David Eagleman
speaker
1,631 appearances
7 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 20 Mar
David Eagleman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The brain has an extraordinary amount of its circuitry devoted to other people and making models of them and understanding them.
And I think one of the key things in life, especially now during our polarized era, is to really try standing in the shoes of other people, especially people that you're disagreeing with and try to understand the world from their point of view.
Eagleman.com.
Thanks.
Great to be here.
Yeah, that's a project I did for a year in secret until it was all done. Why is it secret? Because they don't want you to... Why was it secret? I don't know. They just didn't want me talking about it while I was doing it.
Yeah.
That's right. That's right. Yeah. I had to sell all kinds of paperwork. They would take me to the European Central Bank. They like beat me through a door and then we go and we'll go do another door. You have to do another security badge and then another. It was really deep in there where they keep all the counterfeits. Oh, they have the counterfeits. Oh, how cool is that?
They keep counterfeits that they collect and they've got them in piles. And we think this is from Turkey and we think this is from Germany and whatever. And the way they can tell is just some signature of that counterfeit. So they just put those all together and...
Both are very difficult, but dollars, apparently there are super bills, which means perfect counterfeits.
If you live in Europe, it's just easier to- Launder them?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. What they wanted to know was, what do people actually perceive when they look at a bill? And what do they not perceive? So what they were doing was spending- Tons of money on anti-counterfeiting measures. There's a hologram, there's color-changing ink, and there's a little stripe, and there's little fibers in the bill that change color when you shine a UV light on them, things like this.
There's all kinds of stuff. And it turns out no one ever notices this stuff. As in, okay, forget the UV light part. Just looking at the bill, there's about five or six different security measures. People just don't notice. So what the EU realized is they're wasting tons of money every year on this stuff, and they wanted to figure out
What is the way we see the world and what would cause people to look at the bill and get it a little bit better? So I happened to be at a visual neuroscience conference and I was standing in the back and there was this other guy standing there. So we start chatting at some point. He said he's from the European Central Bank.
And I said, wow, what are you doing at this little visual neuroscience conference? And he said, I'm here to learn some things and figure out how to reduce counterfeiting. So we started chatting for a while. Yeah. popped some ideas, and then that's how they contracted me.
I mean, I suspect they did some research on me and they figured out that I was capable of doing this. But yeah, I think it was so brave of them to do this because to my knowledge, other governments haven't done that before. They've got their guys and they try to figure stuff out about better and better security measures, but that doesn't work.
In fact, the European Union had done this thing for a while where they... ran public campaigns, this thing about, hey, everyone, when you're handed a bill, you should really stop and look at the bill. And it didn't work at all.
With five bucks. Exactly. So they spent $10 million more doing these public service ads on it and didn't lead to anything. So that's why they were looking for a new strategy there.
Exactly right. But also, it's really easy to copy that. The ECB, the European Central Bank, hired me to do this. So I said, okay, are you going to send me some counterfeits? And they said, we can't for legal reasons, so you need to counterfeit yourself. You need to make your own? Exactly.
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