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
And it turns out, for the kind of studies I was doing, the difficulty with counterfeiting, for example, is getting the paper right. The paper is very special. I'll tell you how they do that in some places. In Venezuela, when the economy was really crashing there, they would bleach the Bolivar bills.
They would bleach their bills to make counterfeits for other countries because it turned out to be economically worthwhile to do that. But... So what I did, though, is I would, for example, you can take a bill and you can just copy it with a high resolution scanner and print it and so on. It doesn't feel quite right.
But the point is, it's quite easy to get all the pieces and parts, except for one, except for the watermark. The watermark is the part where you hold up the bill and you look and you can see a little figure through the thing there. That, it turns out, is the part that's the most difficult to counterfeit because that exists between the front and the back. That's what I thought, yeah. Exactly.
So you can't print that in any normal way. So typically counterfeit operations have an artist that draws that part. So this led to one of the main recommendations I made to the European Central Bank, which is they had a building, a little structure as their watermark. So you look in the thing, you see the little building.
I ran studies showing that I can show you a building and then I can show you another bill that has a similar building and you can't tell the difference. Unless you're an architect, you specialize in that kind of thing or something. This has Doric columns. This has ionic columns. Exactly. What I recommend is they put a face there because faces we are super specialized for.
We've got all this neural real estate for recognizing faces.
So you can tell if a face doesn't look right. Imagine you're looking at your wife's face and someone's drawn to the side. You would immediately be able to tell.
Now, the problem was they thought that was a great suggestion and went for that, but they didn't know whose face to use because in the European Union, you've got all these different countries and everyone wants their own person, their own king.
So what they did finally is they used the face of the mythical goddess Europa. Now there you go. Which is sort of a half step in the right direction because on the one hand, we can get used to it and recognize, hey, that face doesn't look right. But it's not a face we immediately recognize because it's a made up face, first of all. So it wasn't the perfect solution, but it got us closer.
So one is your ability to recognize other people's faces. This is evolutionarily very important. We're an extremely social species. So we live in small groups and we look at faces and the identity is massively important to us.
And we're so good at it that when you realize that the difference from face to face is like a tiny difference in the distance between the eyes or the length of the nose or the frenulum These are really subtle differences. Yeah. But we are exquisitely good at it because we're a social creature.
Now, the issue about why you don't recognize your own face, that's because you only see your face from a particular angle in the mirror straight on. So it's backwards. By the way, it's left, right reversed in the mirror. But also you don't see yourself from all the other angles. Oh, it was a side profile too, yeah. Yeah. I was like, that's not what side profile looks like.
I was like, you're crazy. It's exactly what your side profile looks like. This is analogous to you for different reasons, but it's analogous to hearing your own voice. You and I as podcasters are probably much more used to hearing our voice than other people. But when you're a kid and you hear your own voice on a tape recorder, you think, it doesn't sound anything like me.
And that's because you only hear your own voice from inside your head. The resonance of the skull and the cavities in there is very different from how other people hear you.
Exactly. So that's why when you saw your face and stuff. The other weird part is that you're constantly changing, right? Your face morphs through time. And when you look at a picture of yourself from a decade ago, two decades ago, and so on, but it's hard somehow to keep track of that about ourselves.
Now, here's the thing. The reason the watermark is important is because all the rest of it is just super easy to scan digitally and reproduce. So all the rest we just assume will be right. The watermark is the part that has to be done by hand usually. And so that's why that really matters there.
What's interesting, I'll tell you one of the other recommendations I made to these guys is I said, look, what I've realized from a year of doing this is that a bill is full of distractions, right? The thing, the trees, the flowers, the banners, the eagles, the whatever. Like it's so full of stuff that you would not notice if that tree were missing or the eagle. Like it just doesn't matter.
And what that does is it distracts us from the security features. Therefore, the optimal thing to do would be to have a blank bill with a single hologram in the middle. Holograms are hard to counterfeit. That's it. You just want a single hologram that tells you the money, 20 or 50 or 100. And I made the argument to these guys and they all sat there and they said, you know what?
In theory, we agree with you. The logic of it is indisputable. But what they felt like is money has to be regal looking. And they felt like there's all this cultural momentum to money. And so in the end, they rejected that. They turned it down. But it's a real shame because that's how you stop counterfeiting or reduce it greatly.
That's it. That's the whole thing. That's the right way to do it.
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