Good Job, Brain! - 57: Fake It Till You Make It

Episode Date: April 9, 2013

Impostors! Countefeits! Forgeries! Decoys! Yes, a show all about FAKES. The history of counterfeit money may surprise you, but probably not as much as the shocking secrets of that ol' regular inkjet printer sitting in your house RIGHT NOW! We also talk about stunningly weird (and perhaps, frightening) examples of biomimicry in the animal kingdom. Chris quizzes us on notable fake bands, and Dana shares a crazy-pants story about faking one's own death...for fun. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, hooligans, Hootin for Hoopla and Hootin'nanny. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and off-beat trivia podcast. This is episode 57, and of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your joyousy jumping jabbering jester's. I'm Colin. I'm Dana. And I'm Chris.

All right. Time for our first general trivia segment. Pop Quiz, Hot Shot. And here I have a couple of actually random Trivial Pursuit card. Give two? Yeah, which one should I pick? Left or right? Left, left.

Blue Wedge for Geography and you guys have your barnyard buzzers. Name two of the three nations that make up the Baltic States. Oh, that's my question. Purple. No. Oh, sorry. Oh, got it, Monopoly. I'll take a stab.

Estonia? Correct. Latvia? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. All right. And then is the third one, is it Lithuania? Correct. Wow, look at that.

Okay. Well, unfortunately, it only asked for two, so you're wrong. So you lost all your points. Yep, that's right. You're the loser now. Flew too close to the trivia son. Pink Wedge for a pop culture. What X-Men star was named Sexiest Man Alive by People Magazine in 2008?

Dana Hugh Jackman Yes Hugh Jackman Ian McEllen Patrick Stewart Ian McKeown could win Sexiest Man alive

I don't doubt that Yeah Yellow Wedge In the late 17th century Scientist Isaac Newton and Gottfried Libnis Leibniz

Each claim to have created What branch of mathematics I believe they both claimed the calculus was there. The calculus? Yes, calculus. Eventually both were given independent credit for its creation. Oh. Purple Wedge?

What 18th century Austrian composer started writing music at five years old? Full name. Wolfgang Omadeus Mozart? Yes. Very good. Green Wedge for science. Which animal is not also called a panther? It's multiple choice.

Cheetah, cougar, jaguar, or leopard. Cheetah. Yes, cheetah. A cheetah is just a cheetah. The name Panther is used for the cougar in North America, jaguar in South America, and leopard in Africa and Asia. I didn't know any of that. Yeah.

I thought Panther was like its own thing. All right. Last question. Orange Wedge. What is a fixie unable to do that other bicycles can? change gears Yes Is it a long answer?

A fixi has a single gear It's a single gear bike Like a fixed gear bicycle Yeah right It cannot coast Oh that's true Because they have the back brakes right as well Okay

I don't know bikes out So the single fixed gear Makes the pedals turn with the wheel So they can't coast Oh sure Yeah okay It's like direct drive I'll give myself partial credit

Okay Good job Colin Oh good job everybody And this week This is your suggestion Chris, this week's topic? Yeah, I think so. Oh, great. You're like, I want to talk about fake things. Fake things. Well, we went to

when we were in Paris a couple of years ago, we went to La Muzé de la Cautrefaçain, the Museum of Counterfeits. Whoa. Is it just money? No, it's not just money. It was like counterfeit money, counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags, counterfeit makeup, counterfeit toothpaste, counterfeit

video games, counterfeit cars, like just, if you can fake it, they got it. If you can fake it, they have it. It was really fascinating. And so I've always had kind of a fascination with like counterfeiting and fakery and things of that nature. So this week we're going to talk about fakes, forgeries, mimics, and impostors. It's big is the new Fakes.

The final frontier. Oh, my God. It took us three hours to rehearse. It was the embarrassing part. It was like in stereo. They're sitting on both sides. That was the best take. So, I mean, fakes can mean any kind of things,

but really they all revolve around deception. Counterfeit is fake currency for the purposes of making yourself rich. One of the kind of fakes that really interests me, me is decoys, decoy fakes, you know. And decoes have really been on my mind a lot because I just read an article not too long ago about the discovery of a new species of spider. Have you guys read about this? Yes. The decoy spider? Yes. This is so great. We actually linked it out on our good job bringing Twitter. Oh, let's try. We had some cool spiders stuff. It's so scary. It is, it's great. So what this spider does, they just discovered it. And what this spider does is

make a fake decoy spider that it leaves in the web to fool predators. So, you know, birds or wasps in particular that will attack this spider. And so the thing is great. So it uses, like, little bits of, like, bark or twigs and some of its own webbing and just whatever debris it can get. And it constructs a decoy that's three or four times its natural size. And then it kind of just hides out of the way. And the photos of it are incredible. You look at these pictures.

You're like, I can't believe a spider made that. It's got, you know, kind of a rough body and little legs. There goes humanity. There goes humanity. Spiders are making decoys now. What does it do once the bird gets there? They say that the spiders that make these decoys have a higher rate of survival. So it's, I don't know if you can answer the why.

It doesn't eat the bird. Okay, yeah, it doesn't eat a bird. Let's say a bird is going to fly at your spider web and try to eat you. Like, okay, maybe the bird flies at the decoy and try to see the decoy, but maybe that gives you just enough time to get away. Right. Well, so I should also emphasize that they say that one of its main predators are a wasp. So I don't know that it, like, flies away with it. It's, you know, it'll attack the decoy and then maybe go on its way, right.

Or get caught in the spider web. Right, that's true. So I think a smart decoy spider would become a booby-trapped decoy spider and construct an additional booby trap behind the web to trap the bird. Taint the spider, the fake spider. And then when they're eating spiders, man, we should be spiders. In 10 years, they're going to discover a new species. All right. Well, I'm going to restore your guys faith in humanity a little bit here because this was really sort of just a intro to what I want to talk about, which is human-made decoys.

Oh. The military has just a great, incredibly interesting history of using decoys. I had always heard about these growing up, but I didn't realize how extensive the use of decoys was. So one of my favorite uses of decoys is fake tanks, okay? And this was a big thing, partly in World War I, but really taking off in World War II. The Soviets and the Germans in particular, the British became really adept at this. And part of it makes a lot of sense. Like, a real tank is expensive, slow to move around.

And if it gets blown up, it's a huge investment down the tube. So making decoy tanks does two things. You can put up a field with tanks literally made out of wood and painted canvas. So from a distance, if you have an enemy scout, you know, it looks like, oh, they've got a lot more forces there. One of the other real uses of the decoy tanks was for aerial bombardment. You know, that if you're flying over, again, you're in the bomber view window of an airplane at many thousands of feet. If you see things that look approximately like tanks, you'll drop your playadilla on there. And you've now thrown the enemy off your trail.

The Soviets were really considered to kind of be the masters of this. They would go so far as to build little skeleton skins that they could pop on jeeps because jeeps are cheaper. So, you know, you pop the fake tank skin on. So you could actually drive it around. So it gives the appearance of being able to move these tanks around. That tank is going 60 miles per hour. It became such an important part of warfare and the deception that there were whole divisions of the armies given to just making decoys. And again, you know, the Soviets just,

They would have decoys of everything's, fake missiles, fake missile launchers, fake tanks, fake ships. There were inflatable tanks that are just who you sound like. It's, you know, you look up close. You'd be like, nobody would fool by this. But that's the point. You don't need to be fooled up close. The American troops during the invasion of Normandy, they credit a big part of the success is that leading up to the invasion, they had large masses of fake vehicles in various invasion

points. And the idea was to fool the Germans into thinking, oh, they're going to attack here. here because this is where all the vehicles are massing. And in fact, it draws attention away from where you have your real vehicles stored up. Wow. I sort of thought that this was something that would have gone out with World War II. I'm like, all right, well, you get high enough technology. This isn't really going to fool anybody. But no, of course not. It makes sense. The decoy technology keeps up with the enemy technology. Of course. The U.S. military, we have the M1 Abrams tank, you know, just a staple of the U.S. military. And, you know, these things are

millions and millions of dollars. They develop M1 tank decoys that only cost a few thousand $1,000. And part of the project is you can fit an M1 tank decoy into a duffel bag. They are proud of this. So it collapses. It folds up. It's like a tent. Yes, it's exactly. It's like a little tent. So you bring out your little fake tank decoy, pop it up, unfold it. It can be done by just a couple people out in the field. They get so advanced that some of these tank decoys can even give off fake heat signatures. So if you're in an enemy aircraft above, you'll get fake heat signatures coming off of them. they have audio recordings if they even need to simulate the sound of a tank fleet moving around.

Wow. And this is just tanks. They're also fake planes, too. And again, you know, from a cost-benefit analysis, okay, well, if I can make a fake plane, you know, for thousands of dollars and it gets blown up, big deal versus a real plane that costs $30 million in getting blown up. As we get closer and closer to current day, it's harder and harder to find details about what kind of decoys the government actually has. So what I'm describing to you, some of this information is over 20 years old. So you can Imagine just how much more advanced has gotten in the last 20 years. Hologram. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, and again, it's, you, you, you are only half joking. You are only half joking. It might be. Yeah. So, again, it's, you know, next time you're out on a bombing run, trying to bomb some tanks. Take a minute. Make sure that they're real tanks before you drop your bombs on. All right.

Thank you. That's good advice. That's news you can use. One of my favorite things to do when I'm on an airplane is to browse through SkyMall. Which is the catalog and weird stuff. And they always sell the fake person decoy that you can buy. Like it's like a life-sized fake person. Oh, like the ones that you put in your car.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can go in the carpool lane. Or you can put it in your house so you can do like a home alone thing where it looks like there's people in the house. Oh, yeah, okay, sure. I wish I could meet someone who bought one of those things. You know, I want to know what's it like. Yeah, I want your, yeah, your you story of this fake person. Yeah. I remember when actually Chris suggested the topic, I was like, oh, yes, finally I can talk about this one cool thing. But then I also have a very deep fear of it. So what I suffer is motophobia. Mottophobia is fear of moths. I don't like moths. I'm fine with butterfly. Something about moths.

Freak me out. They're furry and they're fuzzy and they look creepy and they flap. It's almost like. We just go for it. Yeah. They're aggressive flyers. They are. But for this segment, I put on my big boy pants and I decided to research this. So there's a moth. And moths are usually nocturnal. But this type of moth, they sometimes fly during the day or at around sundown. And they're called the hummingbird moth.

So they're called hummingbird moths because they look like hummingbirds. They're huge. They're big. So they're a little bit smaller than hummingbirds, but they're pretty meaty. They're fat and they're plump and they're fuzzy. So it kind of looks like feathers. The way they fly actually almost looks exactly like how a hummingbird will fly. They flit?

Yes, they flip. They can hover. They can fly vertically horizontally. It doesn't have a beak, but it does have the proboscis, which is the curly thing, like a tongue that they use to extend and drink nectar from flowers, like butterflies. So the proboscis actually really long and you can see it. And it almost looks like a beak. Huh. And it makes an audible humming noise.

What? This insect. If you didn't know, you would think you're looking at a hummingbird. What color? They're like brown. Okay, like mothy color. Yeah. I think the only thing that quickly gives it away is probably their antennas.

But they're moving so fast that you can't see the antennas at all. Or you think they're feathers. Even though I have a few of moths, this is amazing. Where are they found? They're found. In your nightmares. Really? They sound cool.

They're kind of cute, too, and surprising that I'd say that. They're found mostly in warmer areas in Europe and in Asia. Here's the other thing, if we're talking about mimicry or biomimicry, the eggs that they lay, they're glossy and they're pale green. They're said to look like flower buds of the host plant that they hang out around. It's like a natural camouflage. Crafty little bugs. I have a quiz Okay Oprah

You get a quiz And you get a quiz Well if we're talking about fakes Let's talk about one of my favorite things Fake bands Yes fake bands Bands from movies Bands from TV

Sometimes sometimes as good as Or slightly better than real bands Sometimes often mistaken for real bands It is a straight up quiz I will quiz you I'll ask you a question and you will tell me These are all themed around fake bands. Okay, okay.

All right. I think I know one. Okay, all right. The members of this fake band were actually later in another fake band called the Folksman, Karen. Spinal Tap. Spinal Tap. Yes, yes. The members of Spinal Tap were then in the movie A Mighty Wind.

A long time ago, my brother, like, asking me like, wait, no, spinal tap's a real band, aren't they? Spinal Tap really did cross over to the point that a lot of people do think that they are an actual band. Yeah. Yeah. They go on tour sometimes. They do. Well, yes, the members, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, and, oh, Christopher Guest, of course, Christopher Guest. Do go on tour, and Karen and I saw them on tour.

They're as close to... Yeah, but they might be real now. They really blur the line, don't they? Okay, so how about this? This fake band from the TV show Full House was fronted by John Stamos's character. Oh. Oh. Jesse and the...

Coasters in the something, no. No. I'm not going to be able to retrieve it. Oh, I don't know. You'll know, but I hear it. It's Jesse and the Rippers. Yes. Jesse and the Rippers became big in Japan when they covered the Beach Boys hit forever.

Because, of course, they did. We also did Kokomo. I remember that episode. Well, that was with the Beach Boys. John Stamos actually would play in Beach Boys concerts with them sometimes. Really? Yeah. He's a talented musician.

Yeah. That's true. Wow. Here's another one you've. probably read or heard about and may not be able to recall, but we'll see. Referenced obliquely in the books, this fake band played in one of the films of this mega-hit franchise with a song called Do the Hippagriff. Karen.

Is it the Weird Sisters? It is the Weird Sisters in the Harry Potter franchise is the band that they're all fans are. And they're in movie four. They're in movie four. At the Yule Tide Ball. Yes, indeed. At the Yule Ball, they play their hit song. Do the Hippagriff.

Did not take place in the books. The only two members of this fake band who really sang on the albums were Shirley Jones and David Cassidy. Sounds like Colin. That is the Partridge family. That is the Partridge family. Yes, yes. Definitely a fake band. Yeah.

The plot of this movie sees the main characters travel to a future in which their band, Wild Stallions, are worshipped. Let's go with Dana. Bill and Ted's excellent adventure. No. Oh, wait, to the future, Bill and Ted's bogus journey. Oh, okay.

Sorry. Bill and Ted's bogus journey, yes. The lead singer of this fake band appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2009 to play the band's signature song, Friends Forever. It was from a... It was from a popular television show, those popular kids in the 1990s.

Was it from one of the... The Nickelode. It wasn't one of the Nickelodeon? Nickelodeon. So the actor who appeared on Jimmy Fallon to play the song was Mark Paul Gosseler. What's the name of the band? Oh. From Saved by the Bell. Yeah, I have no idea. Wow.

Snack Attack. I don't know. Oh, it's Zach Attack. Zach Attack is the name of the band. That's great. Well done. Friends Forever. Wow.

Much like the Beatles, this fake band, reunited on a rooftop for one final performance of their hit, Baby on board. Colin? That is the B-sharves. The B-sharves. From the Simpsons. All right. Fake bandception. This fake band was forced to play an even faker band at a film shoot. The even faker band

they were forced to play was called Cap'n Gitch and the Shrimp Shack Shooters. Whoa. So it's a fake band. Yes. A fake band from a movie. And at one point in the movie, they were forced to the band, Cap'n' Geach and the Shrimp Shack Shooters. Oh, man. That sounds familiar.

They're a very, very famous fake band, of all the fake bands. This is a big one. The movie is that thing you do. What is the name of the band? The Wonders. The Wonders. Yes. This fake band was assembled for a 70s television show, then became a real band.

It's the monkeys? The monkeys. Yeah, okay. The only thing I doubted it, I wasn't trying to play. if it was 60s or 70s. Yes. The monkeys originally were not hired to, like, play their own instruments. They were musicians, but they weren't really hired to, like, be an actual band. And then

eventually they kind of, like, got creative control of the, the music, and they did go out on tour playing their own instruments as a real band. But they were assembled as a fake band. This fake band was fronted by record producer Jerica Benton. Oh!

Jim in the hologram. That is correct. And finally, it's not George Clooney singing in this fake band, but it's bluegrass singer Dan Tyminsky. Karen. The soggy bottom boys. The soggy bottom boys. Oh, brother, we're out there.

Wow, that's tricky. Had a big hit with Man of Constant Sorrow, which none of the soggy bottom boys actually played. And that's the fake band. That's great. That was hard, too. So we're talking about fakes and decoys and bluffs, and so I'm going to tell you a crazy-pants story I found about this guy who faked his own death. Oh, I love these. I love these. So the person is Lord Timothy Dexter, and he was born in Massachusetts in 1748.

Whoa, that long ago. Yeah, and he was like kind of a self-made man. He was poor, but he was an author and he was a go-getter, and he wrote a book, and it had tons of typos, and I mean, typos. It had tons of punctuation and grammatical errors, so he had to give it away for free, and then it went into eight printings, and he was kind of a jokester, and people criticized him on the punctuation and the book. book so when he reprinted it he had a page in the back it was just full of commas and periods so like punctuation marks what a jerk that's good i like that so make your own yeah he wrote on it place it as you please so that's who we're dealing with that's the guy that the story revolves around so he did the oldest the oldest trick in the book comes up on sitcoms it comes up in movies it's so corny now but maybe he invented it he wanted to know what

people thought of him. So he fakes his own death. And this is the 1700s. So it's not to, like, escape why, I mean, you're really in a jam. He just wanted to hear what people say about him when he's out of the room. Yeah. So he faked his own death. He, three thousand people came to his funeral. Now, what did he do? How did he fake his own death? He just told people that he died. Like, but I don't know. I believe him. Like, he just really, so I die. He was a self-styled lord. So he was like, he was like, Like, Lord Timothy Dexter die, you know. He sent out, like, his own fake announcements, basically. Yeah, he did.

And he tried to get as many people as he could to go to his funeral. 3,000 people showed up. Well, huge. And then his wife was there, and she wasn't crying as hard as he thought she should be crying. Oh, he didn't tell his wife. No. Oh, God. He wanted to know what she thought.

Wow. Yeah, he was a piece of work. You're saying yourself up there for some really potentially embarrassing, hurtful things, yeah. She wasn't really reacting the way he thought she should react when such a great person died. So he came out and he beat her at the funeral. What's going on in this story? It's crazy. I imagine him like hiding the bag dress like a little old lady or something and then just ripping off a wig.

And I shouldn't joke about it. But I mean, she's attacking his wife at his own funeral. I wish there were more first person accounts. But it was just like this guy. It was crazy. And you're right, it is. I have absolutely seen that plot on sitcoms. Yeah, it's such a trope.

And I was like, was he the first? Well, I just, you know, it's just such a simpler time. It was so much easier to fake your death back then. Yeah, right, exactly. You could just send out an announcement. Oh, he's dead. All right. Let's take a quick break.

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Weapons. And we're back. You're listening to Good Job Brain. And this week we're talking about fakes, forgeries, mimicry, imposter's, lies, and other bad stuff. Other forms of deception. Yeah. Trick-fixie business, yeah. So clearly we should talk about counterfeit money.

Yes. Oh, yeah. Okay, all right. People have been counterfeiting money since there was money. Clearly, like you see money and you're like, gee, well, I mean, if, Somebody's going to give me, like, a bushel of rice for this tiny little piece of copper. Like, what if I were going to make a fake one? Then I could get many bushels of rice.

The motivation is just readily apparent. Right, exactly. You don't have to think too hard. I want more of it. And this is why counterfeiting is, of course, done by some of the most brilliant criminals, you know, making, like, incredible money that is just extraordinary. And then the absolute stupidest people in the world who literally think it is a smart idea to, like, print a $5 bill on their inkjet printer. and, like, tape the sides together and try to pass it off. Do counterfeit in the olden days would carry the death penalty?

Whoa. Because if you think about it, it's not just like, oh, I stole this $5 item from this guy because I made a fake $5 bill. Like, if you are counterfeiting and you are pumping a lot of fake money into the system, you can ruin a country with counterfeit money. It can be an incredible danger to the actual stability of that nation. if there's too much counterfeit money because it totally devalues

the currency, the real currency of that nation and you can make them broke. Great Britain tried this on America during the Revolutionary War. Really? They counterfeited American currency and tried to get that counterfeit American currency into the country to destabilize our currency

and devalue it. That is so smart. That's devious. The Nazis were going to try this against the allies. They actually had Jews in concentration Camps printing counterfeit, like millions of counterfeit British pounds that they were going to try to inject into Great Britain to weaken them.

Yeah. Money used to be the value of the metal in the coin. That's true. People used to do is called clipping. They would take coins and they'd shave the silver or the gold around the edges. And then they would get as much of those shavings as they could and then melt those into new coins. And that they'd kill your friends.

for that. I mean, they draw in court of you for that if they call you doing that, too. Benjamin Franklin made some, actually printed some of the first paper money in the colonies and printed on this money was, to counterfeit is death. Benjamin Franklin did not mince his words. It was estimated in the United States of America that after the Civil War, anywhere from one third to one half of the paper currency in the United States was counterfeit. For where? There was a huge, people were just making it.

Well, here's the thing, right? So as per the Treasury, the Treasury has this on their website. At that time, there were approximately 1,600 state banks designing and printing their own notes. Each note had a different design. And so there were 7,000 varieties of genuine paper currency in the United States, and then there were 4,000 varieties of counterfeits. So it was really, really difficult to distinguish real from fake. And so basically what they ended up doing was in, well, in 1863, they established a national paper currency.

Prior to that moment, the U.S. just had coins. And then what, what do you think happened? People printed stuff on paper. They started counterfeiting the national currency. And so then two years later, after the adoption of national currency, that is when they established the Secret Service. Secret Service, which I think we might have talked about on the show before, the Secret Service was originally established to prevent counterfeiting.

Outside the U.S., the most counterfeited bill is the $100 bill. the one that's the most in circulation everywhere. But in fact, apparently inside the U.S., the most counterfeited bill is the 20. Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, it's easier just to pass 20s in general. It is. And so what you do is you make a whole bunch of 20s, and then you just go store by store

buying a pack of gum for $20 because, again, people aren't going to look at it. If they get a 50, they're going to get a counterfeit pen and they're going to be really scrutinizing it with the 20. You just go around passing bad 20s, and you get $19 and change back for every one of them. and it's a small time criminal operation. There's also, and I think that this is tremendous, that they actually have to tell people and more people about this, but there's something called raised notes. And what these are, people will take a dollar bill,

and they'll take a $10 bill, and they'll cut the corners off of the $10 bill, a real $10 bill, and they will tape them or glue them onto a $1 bill. Now, if you have more than 50% of a U.S. bill, that's still legal tender. So a bill with a corners cut off, you could take it to the bank. But then don't know what you did. Well, yeah, unless they don't, you know, unless you rip it in half or try to disguise it somehow.

But, like, on the Treasury, you can see, you know, a $1 bill with George Washington on it that somebody taped the tens on the corners to. That's great. And people will take these things because they're just not looking for it. Now, here's the part that you really have to worry about. If you end up with a piece of fake currency, you have lost the game of musical chairs. It is the hot potato and you're stuck with it. No one's going to reimburse you for it. Right.

It is fake and you are out that money. If someone detects it, if you unknowingly bring a counterfeit to a store and hand it over to the cashier, they're like, this is counterfeit. You don't get it back. You don't get it back. They actually keep it and they're supposed to give it to the secret service. And if they were to unknowingly give it back to you and now you're on notice that it's counterfeit and you go to try to spend it somewhere else, now you are committing a crime. Right.

Because now you are on notice. You know it's counterfeit. Yeah. There have been instances where people get a counterfeit note from the bank and they go home and they try to spend it and they're like, it's counterfeit and take it back to the bank. And the bank's just like, sorry, we can't do anything about this. How would they know that it was them who passed it to you and that you're not trying to run a scam? Why are they giving you a dollar? Why are they doing it?

Yeah. No, it's true. It's true. It's like shouldn't the bank have a better system for, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So how do they actually make bills now? Like I know they have really, really high-tech ways, but what are some of the things that they use? Well, I mean, the paper has all these little tiny, I mean, you've looked at a dollar bill and there's all these little fibers and things like that in it.

And I mean, so what some people will do is they'll take an actual $5 bill and they'll bleach it. And then they'll print $100 bill design on it. But if you hold it up to the light, you can still see the ghost of Abraham Lincoln staring out at you from the bleached $5 bill. There's actually, they call this, I ran a question. this as well. They're called super dollars. It's this rash of counterfeit bills that the United States speculates might be made in North Korea. I hear that North Korea is a source of a lot of counterfeit. And North Korea says it's actually made by the CIA has sort of prank against North Korea. Who's right? I don't know. They're so good. Like the paper quality is so good and the

printing quality is so good because the printing quality on these things like the the etchings and the lines are so sharp and crisp miniature. Yeah. And these are typically blurred on a counterfeit, but the super dollars, they call them, are so good that a way to tell them from regular dollars is that they're actually of higher quality than regular dollars. They're over-engineered. Yeah. As you say, though, a lot of it is the paper, like the little fibers in the paper or the little strips that they started embedding and the watermarks now to do all these things.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I mean, you talk about counterfeit detection. Like, we've all seen it. We go to the market and they've got the little pen, they run across it, or sometimes they'll hold it under the little UV light detector. And these are all to look for signs of tampering or making fake money and things like that. And I'll tell you, the pens, they say, don't actually work anymore because all you have to do is use hairspray on your fake bill.

Basically, it prevents the ink from soaking in. And so when you use it, when you have used hair spray on it, it doesn't show up as being fake. Right, right. So it's for counterfeiting. You know, as home printers get better and better, we need to stop the guy from just printing up a $5 bill and cutting it out and passing it to a unsuspecting merchant somewhere. This is a real concern, actually. As home technology like printers and things started to get better and better and better, governments were starting to get really nervous, in fact. I mean, in the U.S. government in particular, because moving into the 80s, 90s, you can get

home printers with incredibly high resolution. You can get scanners with incredibly high resolution. And so, you know, law enforcement agencies particularly are worried about criminals using this, you know, what's to stop a criminal from scanning in at incredibly high res, a $20 bill, and then printing out. own versions on a super high printer. Well, the answer is that the government works with technology companies to build in anti-counterfeiting protection in the devices that you already have. So this is sort of in your house. In my printer. That's right. So we've talked to, this is sort of one of those open secret kind of things where the printer companies don't deny that this is true. And in fact, they boast about it because it helps. So for example, you have, you know,

say an HP printer. They can program the printer to recognize currency and, basically, basically refuse to scan currency. Whoa. Yes. And so they will work with the U.S. government. Again, we'll take the $20 bill as an example. But will they report me, like, through some wireless, like, beep, beep, beep, this person is Scott.

Hold on, hold on to that question for a second. Hold on to that question. What about doing for an art project? The answer may surprise you. Right. Don't Wi-Fi or printer. That's a great question is, is like, well, what about fair use or what's to stop me from finding a high-res image of a $20 bill on the web?

You know, why didn't need to scan it in, all right? So one thing that, you know, scanner's can be programmed to do. Again, this is by the manufacturers in full cooperation with the government, is to not only recognize patterns of currency, but specific colors. So say, for example, we're talking about the green ink that we use in American currency is mostly green on one side. They can program their scanners to recognize the exact tint of that green. So it knows whether you're scanning a reproduction of a bill or the actual bill. And if you try and print it out, they can embed a signal in that color that it prints it banded or jaggy or with noise in it, foiling you from reproducing

the exact features of bills. Now, again, I want to stress, these are common features now built into modern scanners that they don't necessarily advertise on the box, but they are in fact built in. Okay, so say somehow you get an awesome high-res image of a $20 bill onto your computer. It's super, super, super detailed and the quality could fool somebody. How do I produce it? All right, maybe I've got a great printer. So now the printer companies are like, okay, how do we do this without crippling the printing ability for people for normal uses? So are you guys familiar with the term steganography at all? You may have heard this term.

Yeah. Encrypt, it's big in that cryptography circle. Stegonography is basically, it comes from hidden writing. It's like hiding information in other information. So they have programs that can embed documents in a photo, for example. Okay, so steganography. And the same route from Stegasaur means like covered, covered writing. Oh.

Printer's technology is the means by which your common household printers, HP, Epson, whatever it is, they will embed tracking pixels when you print things out. Virtually every major manufacturer that makes inkjet or laser printers, when they produce anything that you print, they will print a unique coded arrangement of yellow pixels that are not visible to the naked eye unless you're looking up really close or have a really high scan of it. And what this is is a signature that can say this came from this printer with this ID number that was sold and they can track it all the way back up through the chain. So your question is, well, how could they find me? The way they could find you is that if some merchant, as Chris says, you know, if merchants get counterfeit bills, they're supposed to contact the feds.

And what the feds can do is they know sort of the codebook that the printer manufacturers use. And they can say, all right, it came from this exact printer with this serial number. But that's only if I use it. That's only if you use that printer. But again, this is major printer manufacturers are sort of, let's say they're encouraged by the government to install these features, by which I mean they are more or less told to. But my fear is still the alert. There's no beep, beep, beep, beep, this person using, they're going to GPS mat me. Well, you know, certainly.

You're like, hey, guys, I'm just printing out for an R project. They could easily get there with a technology. And of course, you know, there are a lot of privacy advocates who are, you know, for good reasons, they're really against this technology because it can be used to spy on you. You know, I mean, it's like any other technology that's ostensibly for law enforcement purposes. You could think of other ways to use it. So there are, if you go online, you can find a ways to hack your printer and turn off and turn off the embedding tracking pixels. Yeah. I was like, you make me want to go home and hack my printer right now.

There are whole websites dedicated to telling you basically how to get, if you know what you're doing, how to get inside and stop your printer from sending these things. Oh, I just want to see the track. Like, I actually want to experiment to see if my printer does it. If you have an off-the-shelf printer from any major manufacturer, but in the last, decade or more, your printer is producing tracking pixels. Oh, that and decoy spiders? Oh, what a world. And just to drive the point home, all of this is driven by trying to prevent counterfeit. Again, it's really, really potentially dangerous.

That's true. It's true. I just feel weird that it's doing sneaky stuff. Right, right, right. I have another quick news bit about imitators for the last decade. people have been worried about the bees disappearing. Right, right, the colony collapse. Yes, the colony collapse, and it's a big deal because without bees, then their main job is to pollinate crops, and that's becoming a problem. So Harvard decided to try to find a possible solution with the bees disappearing that maybe we can do something, meanwhile, to continue their work of pollinating crops and stuff.

So what they did was they invented machines that can both fly and, to some extent, behave like bees. These are little machines. Robo bees. They're called robo bees. They're actually called. That was my ending segment. I'll be like, guess what they're called. They're actually called robo bees.

And they're as big as probably a little bit smaller than like a coin. and they have bee-like wings, but the body is like mechanical. So in 2007, this Harvard Lab conducted the first successful flight of a Robo Bee. They can fly by themselves. And they even have a hive that they go to, mostly for refueling and for charging. It's not like their actual hanging out because they're machines. That would be really awesome. It's scary, actually.

That's something they're working on is they can guide Robo bees. from flower to flower. They're also trying to inject algorithms and programming so that they can behave in a colony. I can't see any way this big are wrong. Exactly, it is. They won't have a queen,

but the robo bees will live in a hive and maybe in a couple of years or in a decade that they will have hive mentality and colony mentality. I'm sitting here thinking about how, oh, this is how the human race falls. But the thing is, it's not just pollination, too. I mean, they can potentially use this for search and rescue missions after, like, a natural disaster or nuclear disaster,

military surveillance or mapping climates and places that, you know, it's hard to reach. Right, right. People. They're just their little micro drones, basically. They are. It's size of a coin. They can maybe monitor traffic in the future, like a whole bunch of robo bees just flying out. And then, okay, I got this part.

I got this quadrant. I got this quadrant. They fly back and they give you the information. Man, this episode is like full of things that may that might wipe out the human race. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, true. Counterfeiting, Robobies. Decoy spiders.

Decoy spiders. Triggering my doomsday prepper. Yeah. Get to Toronto's main venues like Budweiser Stage and the new Roger Stadium with Go Transit. Thanks to Go Transit's special online e-ticket fairs, a $10 one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel on any weekend day or holiday anywhere along the go network. And the weekday group passes offer the same weekday travel flexibility across the network, starting at $30 for two people and up to $60 for a group of five. Buy your online go pass ahead of the show at go transit.com

slash tickets. And Dana, you have a last quiz segment for us, right? Yes. It's kind of a grab bag of fake imitation, faux, hoaxy, imposter things. So get your buzzers ready. All right. Famous people who had this item include Winston Churchill, Clark Gable, Emma Watson, and George Washington. Emma Watts. False teeth? Yes.

Oh. Emma Watson lost her teeth while she was filming Harry Potter, so she had to get little fake teeth. Wow. I have fake teeth. I have one. I have two. Why are you so surprised? I don't have any fake teeth at all.

I don't have any fake teeth. No, I want a fake tooth. They're like hide stuff in there. No, it's not like a little locket. It's like keys and things in there. What would you hide in a fake tooth? That's between me and my fake tooth. Oh, no.

If I ordered serimi in a restaurant, what would I be served? Serimi? Serimi. And a Japanese restaurant. Can you spell it, though? Is that crab or fake crab? Yeah. Oh, okay.

Oh, it specifically is the imitation crab? Yes. S-U-R-I-M-I, right? Yeah. Yeah. And the mid-90s, early 2000s, this author wrote The autobiographical novels, Sarah, and the heart is deceitful above all things about growing up as a truck stop prostitute. But this author was exposed as a fake in 2005 in New York Magazine article.

Oh, I remember this. Who was this? I remember when this happened. Oh, frustrating. It's J.T. Leroy. And I have a story about J.T. Leroy. Yes, that's right. They were starting to get heat about being a hoax.

They called one of my friends and offered to send a raccoon penis necklace. to her random penis bone necklace oh oh that's not a live one and I was like wow that is crazy I was a little jealous really really really you want a raccoon penis bone I guess you raccoon I think it was like supposed to bring luck or something not for the raccoon not for you JT Leroy either

a few more of those Jud Apatow launched a fake sitcom on NBC.com to promote his film Funny People. Oh, what was the name of the TV show, the fake sitcom? Yo Teach! Yeah. Oh, that's right. I thought it was real. That was in the movie.

I didn't know that they actually made a fake trailer. It was on Hulu, too, and I watched it, I was like, this show is horrible. What is this? That's funny. Yo, Teach. Yeah. With Jason Shortsman. This show stars Betty White and a cast of senior citizens, pulling pranks on unsuspecting

folks in Southern California. Karen. Oh, why do I know this? Off their rockers. Betty White's off their rockers. I need to see this show. It's a real show. Like, if you told me, I was like, oh, it sounds fake.

No, it's Betty White and a bunch of funny old people pull pranks. I would watch that. I would watch that. My parents really enjoy that show a lot. All right. Last one. It's tricky. It's a tongue twister for me.

All right. Take your tongue. Polymethyletylite acrylics are better known in beauty circles as what? Fake nails. Yeah. Yeah. Go caring. Fake nails.

Have you ever had them before? No. They suck. Wait, they... Not like Lee press on nails, but like some serious shit. Like the ones that they glue... They changed the chemical. Yeah.

Oh. That's the worst. And they were like people getting infections and stuff, right? Wasn't that it? There's just nothing but trouble. They're crazy business. It's a lot of chemicals. And I think, like, different people have different reactions.

And some people, like, react really badly. It takes a long time for your nails to recover when you take them off. And they feel glamorous for the first little while. And then you're like, why did I do this? This is a mistake. It's not worth. Good job, you guys. All right.

And that is our show. Thank you guys for joining me. And thank you guys listeners for listening in. Hope you learn a lot about. spying printers counterfeiting money and robobies. You can find us on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, and on our website, which is goodjobbrain.com. And check out our sponsor at bonobos.com. And we'll see you guys next week.

Bye. See Chris down. It feels really good to be productive, but a lot of the time it's easier said than done, especially when you need to make time to learn about productivity so you can actually, you know, be productive. But you can start your morning off right and be ready to get stuff done in just a few minutes with the Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day podcast. New episodes drop every weekday, so listen and subscribe to Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day

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