simplest form of the lenticular lens, would be a magnifying glass and take a couple and you put them in front and you can start making objects flip back and forth.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:45:22] Yep.
Travis Bader: [00:45:22] If someone were to match that same pattern, would they be able to see back through it? Like could you make yourself a cover out of this where you’re camouflaged, but you could see everything else on the other side?Â
Guy Cramer: [00:45:33] Yeah, that’s actually a popular question.
Travis Bader:Â [00:45:35] Is it? Okay.
Guy Cramer: [00:45:36] That’s usually the first question that gets asked when I do these demos and I pull up the riot shield and they’re going, but how do you see through it and there’s a number of simple solutions. We can perforate it like a bus advertising wrap that goes over the windows where you can see out from the inside, but it’s difficult to see in. We can put holes in it, like larger holes. You could even put an eye slit, right?Â
[00:45:58] So what we’re trying to do is, most typical combat engagements take place at 40 to 50 yards and so people that are kind of looking at these videos going, well, I can see the material. Well A, it’s in prototype phase, so it’s not very clear yet and B, I’m 10 feet away or closer in every single scenario. Imagine this at 40 yards, you’re not going to see it.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:46:19] Right.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:46:20] So those two components together haven’t been factored in by those people that are kind of complaining about this and then the third item is, even if you know there’s something back there, you need to identify what it is before you start to attack it. Because it could be something friendly.
Travis Bader:Â [00:46:39]Â Verify identification.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:46:40] It could be a civilian.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:46:42] Yeah.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:46:42] I mean, it could be anything. It could be, it’s funny because I worked with the Bureau of Land Management on visual mitigation of like oil tanks on these big oil farms down in Colorado. And they said, can you make these things invisible? And I said, yeah but you don’t want to. And they said, why not? I said, well, you allow hunters on those grounds and they said, yeah.Â
[00:47:00] I said, do you want bullets going through this material through your tanks? And they said, no absolutely no and I said, well, then there has to be some visual component to those tanks. So sometimes it’s hard to see through a problem and figure out some of the problems you’re gonna run into if you can do what they’re asking you to do.
Travis Bader:Â [00:47:18] Right.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:47:18] And right now it kind of makes me sound smart by going, Oh no, this is what you want to do, but at the time I’m sitting there going, thinking about this for a couple of hours going, oh wait a second.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:47:27] Sure.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:47:28] Yeah, I could do it, but you don’t want to do this.
Travis Bader:Â [00:47:31] As a problem solver. As an inventor, your first, your mind naturally goes to, yeah, I can find solutions to that.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:47:38] Yeah. And I.
Travis Bader:Â [00:47:38] Rather than perhaps starting at the very first question and questioning, should I be finding a solution for that one?Â
Guy Cramer: [00:47:44] Well, it’s funny cause one of the comments on now, one of the big media outlets that just posted the story yesterday. This comment came up that said, I find it hard to believe that a single individual could come up with something like this when the universities are spending millions of dollars. And yet history is full of individuals that have come up with.
Travis Bader:Â [00:48:02] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:48:03] Lots of problem solving capability. And what my grandfather taught me to do was come up with novel approaches to problems and look for the half step approach, the hybrid approach. And he told me back then, he goes, the world is looking to universities to come up with a new material for something. And he goes, quite often, you can go back in the lab and find two things and slap them together and they’ll work just as well, or even better sometimes.
[00:48:28] And that’s exactly what I’ve got right now, is something that I was able to kind of grab off the shelf and start to play with and utilize those different components that came about because of it.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:48:39] They say when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:48:43] Yeah, exactly. Yeah.Â
Travis Bader: [00:48:45] And these guys didn’t have grandpa’s education.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:48:47] No. Yes, he knew how to fix things, may not have, we would get our TVs fixed by him and the TV would often come back with a pair of pliers, so you could turn the channel by moving the pair of pliers, but it worked right.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:49:00] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:49:00] The aesthetic of it didn’t affect him at all right.Â
Travis Bader: [00:49:03] Yeah, it’s fine.
Guy Cramer: [00:49:03] He didn’t care what it looked like.
Travis Bader:Â [00:49:05] End result, it works.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:49:06] It did.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:49:06] You got your TV.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:49:07] Yeah.Â
Travis Bader: [00:49:08] I love it. So the quantum stealth, just to backtrack a little bit here, I’m taking of the quantum, cause you talked about the double slit experiment.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:49:16] Yes.Â
Travis Bader: [00:49:17] And that’s to do with quantum mechanics?
Guy Cramer: [00:49:20] Quantum mechanics. So this is another question that comes up on the forums now. Well, do you just use quantum in the start of everything to kind of make it sound like it’s more than it is? Well, there actually is what we believe, I mean, we can’t be for certain but.
Travis Bader:Â [00:49:34] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:49:35] We can look at the evidence. So if you go to our website, there’s a section on laser scattering manipulation and deviation, and in the very last, or sorry, in the second video of the three that are in that one video, the laser is actually shown in a line, and so we can actually split this laser into a thousand parts with this material and that shouldn’t be possible.
Travis Bader: [00:50:00] And that’s the interference pattern. Possibly.
Guy Cramer: [00:50:04] Possibly, yes. What we believe is taking place is that there’s a quantum mechanics taking place. And the reason I say that is that, when we create a cone out of this material by aiming it at a certain angle and on a certain part of the lens, we actually end up seeing a interference pattern within what we’re seeing. And so right away, when I saw the interference pattern, I knew quantum mechanics was that play here.Â
[00:50:31] And so I found out my patent attorney and he’s got his masters of science and physics, and I said, listen I don’t have the degree, I think this is what’s happening, but can you tell me this was what you think is happening? I said, is this quantum mechanics? And he paused and he said, I think that’s the only explanation. He said, you got to remember Guy, that quantum mechanics is going on all, around us all the time, we just don’t perceive it like we do with normal physics.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:50:57] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:50:57] And you’ve just happened to discover with this material that it’s got a quantum component to it. And then I said, could that be the reason why after all these military demonstrations, we really didn’t get any traction. And he said, I think that is a big component because he goes, you’ve got to remember you’re meeting with people that are not at the top of the food chain.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:51:17] Sure.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:51:18] And the people you’re showing it to have to convince the person at the top that what you showed them in that demonstration is viable and real and works within the laws of physics, and if that person has any understanding of physics, they’re going to start shaking their head going.
Travis Bader:Â [00:51:34] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:51:35] No, until I see it, I’m not going to believe it. And that could be a huge reason why it was dismissed, is that none of this makes sense. Even the chief scientist at the program, executive office of the US army, so that’s PEO soldier, I sit down and he says, well, what you’re about to show me should be impossible and I only say should be cause you’re about to show me something.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:51:57] Right.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:51:58] So I pulled the material out and within 20 minutes he turns to his two engineers, and then he goes, we need to rewrite everything we thought we knew about this because he just proved us totally wrong. And then then he puts the material down and he says, Guy, I would love to give you financing to move this further. The problem is we have no budget for something that’s supposed to be impossible because we thought.
Travis Bader: [00:52:23] Try to find someone to sign off on that. Yeah.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:52:25] Yeah, he said, we have no requirement in the military to make something invisible because it’s supposed to be impossible. Well, they changed this about five months in, and they came out with a requirement and someone in the media actually texted me and alerted me to it. And he goes, this kind of sounds like your material. It was very generic, they don’t want to give away what I was doing. They came up with this requirement and I called them up and I said, is this our material?
[00:52:48] And the secretary that was at the meeting, she goes, yes isn’t this great? This is what you were asking for and I said, no it’s not great because you guys filed it under an SBIR, which is a small business initiative program that they have in the US and I said, we don’t qualify as a Canadian company.
[00:53:03] And she said, but you’ve got a US company and I said, yeah, out of Colorado but it doesn’t qualify because it’s also owned by Canadians. So they throw up their hands and said, we don’t know how to work with you. Which is difficult to believe that with all the companies that they work with in.
Travis Bader:Â [00:53:19] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:53:19] Canada, that they couldn’t find a way to work with me on this, but they, they attempted anyway.
Travis Bader: [00:53:24] So is this why you’ve gone through the patent route and it’s now going to be essentially in the public domain.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:53:30] Yes, it already is in the public domain. So we had given the military a date, and that date was late 2018 and I had been down to the special operations trade show in Tampa called SOFIC in 2018 and I won’t go into the details, but I got a meeting with the commanding general of MARSOC, which is the Marine US Marine Corps Special Operations Command.Â
[00:53:57] And he looked at the material and he goes, I agree with you this should never be out there. And what do we do? How do we work with you? And I said, whatever you want to do, I will work with you.
Travis Bader:Â [00:54:08] But you better giddy-up.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:54:09] Yeah, exactly. And so he had his staff follow up with me and we went back and forth for a couple of months and they alerted the US army special operations command, who eventually sent a soldier up in September. So now we’re getting really close to that patent deadline and I said to him, I said, you’re the last guy, right?
[00:54:26] It all hinges on you, if you’re unable to convince your bosses that this should be acquired, it is going to go the patent route, and I can’t stop that train once I file that final patent. So we initially filed something called a provisional patent, which is the patent office doesn’t even look at them, but it gives us 12 months to improve on the patent. It gives us a priority date.Â
[00:54:49] So I was, I’d already had the provisional patents in place, which meant I could share now with the, more with the military than I could before. Like version two wasn’t off limits for them to look at at this point.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:55:01] That helps.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:55:02] Oh, it, it helped drastically at that point.
Travis Bader:Â [00:55:04] Sure.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:55:04] And then you file a non provisional patent. Well, once you file that non-provisional it gets to a certain date and it gets published and it gets published to the world.
Travis Bader:Â [00:55:15] Right.
Guy Cramer: [00:55:15] So anyone can go in and type in HyperStealth and right now two of the four are available on the world patent office site and you can’t stop that from happening. So there’s no reason for me to keep quiet about it anymore. It’s better for us to get ahead of that release and some.
Travis Bader:Â [00:55:30] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:55:30] Joe on the internet finding it and picking some weird aspect out of it and not presenting it properly. So I’ve been working last couple of months on producing the videos to get out there.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:55:42] And control the messaging.
Guy Cramer: [00:55:43] Yes. And a lot of what I did up until these patents were released, there was always a chance the military or government could come in and decide to classify it at last minute. So I couldn’t let anyone in on what I’m doing. Now I’m the only guy at the company I’ve had an assistant years ago but, recently I haven’t needed anyone. So when we designed these camouflage patterns, they end up getting printed somewhere else.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:56:07] Sure.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:56:08] So it really is only a one man operation. The videos took a little more effort, but I took cinematography at BCIT.
Travis Bader:Â [00:56:16] Right.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:56:16] And understood how to do this. And of course, with the tools available from your Apple computer and the programs that they have out there. A lot of high end studios use the same programming out there.
Travis Bader:Â [00:56:28] Yep.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:56:28] To do the same thing. And so it was just a matter of taking what I had done in those demos and what I needed to redo in the videos to get the message across on, this is what we’ve done, this is how we’ve done it, and this is why it works the way it works. And those videos are trending on the internet right now like you wouldn’t believe.Â
[00:56:49] And my Twitter feed is kind of exploding. I think I had like less than a hundred people following me the other day and now I’m up to 400 and I got to turn off the notifications cause people are trying to communicate with me that way. And the media is in constant communication with me about this, but.
Travis Bader: [00:57:09] Yeah just us talking right now, your phone’s buzzing off the hook.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:57:12] It is yes. And I learned from the CNN interview that I did in 2012 to do this differently. So what happened there was they interviewed me about the camouflage we had done for the US army, and it was a three hour interview that they ended up cutting down to two and a half minutes.
[00:57:31] And that got on YouTube and for, it’s now got 3 million hits. And every troll out there was looking at it because we couldn’t show the material. We were showing mock-up photos and I told CNN. Please mark them as mock-up photos before you post them up.
Travis Bader: [00:57:45] And they didn’t did they?Â
Guy Cramer: [00:57:47] They didn’t.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:57:47] No.
Guy Cramer: [00:57:47] And of course that made us look like we were trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. And so I put up a webpage explaining this and that limited some of that response, but not a lot. And so it’s very therapeutic to go through all those comments that have been on there for years and go, we’ve done it, go here. And I’m not attacking anyone, it’s just.Â
Travis Bader: [00:58:08] No but when fancypants55 comes on and tells you that you’re absolutely off base, and here’s why. It’s kind of nice to come back and just say, here it is, take a look.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:58:17] Yeah. And the way that we dealt with that I looked at and I said, okay, this time we’re going to do it differently. Rather than me going to the media first, and them kind of dictating how the story gets told and every story that’s come out so far has had some level of something incorrect about it.
Travis Bader:Â [00:58:37] Sure.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:58:38] It’s amazing what you can say to someone in an interview and how they take that, one of the articles said it has to be curved, and I’m looking at that going. No, that’s not what I said and how did you get that? Well, all the examples he saw were curved and.
Travis Bader: [00:58:54] Well, I can attest it doesn’t have to be curved.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [00:58:56] No.
Travis Bader: [00:58:56] I’ve seen it.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:58:57] No, it stands up on the table because it’s curved.
Travis Bader:Â [00:59:00] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [00:59:00] And makes it easy so I don’t have to be holding it, but it can be flat or curved and it doesn’t make a difference. But we wanted to get that narrative out ourselves. So if you go to our website, you’ll see a 57 minute technical video that tells you how and why and when. All those little boring things, and 10% of the people have actually watched it all the way through, so I’ve got all those analytics.Â
Travis Bader: [00:59:23] You’re looking at the metrics.
Guy Cramer:Â [00:59:24] Oh yeah. And so I looked at the metrics and I actually was able to cut down where I was losing people. And so we ended up cutting it down once to, I think it was 23 minutes, and then we cut it down to 18 minutes and then a nine minute one, and then I cut it down to a couple of minutes from there. And so you can take those metrics and figure out exactly where people are drifting.Â
Travis Bader:Â [00:59:46] Right.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:59:47] Right. In this world of Instagram, it’s hard to keep people focused, and so the, the, the people that are attacking it now, it’s very easy for me to go back and go, no, go look at this video right.
Travis Bader:Â [00:59:58] Right.Â
Guy Cramer: [00:59:59] Obviously you haven’t looked at them all and just a word of warning to all those people that want to critique this, please watch all the videos first cause it’ll save you a lot of embarrassment later on. I had people going, Oh yeah, it, if I brought out my thermal camera, I’ll be able to see it.
Travis Bader:Â [01:00:14] Not clearly.
Guy Cramer:Â [01:00:15] It stops thermal.
Travis Bader:Â [01:00:17] Right.
Guy Cramer: [01:00:17] Right. Obviously you didn’t even watch six minutes into the video to find out that it stops thermal. And in the shorter videos, it comes up at like the one and a half minute mark.
Travis Bader: [01:00:25] I may be one of those 10% that have actually watched all the way through and your videos. And when I looked through there, now that it’s out in the public domain.
Guy Cramer:Â [01:00:33] Yeah.
Travis Bader: [01:00:33] So aside from, even though it was called quantum stealth technology. And the public, so we think about camouflage, we think about hunters and anglers, but it does other things as well too. You’re talking about being able to use it as a multi projector, is that?
Guy Cramer: [01:00:49] Yeah, so special operations command actually has me coming down in January to demonstrate this to them at a, they’ve got a civilian arm called the soft works and they work hand in hand with SOCOM. And they actually came out with a competition in late August, just as my videos are about to go up. And the competition is, we think industry is getting close with holograms to be able to allow us to use them as a defensive tool in operations and could you, if you’re interested, please submit a white paper.Â
[01:01:23] And so I registered, but I hadn’t submitted my white paper and then they canceled the competition. And right when they canceled, I’d actually had my video up for one or two days on these holograms and it’s a 17 minute video on our website. And so I sent them the link right away and I said, I met most of your requirements. And the lady responded back in an hour and she must’ve watched the whole video.Â
[01:01:47] And she goes, I’ve submitted this to my bosses and they’ve contacted me twice since then to say, we want you to come down and show us what you have. So they’re looking at it as a way of creating our holographic wall in an urban setting. So in an urban setting, you can’t dig a trench or a Fox hole to hide in.
Travis Bader:Â [01:02:02] Right.Â
Guy Cramer: [01:02:03] And if there’s no covered, hide behind, what do you do? And they’re looking at this going, okay, even that though it can’t stop bullets, and it’s not meant to stop bullets in this current configuration, at least you can hide behind it so the enemy can’t see you to start shooting at you.Â
Travis Bader:Â [01:02:17] So concealment instead of cover.
Guy Cramer: [01:02:19] That’s right.Â
Travis Bader:Â [01:02:20] Yeah.Â
Guy Cramer: [01:02:20] And so we’ve been able to show that, not only can we put a still image up there, but we can put a video up there. So I can put a soldier, a decoy soldier on this thing that if I’ve actually got it in the studio here, would look way better than you actually see on the videos. Because the camera’s compensating for the projector light that’s coming through.
Travis Bader:Â [01:02:41] Right.
Guy Cramer: [01:02:42] So essentially how we’re doing this is where we’re firing the projected image through the lenticular lens in one polarization. And then there’s a gap of a few feet between the first lens and the second lens. And the second lens is in the opposite polarity.
Travis Bader:Â [01:02:57] Right.
Guy Cramer: [01:02:58] So if one is vertical and one is horizontal, or vice versa, the image will stop on the second one, and you’re looking at it going, that shouldn’t happen. And the physics that’s actually occurring between that gap, I don’t know what’s going on there.Â
Travis Bader:Â [01:03:13] But it works.
Guy Cramer: [01:03:14] I have a general idea of what’s happening, but it doesn’t make full sense to me and.
Travis Bader: [01:03:19] So we’re back in the quantum realm again?
Guy Cramer: [01:03:20] I think we are, and that’s great because when you file a patent, you don’t need to know how it functions.
Travis Bader:Â [01:03:27] Right.
Guy Cramer: [01:03:27] You only need to know how to build it and what the outcome is, you don’t need to know the middle part, which is what I don’t fully comprehend what’s going on here. So I’ve been able to do a few different simulations with that holographic side and the video show, we can actually put decoy animals up there for the hunters, so they’re not having to carry the full scale plastic beast in the back of the truck.
Travis Bader:Â [01:03:53] Yeah.
Guy Cramer:Â [01:03:54] Right. They can actually put whatever they need to on this material that weighs literally a couple of pounds and have a battery powered projector that works for four hours before it needs to be recharged out in the middle of a field.Â
Travis Bader: [01:04:07] I’m thinking about a decoy spread of hundreds of snow geese decoys set up. Wouldn’t be great just to flip the switch and have all of them just appear?Â
Guy Cramer: [01:04:16] Yeah. And again, you’re trying to improve upon what’s already out there.Â
Travis Bader:Â [01:04:21] Sure.
Guy Cramer: [01:04:21] And one of the companies we work for, I won’t name them, but they’re a hunting company. They do a lot of decoys sales, and they were not happy when I told them about what we were able to do with this new technology, but they hadn’t seen it. So in their minds, that was, oh maybe he’s kind of making this up or elaborating on this, so it was a little, let’s hope that’s where he’s going with this and sure enough, yeah we’ve proven that we can do what we said we could do.Â
Travis Bader: [01:04:46] I know I’ve got a ton more questions, but I’ve got to be respective of the listeners time as well. So I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions afterwards because you are just a wealth of information. The stuff that you’re inventing here is crazy cool. It was an absolute pleasure having you on here.Â
Guy Cramer:Â [01:05:02] Thanks for having me on. I have a passion about this stuff, so I enjoy talking about it.Â
Travis Bader:Â [01:05:07] And that concludes this episode of The Silvercore Podcast.Â