Good Job, Brain! - 286: The Secret's Out

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

It's time to spill the beans! Inspired by the hidden rooms at Disneyland, Karen's got a quiz all about secret rooms in famous landmarks. Encyclopedia Chris cracks the case of the mysterious money zeroes, and shares how Pikachu threw a wrench into the long-kept secrets of printing. Colin likes his trivia shaken, not stirred, and rocks out to the unbelievable top secret plans *inside* the Rock of Gibraltar. Find out how Quaker Oats hatched an absolutely absurd idea and cracked the breakfast game with a secret ingredient. ALSO: Eggcorn Watch For advertising inquiries, please contact [e-mail]! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, ecstatic enthusiasts, enthralled and egregious eggorns and excellent etymology. This is Good Job, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. Today's show is episode 286, our first episode in the year, 25. Of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your sizzling, silky season starters sifting through cerebral sands surrounding silly subjects. Woo! I am Colin.

And I'm Chris. It's our new spring 2025 season. Hello, Chris and Colin. Hi. How you doing? If this is your first time listening to Good Job Brain, welcome. We are a facts quiz trivia. podcast started because we played pub trivia for a really long time together you got you got back into it

recently karen right you've been going yes that got you back in the game let me just show you here to the camera listeners you can't see it i just want to oh my oh my gosh you have at least $20 in singles right now almost $200 in mostly singles hey now we all have kids it's kind of hard hard to find time outside, but turns out at the bar, two blocks away, started doing trivia. It's structured a little bit differently. Each person has to put in $2 cash to play. Oh, the winning team wins everything. Whoa.

Wins all the cash. Oh, man. And also, it's just me and my husband. We're of the same household. We don't have to split this six ways. Jokes on them. Yeah. I've never played a cash game like this.

No, I've never heard of that. And the second place gets a $20 gift card. And that's usually what we're used to, right? Yeah. Most pubs give out like a $25, $50 gift card. That is pretty cool. Last week I was sharing in our Loeb-Trotters, a listener fan group, if anybody's in the area, to join.

And then Matthew, listener, came, joined our team. We won. All right. Generally, when we have time away, I've got some notes in my phone. taking notes on, you know, segments or things that I want to talk about on the show. I'm always writing down any good egg corns that I learn over the break so we can do egg corn watch when we come back. And egg corn, we love to talk about hearing good job brain, is somebody using the wrong

word or the wrong phrase, but in a way that sort of makes sense and might even make more sense than the original comes from a woman who called acorns, egg corns, because they sort of looked like an egg and they sort of look like a corn and it sort of makes sense and you can kind of see it anyway this one I just saw this and I was like okay that's that's funny um you know so like you and your you're significant other fighting and of course you know you still really feel great about each other but you know you're just you're just having you're having a tiff uh maybe you're going at it you know fighting each other like a couple of you know rabid little rodents because you found yourselves in a classic lover squirrel

Just a classic lover squirrel. Caught a lover squirrel. I'm sorry, did you did you say squirrel? Yeah, you know, like a lover squirrel. Yeah, you know, like a lover squirrel. It's kind of chaotic, rabidly, little teeth, you know, moving around.

Everybody's like freezing and they're making sudden movements away. Eating nuts. A lover squirrel. Yep. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good one. Now my iPhone just has a note in it that says

lover squirrel. I'm glad I'm alive. They didn't like find that after I died. I'm like, what this is mean? It's a pass code to my head point. Hey, good times. All right. Well, without further do, let's jump into our first general trivia segment, pop quiz, hot shot. Here, I have two random trivial pursuit cards and you guys have your barnyard buzzers. Listeners, jump in answer some questions let's go first card blue wedge for geography stelenbosch is a mountainous wine region in which country oh chris is a wino yeah i don't know i feel like it's 50-50 Chris come on yeah Germany Colin what's your guess uh huh I was gonna I mean I was say yeah France or Italy

Stellenbach I'll say France Stellan, B-O-S-D-H. Stellan Bosch is in South Africa. Oh, my gosh. Wow. South Africa, yes. That's cool. Here we go.

Pink Wedge for pop culture. Which Texas love song was banned from British airwaves during World War II because it was too catchy. Oh, my gosh. Texas love song. Texas love song was banned. love song during World War Two. Oh my gosh.

What's a Texas love song? Yeah, I'm trying to just think of anything that fits the bill here. Okay, what do you got, Chris? Is it like tie a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree or? I'll tell you what. Oh, my gosh. Texas is in the title. Oh, okay.

This is why they're able to say it's a Texas love song. It's in the title. It is deep in the heart of Texas. Oh, deep in the heart. Is this a love song? Okay, all right. Okay. Flavor text here, the hit song's happy clapping routine distracted factory workers.

Oh, well, oh, sure. Oh, because they're not, you know, you're not. Hands down on the tools they're doing. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Right, yeah. I only know it from Peewey's Big Adventure, of course.

Yellow Wedge. What, 1946 Jimmy Stewart Holiday movie did the FBI suspect of promoting communism? Chris. It's a wonderful life. It's a wonderful life. I trust Colin had that in the bag also. And it did, in fact, promote communism. So there we go.

Yeah. Fairly judged. Says here, because Mr. Potter, the capitalist banker was despicable. Here we go. Purple Wedge. Next question. Arts and literature. Which author went into hiding after receiving a fatwa?

issued by Aotilla. Sorry, no, please continue. I don't know how to pronounce it, but if you can help me. Comini. Ayatala Comini. All right. You were quick on the draw, but... I was a little too eager.

I know you also know this as well, Chris, but it was Salman Rushdie. Correct. Salman Rushdie. Greenwich for Science and Nature, the New Horizons, that's capital and capital H, the New Horizon Space Probe took the first detailed photos of which celestial body in 2015. New Horizons.

Right, right, right, right. I mean, it's like, we're almost... Pretty recent, pretty recent, first detailed photos, probably pretty far. Probably pretty far, probably pretty far. Go for it, Chris. Uranus. Even further. Even further than that, Pluto.

Pluto. Pluto. Yeah. Wow, okay. Now that was after it had been demoted as a plant, right? Yes, after, yeah, it is not a planet. Yep, yeah, yeah. Last question on this card.

What is a mix of a miniature schnauzer and a poodle called? It says here, besides a mutt. Oh. This is where we turn to Karen, usually. It is called a pooser. And if it's not, now it is. I'm going to lobby. Yeah, yeah.

It's the opposite. It is the schoodle. Shnoot. You could have had it, Chris. I mean, it's the other way. I chose the obvious best one. Oh, my gosh. Hooser.

Wait, hold that. Reverse. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, let's do another card. I got another card. All right.

Here we go. Blue Edge for a new card for geography. What's the name of the week-long celebration in New York City, where the public can mingle with sailors, marines, and post guardsmen. Colin? That is, Fleet Week. Fleet Week. I lived in New York for a few years, as you guys know.

I have seen some of the drunkest humans I have ever seen in my life, like moving around the city of New York during a Fleet Week one year. Yeah, I don't know what country they were from, you know, but just they were so happy to be there, yeah. New York, New York. That's right. I think of anchors away. All right.

Pink Wedge for pop culture. For which disguise is hit maker Sia famous? What a grammatically correct question. Is it like the dual color wig that goes over her face? Is that it? Yes, it's looking for wig. Oh, okay, just wigs. Okay, yeah, okay.

She famously has her face cover in these big bangs. Usually half of it is black, half of it is white. Yeah, Australian singer, Sia. Yellow Wedge, which Canadian Prime Minister was toasted by Richard Nixon as a future Prime Minister of Canada when he was four months old? Oh. Justin Trudeau, baby, let's go. Yeah, all right. Son of Pierre Trudeau.

That's all I got. Purple Wedge, what Jabberwocky author used some of the same nonsense words in his epic 1876 poem, The Hunting of the United States. poem, The Hunting of the Snark. Colin? That is Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll. Author of Alice in Wonderland. Green Wedge for Science and Nature, which branch of science specifically studies earthquakes?

Chris. Seismology. Seismology. Good job. So fun to say. Last question. Orange Wedge, which mixed martial artist won her first 12 career fights. until being bested by a holly home in 2015.

Chris. Rhonda Rousey? Ronda Rousey. All right. Good job, brains. Today's episode for new listeners, every, almost every good job brain episode, we usually have a topic or a theme,

and we all go into our holes and get inspired by that topic and maybe research some weird facts, maybe make a quiz. And so today's topic, I just recently came back from Disneyland. I was there running a few races, a 10K and a half marathon, as I usually do, in costume. Speaking of trivia in Disneyland, there are always a few classic ones about like secret and secret-ish rooms in the park. You know, Walt Disney actually had an apartment that he would stay in above the firehouse near the entrance.

There's the classic one of the Matterhorn Mountain, the top. part inside of Mountain is a mini basketball court. Oh, a basketball hoop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I love stuff like that. I love like secret rooms and secrets. And so today's topic I chose was secrets. Secrets.

It's Conan O'Brien, right? Yes. So this week, the secrets out. I would like to start out by talking about a secret that you and I are carrying around on our person all the time. Karen, you probably had a stack of these secrets in your hand earlier, actually. So I asked everybody to bring something that maybe is a little hard to get your hands on these days, just a piece of United States currency. Now, it's pretty hard.

I asked everybody before the show began, please bring, it can't be a $1 bill, but $5, $10, a $20, a $50, $100, if you're going to go crazy here on a good job, Brain. And just grab one of them. Karen, you have a few of different denominations. Colin, you've got something here. He's got the hindo's. I do. Well, at least one. So I want you to look on the back of one of your bills, and you're going to see probably things like the United States of

America, in God we trust, et cetera, et cetera. But look really, really closely on the back of your bill. And you should see, once you kind of stare at the seemingly blank sort of background around the White House or Monticello or whatever it is, you should see some yellow writing. You may have to really screen to see this. You see some little yellow characters on the back of the bill. I have a 20 here. and so it's a whole bunch of little 20s.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, it's not a sentence. Like, they're numbers. It's not a sentence. It's just numbers. Yeah, exactly. And so it's the denomination of the bill you're holding, and it's written over and over and over again.

So I have my 20, and if you look, there's just lots and lots of little yellow 20s. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, all scattered all over the place. Okay, all right, yeah, I've got to looking at Independence Hall here on the back of the 100. Yeah, and I see lots of little 100s. Yeah, yeah, okay. Now, let me ask you before we get into this.

If you had to guess, what is this for? Why are there all kinds of little, little 20s and little hundreds? Yeah. One of those. Counterfeit protection. What, what in particular, how would this help with counterfeit protection, do you think? I would guess like a special ink or like super microfine printing or I don't know. Like it would be difficult to make.

Yeah, that it would be expensive or difficult. Yeah. Something like that. Right, right, right. And so it's like if you wanted to check if something was counterfeit, you could always look at this. But if you notice, well, here's the thing, Colin, I had to point these out to you for you to see it. True. So it actually, that doesn't make any sense because it's not a feature of the bill that you could look at to see if it was counterfeit or not.

Okay. Well, so here's the thing. Computer scanning, maybe. Half of this is a red herring, basically. Oh. So it says 20, 2020, the 100th is 100, 100, 100. Karen, what is, you have a $5 bill? Yeah, I do.

What does that say? God, my eyes are so bad. I think it says 05. It says 05. Not one digit five. Not five. See, the thing is, the zeros, the zeros are the only thing that matters. And they're not even zeros.

Oh! They're not zeros, they're circles. And the other numbers in the denomination don't actually mean anything. The interesting thing is, I've got here a 20, dollar bill and I have here also a 20 euro bill yeah and if you look very closely on the 20 euro bill in the white you can see patterns of yellow circles Karen and I both have have the bill like six inches from our nose with our iPhone yeah like looking at the menu at a restaurant so it doesn't say 20 2020 it just has seemingly sort of random patterns of circles

on the euro. Oh. If you look at the yen or rupee, you'll see somewhat hidden in the design somewhere a constellation of circles that are like this yellow and this big. And this is indeed, you know, an anti-counterfeiting measure. The interesting thing is the existence of these circles or the purpose of these circles was originally, and for many years,

a secret. They began rolling this pattern out on some world currencies starting in the year 1996, but it wasn't actually discovered until, or really, nobody really noticed or figured out what it was for until 2002. Wow. And there's a, there's an article on the BBC that kind of explains all of this, but there was a, there was a PhD student at Cambridge in the UK, who's name was Marcus Coon, and their department had just gotten a brand new color photocopier. And so, you know, remember being in your 20s when you're like technically smart and like a Ph.D. candidate and then also very stupid because they're like, ha ha, we should test this thing out by photocopying money. Oh, right. Let's copy our money.

And let's see if this thing could do, because it's a snazzy new color photocopier, can we make a, can we make a convincing looking fake piece of money? So they took a 20 pound note and they put it onto this color copier and they pressed copy. And it was like, and paper comes out of the paper tray and they go over to see their copy of money. And they go and they take the paper and the paper says, warning, it is a crime to copy currency. That's right. And they're like, what? The machine knows it can read our thoughts.

You know, how did the copier know that they were attempting to copy currency? They tried with a euro note and the same thing happened. So now they've got pounds and they've got euros. And Marcus Coon notices, finally comparing the two, that both of them have these similar yellow circle patterns. on the notes but they hide them sometimes on the euro here they're just there but on other notes they had hidden them in the design so you you couldn't really tell what was going on on the on the 20 pound note the circles were rendered as the heads of musical notes ha ha that's cool and then of course in the u.s notes they hide them as the denomination but it's not again it's not a zero circle

And in fact, if a copy machine, if a scanner, these circles are in a certain pattern. A certain repeated pattern of five circles. And Marcus Coon dubbed this, what it is known as today. He called it the Uryan constellation from EUR, a Euro, but it looks like Orion in the night sky because the constellation of five circles that it sort of looks like a sort of across. You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what it's generally known as today because the people that developed this technology and the institutions that use it by and large, they don't talk about it. It doesn't have an official public name because they just don't talk about it.

That, man, you know, I remember, I mean, in the midst of time on the show, I feel like we talked about printer technology on an earlier show. And this is sort of the corollary of that, like we were talking about how the printers will also sort of signature their print by putting, you know, yellow dots that you can't see unless you know they're there kind of thing. Right. And so the government basically comes and says to the printer companies, right, here's what you're going to do. Exactly. Exactly. So then it makes it so you can't print it, you can't scan it. Apparently it was developed in 95 at a Japanese company called Amran. So sometimes they're called Amran rings, but, like, very, very few people have ever who know about this or who work in this have ever spoken about it publicly.

Right. That BBC story that I was talking about called the secret codes of British banknotes. It actually quotes a marketing director for a company that produces like the material for printing currency on that some countries use. He says there's features on banknotes that, like, aren't even known about to this extent. And it's even more secret. Wow. Yeah, I bet. So there's something else that recently came up, something similar.

It's funny because I learned about the Uryan constellation. And then I heard about this other thing in the news, which involves a form of currency that's even more valuable than cash, Pokemon cards. This is all happening now. It's an ongoing scandal. In 2024, the trading card and comic and now video game authentication company, CGC, right? They announced that they had authenticated and graded a bunch of Pokemon cards that were from the very earliest days of the Pokemon card game. Like early prototype cards that were made by the company to playtest the game, basically, as they were designing the game. Okay.

They even said that they had worked with one of the original creators of the card game to help them verify and authenticate the cards, which they had graded and put in the plastic slabs. And these cards were very quickly turned around. They were graded in 2024. They were very quickly turned around and put on a lot of auction sites, like heritage auctions. So like a prototype Pikachu card that was dated to 1995. 1995 is before anything Pokemon had ever cut. It's before the games got released in Japan.

And that like that one card sold for $20,000 in December, in Heritage Auctions. But the thing is, once some of these auctions went online, high-resolution images of the cards started to spread around because the auction sites would take a very high-resolution photo with a card so you could look at it on your computer and you could, you could identify, you could see the flaws in the card for yourself before you bid five whatever figures on this thing. And one user on a Pokemon forum starts playing around.

with the images in Photoshop and adjusting the levels and things like that and discovers Colin little patterns of dots on the cards. Now the existence of a pattern of dots is not necessarily a bad thing because this is also an anti-fraud

measure. Colin, as you're saying, developed by Xerox in 1980s printer dots. So whenever Karen, whenever you print something on your printer at home, your printer is printing a matrix of very small, imperceptible dots on that paper. And if you know how to decode that dot pattern, you can figure out the date that thing was printed, the time it was printed, and the serial number of the printer.

So, Karen, your whole counterfeiting operation you've got going is busted because all your counterfeit bills are you're running off on your laser printer have a pattern of dots that say what serial number of the printer was that was used to make that. And is it just tiny, tiny? It's tiny, tiny. And this feature, this feature also was a secret for a long time. They did not tell people that they were, you know, secretly, essentially watermarking. Everything you printed in your house.

Everything you printed was watermarked. It was only in 2005 that the Electronic Frontier Foundation, cracked the code and so now members of the public if they see these dots they can use that code to figure out when this object was printed and this guy in the Pokemon forum found that these cards with which they have sold a lot of these cards for a lot of money on heritage golden auctions these cards had printer dots on them that dated them to the year does anybody want to guess? 2023.

2024. Oh man. That was being too generous. They didn't even wait a year. They have dots on them dating them to 20, 20. Wow. So again, this is an ongoing thing. I'm not really sure what the resolution of this is going to be.

But I think the moral of just all of this from the dots on your bills to the dots on your everything you print at home, it's don't try to counterfeit things. like your eyes are not as clever as you think they are and there's a lot of stuff out there in plain sight that you simply don't know this you don't know it's there and you are not going to be a dedicated member of a Pokemon forum online like I would not try yeah yeah game over exactly yep you know what I like to imagine are the secret meetings that had to happen oh yeah all of the printer people on board, the government, multiple governments developing a standard. And Colin, I mean, you, you know, as I asked you to think about it again, you got it.

It's because you were like, is somebody, something to do with a computer scanning? Yeah, it does. Yeah. All right. I have a quiz. I made a quiz. And I mentioned before, secret rooms in Disneyland. So here I have a quiz about secret rooms in world famous landmark.

Oh, nice. So this is a buzz and quiz. Get your barnyard buzzers, a quick refresher. Colin is the horse and Chris is the rooster. Here we go. Question number one, we'll start easy. What landmarks torch room might be a generous name, as it really is a space only accessible by a ladder?

Let's do Colin, you buzzed in first. It is near to Chris's heart, the Statue of Liberty. I was a big Statue of Liberty head as a young kid. By the time that I was, you know, going to the Statue of Liberty, you couldn't go to the torch anymore. Yeah, yeah. Tell everybody. Well, what do you know about the Twitter? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you used to be able to go. Well, first of all, everybody used to be able to go up to the crown. I think sometimes you can still go up to the crown, but it's not like an every day all the time thing. By the time you're getting up there, you're on these like tiny spiral staircases.

And you're like, you are packed in there with people. So I can only imagine going to the torch is even crazier. And it's probably a safety hazard. They don't want people going up there because either somebody's going to fall down the stairs, go over the railing or what. But yeah, you used to be able to just climb all the way up to the torch of the Statue of Liberty. So the torch room now, only the National Park Service staff are allowed there. Okay.

But they do have a torch cam. So they put a cam inside the torch and outside the torch. so that you can see the hollow space and then you can also see the views from the torch of New York City. Very, very cool. All right. Question number two.

There actually is a secret room in Mount Rushmore originally meant to house important records just like in the movie National Treasure. This unfinished room is located behind whose head. Colin? George Washington. Incorrect. Chris.

Teddy Roosevelt. It's Lincoln. It's Abe Lincoln behind his head. And, you know, again, room is very generous. This is like a rectangular hole cave. The Lincoln hole, if you will. The Lincoln Tunnel. No secret documents there.

All right. Question number three. In what city can you find the secret inner heart of Christo Redentor? Colin. Is that in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil? Yes, Rio de Janeiro, Christ, the Redeemer with his outstretched arms. Turns out not, you know, obviously not a solid piece of mass. It is hollow inside.

It actually has a lot of different like walkways and tunnels, not really public spaces, but for people to maintain the statue. but in the chest cavity there actually is a heart like a beautiful art deco sculptural heart that's inside three feet four feet wide I've seen some really cool footage of like you know drone footage flying around like the arms the outstretched arms people get up there it's crazy I don't I don't really get like you know acrophobic a lot but like for some reason the view from, yeah, from the Christ the Redeemer arms out there. Yeah, and you're way up there on top of the, you know, the hill. Yeah, it's pretty impressive.

All right. Next question. There is a detention holding room, not a prison cell, despite popular belief, at the base of the Elizabeth Tower, more commonly known as what? Oh, yeah. Colin. The Tower of London? It is the Big Ben.

Oh, okay. The Big Ben. I've always heard this rumor growing up. Oh, Big Ben, there's a prison cell. I never heard that. In my mind, and I think in many people's mind, the holding cell is like at the top, like where the clock is. Like behind the clock base, right? Yeah, yeah.

That's where you put it in a video game. Well, yeah, that's what I thought. But no, it's at the base. It's at the base. Okay. All right. Question number five, what sport are you able to play? above the Grand Central Terminal in New York City.

Oh. What sports? Chris? It's not water polo. How about tennis? It is tennis and other racquetball sports. There is a secret-ish, not really, but there is a tennis court. Oh, cool.

Who can play there? Who can get there? Anybody. You just have to make a reservation. Oh. And pay. Yeah, the Vanderbilt Tennis Club is up there. And it's not the biggest space, but it's kind of cool.

Last question here, number six. The secret water tank beneath the Palais Garnier inspired what book turned musical turned film? Again, the secret water tank beneath the Palais Garnier inspired what book turned a Turned musical, turned film. A secret water tank. Yes. Colin. Uh, the shape of water.

Incorrect. This is... Oh, Chris. Music of the night. Give it to me. Ah. Oh. Phantom of the opera.

Phantom of the opera. Actually, it was inspired by the Pelleys Garnier, which is an opera house. And what is the tank for? Underneath in the basement is water. So, like, in the show, in the musical and in the movie, you see him traverse. Like, he lives underground under the opera house, and he's traversing with a canoe, not a canoe. Yeah, like sort of like a little, like a gondola. Yeah, yeah, like that's part of the magic, right?

Ooh, there's like a secret waterway. There's like a secret lake. But turns out it's a water tank. The architect of the opera house kept the water. available just in case if there was fire which was very common it looks like a lake like a grotto otherworldly but yes

inspired Phantom of the Opera and there's my secret spot quiz. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back Introducing TurboTax Business a brand new way to file your own

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Smart trivia. Good job brain. Welcome, everybody. You're listening to Good Job Brain. And this week we're talking about secrets. Secrets. I'm trying to stop them, everybody. I'm trying to stop this.

I can't control them. So I am a dad As you guys know As we as discussed But I And there are a lot of types of dads out there But I have never been I've never been a World War II dad

Oh God I have a World War II dad Okay all right I don't I don't need to explain any further You know what I mean like there And look no judgment I'm not I might become a World War II dad at some point I don't think I don't think you plan to be a World War II dad When you're younger

It kind of just creeps up on you sometimes. That's not who I am generally, but I do have a fondness for stories of subterfuge and definitely, you know, sneaking around and secrets. Okay. You're a spy dad. Yeah, I am more of a spy dad. No shortage of good subterfuge stories from World War II, I have to say. To the extent I can have a favorite World War II secret mission, this might be it. Okay. All right, so let me lay it on you.

All right. All right. It hits me in just in just all the right ways. Let's set the scene here. We're going to Gibraltar home of the, of course, the famous eponymous massive rock, the rock of Gibraltar. The land of Gibraltar itself, I don't know if you guys have been there or passed through there at any time either of you. It's not huge. It's a small place. It's a small chunk of land, you know, a little over two and a half square miles. Right at the southern near the. the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula there. It is UK overseas territory. Spanish, still a little salty about that. So just to emphasize that it is under UK control. So Gibraltar itself, like, you know, the spit of land there and the giant rock mountain on it, has for many hundreds of years been a very strategically important place for military and imperial outpost. It's like a natural fortress, essentially.

You've got this giant rock mountain. And it's right on this straight. You have a great vantage point of sea traffic coming in and out. You have heard of the Rock of Gibraltar, of course. Yes. You may not have heard of the tunnels of Gibraltar. Ooh. Yeah. There is a elaborate tunnel system carved into, dug into the Rock of Gibraltar,

chiefly constructed by the British Army over many decades. You know, I mentioned Gibraltar is a small place. Two and a half, a little bit more square miles. There are more than 30 miles of tunnels built as supply routes and navigation routes to get among the various military installations that, you know, the British Army had built up over the years. Not a small endeavor. They could hold more than 15,000 soldiers inside this carved out massive complex, all right? Wait, hold on. I have a question.

Yeah, go ahead. When you say subterranean, so all of this stuff is underneath the rock of Gibraltar, not inside the rock of Gibraltar. It is both. Okay. It is both. It is extensive. It extends laterally and goes up and down. It's like a human ant hill.

Yeah, exactly. Like a human ant hill, a human military ant hill. Right. So I did promise this was a World War II story. British Army has been here for a couple hundred years, right? To this point, you know, building up their systems inside Gibraltar. In 1940, British intelligence sussed out that the German army was planning to move troops through Spain and capture Gibraltar, okay, from the British.

Again, very strategic place, especially in the middle of World War II. So among all the other military plans and contingencies going on, the seed was planted for Operation Tracer. Oh. Operation Tracer. Pretty good name. Pretty good name. Was a classic example of what they call a stay behind plan.

And a stay behind. behind plan is exactly what it sounds like. It is a plan where you might need to evacuate or get overrun, but you leave behind some of your troops to do something. All right. So in 1941, I'm not going to throw a lot of names at you here, I promise. Maybe I'm no more than two. All right.

In 1941, Rear Admiral John Henry Godfrey, all right, Godfrey, he devised the general plan to set up a secret observation post inside Gibraltar that would be manned by a small team of dedicated soldiers who would continue to stay hidden, stay active there, even if Gibraltar did indeed end up getting captured by Germany, okay? And again, they weren't in immediate danger. They had time to formulate plans, but they got on the ball and they were. thinking big. It's sort of like an inverse Trojan horse scenario, right?

Like you're putting your guys inside as opposed to sending a gift out there. Super top secret, this whole thing, right? I mean, because it's like, if you're planning on embedding a team inside what might be enemy territory, can't get that leaking out. So the idea was that this would be an observation

and monitoring post so that you would station soldiers here that in the event the Germans took over the area, they could issue reports and radio back to British Army and Allied Army headquarters, the movements of ships and troops and things like that. So the idea was they were going to dig out, build out a special cave.

It's a glorified cave, basically. They carved it out. It was lightly finished. They plastered up the walls and they had like, you know, cork flooring to kind of keep it quiet. Wow. Bathrooms! I need to know about the bathrooms. I will get there.

I'll get to the bathrooms. I'll get to the bathrooms. The goal, their goal was to support a team of five men. for one year. Oh, okay. So they had to plan out all the food, all the supplies, the toilets, Karen, yes, all of it, everything that you would need. That changed eventually to the plan was a team of six men, and they were going to be

trained to stay there, if needed, for as long as seven years. Whoa. Now, yeah, I mean, think about the mindset here, just like. And what's the end game? Exactly. Exactly. The end game, right, if you were preparing these guys to be there for seven years is hopefully, you know, you win the war sometime in that seven years. And if it's been seven years, or do you have to bust out and you might. A lot, a lot, a lot of planning went in. And at the same time, it had to be kept absolute as secret as you could keep it. By December 1941, they had started the construction, which was really, you know, extending the tunnel system that was in place into new areas of the rock. Everything in the construction was shrouded. in secrecy. The diggers, the construction workers on the project, they weren't told exactly where they were digging. They weren't told exactly where in the complex they were

constructing this, so that even if they were compromised, they might not have helpful information. Only the, only the very high level people know exactly what the map of the tunnel is like on the inside. As soon as the construction was over, the military had the whole crew sent straight back to England, just as an extra measure of like, you know, no loose lips, right? So it was about 45 feet by 16 feet by 8 feet tall, all right? So not huge. There were two observation ports, one looking west over the Bay of Gibraltar, one looking east over the Mediterranean. In addition to the toilets, Karen, just want to emphasize that they had toilets.

All right. There was a 12,000 gallon water tank. talk about secret tanks. I mean, that's like a good-sized swimming pool, 12,000 gallons of water. They had three batteries for power, okay, to, you know, run, among other things, the signaling and radio equipment. The batteries, they could be charged with one of two generators. One of them was a hand-cranked generator.

Would you like to guess about the other generator? Would you like to guess what powered that one? What would be the most fun thing you could think of? It was a human-sized hamster wheel. You know what? I stand corrected. No, it was a bicycle power generator. Did they really think even if anybody captures Drupalter that they wouldn't know there's this?

So when they put the crew in here, this crew of six, they sealed them in. So they built a new place. But they also left the guys with bricks to seal it up from the inside because they were planning that, you know, there's no way they could seal off all 30. miles of the complex. So what they did is their best to sort of hide it in the system. That's right. Behind a fake wall. Exactly. You got it. There was a fake wall covered with, you know, like corrugated metal and bricks and all this kind of stuff. Yeah. They planned this thing up and down. They reviewed the dietary needs, the exercise plans. How much tobacco and alcohol to, you know, to ration out for the guys who might be here for seven years. They plant it down to every detail,

no matter how grim. So toilets, the first thing that might come to your mind. What's the second thing that might come to your mind if you have a crew of people in here not allowed to leave for maybe seven years stir crazy cabin fever certainly that and they did in fact train and do some psychological assessments and personality assessments before the crew i mean the best that you can before they sent them out there what do you do if someone dies you got to have a plan for it the plan was to embalm them and essentially cement them up in the walls, Karen. They left behind extra soil

if they would need it. I mean, and they had to drill. Like, okay, here's the plan. All right. You know, if Roger dies, sorry, buddy, we're going to embalm you and you're living in the walls until we're all let out. By the beginning of August 42, the team was ready. They were on the ground in

Gibraltar. They had gone through the training. They had fake cover stories. They had fake jobs, even within the military that they were assigned to give them a reason for being and Gibraltar. And in fact, things had gone so well that the Army had already started developing other sort of similar stay behind plans in other places.

By the end of that month, by the end of August, 1942, they had finished construction. Despite all this buildup, all of this planning, Operation Tracer was never activated because in May 1943, the Allies had seeds control of North Africa. And then within very short order had driven the access forces out of the region. So there was no real threat anymore to Gibraltar. So they basically closed up shop. They used one last sort of radio communications exercise, maybe to justify the effort that had gone into it.

And then they blocked it up. They sealed it up. No one could talk about it. They took all the provisions out right. And no one could talk about it. No one could talk about it. For decades after World War II, among the locals on Gibraltar, there were rumors that there was a secret room inside the rock of Gibraltar, right?

Because, you know, look, stuff gets out. It was not until 1997 after two years of searching a group known as the Gibraltar caving group dedicated to many things, but among them sort of, you know, exploring and preserving the cave system um they they found it they found it they were looking for it they went out trying to find it and just basically kind of nancy drew and look at this fake wall we look at this fake wall that's right one it was very much like they they felt like a draft of wind and then they're like they followed it and then they found they found the special brickton area they opened it up very carefully because they were pretty sure they knew what they had found um yeah and they also didn't

want to tell anybody. So now it's sort of this like second order secret where they realized like this small group, we're the only ones minus whatever old timers might still be alive in 1997, who even know that where this exactly is. They filmed a documentary of them, you know, exploring it a little bit and talking about it, again, with care and showing the water still ran. Like the faucets still work. Wow.

So that is Operation Tracer. And just as a, as a CODA here, little bit, and I'll go a little bit sideways here. So as I mentioned, Rear Admiral John Henry Godfrey, sort of the mastermind of this whole thing. His assistant was a man serving in British intelligence by the name of Ian Fleming. No! Ian Fleming. Yes. The author of the James Bond series of novels, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as well. Yes.

Yes, Way. In addition to being associated with helping plan and assist Godfrey with this operation. He was also masterminded Fleming Operation Golden Eye, which was another allied stay behind plan that he had basically signed up to be the stay behind. He had signed up to sort of infiltrate himself with a cover story and stay on the ground. Yeah. No. The name Golden Eye has very.

particular place in James Bond lore and Ian Fleming lore. It was the name of his compound where he lived in Jamaica and it was of course also incorporated into the name of the James Bond stories and movies. Yes, so Ian Fleming. Yes, and video game, of course, one of the all-time great video games. I think we can all agree. Yeah.

So he had his fingerprints over this, over a golden eye. Wow. And talk about just secrets and subterfuge and Spycraft. All just all comes back into this awesome little ball of stories on Gibraltar. You can go online. You can see, you know, schematics of what the cave looked like where these guys would have been holed up, you know, doing their secret observations.

It's really pretty, I don't know, it's chilling in a way, but also extremely, extremely cool. Wow. That's cool. Throughout history, royals across the world were notorious for incest. They married their own relatives in order to consolidate power and keep their blood. blue. But they were oblivious to the havoc all this inbreeding was having on the health of their offspring. From Egyptian pharaohs marrying their own sisters to the Habsburg's notoriously oversized lower jaws. I explore the most shocking incestuous relationships and tragically inbred individuals in royal history. And that's just episode one. On the History Tea Time podcast, I profile

remarkable queens and LGBTQ plus royals explore royal family trees and delve into women's medical history and other fascinating topics. I'm Lindsay Holiday and I'm spilling the tea on history. Join me every Tuesday for new episodes of the History Tea Time podcast, wherever fine podcasts are enjoyed. All right, I have a last segment here, very, very, very different. than spy operations and currency protection. I'm going to talk about oatmeal for a long time. Oatmeal, yes, the breakfast, the porridge. For a very, very long time, oatmeal was marketed, has been marketed,

it still is marketed as health food. Sure, sure. It's very clear that oatmeal is marketed towards adults. It's wholesome. It's healthy. It's heart healthy. Loaves your cholesterol. You got famous old person.

Wilford Brimley talking about, you know, Quaker Oats, and it's the right thing to do. And even before that, even before the TV commercials, print ads and magazines, you know, hot cereal and all about purity and health and wholesomeness and hearty. All appeal to adults. And that kind of changed a little bit. In 1989, General Mills launched something called oatmeal swirlers. Oatmeal Swirlers. If you remember that, if you're a child in the United States in the 80s, oatmeal swirlers, which is essentially your normal packets of instant oatmeal.

But it also came with a condiment packet that's filled with sweet sauces. Okay, all right. And the whole idea is kids can then squirt these sweet sauces on top of their oatmeal, you know, to make it more fun. That's how kids were eating oatmeal anyway. Yeah, yeah, put jam in it. They were dumping some kind of sugar. Honey, maple syrup, honey, sugar, right, yeah. And, you know, in the commercial, it's like, ooh, you can squirt,

happy, smiley faces on your oatmeal and you can play tic-tac-toe, and it's like a ketchup packet, you know what I mean? Oh, I remember that. I remember. Oatmeal swirlers. The tick-tac-toe game on their oatmeal. It was obvious from the commercial that this was aimed at kids, not their parents. Trying to make oatmeal.

Trying to make oatmeal cool. And making oatmeal cool has been a long and big challenge for the oatmeal slash porridge slash hot cereal industry. Holy grail. Because the competition, I mean, you know, every other breakfast food is cool for kids. It's something that kids want. Super sugar. Serial. Serial crack.

Super sugar anything. Yeah, exactly. Cereal crack that nut, eggo waffles. Yep. Toaster strudel, Pop-Tarts, everything this side of poached eggs is fun. It's like super fun, cool breakfast food. And I mean, but oatmeal just could never get there. Also, these branding, they usually have a cute mascot. And then maybe there's a toy inside, you know, and no kid is like, hmm, I would like some beige hot goop please where the brand is an old religious man. the kid's not thinking that he needs to lower his cholesterol right right right yeah also you set it down in the kid it's like oh you can't eat it yet hang on it's got to cool off yeah because it's like

right right right and there's a perfect well right exactly there's like a perfect point between liquid hot magma and disgusting sludge and you've got to eat it all in that window okay so opio swirlers kind of cracked a little little door open but boy did things change in 1998. In 1998, in the United States, the Quaker Oats Company came up with an oatmeal product for kids and why it appeals to kids is because it has a secret. It has a secret surprise. And this product is at the intersection of extreme creativity, innovation, and just like absurdity.

Here is a headline. Let me read you a headline from Chicago Tribune in 1998. Quaker gets ready to hatch new oatmeal line. Yes, I am talking about the Quaker Instant Oats Dinosaur Egg's Brown Sugar Flavor. debuted in 1998 and you can still find it on supermarket shells. Well, what is it? It's a packet of instant oatmeal. oatmeal. Okay. And in this packet, there's rolled oats and white sugar eggs. They look like smooth

pebbles. You know, like Jordan almonds. Okay. Yeah. So when you add hot milk or water to the oatmeal, the liquid starts to dissolve the egg. Ah. To reveal a secret edible dinosaur. You may be in one packet, maybe you get like a dozen of these eggs. As you swirl around, the whites of the eggs disappears into the oatmeal and then you get these colorful dinosaurs that are also edible that late 90s a kid's food era where it was like things were really extreme we got like you know sharkberry coolade with the shark with the sunglasses and then and then you have the purple easy squirt ketchup and then now we have oatmeal that would hatch secret animals secret I thought you were going to say it was like I was imagining like a bath bomb like made of oatmeal though like the whole thing was an egg

that you put in the hot water. Oh, no, no, no. Yeah. I hope someone's listening. That's not a bad idea. This is a little bath bomb. Do you think a bath with it? I mean, oatmeal is good for your skin, Chris.

I don't know if you knew that. Yeah. But the thing is, unlike these other extreme 90s food, they're still selling dinosaur egg oatmeal today. It hasn't gone the way of, you know, ecto cooler or something. I need it to find out more. What an unhinged crazy idea. Like it was like Jurassic Park came out of 1993.

There was definitely a period where everything was dino this and dino that. Yeah. So I needed to find out more. So I did what any sane person would do in this situation is I headed over to the good old US patent and trademark office library. Nice. And proceeded to rife through every single patent filed by the Quaker Oates Company. That's fantastic. And I wanted to see if I could.

find the patent or maybe related patent that led to dinosaur egg oatmeal. And guys, let me read you this patent. December 22nd, 1999, the Quaker Oats Company, titled, Animated Food, Comma, Food Additive, and Method. Here's a little summary. The animating food product animates the food by dispersing an outer mass in liquid and revealing an inner mass of the animating food portion. As used herein, the term animated means that an observable change in the cereal occurs that provides or simulates giving life, providing a visually stimulating change, including but not limited to the hatching of an egg or the transformation of one object into another.

They're covering their bases, yeah. I found it. I love this kind of detective work. So how does it work? I mean, it's pretty straightforward. The egg is made out of sugar and fat that has a different melting point than the dinosaur, what they call in the patent dinosaur tablet. So the egg part dissolves away, revealing.

It leaves the dinosaur. In 1998, also Quaker introduced the Barry Blue Sea Adventures oatmeal, But instead of white eggs with colorful dinosaur tablets, it's colorful sea creature tablets in blue eggs. And the blue egg coating would dissolve turning your oatmeal blue. Oh, yeah. Everything had to turn blue in those days. Sea Adventures oatmeal was discontinued after just a few years. But you know what?

Dinosaur eggs still going strong. Here, I just want to share some other patents I found of note. handheld oatmeal. Oh, I don't know about this. At first I was like, oh, kind of like, you know, those apple squeeze pouches, but it's like oatmeal. I was like, oh, I can kind of see that. It's not that.

It's a bar, like a cooked oatmeal bar. And it comes in flavors of mixed berry cheese and onion and mushroom. What? Oh, no. Trying to build out the, you know, expand the product. Going the other way. When oatmeal's got cheese and onion. you can eat oatmeal any time.

But again, you know, these are patents filed. They may not make it out on shelves, you know, but just in the case, right? They just take out the tariffy. Yeah. Hey, guys, I patented my onion oatmeal. You told you not to do that. We don't need to protect the onion oatmeal. They have a patent for a microwavable oat muffin, a batter, and you microwave it, and it'll cook.

Ah, like a little single, a single serving fresh muffin. Did you know the Quaker Roads Company actually owned Fisher Price, the toy company. No. Between, yeah, the 70s, 80s, early 90s. And so a lot of the Quaker Roads Company patents during that time were all for toys. Was like, oh, adjustable picnic table or like a wagon or like a toy box. Turns out they owned Fisher Price for a couple decades there. All right.

The last one, last patent I'll share. effervescent food products a food product comprising of a fizz component that causes the product to fizz or have an effervescent effect upon addition of acquiesce liquid oatmeal oatmeal bath bomb pop rocks oatmeal pop rock cereal and turns out this is a thing these days there are cereals out there that are effervescent you add milk and it fizzes and it's supposed to be good fun cool I would try it

everything that you've listed everything I'm not even a big oatmeal guy but everything that you've listed I would try at least once yeah even handheld cheese and onion Karen any oatmeal can be handheld oatmeal if you're dedicated I love oatmeal

and you know just a small fact about me the only reason why I love oatmeal is because I saw one episode of Good Eats by Alper Brown one of like the early episodes on his episode of oatmeal and it changed my life. Wow. Change completely how I thought about oatmeal and I don't know. I just enjoyed it a lot more after knowing about the science of that.

Thank you, Alton Brown. To end the segment, I was insane enough. I was insane enough to find out it was a bunch of people credited in the patent as the inventor of dinosaur egg oatmeal. I found all of them on LinkedIn and I did pay. I paid for a LinkedIn premium just so I could message someone. They're all retired. You know what I mean?

Like all these people, no one's going to answer me back. Yeah. They're never going to talk about it because they're probably NDA and, you know, it's still a product that's out on the shelves in the Picker Oats Company, which is owned by Pepsi Co. Now, what went on in that room? Incredible.

You want to know what didn't make the cut, right? Yeah, like what was overruled in the favor of, yeah, the melting dinosaur eggs. I love your dedication, Karen. I mean, this is what trivia does to you. It'll just, it'll, next thing you know, you're paying for LinkedIn premium so you can message somebody that you sort of stalked off of patent records. I mean, this is, what has our life become?

And that's our show. Thank you all for joining me and thank you listeners for listening in. Hope you learned stuff today about hidden spies in the Rock of Gibraltar, about dinosaurs. about dinosaur egg oatmeal, about fake Pikachu card, and mystery money rings, and about hidden rooms in landmarks. You can find us on all major podcast apps and on our website, good job brain.com. This podcast is part of Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit airwavemedia.com to listen and subscribe to other shows like Rainbow Puppie Science Lab, Unspookable, and Wiser World. Welcome everybody to a new season, and we'll see you.

Next week. Bye, buddy. This is Jen and Jenny from ancient history fan girl, and we're here to tell you about Jenny's scorching historical romanticcy based on Alarika the Bissigoths, enemy of my dreams. Amanda Boucher, best-selling author of The Kingmaker Chronicle, says, Quote, this book has everything, high-stakes action, grit, ferocity, and blazing passion. Julia and Alaric are colliding storms against a backdrop of the brutal dangers of ancient Rome.

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