July 26, 2019 • 60 mins
Did the real Paul McCartney die in a car accident, only to be replaced by a doppelgänger? What about the similar stories surrounding Taylor Swift, Avril Lavigne, Saddam Hussein and more? Join the guys as they explore the facts, fiction and plausibility of celebrity body doubles, replacements and more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:24):
to the show. My name is Matt Noel is on
an adventure they called me Ben. We are joined as
always with our super producer Paul mission Controled decade. Most importantly,
you are you. You are here, and that makes this
stuff they don't want you to know. We have a
special guest of sorts today, Matt, we do. We have
j J. Paseway. He's a new producer here at the
(00:45):
I Heart Radio Network, the I Heart Radio Podcast Network.
That's a hard shrug you're doing there, man. Whatever this
thing is that we're a part of is called Yeah,
it's pretty pretty awesome. It's good to good to have
you here. J J. Apparently he knew like what this
show was before getting here, right, and we're still friends. Yeah,
I know, he's like trip. He hasn't looked me in
(01:07):
the eye yet, just because I kind of like ran
into the studio right before we hit record. Yeah, and
I can't see him because my view of J J.
Oh okay, he's looking at me. Oh gosh. Yeah. Yeah.
Well you've got sort of blue steel vibe going on today,
so I can see how people would be, you know,
got you a little bit intimidated. Oh I'm feeling it.
I'm feeling the blue steel. Yeah, I'm going for kind
(01:29):
of an eye of the tiger thing and I'm sort
of doing it. I'm pulling it off kind of. Oh no,
I'm seeing the intensity. So just to check in with you,
everything is good. We just had our big July four,
like I guess, weekend. Yeah, yeah, I have some some
traveling that I need to catch up on. But uh yeah,
July four America, right. I hope you had a good
(01:52):
weekend as well. And if you are listening in a
different country, July four, and I think it's weird for
us to assume everybody knows this. July four is when
the United States celebrates independence from Britain, right, And the
way in which the US most often tends to celebrate
(02:12):
this day is through getting kind of drunk, lighting fireworks
and having barbecues. There you go, and that's what some
of us did. That's very diplomatic. How you guys doing
out there in the booth, thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs up,
all the way comes up. That's great. And how are
(02:33):
you doing, folks out there listening to day? Uh? Do
you have something on your mind? How We're going to
investigate some pretty interesting stuff here that may be familiar
to some of us. If at any time while we're
exploring this strange rabbit hole, the spirit so moves you
when you have something on your mind that you want
to tell us and you don't wanna have to type
(02:53):
it out, they have no fear. You can pause, the
show will wait for you, and you can give us
a call. You can call us at one eight three
three S T D W I T K. You'll you'll
figure it out. You'll here, been on there, You'll know
you're in the right place. And I feel like we've
established the rules of the call I lied such that
(03:14):
at this point, you know, fill it up. Yeah, all
you have to do is call so. So we talked
at the top here just about how um, honestly odd
it is when someone, UM, I can't speak for you, Ben,
but it's an odd experience when someone recognizes your voice. UM.
(03:36):
And on this show, it's only happened to me a
handful of times. Um. I'm assuming that it's happened to
you more because you had a visual presence on this
show for so long, UM, and so many people watch
those videos. But today we're talking about the concept of
being known, of being recognized right to the nth degree.
(03:59):
As indeed, Matt, we are talking about the concept of celebrity.
Celebrity is really bizarre when you think about it. Since
before the dawn of recorded human history, we've looked to
place our beliefs and our values on the form of
a familiar face, something that is like us. Abstract ideas
are all well and good on their own, but generally speaking,
(04:20):
humans like other humans or things that look like humans,
and they want that to be sort of a coat
rack upon which ideas hang, something with which we can
directly identify. So for a lot of people, maybe during
the Cold War in the West, when they thought of communism,
(04:43):
they didn't think of a bunch of ideals written by
some stuffy, old dead European folks. They they thought about, uh,
specific propaganda image, maybe a soldier in red marching or something. Yeah,
we we are a symbol seeking being, uh, the human is,
(05:04):
and these celebrities a lot of times are the representations
of from propaganda. Are ways for us to quickly organize
the way we feel about something or the way way
we should feel about something, or way we actually do
feel about something or someone right. And we can be
blinded by this too, which is a bit of a
different bag of badgers for us. We can be blinded
(05:24):
by this in strange ways, and our brains are pretty
good at making things seem normal. So picture, imagine your mind,
the most famous person you can think of, the most
famous person, caveat who is alive today. If that person
said something that didn't gibe with what they usually say,
(05:48):
their die hard supporters are more likely to go along
with it because they identify with the person first interesting
and the idea that they have. You know, they can
be led along or let us stray someone see, just
by the way in which that person with whom they
identify says or explains a certain thing. And this is
(06:11):
why human beings love the concept of celebrities. In a
lot of ways, celebrities today are similar to deities in
ancient times. You know, people obsess over them. We perform
certain rituals, and that doesn't necessarily mean you know, you're uh,
sacrificing and got to Neil de grass Tyson or Bill
(06:32):
High or something. It can be as simple as checking
your Instagram stories every day or every couple of hours
or something right right. Or you always listen to a
song by your favorite musician when you're about to do
a thing, you know what I mean, Like you always
play on the Road Again by Willie Nelson when you're
(06:52):
on a road trip. So that's the first track at least,
right right exactly, So when we perform these rituals, we
feel a genuine personal connection with entities that we may
have never met and may well never meet an hour lifetime,
and who may not be anything like the representation that
(07:14):
exists on whatever medium you're consuming exactly. So it's no
wonder then that the world of celebrity is also a
world rife with conspiracy. A while back, I wanted to
bring this to your attention. A while back, Matt, you
and I did a strange video which I still think
holds up. Yeah, it's it's kind of ridiculous, But in
(07:37):
that video we have this sort of meet the team
kind of thing, right, and in there you have you
built this great chart, uh, supporting the notion that Paul
McCartney had died and been replaced by someone else. Do
you remember this. I do remember this and shout out
to Diana, my wife, because she gave me most of
(07:59):
the information that was included in that. She helped me
build that thing. She is she has an obsession like
we're talking about with the Beatles, whether living or dead,
and she knows so much. She basically was like, oh, yeah, well,
here's all the things. You just put this on there,
put that on there, all cut all this stuff out here.
You got it. That's awesome, man, that's awesome. That video
(08:21):
is still around on our YouTube channel, which I missed,
by the way, for some reason. The main thing I
remember about that video is you holding some kind of
pipe and looking and explaining this conspiracy thing to me,
and then we're in a bathroom. Yeah, we realized we're
in a bathroom and you've been urinating the entire time.
(08:42):
That's right as it cuts over spoiler. Uh it is
safe for work. We should say that. We thought that
was hilarious. We hope you enjoy it. Maybe some of
our fellow long time listeners in the audience remember that
when today we're diving back into the world of celebrity conspiracy,
specifically the idea that some of the world's most famous
people have been secretly replaced by lookalikes, body doubles, dopplegangers,
(09:07):
who douple gangers. Who can I say it? So, guess what?
Here are the facts. It just doesn't sound the same
when you've got it. Here are the facts. When we
hear that word celebrity. You know, we've we've been talking
about this whole time. We're all on the same page.
We understand what that is. Somebody who is known a
famous person, an athlete, a musician and actor, maybe even
(09:29):
one of those insta fluencers. I don't even know how
you say it. Oh that's good, that's good, that exactly. Um.
But but there's a there's a thing here, and it's
it's tough to differentiate, but we're going to try and
do it. Here between someone being uh, capital F famous.
(09:52):
It's not really capital, but let's just use a capital
F as in this person is known throughout the world
for some reason as a a human person that does things,
but then an internet famous person that is slightly different. Yeah,
I would, I would say so, I would completely agree
with that. So we're talking maybe about athletes, musicians, actors
(10:19):
and so on. That's often what we mean, right when
we say, as you say, capital F famous or heads
of states or heads of religions, people who are photographed
by other people all the time. And then we have
and then we have the thing where people are maybe
more famous in a specific field. That's probably where I
(10:39):
would put what we call instant fluencers or uh, very
very well known YouTubers who focus on a specific thing, right,
And of course we have to be honest. Podcasters fall
in that. There are some there are some maybe they
count as capital F famous people who are also podcasters,
(11:04):
but they're not famous for that makes sense. Thinking about
Will Ferrell right there, Oh that's right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
he'll get into podcasts right now. I think it's just
Ron Burgundy. Oh yeah, exactly. So, so it's strange and
it's also, um, it's a bit unsettling the idea or
(11:27):
the notion of celebrity because it places hierarchical value on
people in a way that should not really exist. So,
with all that in mind, if we do a very
broad definition, if we sort of mash up those kind
of known in their field people and the worldwide known
(11:47):
people you know, the Michael Jackson's and so on. You
smash them all together into one thing. We can ask
ourselves how many people in this world, in one way
or another, would be considered amos. It's really really tough
to tell. Some, like you said, Matt, are known worldwide
as a kind of eternal position, like the pope changes,
(12:10):
but everybody is aware of the idea of the pope.
The pope is very very well known, not always very
very popular, but very very well known. And some people
are known more in their field of expertise. What's what's
someone who would be really specific field of expertise? We
know I'm thinking of scientists a lot of times, or
(12:35):
um like perhaps an FBI investigator that is known in
the true crime world and or the law enforcement field. Great, okay,
I've got one about Nobel Prize winners. So there's an
American astrophysicist, John C. Mather, who essentially proved that the
(12:56):
Big Bang was real, not just the theory. He is
very well known in his field. But you know, it's
difficult because if you ask the average this is not
a ding on the average person. If you ask the
average person name your two favorite astrophysicists. They might have
(13:17):
a tough time because most people's conversations are not going
to relate to that on a day to day basis.
So we have experts in their field, we have worldwide famous,
and then we have some infamous people like the child
molester Jeffrey Epstein. Oh, hey, it's not alleged. We don't
have to say alleged. Let's do an anti shout out
(13:38):
to you, Jeffrey Epstein for possibly actually facing charges and
going to jail. Maybe we'll see, we'll see. It's I
think at this point the money matters less than the
potential co conspirators who could be indicted. I don't know.
I don't want to be too skeptical about it, but
it's it's just so rare for people at that level
(14:01):
to go to jail, and especially after what happened last
time that we have a whole episode on about if
you're interested, but beware, you will throw things as you're
listening to it, right, And maybe it'll be like the
Westminster the Westminster child abuse circle where they tossed out
a few scapegoats posthumously, and then the people who are
(14:23):
implicated were also the people investigating it and nothing ever changed.
I don't know, I you know, hope springs eternal. Anyway.
So we've got those people infamous, the villains, the well
known experts in their field, the worldwide. Everybody knows who
that is kind of people. How do we tell how
many people in the world are are those sorts of folks? Well,
(14:47):
we we have some help here in this quest. Even
if it's not the perfect examination of it, it's it's
getting us somewhere. Right. There's this mathematician named Samuel Arbesman
who who took a pretty interesting approach in back inten
He looked at Wikipedia and they have this thing on
there called living People. It's a category in which you
(15:09):
can kind of search and navigate through. And at the
time that the count in the number of living people
was just over six hundred thousand, six hundred four thousand,
one seventy four. And he, uh, you know, he even
admitted when with his own study and everything he was doing,
(15:30):
that Wikipedia is no notability standard was pretty low. Uh
as when it came to like who is famous, who
is not famous? Who is worthy of being on Wikipedia? Right,
some of our co workers are in Wikipedia. I don't
think we are, but so our co workers are, yeah,
we are not Josh and Chuck. I believe you're on there,
and I think maybe Holly and Tracy. That makes sense.
(15:51):
The question here is how many of these over six
hundred thousand people has everyone heard of? Could one person
have heard of them all? That is doubtful. It's just
so many people. But with this in mind, we can,
at least, as Absmen puts it, get a hint of understanding.
(16:13):
We can. We can get a little bit of a
spider sense or a guestament about how common fame is
in the world. And so here's our shortcut works. He
divided the famous people count by the global population in
twenty thirteen, which was seven point oh six billion, approximately,
and then with that math he got the number of
(16:35):
point zero zero eight six percent, so much less than
one percent, which is probably good for everybody's sanity, right,
and probably bad for the celebrity stalker industry, but you know,
they're just gonna have to deal with it. This number
is not ironclad by any means, but it's still pretty
fascinating because it tells us when we're talking about possible
(16:58):
celebrity doppelgangers, were also talking about a very small subset
of an already very tiny slice of humanity, and based
on that fact alone, we might think initially, we might
think it would be easy to spot an impersonator or
a replacement. You know, there's someone saying I am the
(17:18):
number one, Uh, car Carly ray Jepson fan. Is that
a person? I think? So. I don't know who it is,
but I've heard that name before. Okay, so someone loves
this person, Carly ray Jepson. They say, I've got all
of her albums or videos, whatever, what is she is?
(17:39):
She's done it. If it's in the public sphere, then
I have it, says the super fan. So I would
notice immediately a change, even if those filthy, casual Carly
ray Jepson fans don't understand the magnitude of my work. Uh.
Then we could go a bit further and assume the
average living celebrity will tend to be photographed and filmed
(18:01):
more often than the average non celebrity, right, yeah, I
mean it would have to be, or would it. Yes.
So a lot of the things we've been discussing thus
far are our assumptions. We're making assumptions based on you know,
evidence and numbers and our own experiences, but they are assumptions.
(18:22):
But really think about it, if we're talking about the
current president or any president, or maybe some daytime news hosts. Many,
many famous people have entire groups of people teams who
are controlling their images. They have offices built around managing
the icon that is their very own celebrity, that is
(18:44):
a pr little gem or something that they get to
show around. And um, it may actually be easier for
a celebrity to be replaced because in many ways they've
they've already been replaced by all of these images of
of themselves, these versions, these virtual versions of themselves that
are out there. Sure, you know, they've had different haircuts
(19:04):
over you know, the time that they've been famous. They
wear a lot of different outfits, They go to all
these different places and do different things. Um, celebrities. Yeah,
I think it's a good point. On the celebrities were
more tightly controlled that one might imagine. When we say replaced,
we don't necessarily mean somebody's cutting off their fingers one
(19:26):
by one and sticking other people's fingers on their hands,
but that would be interesting. They live by scripts a
lot of times, even if it's not their own intention,
Like their words may not be their own, and words
maybe written by publicists or speechwriters or social media gurus.
Their candid selfies are often carefully orchestrated by professional photographers,
(19:50):
and their trends and attitudes or their public stances may
be dictated by deep dive marketing research indicating the most
attention grabbing responses, opinions, or hot takes of the day,
or for some movie that they're about to put out.
They have to say certain things or be careful not
to say other things. So it might not be as
(20:11):
difficult for a celebrity to be taken out and replaced.
It might not be as difficult as it initially sounds,
because let's admit it sounds kind of out there. But
the question is, could it really happened? Could some celebrity
known around the world actually be replaced? And if so,
how and if so why? And we're going to talk
(20:32):
about that after a quick word from our sponsor. Here's
where it gets crazy. We were talking about this earlier
off air. Body doubles are real stuff happened, yeah, oh
for real in in two places, and the first one
(20:55):
is one that you already know about. There are body
doubles in Hollywood in filmmaking for sure, Yeah, yeah, good call.
When when you're thinking about stunt doubles and stand ins,
there are there are people whose job it is to
to look like a celebrity and either stand in light
to make sure that it looks good with the costume
(21:16):
or something. And then also people who get paid to
do very dangerous, sometimes terrifying things and they look like
at least similar to a celebrity exactly, and they're but
they're publicly acknowledged. They're publicly acknowledged, but you won't know
who they are unless you're a huge fan of stunt
(21:37):
doubles or you know a person of a celebrity and
also know their stunt double or a team of stunt doubles. Um.
But but in there's another case here, and it's politics,
and that's when you have a huge state actor, a
figure that's known really, really well, but it is also
in danger of being assassinated or at least harmed, right right,
(22:00):
So one of the most famous cases would be Joseph Stalin.
He was a real pill. He implemented uh controversial plots
against citizens of the Soviet Union, even ministers and folks
who are in his inner circle was the leader. Yes, yes,
(22:20):
people who opposed him were executed after a fake trial
on a good day. Other days they just disappeared, and
we mean disappeared from history. They were removed from official photographs,
real devious stuff. Stalin increased the role of the Soviet
secret police as he became the absolute power in the thirties,
and it made sense for him to use these political
(22:42):
decoys because he was protecting himself from his growing list
of enemies. We don't know how many body doubles he had.
He definitely had more than one. We know about two
for sure. One was a double named Rashid, and he
was dismissed from the army because he looked too much
like Stalin. He went home, government agent came to recruit him,
(23:05):
and he became a sit in for the dictator at
meetings and banquets. Somehow he survived being in close proximity
to Stalin, and he died in nine at the ripe
old age of ninety three. So well done, Rashid, good
job staying alive. We also, I do have to mention,
we also have a episode of ridiculous history that's entirely
(23:27):
about body doubles in the political sphere, so it listen
to a little bit more of this, but he is
again just one of Stalin's body doubles. There's one that's
a little more well known. I would say, oh, yeah, somebody,
how do you say his name, Felix Dade? Yeah, yeah,
I think that's good. Oh yeah. So you can head
on over and listen to that episode of Ridiculous History now,
(23:50):
or you can hear this abridged version right now. Oh.
This is one small fact about dadyev. He was so
good that in nineteen forty five he was flown to
Yalta and he met with President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill,
whoa after the after the during the postwar reorganization was
(24:14):
it was it as the double, it was Stalin. They
thought they thought he was Stalin. Oh my god, which
I mean, well done. Right. Yeah. So this is one example.
But then we also have the examples from the Middle East,
most famously Iraq. Yes, Saddam Hussein and one of his
(24:34):
sons were really really big big body double fans. Uh.
Let's see. Let's see. We've got some quotes here that
come from inverse dot com. This says the late Rocky
dictator reportedly employed a roster of body doubles when you know,
when he was ruling, and when we say roster here,
we're not talking about one or two really good body doubles.
(24:57):
We're talking about a dozen dozen this perhaps of people
who looked similarly enough to him that they were employed
throughout his rule. Right, He was a prolific fan of
body doubles, and people would observe this very very close
eye on it, especially these tensions were ratcheting up in
(25:17):
that part of the world, and they would they would
read some more or less kind of read tea leaves
and try to interpret smaller clues like the way his
bodyguards acted. You know, did they act differently around the
true dictator than they did around his body double. Saddam
was reportedly possessed of a little bit of an ego,
(25:40):
and he was a big fan of close ups, and
so people began to think, well, if he doesn't get
his close up in during one of his many speeches
and proclamations, that means it's a body double. People were
so worried about this that in two thousand three, when
he was captured, then Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had
to like go out and address concerns that they may
(26:02):
have nabbed a decoy and was you know, they were
figuring out ways to determine whether this was the real
Saddam Hussaying and this practice continued. Oh and just to
jump in there, I remember in two thousand three when
Saddam was captured, thinking that's not the real Saddam Hussein.
And I was very skeptical of it. But I didn't
(26:22):
I didn't know who. I wasn't thinking about it at
that level at this point, but I was aware just
through pop culture that he that said i'mous saying did
employe body doubles and his oldest son, Uday Hussein was
a monster, and that doesn't have anything to do with
his practice. He it looks like he learned from dear
(26:44):
old dad and he started using body doubles as well.
There was a guy named Latif who said he went
to school with dude Hussaying and in night he was
enlisted to be Huday's body double. Non consensually. Yeah, because
in Iraq, you there's this mandatory thing where you have
(27:04):
to join the military when you reach a certain age,
and U Day's body double. But was basically told, yeah,
you are going to join as U Day. And that's it.
That's what's what, that's what's happening. And the guy who
was Day's body double survived, escaped rock and it was
even a movie made about his story called The Devil's Double. Yeah,
(27:29):
and you know, yeah, he has one man, the person
that we're talking about, and he had some stories to tell.
He had a lot of claims and it's difficult to
you know, back a lot of that up with hard facts.
But again, this is a person who experienced them and
then his claiming to have experienced them. But he said
he got shot over twenty five times twenty how many times?
(27:51):
Twenty six times? Twenty six times while he was impersonating
the son of the Iraqi dictator as well as um
something else crazy. Oh he he was describing U Day
as essentially someone who was off his rocker. Oh yeah,
incredibly violent and enjoyed torturing people, like really enjoyed it.
(28:15):
And you know, it's tough because that's one person's opinion.
I don't know enough about him. I've seen other documentation
of other people claiming very similar things, so I'm inclined
to believe it. Okay, that's very fair of you. I
just want to go on record he did torture, be abominable,
(28:38):
unforgivable things. We're talking repeat sexual assaults, we're talking murdering
people for the for the thrill of it, like the
old Diet coke commercial jingle. It's not surprising that he
would have a body double because there were many, many
people who wanted him dead for his many many a procities. Okay,
(29:01):
it's just it's like to the point where it's a
lot of work for one dude. Oh, dude, I hear you.
For me, it's trusting. You know any Western source that
would say that about somebody you know like that, you
know me, really good point. It's just it's hard for
me to know where the line is of what's true,
because I don't I don't disbelieve that he did some
(29:23):
pretty terrible things. Yeah, I see, But was it exaggerated
for propaganda purposes and so on? It's a good question.
There is another question that we should address, which is
how many more suspected body doubles are out there. According
to Joe are Reader, who was a former undersecretary for
the U. S. Army in two thousand one, he said
(29:47):
that many many world leaders had used body doubles to
escape capture. He said, Osama bin Laden used body doubles
man Well Noriega uh, Fidel Castro and more. And there
were even rumor is that Hitler used a body double
to escape death. That is a story for another day.
I think I'm pretty sure a whole episode on that.
(30:08):
Check it out if you're if you're interested, it's pretty compelling.
I don't know, Argentina. I mean, yeah, Nazi Nazi Party
members did escape there through the ratlines, right, they certainly did. So.
We also know that body doubles were used in ancient times,
(30:31):
not even really in ancient times. That were used up
until the widespread dissemination of photography, right and a v equipment,
So it became easier to say, oh, no, no, no no, no,
I've seen a picture of the emperor and you do
not talk like him, you do not look like him, You, sir,
(30:52):
are an impostor. Yeah. Basically, any way to record image
or sound, right, because if you're just dealing with an
illustration and a written document, even that has quotations or
something in it, that's the only way to know the
even the president like George Washington. Imagine how many people
(31:13):
in the United States actually saw George Washington, and then
most of what people in the public knew of him
throughout the world were drawing our paintings, illustrations, paintings, any
image of him that was just created from another person's
imagination through looking at him exactly. And now that we
(31:35):
have access to these amazing surveillance devices called smartphones, it's
very very easy to not only take pictures of people,
but to find pictures of people, and they don't have
to be famous. So it seems like we're back to square.
What how would you effectively fool people if you were
a politician and athlete, musician and actor and so on
(31:57):
and so on in this in this world where it's
much easier to verify this, it turns out that the
same technology that made body doubles and impersonations more difficult
for a time may make it much easier. And we'll
we'll we'll explore why after a word from our sponsor.
(32:25):
All Right, that's a bit of a bait and switch,
because we have to get to celebrity body doubles. This
is the meat of what we are. This is this
is the meat of the conspiracy burger. Okay, I didn't
eat lunch today. I'm just these are all going to
be food comparisons. Me neither, and I'm right there with you.
I would like to add some biber bacon on top
(32:49):
of whatever this sandwich slash hamburger we're creating here. And really,
there's an entire industry out there of people impersonating celebrities. Really, yeah,
and and it's it's what we were talking about right
before the break to your your phone, Instagram, Facebook, social media.
On the streets of New York City. There are people
(33:11):
in in l A, my god, just everywhere. Um. There
are people who impersonate singers and go do shows. There
are people who impersonate actors and do events. There are
there are people who impersonate fictional characters. I have some
pretty good friends who impersonate Bill Murray. Not yet, no
(33:34):
I had I think that was just him. I think
that was Bill. Really, no one will ever believe us,
but but he knows some people who, for instance, appear
at functions, children's parties and stuff as you know, Cinderella
or as snow White or something. I also have friends
who do this. Yeah, and that that seems like a
(33:55):
really wholesome gig. We're not talking about the was kind
of impersonators. We're not talking about someone who is doing
a spot on kiss cover band or something. We're talking
about impersonators who replace celebrities in a way for the
(34:17):
purposes of crime. And this goes back to the biber
bacon that you mentioned earlier. Yea more of a biberrito,
right it is a yeah, the biberrito comes after the bacon,
so the bacon is um. Actually it's terrible to call
that because I'm a big fan of bacon. Big ups
to you, Bacon, just for existing and being and even
(34:38):
though you're terrible for me and for the environment and
all of those things, thank you for providing your oils
with which to cook other things. Okay, let's just go
and get on here. So you may you may love
Justin Bieber, you may loathe him. Either way, there's no
denying that this guy, the image of him, his voice,
(34:58):
everything about him extremely extremely popular, and specifically with younger women,
younger girls, teenage girls in particular. And there's this man
named Leem wir m o I R. He's thirty, he
was thirty four years old, and he really capitalized on
Justin Bieber's popularity and not in a good way. No,
(35:23):
he would pretend to be this teenager justin Bieber online
and he would talk to teenage fans and he would
start hounding them for money and then explicit sexual videos
of themselves. If they didn't send him money, then he
(35:47):
would say that he was going to post their videos online.
This guy is an uber creep, and you have to
imagine how emotionally traumatizing that is. If you're a huge
super fan and fav singer, you have, like maybe it's
your first crush or something, and you think that this
person is asking you an underage person, a child, for
(36:10):
what nude videos or something, and then for some reason
it's got has got to be at least a multimillionaire
is shaking you down for cash. Hopefully you know you.
You'd think that someone would recognize that, but again that
that kind of fog of celebrity. It's powerful, right, and
(36:32):
some people start successful criminal careers by rinsing and repeating
this sort of tactic. There's an I person here named
Emma Charlton who posed as a Vanity Fair editor Anna Wintour,
the one the one who occurs in that film The
Devil Wears Product. So Charlton tricked this guy into falling
in love marrying her, and then she just robbed and blind.
(36:57):
It turned out she had a long history of im
personating other people, some famous and fleecing, fleecing various dudes
that I thought they were in love with her. So
those are pretty dark. That's still not quite what we're
what we're getting at, right, Let's let's go to something
a little bit softer just for a second, right, because
(37:20):
people also impersonate celebrities for the purpose of pranking. Right, Yeah,
there was there was this thing that occurred back in
where this picture of Justin Bieber was going all around
the internet. I think we may have mentioned it in
passing before on this show. This is what I meant
(37:40):
by biberrito, Yes, exactly where it was. It was a
photograph of Justin Bieber wearing a hat, sunglasses, and a hoodie,
and he was eating a burrito from the center of
the burrito rather than at one of the ends. And
it was supposedly taken by some passersby while Justin Bieber
was enjoying a burrito just out in the park somewhere,
(38:01):
and it got retweeted so many, Like I don't even
know exactly how many times, thousands and thousands of times.
It was posted on all kinds of different blogs and
it became, I guess, a trending thing that was occurring.
But it turned out that it was literally just some pranksters, uh,
that we're pretending to be Justin bieber um and that's
(38:24):
all it was the entire time. But you think that
you'd think that with the number of people who know
who this kid is. Who are this guy Justin Bieber?
I guess he's a bit older now, but who knows
who he is. They know exactly what he looks like.
You'd think that somebody somewhere would have figured out that
that wasn't him. But it didn't happen until these guys
(38:47):
posted a YouTube video explaining exactly what they did and
how they did it. Wow. I guess the reaction was
just so attention grabbing right. Well, and think about this
around you, on your social media, whatever you're using, everyone
is believing that this is an actual picture of Justin Bieber.
So you almost don't even question or you don't question
(39:08):
it whatsoever. You just take it for granted. Oh that's
Justin Bieber that's weird. I'm gonna be honest with you, Matt,
I'm just gonna lay it all out on the table.
I confess to you. I know ding on the guy,
but I am not typically in a situation where my
my Bieber count is very very low on a day
(39:29):
to day basis. Oh yeah, your encounters with the Beebes
the Beebes, Yeah, is that a thing? The Beebster? I
don't know. I don't know. Justin Oh all right, Well,
you know I wish him the best of luck in
his career because it's tough work to be a musician.
I'll tell you this tremendous respect for Justin Bieber on
(39:52):
this side over here, even though he did he caught
up doing a lot of things that that has been.
That's a little kid that has been fighting through the
music industry since he was a little kid. That's so
very kind of you. I mean, come on, I don't
have a statement because I I just don't know much
about it. But but we see how even a very
(40:14):
well known person can be uh can be impersonated very seriously.
It doesn't it doesn't matter how famous you are. Maybe
to your point about social media, it could make it easier.
Now we get to the stuff that people will tend
to dismiss out of hand. What if a celebrity was
not consensually impersonated, right, What if they were murdered and
(40:36):
replaced somehow taken out. This brings us to twenty fifteen
when buzzfeeds Ryan Broderick found a Brazilian blog called Avril
is Dead, referring to the musician Avril Levine. The idea
is in the blog not Avril Levine got famous in
the early two thousand's, and then she was emotionally overwhelmed.
(40:59):
Her grand father passed away, and she died by suicide
right after the release of her first album, which was
called Let Go. Oddly enough, according to this theory, the
record company, the record label did not let Go because
the first album was so successful. They said, Okay, we
can just get someone who looks kind of like her,
(41:20):
a doppelganger, and keep the machine going, keep the keep
the money coming. In a little while later, Avril Levine
finally addressed this idea, and she said in an interview
on an Australian radio station k i I S, for
anyone interested the host aster, did you laugh at the
(41:41):
rumors that went around where you no longer exist? And
there's a clone of you, to which aver applies. Yes,
some people think that I'm not the real me, which
is so weird, Like why would they even think that?
For supporters of this theory there, you know, you're probably
white knuckled right now with your hands on the steering
wheel or whatever, and you're saying, of course that's what
(42:01):
the clone would say. Yeah exactly, But you know, uh,
as weird as it sounds, imagine just put yourself in
the shoes of some record company. Um. Now this is
gonna sound weird, but just imagine this. You're the head
of a record label. You just had one of the
(42:24):
most popular albums ever come out, or at least within
the past like a couple of years, um, come out
on your label, and it's this one singer songwriter that
is going to make you. You You know, they've made you
millions of dollars, They're gonna make you millions and millions
of dollars with their next album and everything. What if
that person dies and it's kept quiet enough to where
(42:47):
you think, well, maybe we can put out another album.
I mean, that's insane to think about. Like, what would
you do given the opportunity? Right exactly, You already have
millions of dollars. You're going you're set to make millions more,
tens of millions of dollars. Um, What would you do
to continue that money flowing in? I don't know. That's
(43:08):
one of those age old questions. Why do powerful rich
people do some of the things that they get accused
of and sometimes uh convicted for? Anyway, So it goes
to um Black Mirror. Have you seen Season five? Black Mirror?
So there're only three episodes, but one of them features
Miley Cyrus and in it she plays a pop star
(43:28):
called Ashley Oh. And this pop star spoilers by the
way ahead right after this three to one spoilers. So
she gets placed in a medically induced coma by her
management team essentially her aunt and some other people working
for her, and then they want to replace this pop
star with an AI. Essentially it's called Ashley Too, but
(43:52):
it's created from this weird, little, compartmentalized, pr friendly version
of Ashley Oh's personality. Yeah, the hardware they start off
with is I very rarely use this word, but it's
kind of cute. Oh the little tiny Yeah, no, I agreed,
but in this case they're gonna make use of holograms
(44:14):
and Ashley Oh's personality to basically replace the pop star
uh completely And it feels a lot like this story
with Avril Levine, like to continue the money flowing in,
they would do whatever they needed to do to make
this person at least seem real, right, right, and they
(44:37):
would be able to apply near future technology. Yeah, and
it's you know, but it's not the first time some
pop star has been, you know, accused of being not
the real one, right, that's correct. This one is for you, Diana,
although working with us on that previous video, I'm pretty
sure you know all of all of this already. That's
(45:00):
September nineteen, a rumor that Paul McCartney, famed member of
the Beatles, had died, began spreading across college campuses in
the States. These rumors expanded they were there was a
snowball aggregate effect because people felt they were finding more
and more clues hidden in album covers and in Beatles songs,
(45:23):
and clue hunting was infectious, addictive, and fun. Within a
few weeks, this blows up at its global for most people.
This craze was short lived, and Paul McCartney, if it
is him, has an interview where he says, no, I've
I've been taking some family time. I've been in Scotland, Kenya,
(45:44):
places like that. I've been kind of off the grid
because you know, I'm massively rich. Yeah, and I can
just go places like that. John Lennon is very stressful
to work with. That's pretty obvious, right, I mean, yeah,
I know McCartney also has his quirks. Sure, sure, that's true.
(46:05):
Just trying to give John Letton benefit of the doubt, Okay,
right right, I mean right, that's that's true. Well, McCartney, though,
he has this interview in Life magazine where he's like,
you know, very much alive or whatever and just hoped
over to Scotland year And despite denying the rumors, the
(46:26):
exaggerated rumors of his death in a very Mark Twain
esque way, Uh, McCartney still had to confront these things.
People said that he was a lookalike. His real name
was William Shears Campbell or William Shepherd. William Campbell allegedly
became Billy shears On Sergeant Pepper, and William Shephard was
(46:48):
supposedly the inspiration behind the continuing story of Bungalow Bill.
That's awesome. It's a weird one. Hello, Bill, were you
listen to a lot of Beatles at my house? To
all of this stuff rings so true to me? Ah,
I love it? So how did this? How did this
one start? Oh? There's an article it's called is Beatle
(47:12):
Paul McCartney Dead? And it was written September seventeenth, nineteen
sixty nine this gentleman named Tim Harper, who was the
editor of the Drake Times Delphic. It was a student
newspaper of Drake University over in Des Moines, Iowa. Now
this article, it, uh, it addressed the rumor, essentially the
(47:32):
rumor mill that was kind of going around the school
that all these clues, if you put them together, it
means that Paul McCartney has somehow died. And let's let's
look at some of these uh messages here. So it
includes a message that says, turn me on, dead man.
And this comes from the White album from the song
Revolution nine. And it's when you play it backwards. It's
(47:56):
that old backwards masking thing that we've talked about before.
And uh, this uh apparently if you like look at
all of the rumors and the things that were published,
if you try to trace it all the way back.
You get to this article, the the one that we
just mentioned in Iowa, right right right by Tim Harper. So,
according to music journalist Merrill Nowdon, this was the first
(48:19):
published work on the idea that Paul McCartney was dead
because of some backward masks lyrics turned me on dead man.
It's weird, weird flex So we have let's do one
more example. What about Abbey Road? He wasn't wearing shoes
and he was smoking. What about Abbey Road? Just saying
you didn't standing with four people who all looked kind
(48:39):
of like what you gotta differentiate yourself. But just Paul,
I don't know, man. What about that car crash? I
don't know. He wasn't a car crash, and as many
I don't know. So I have got to say a
lot of people still think that is a fringe theory,
among them being the man who, as we record this podcast,
(49:00):
claims to be Paul Paul McCartney. He would say he
claims to be that because he is Paul McCartney. Yeah,
he would. It's I I am profoundly inspired by your
commitment to this. I know it's do you seriously think
it's the case I don't I will, I will. I
will send you and Diana on an adventure in a
(49:23):
foreign country if it turns out that he is not
really Paul McCartney. Okay, accepted deal. I will work will
be to prove that that is not Paul. Uh. So
we'll do one more before Matt Diana put me in
the poorhouse, and that is Taylor Swift. People, this is
(49:46):
a weird one. I felt people were arguing, based entirely
on the photographs, that Taylor Swift is in fact the
clone of a former Satanic priestess. Yeah, right, as you do.
This dates back to two thousand and eleven, and people
say that Swift is actually a clone of one Zena
love A, the daughter of the founder of the Church
(50:07):
of Satan, Anton LaVey. And there are a bunch of
videos on YouTube comparing the two. I would suggest I
would take a look at them if you want. They
don't look very similar. But a lot of that is interpretive,
and I the beholder and so on. So right now,
it doesn't seem that there's too much sand to the
(50:27):
idea that celebrities could be killed, replaced, or taken out.
We're not quite at that black mirror level, yet at
least not in person. It is going to happen, though
it's going to happen, it's not gonna maybe happen in person,
but we are in the world of deep fakes. What
is what is deep fake? Aside from another episode, well so, yeah,
(50:50):
that's a way to digitally manipulate the sound and image
on you know, in digital photography and audio, to make
it seem as though a person, in this case a
celebrity or well known individual is saying or doing something
that they are actually not. And it's quite effective. If
(51:12):
you go back to I'm by the way just watching Mr.
Robots season three and back in season two, they had
just a quick little piece of video that happens on
a television screen where President Obama is talking and he
mentions one of the characters, Tyrrell Wellick and it at
(51:33):
the time in I remember being taken aback by it,
I didn't understand, like, how did they get the president
to say that? Why would they why would he agree
to that? What do you pay a president when he
makes a quick little cameo counterpoint? You don't pay presidents.
You donate to their foundations, charities and campaign funds. There
(51:56):
you go, there you go. I was perplexed by it,
and I I remember I think we even I can't
remember we mentioned it on the show like when it
came out, but we we have talked about it since then.
And you can see there are YouTube channels online with
the deep fakes that are super just believable and scary,
(52:18):
making putting other people's faces on bodies, making those bodies
say things, putting words into the mouths of other people
who are being interviewed. If you if you want to,
let's just stay on the President Obama thing. If you
go to two years later, after the Mr. Robots Season
two things, you go to this video that Jordan Peel
(52:41):
made and he he impersonated President Obama quite a bit
in his career, or he continues to do that, but
for a while there was one of uh, you know,
one of the funniest things he was doing. At least
according to me, he nailed the voice, just so so
good with the voice. Well, he made a video of
him talking and a deep faked video of President Obama
(53:04):
saying all the things that Jordan Peel was saying. I
remember that, yeah, And it was in warning to everyone
that you have to really trust the news sources that
you look at. You have to trust the videos you've watched.
Um and it's becoming harder and harder to do that.
I would say the ups, I would say, you have
to distrust more stuff. Well, yeah, you you have to
(53:26):
trust the humans that are behind the things, right exactly,
You have to trust the source or you have to
at least do your own due diligence on this. And Hollywood,
of course, it's very, very excited over the moon about this.
Can you imagine how much more affordable films will become?
Why would you need to pay whomever you know, like
(53:50):
Julia Roberts or um Idris Elba. What would you need
to pay them millions and millions of dollars every time
you make a movie when you could just buy the
rights to their likeness and their voice and then use
deep fake technology. Holograms are there that they're pretty sophisticated,
but we're not on the point where they can replace
(54:11):
human beings yet. Well, and at this point almost all
consumption occurs on our phones. True. Also, I gotta go
on this one pitch pitch one thing. Okay, so imagine
we combine deep fakes with AI kind of limited AI.
(54:31):
This leads us to a strange place, very very quickly.
I have a prediction. I predict that in the mid future,
you know, mid term future. So it's completely possible that
we could democratize screenwriting and filmmaking in a very strange way,
a way that would not require more than one human
(54:54):
being to be involved. Imagine if you had something that
was like Alexa or Sirie or Google Home or whatever,
and instead of just messing with audio, this would mess
with audio and visual. So you could just say to it.
You could say, hey, Google or Alexa, combine Police Academy
(55:15):
for and just name another film, back to the Future
three and Back to the Future three. Just combine those
together and make a film for me. And then this
algorithm would be able to write the script for that
that combines these things, take the references from the other
visual aspects and combine those so that we would have
(55:37):
something like, you know, back to the Police Academy for
or back to the Police Academy three, you know what
I mean, or Police Academy to the future. You know,
it's completely possible, And then that means the only human
being involved in that entire process once this technology exists
is the person who asked the question, and I think
(55:58):
we're on the way there. Wow, pretty pretty stunning stuff. Yeah,
it's funny too, because all you'd have to do is
combine some of the top grossing films over the past
fifty years basically, and then you could just have new
hits and change the proper nounds and scriptwriting is so
formulaic anyways for a lot of those films. But it
(56:23):
appears that at least four now, at least in the
cases we've outlined, there's no solid proof of celebrities being
actively murdered and replaced. Yet we do see the numerous
possibilities for replacement, if not, if not assassination. Uh. And
we do know that there are likely body doubles out
(56:45):
there in other other forms other uh, I mean there's
still bodies other forms or other applications would be a
better way to say it, you know. And I just
have to say something here. I believe that a lot
of these allegations that come up with body doubles, especially
with um celebrities who were younger women at the time
(57:09):
when they became celebrities, like your Taylor Swifts and your
Avril Levine's and all this. Um, A lot of this
feels like, I don't want to say, I don't know
if it's body shaming isn't the right term, but the
disbelief that a celebrity, especially a female celebrity, looks differently
(57:30):
than she did when she was, you know, seventeen eighteen,
whenever she became popular or younger. UM, I think has
to do with our own perceptions of that and how
we've been manipulated by media to view women as they age.
Is that I feel like there's something there because there's
(57:51):
there's an interview with Avril Levine where she was being asked,
you know, have you heard the rumors that you were
replaced in everything that we were discussing, and the images
of her she does not look like she did at
least in too whatever that whenever she was interviewed or something.
She does not look anything like the Avril Levine that
we all grew up watching on MTV. And it's just
(58:12):
the nature of growing up and changing. And I don't know,
I feel like there's something in there with the way
we treat celebrities and follow them over all of this time, UM,
that maybe we just lose sight of who the person
is when you're looking at them. The fact that human
beings age and changes. Yeah, I don't see that. So
(58:35):
that's where we're leaving the conversation today. I know this
was a really long one. I think this is our
longest episode we've done in a while us. So we
want to hear from you what celebrity replacement theories, if any,
do you feel have some true grit? What do you
think would be the most likely, uh scenario wherein this
(58:59):
could occur? And if you have proof of it, let
us know if you are if you are Paul McCartney
and you're just tired of hearing this, Uh, that's that's fine.
Let us know. We we hope we were fair about
that case. Or just send us pictures of your favorite
doppel gangers. It's often said that everyone in the world
has someone who looks exactly like them. Have you ever
(59:20):
met your doppelganger? Was it cool? Were they cool? How
did it go? Tell us? You can find us on Facebook,
you can find us on Instagram, you can find us
on Twitter. You can also give us a call directly.
We are one h three three st d W y
t K. Leave a message. We will hear it, we
might get on the show. Yeah. And if none of
that quite bags your badgers, you want to contact us
(59:43):
in what is now the old fashioned way, there's good news.
You can reach us directly via email. We are conspiracy
at iHeart radio dot com. M hmmm. Stuff they Don't
(01:00:10):
Want You to Know is a production of iHeart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:24):
to the show. My name is Matt Noel is on
an adventure they called me Ben. We are joined as
always with our super producer Paul mission Controled decade. Most importantly,
you are you. You are here, and that makes this
stuff they don't want you to know. We have a
special guest of sorts today, Matt, we do. We have
j J. Paseway. He's a new producer here at the
(00:45):
I Heart Radio Network, the I Heart Radio Podcast Network.
That's a hard shrug you're doing there, man. Whatever this
thing is that we're a part of is called Yeah,
it's pretty pretty awesome. It's good to good to have
you here. J J. Apparently he knew like what this
show was before getting here, right, and we're still friends. Yeah,
I know, he's like trip. He hasn't looked me in
(01:07):
the eye yet, just because I kind of like ran
into the studio right before we hit record. Yeah, and
I can't see him because my view of J J.
Oh okay, he's looking at me. Oh gosh. Yeah. Yeah.
Well you've got sort of blue steel vibe going on today,
so I can see how people would be, you know,
got you a little bit intimidated. Oh I'm feeling it.
I'm feeling the blue steel. Yeah, I'm going for kind
(01:29):
of an eye of the tiger thing and I'm sort
of doing it. I'm pulling it off kind of. Oh no,
I'm seeing the intensity. So just to check in with you,
everything is good. We just had our big July four,
like I guess, weekend. Yeah, yeah, I have some some
traveling that I need to catch up on. But uh yeah,
July four America, right. I hope you had a good
(01:52):
weekend as well. And if you are listening in a
different country, July four, and I think it's weird for
us to assume everybody knows this. July four is when
the United States celebrates independence from Britain, right, And the
way in which the US most often tends to celebrate
(02:12):
this day is through getting kind of drunk, lighting fireworks
and having barbecues. There you go, and that's what some
of us did. That's very diplomatic. How you guys doing
out there in the booth, thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs up,
all the way comes up. That's great. And how are
(02:33):
you doing, folks out there listening to day? Uh? Do
you have something on your mind? How We're going to
investigate some pretty interesting stuff here that may be familiar
to some of us. If at any time while we're
exploring this strange rabbit hole, the spirit so moves you
when you have something on your mind that you want
to tell us and you don't wanna have to type
(02:53):
it out, they have no fear. You can pause, the
show will wait for you, and you can give us
a call. You can call us at one eight three
three S T D W I T K. You'll you'll
figure it out. You'll here, been on there, You'll know
you're in the right place. And I feel like we've
established the rules of the call I lied such that
(03:14):
at this point, you know, fill it up. Yeah, all
you have to do is call so. So we talked
at the top here just about how um, honestly odd
it is when someone, UM, I can't speak for you, Ben,
but it's an odd experience when someone recognizes your voice. UM.
(03:36):
And on this show, it's only happened to me a
handful of times. Um. I'm assuming that it's happened to
you more because you had a visual presence on this
show for so long, UM, and so many people watch
those videos. But today we're talking about the concept of
being known, of being recognized right to the nth degree.
(03:59):
As indeed, Matt, we are talking about the concept of celebrity.
Celebrity is really bizarre when you think about it. Since
before the dawn of recorded human history, we've looked to
place our beliefs and our values on the form of
a familiar face, something that is like us. Abstract ideas
are all well and good on their own, but generally speaking,
(04:20):
humans like other humans or things that look like humans,
and they want that to be sort of a coat
rack upon which ideas hang, something with which we can
directly identify. So for a lot of people, maybe during
the Cold War in the West, when they thought of communism,
(04:43):
they didn't think of a bunch of ideals written by
some stuffy, old dead European folks. They they thought about, uh,
specific propaganda image, maybe a soldier in red marching or something. Yeah,
we we are a symbol seeking being, uh, the human is,
(05:04):
and these celebrities a lot of times are the representations
of from propaganda. Are ways for us to quickly organize
the way we feel about something or the way way
we should feel about something, or way we actually do
feel about something or someone right. And we can be
blinded by this too, which is a bit of a
different bag of badgers for us. We can be blinded
(05:24):
by this in strange ways, and our brains are pretty
good at making things seem normal. So picture, imagine your mind,
the most famous person you can think of, the most
famous person, caveat who is alive today. If that person
said something that didn't gibe with what they usually say,
(05:48):
their die hard supporters are more likely to go along
with it because they identify with the person first interesting
and the idea that they have. You know, they can
be led along or let us stray someone see, just
by the way in which that person with whom they
identify says or explains a certain thing. And this is
(06:11):
why human beings love the concept of celebrities. In a
lot of ways, celebrities today are similar to deities in
ancient times. You know, people obsess over them. We perform
certain rituals, and that doesn't necessarily mean you know, you're uh,
sacrificing and got to Neil de grass Tyson or Bill
(06:32):
High or something. It can be as simple as checking
your Instagram stories every day or every couple of hours
or something right right. Or you always listen to a
song by your favorite musician when you're about to do
a thing, you know what I mean, Like you always
play on the Road Again by Willie Nelson when you're
(06:52):
on a road trip. So that's the first track at least,
right right exactly, So when we perform these rituals, we
feel a genuine personal connection with entities that we may
have never met and may well never meet an hour lifetime,
and who may not be anything like the representation that
(07:14):
exists on whatever medium you're consuming exactly. So it's no
wonder then that the world of celebrity is also a
world rife with conspiracy. A while back, I wanted to
bring this to your attention. A while back, Matt, you
and I did a strange video which I still think
holds up. Yeah, it's it's kind of ridiculous, But in
(07:37):
that video we have this sort of meet the team
kind of thing, right, and in there you have you
built this great chart, uh, supporting the notion that Paul
McCartney had died and been replaced by someone else. Do
you remember this. I do remember this and shout out
to Diana, my wife, because she gave me most of
(07:59):
the information that was included in that. She helped me
build that thing. She is she has an obsession like
we're talking about with the Beatles, whether living or dead,
and she knows so much. She basically was like, oh, yeah, well,
here's all the things. You just put this on there,
put that on there, all cut all this stuff out here.
You got it. That's awesome, man, that's awesome. That video
(08:21):
is still around on our YouTube channel, which I missed,
by the way, for some reason. The main thing I
remember about that video is you holding some kind of
pipe and looking and explaining this conspiracy thing to me,
and then we're in a bathroom. Yeah, we realized we're
in a bathroom and you've been urinating the entire time.
(08:42):
That's right as it cuts over spoiler. Uh it is
safe for work. We should say that. We thought that
was hilarious. We hope you enjoy it. Maybe some of
our fellow long time listeners in the audience remember that
when today we're diving back into the world of celebrity conspiracy,
specifically the idea that some of the world's most famous
people have been secretly replaced by lookalikes, body doubles, dopplegangers,
(09:07):
who douple gangers. Who can I say it? So, guess what?
Here are the facts. It just doesn't sound the same
when you've got it. Here are the facts. When we
hear that word celebrity. You know, we've we've been talking
about this whole time. We're all on the same page.
We understand what that is. Somebody who is known a
famous person, an athlete, a musician and actor, maybe even
(09:29):
one of those insta fluencers. I don't even know how
you say it. Oh that's good, that's good, that exactly. Um.
But but there's a there's a thing here, and it's
it's tough to differentiate, but we're going to try and
do it. Here between someone being uh, capital F famous.
(09:52):
It's not really capital, but let's just use a capital
F as in this person is known throughout the world
for some reason as a a human person that does things,
but then an internet famous person that is slightly different. Yeah,
I would, I would say so, I would completely agree
with that. So we're talking maybe about athletes, musicians, actors
(10:19):
and so on. That's often what we mean, right when
we say, as you say, capital F famous or heads
of states or heads of religions, people who are photographed
by other people all the time. And then we have
and then we have the thing where people are maybe
more famous in a specific field. That's probably where I
(10:39):
would put what we call instant fluencers or uh, very
very well known YouTubers who focus on a specific thing, right,
And of course we have to be honest. Podcasters fall
in that. There are some there are some maybe they
count as capital F famous people who are also podcasters,
(11:04):
but they're not famous for that makes sense. Thinking about
Will Ferrell right there, Oh that's right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
he'll get into podcasts right now. I think it's just
Ron Burgundy. Oh yeah, exactly. So, so it's strange and
it's also, um, it's a bit unsettling the idea or
(11:27):
the notion of celebrity because it places hierarchical value on
people in a way that should not really exist. So,
with all that in mind, if we do a very
broad definition, if we sort of mash up those kind
of known in their field people and the worldwide known
(11:47):
people you know, the Michael Jackson's and so on. You
smash them all together into one thing. We can ask
ourselves how many people in this world, in one way
or another, would be considered amos. It's really really tough
to tell. Some, like you said, Matt, are known worldwide
as a kind of eternal position, like the pope changes,
(12:10):
but everybody is aware of the idea of the pope.
The pope is very very well known, not always very
very popular, but very very well known. And some people
are known more in their field of expertise. What's what's
someone who would be really specific field of expertise? We
know I'm thinking of scientists a lot of times, or
(12:35):
um like perhaps an FBI investigator that is known in
the true crime world and or the law enforcement field. Great, okay,
I've got one about Nobel Prize winners. So there's an
American astrophysicist, John C. Mather, who essentially proved that the
(12:56):
Big Bang was real, not just the theory. He is
very well known in his field. But you know, it's
difficult because if you ask the average this is not
a ding on the average person. If you ask the
average person name your two favorite astrophysicists. They might have
(13:17):
a tough time because most people's conversations are not going
to relate to that on a day to day basis.
So we have experts in their field, we have worldwide famous,
and then we have some infamous people like the child
molester Jeffrey Epstein. Oh, hey, it's not alleged. We don't
have to say alleged. Let's do an anti shout out
(13:38):
to you, Jeffrey Epstein for possibly actually facing charges and
going to jail. Maybe we'll see, we'll see. It's I
think at this point the money matters less than the
potential co conspirators who could be indicted. I don't know.
I don't want to be too skeptical about it, but
it's it's just so rare for people at that level
(14:01):
to go to jail, and especially after what happened last
time that we have a whole episode on about if
you're interested, but beware, you will throw things as you're
listening to it, right, And maybe it'll be like the
Westminster the Westminster child abuse circle where they tossed out
a few scapegoats posthumously, and then the people who are
(14:23):
implicated were also the people investigating it and nothing ever changed.
I don't know, I you know, hope springs eternal. Anyway.
So we've got those people infamous, the villains, the well
known experts in their field, the worldwide. Everybody knows who
that is kind of people. How do we tell how
many people in the world are are those sorts of folks? Well,
(14:47):
we we have some help here in this quest. Even
if it's not the perfect examination of it, it's it's
getting us somewhere. Right. There's this mathematician named Samuel Arbesman
who who took a pretty interesting approach in back inten
He looked at Wikipedia and they have this thing on
there called living People. It's a category in which you
(15:09):
can kind of search and navigate through. And at the
time that the count in the number of living people
was just over six hundred thousand, six hundred four thousand,
one seventy four. And he, uh, you know, he even
admitted when with his own study and everything he was doing,
(15:30):
that Wikipedia is no notability standard was pretty low. Uh
as when it came to like who is famous, who
is not famous? Who is worthy of being on Wikipedia? Right,
some of our co workers are in Wikipedia. I don't
think we are, but so our co workers are, yeah,
we are not Josh and Chuck. I believe you're on there,
and I think maybe Holly and Tracy. That makes sense.
(15:51):
The question here is how many of these over six
hundred thousand people has everyone heard of? Could one person
have heard of them all? That is doubtful. It's just
so many people. But with this in mind, we can,
at least, as Absmen puts it, get a hint of understanding.
(16:13):
We can. We can get a little bit of a
spider sense or a guestament about how common fame is
in the world. And so here's our shortcut works. He
divided the famous people count by the global population in
twenty thirteen, which was seven point oh six billion, approximately,
and then with that math he got the number of
(16:35):
point zero zero eight six percent, so much less than
one percent, which is probably good for everybody's sanity, right,
and probably bad for the celebrity stalker industry, but you know,
they're just gonna have to deal with it. This number
is not ironclad by any means, but it's still pretty
fascinating because it tells us when we're talking about possible
(16:58):
celebrity doppelgangers, were also talking about a very small subset
of an already very tiny slice of humanity, and based
on that fact alone, we might think initially, we might
think it would be easy to spot an impersonator or
a replacement. You know, there's someone saying I am the
(17:18):
number one, Uh, car Carly ray Jepson fan. Is that
a person? I think? So. I don't know who it is,
but I've heard that name before. Okay, so someone loves
this person, Carly ray Jepson. They say, I've got all
of her albums or videos, whatever, what is she is?
(17:39):
She's done it. If it's in the public sphere, then
I have it, says the super fan. So I would
notice immediately a change, even if those filthy, casual Carly
ray Jepson fans don't understand the magnitude of my work. Uh.
Then we could go a bit further and assume the
average living celebrity will tend to be photographed and filmed
(18:01):
more often than the average non celebrity, right, yeah, I
mean it would have to be, or would it. Yes.
So a lot of the things we've been discussing thus
far are our assumptions. We're making assumptions based on you know,
evidence and numbers and our own experiences, but they are assumptions.
(18:22):
But really think about it, if we're talking about the
current president or any president, or maybe some daytime news hosts. Many,
many famous people have entire groups of people teams who
are controlling their images. They have offices built around managing
the icon that is their very own celebrity, that is
(18:44):
a pr little gem or something that they get to
show around. And um, it may actually be easier for
a celebrity to be replaced because in many ways they've
they've already been replaced by all of these images of
of themselves, these versions, these virtual versions of themselves that
are out there. Sure, you know, they've had different haircuts
(19:04):
over you know, the time that they've been famous. They
wear a lot of different outfits, They go to all
these different places and do different things. Um, celebrities. Yeah,
I think it's a good point. On the celebrities were
more tightly controlled that one might imagine. When we say replaced,
we don't necessarily mean somebody's cutting off their fingers one
(19:26):
by one and sticking other people's fingers on their hands,
but that would be interesting. They live by scripts a
lot of times, even if it's not their own intention,
Like their words may not be their own, and words
maybe written by publicists or speechwriters or social media gurus.
Their candid selfies are often carefully orchestrated by professional photographers,
(19:50):
and their trends and attitudes or their public stances may
be dictated by deep dive marketing research indicating the most
attention grabbing responses, opinions, or hot takes of the day,
or for some movie that they're about to put out.
They have to say certain things or be careful not
to say other things. So it might not be as
(20:11):
difficult for a celebrity to be taken out and replaced.
It might not be as difficult as it initially sounds,
because let's admit it sounds kind of out there. But
the question is, could it really happened? Could some celebrity
known around the world actually be replaced? And if so,
how and if so why? And we're going to talk
(20:32):
about that after a quick word from our sponsor. Here's
where it gets crazy. We were talking about this earlier
off air. Body doubles are real stuff happened, yeah, oh
for real in in two places, and the first one
(20:55):
is one that you already know about. There are body
doubles in Hollywood in filmmaking for sure, Yeah, yeah, good call.
When when you're thinking about stunt doubles and stand ins,
there are there are people whose job it is to
to look like a celebrity and either stand in light
to make sure that it looks good with the costume
(21:16):
or something. And then also people who get paid to
do very dangerous, sometimes terrifying things and they look like
at least similar to a celebrity exactly, and they're but
they're publicly acknowledged. They're publicly acknowledged, but you won't know
who they are unless you're a huge fan of stunt
(21:37):
doubles or you know a person of a celebrity and
also know their stunt double or a team of stunt doubles. Um.
But but in there's another case here, and it's politics,
and that's when you have a huge state actor, a
figure that's known really, really well, but it is also
in danger of being assassinated or at least harmed, right right,
(22:00):
So one of the most famous cases would be Joseph Stalin.
He was a real pill. He implemented uh controversial plots
against citizens of the Soviet Union, even ministers and folks
who are in his inner circle was the leader. Yes, yes,
(22:20):
people who opposed him were executed after a fake trial
on a good day. Other days they just disappeared, and
we mean disappeared from history. They were removed from official photographs,
real devious stuff. Stalin increased the role of the Soviet
secret police as he became the absolute power in the thirties,
and it made sense for him to use these political
(22:42):
decoys because he was protecting himself from his growing list
of enemies. We don't know how many body doubles he had.
He definitely had more than one. We know about two
for sure. One was a double named Rashid, and he
was dismissed from the army because he looked too much
like Stalin. He went home, government agent came to recruit him,
(23:05):
and he became a sit in for the dictator at
meetings and banquets. Somehow he survived being in close proximity
to Stalin, and he died in nine at the ripe
old age of ninety three. So well done, Rashid, good
job staying alive. We also, I do have to mention,
we also have a episode of ridiculous history that's entirely
(23:27):
about body doubles in the political sphere, so it listen
to a little bit more of this, but he is
again just one of Stalin's body doubles. There's one that's
a little more well known. I would say, oh, yeah, somebody,
how do you say his name, Felix Dade? Yeah, yeah,
I think that's good. Oh yeah. So you can head
on over and listen to that episode of Ridiculous History now,
(23:50):
or you can hear this abridged version right now. Oh.
This is one small fact about dadyev. He was so
good that in nineteen forty five he was flown to
Yalta and he met with President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill,
whoa after the after the during the postwar reorganization was
(24:14):
it was it as the double, it was Stalin. They
thought they thought he was Stalin. Oh my god, which
I mean, well done. Right. Yeah. So this is one example.
But then we also have the examples from the Middle East,
most famously Iraq. Yes, Saddam Hussein and one of his
(24:34):
sons were really really big big body double fans. Uh.
Let's see. Let's see. We've got some quotes here that
come from inverse dot com. This says the late Rocky
dictator reportedly employed a roster of body doubles when you know,
when he was ruling, and when we say roster here,
we're not talking about one or two really good body doubles.
(24:57):
We're talking about a dozen dozen this perhaps of people
who looked similarly enough to him that they were employed
throughout his rule. Right, He was a prolific fan of
body doubles, and people would observe this very very close
eye on it, especially these tensions were ratcheting up in
(25:17):
that part of the world, and they would they would
read some more or less kind of read tea leaves
and try to interpret smaller clues like the way his
bodyguards acted. You know, did they act differently around the
true dictator than they did around his body double. Saddam
was reportedly possessed of a little bit of an ego,
(25:40):
and he was a big fan of close ups, and
so people began to think, well, if he doesn't get
his close up in during one of his many speeches
and proclamations, that means it's a body double. People were
so worried about this that in two thousand three, when
he was captured, then Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had
to like go out and address concerns that they may
(26:02):
have nabbed a decoy and was you know, they were
figuring out ways to determine whether this was the real
Saddam Hussaying and this practice continued. Oh and just to
jump in there, I remember in two thousand three when
Saddam was captured, thinking that's not the real Saddam Hussein.
And I was very skeptical of it. But I didn't
(26:22):
I didn't know who. I wasn't thinking about it at
that level at this point, but I was aware just
through pop culture that he that said i'mous saying did
employe body doubles and his oldest son, Uday Hussein was
a monster, and that doesn't have anything to do with
his practice. He it looks like he learned from dear
(26:44):
old dad and he started using body doubles as well.
There was a guy named Latif who said he went
to school with dude Hussaying and in night he was
enlisted to be Huday's body double. Non consensually. Yeah, because
in Iraq, you there's this mandatory thing where you have
(27:04):
to join the military when you reach a certain age,
and U Day's body double. But was basically told, yeah,
you are going to join as U Day. And that's it.
That's what's what, that's what's happening. And the guy who
was Day's body double survived, escaped rock and it was
even a movie made about his story called The Devil's Double. Yeah,
(27:29):
and you know, yeah, he has one man, the person
that we're talking about, and he had some stories to tell.
He had a lot of claims and it's difficult to
you know, back a lot of that up with hard facts.
But again, this is a person who experienced them and
then his claiming to have experienced them. But he said
he got shot over twenty five times twenty how many times?
(27:51):
Twenty six times? Twenty six times while he was impersonating
the son of the Iraqi dictator as well as um
something else crazy. Oh he he was describing U Day
as essentially someone who was off his rocker. Oh yeah,
incredibly violent and enjoyed torturing people, like really enjoyed it.
(28:15):
And you know, it's tough because that's one person's opinion.
I don't know enough about him. I've seen other documentation
of other people claiming very similar things, so I'm inclined
to believe it. Okay, that's very fair of you. I
just want to go on record he did torture, be abominable,
(28:38):
unforgivable things. We're talking repeat sexual assaults, we're talking murdering
people for the for the thrill of it, like the
old Diet coke commercial jingle. It's not surprising that he
would have a body double because there were many, many
people who wanted him dead for his many many a procities. Okay,
(29:01):
it's just it's like to the point where it's a
lot of work for one dude. Oh, dude, I hear you.
For me, it's trusting. You know any Western source that
would say that about somebody you know like that, you
know me, really good point. It's just it's hard for
me to know where the line is of what's true,
because I don't I don't disbelieve that he did some
(29:23):
pretty terrible things. Yeah, I see, But was it exaggerated
for propaganda purposes and so on? It's a good question.
There is another question that we should address, which is
how many more suspected body doubles are out there. According
to Joe are Reader, who was a former undersecretary for
the U. S. Army in two thousand one, he said
(29:47):
that many many world leaders had used body doubles to
escape capture. He said, Osama bin Laden used body doubles
man Well Noriega uh, Fidel Castro and more. And there
were even rumor is that Hitler used a body double
to escape death. That is a story for another day.
I think I'm pretty sure a whole episode on that.
(30:08):
Check it out if you're if you're interested, it's pretty compelling.
I don't know, Argentina. I mean, yeah, Nazi Nazi Party
members did escape there through the ratlines, right, they certainly did. So.
We also know that body doubles were used in ancient times,
(30:31):
not even really in ancient times. That were used up
until the widespread dissemination of photography, right and a v equipment,
So it became easier to say, oh, no, no, no no, no,
I've seen a picture of the emperor and you do
not talk like him, you do not look like him, You, sir,
(30:52):
are an impostor. Yeah. Basically, any way to record image
or sound, right, because if you're just dealing with an
illustration and a written document, even that has quotations or
something in it, that's the only way to know the
even the president like George Washington. Imagine how many people
(31:13):
in the United States actually saw George Washington, and then
most of what people in the public knew of him
throughout the world were drawing our paintings, illustrations, paintings, any
image of him that was just created from another person's
imagination through looking at him exactly. And now that we
(31:35):
have access to these amazing surveillance devices called smartphones, it's
very very easy to not only take pictures of people,
but to find pictures of people, and they don't have
to be famous. So it seems like we're back to square.
What how would you effectively fool people if you were
a politician and athlete, musician and actor and so on
(31:57):
and so on in this in this world where it's
much easier to verify this, it turns out that the
same technology that made body doubles and impersonations more difficult
for a time may make it much easier. And we'll
we'll we'll explore why after a word from our sponsor.
(32:25):
All Right, that's a bit of a bait and switch,
because we have to get to celebrity body doubles. This
is the meat of what we are. This is this
is the meat of the conspiracy burger. Okay, I didn't
eat lunch today. I'm just these are all going to
be food comparisons. Me neither, and I'm right there with you.
I would like to add some biber bacon on top
(32:49):
of whatever this sandwich slash hamburger we're creating here. And really,
there's an entire industry out there of people impersonating celebrities. Really, yeah,
and and it's it's what we were talking about right
before the break to your your phone, Instagram, Facebook, social media.
On the streets of New York City. There are people
(33:11):
in in l A, my god, just everywhere. Um. There
are people who impersonate singers and go do shows. There
are people who impersonate actors and do events. There are
there are people who impersonate fictional characters. I have some
pretty good friends who impersonate Bill Murray. Not yet, no
(33:34):
I had I think that was just him. I think
that was Bill. Really, no one will ever believe us,
but but he knows some people who, for instance, appear
at functions, children's parties and stuff as you know, Cinderella
or as snow White or something. I also have friends
who do this. Yeah, and that that seems like a
(33:55):
really wholesome gig. We're not talking about the was kind
of impersonators. We're not talking about someone who is doing
a spot on kiss cover band or something. We're talking
about impersonators who replace celebrities in a way for the
(34:17):
purposes of crime. And this goes back to the biber
bacon that you mentioned earlier. Yea more of a biberrito,
right it is a yeah, the biberrito comes after the bacon,
so the bacon is um. Actually it's terrible to call
that because I'm a big fan of bacon. Big ups
to you, Bacon, just for existing and being and even
(34:38):
though you're terrible for me and for the environment and
all of those things, thank you for providing your oils
with which to cook other things. Okay, let's just go
and get on here. So you may you may love
Justin Bieber, you may loathe him. Either way, there's no
denying that this guy, the image of him, his voice,
(34:58):
everything about him extremely extremely popular, and specifically with younger women,
younger girls, teenage girls in particular. And there's this man
named Leem wir m o I R. He's thirty, he
was thirty four years old, and he really capitalized on
Justin Bieber's popularity and not in a good way. No,
(35:23):
he would pretend to be this teenager justin Bieber online
and he would talk to teenage fans and he would
start hounding them for money and then explicit sexual videos
of themselves. If they didn't send him money, then he
(35:47):
would say that he was going to post their videos online.
This guy is an uber creep, and you have to
imagine how emotionally traumatizing that is. If you're a huge
super fan and fav singer, you have, like maybe it's
your first crush or something, and you think that this
person is asking you an underage person, a child, for
(36:10):
what nude videos or something, and then for some reason
it's got has got to be at least a multimillionaire
is shaking you down for cash. Hopefully you know you.
You'd think that someone would recognize that, but again that
that kind of fog of celebrity. It's powerful, right, and
(36:32):
some people start successful criminal careers by rinsing and repeating
this sort of tactic. There's an I person here named
Emma Charlton who posed as a Vanity Fair editor Anna Wintour,
the one the one who occurs in that film The
Devil Wears Product. So Charlton tricked this guy into falling
in love marrying her, and then she just robbed and blind.
(36:57):
It turned out she had a long history of im
personating other people, some famous and fleecing, fleecing various dudes
that I thought they were in love with her. So
those are pretty dark. That's still not quite what we're
what we're getting at, right, Let's let's go to something
a little bit softer just for a second, right, because
(37:20):
people also impersonate celebrities for the purpose of pranking. Right, Yeah,
there was there was this thing that occurred back in
where this picture of Justin Bieber was going all around
the internet. I think we may have mentioned it in
passing before on this show. This is what I meant
(37:40):
by biberrito, Yes, exactly where it was. It was a
photograph of Justin Bieber wearing a hat, sunglasses, and a hoodie,
and he was eating a burrito from the center of
the burrito rather than at one of the ends. And
it was supposedly taken by some passersby while Justin Bieber
was enjoying a burrito just out in the park somewhere,
(38:01):
and it got retweeted so many, Like I don't even
know exactly how many times, thousands and thousands of times.
It was posted on all kinds of different blogs and
it became, I guess, a trending thing that was occurring.
But it turned out that it was literally just some pranksters, uh,
that we're pretending to be Justin bieber um and that's
(38:24):
all it was the entire time. But you think that
you'd think that with the number of people who know
who this kid is. Who are this guy Justin Bieber?
I guess he's a bit older now, but who knows
who he is. They know exactly what he looks like.
You'd think that somebody somewhere would have figured out that
that wasn't him. But it didn't happen until these guys
(38:47):
posted a YouTube video explaining exactly what they did and
how they did it. Wow. I guess the reaction was
just so attention grabbing right. Well, and think about this
around you, on your social media, whatever you're using, everyone
is believing that this is an actual picture of Justin Bieber.
So you almost don't even question or you don't question
(39:08):
it whatsoever. You just take it for granted. Oh that's
Justin Bieber that's weird. I'm gonna be honest with you, Matt,
I'm just gonna lay it all out on the table.
I confess to you. I know ding on the guy,
but I am not typically in a situation where my
my Bieber count is very very low on a day
(39:29):
to day basis. Oh yeah, your encounters with the Beebes
the Beebes, Yeah, is that a thing? The Beebster? I
don't know. I don't know. Justin Oh all right, Well,
you know I wish him the best of luck in
his career because it's tough work to be a musician.
I'll tell you this tremendous respect for Justin Bieber on
(39:52):
this side over here, even though he did he caught
up doing a lot of things that that has been.
That's a little kid that has been fighting through the
music industry since he was a little kid. That's so
very kind of you. I mean, come on, I don't
have a statement because I I just don't know much
about it. But but we see how even a very
(40:14):
well known person can be uh can be impersonated very seriously.
It doesn't it doesn't matter how famous you are. Maybe
to your point about social media, it could make it easier.
Now we get to the stuff that people will tend
to dismiss out of hand. What if a celebrity was
not consensually impersonated, right, What if they were murdered and
(40:36):
replaced somehow taken out. This brings us to twenty fifteen
when buzzfeeds Ryan Broderick found a Brazilian blog called Avril
is Dead, referring to the musician Avril Levine. The idea
is in the blog not Avril Levine got famous in
the early two thousand's, and then she was emotionally overwhelmed.
(40:59):
Her grand father passed away, and she died by suicide
right after the release of her first album, which was
called Let Go. Oddly enough, according to this theory, the
record company, the record label did not let Go because
the first album was so successful. They said, Okay, we
can just get someone who looks kind of like her,
(41:20):
a doppelganger, and keep the machine going, keep the keep
the money coming. In a little while later, Avril Levine
finally addressed this idea, and she said in an interview
on an Australian radio station k i I S, for
anyone interested the host aster, did you laugh at the
(41:41):
rumors that went around where you no longer exist? And
there's a clone of you, to which aver applies. Yes,
some people think that I'm not the real me, which
is so weird, Like why would they even think that?
For supporters of this theory there, you know, you're probably
white knuckled right now with your hands on the steering
wheel or whatever, and you're saying, of course that's what
(42:01):
the clone would say. Yeah exactly, But you know, uh,
as weird as it sounds, imagine just put yourself in
the shoes of some record company. Um. Now this is
gonna sound weird, but just imagine this. You're the head
of a record label. You just had one of the
(42:24):
most popular albums ever come out, or at least within
the past like a couple of years, um, come out
on your label, and it's this one singer songwriter that
is going to make you. You You know, they've made you
millions of dollars, They're gonna make you millions and millions
of dollars with their next album and everything. What if
that person dies and it's kept quiet enough to where
(42:47):
you think, well, maybe we can put out another album.
I mean, that's insane to think about. Like, what would
you do given the opportunity? Right exactly, You already have
millions of dollars. You're going you're set to make millions more,
tens of millions of dollars. Um, What would you do
to continue that money flowing in? I don't know. That's
(43:08):
one of those age old questions. Why do powerful rich
people do some of the things that they get accused
of and sometimes uh convicted for? Anyway, So it goes
to um Black Mirror. Have you seen Season five? Black Mirror?
So there're only three episodes, but one of them features
Miley Cyrus and in it she plays a pop star
(43:28):
called Ashley Oh. And this pop star spoilers by the
way ahead right after this three to one spoilers. So
she gets placed in a medically induced coma by her
management team essentially her aunt and some other people working
for her, and then they want to replace this pop
star with an AI. Essentially it's called Ashley Too, but
(43:52):
it's created from this weird, little, compartmentalized, pr friendly version
of Ashley Oh's personality. Yeah, the hardware they start off
with is I very rarely use this word, but it's
kind of cute. Oh the little tiny Yeah, no, I agreed,
but in this case they're gonna make use of holograms
(44:14):
and Ashley Oh's personality to basically replace the pop star
uh completely And it feels a lot like this story
with Avril Levine, like to continue the money flowing in,
they would do whatever they needed to do to make
this person at least seem real, right, right, and they
(44:37):
would be able to apply near future technology. Yeah, and
it's you know, but it's not the first time some
pop star has been, you know, accused of being not
the real one, right, that's correct. This one is for you, Diana,
although working with us on that previous video, I'm pretty
sure you know all of all of this already. That's
(45:00):
September nineteen, a rumor that Paul McCartney, famed member of
the Beatles, had died, began spreading across college campuses in
the States. These rumors expanded they were there was a
snowball aggregate effect because people felt they were finding more
and more clues hidden in album covers and in Beatles songs,
(45:23):
and clue hunting was infectious, addictive, and fun. Within a
few weeks, this blows up at its global for most people.
This craze was short lived, and Paul McCartney, if it
is him, has an interview where he says, no, I've
I've been taking some family time. I've been in Scotland, Kenya,
(45:44):
places like that. I've been kind of off the grid
because you know, I'm massively rich. Yeah, and I can
just go places like that. John Lennon is very stressful
to work with. That's pretty obvious, right, I mean, yeah,
I know McCartney also has his quirks. Sure, sure, that's true.
(46:05):
Just trying to give John Letton benefit of the doubt, Okay,
right right, I mean right, that's that's true. Well, McCartney, though,
he has this interview in Life magazine where he's like,
you know, very much alive or whatever and just hoped
over to Scotland year And despite denying the rumors, the
(46:26):
exaggerated rumors of his death in a very Mark Twain
esque way, Uh, McCartney still had to confront these things.
People said that he was a lookalike. His real name
was William Shears Campbell or William Shepherd. William Campbell allegedly
became Billy shears On Sergeant Pepper, and William Shephard was
(46:48):
supposedly the inspiration behind the continuing story of Bungalow Bill.
That's awesome. It's a weird one. Hello, Bill, were you
listen to a lot of Beatles at my house? To
all of this stuff rings so true to me? Ah,
I love it? So how did this? How did this
one start? Oh? There's an article it's called is Beatle
(47:12):
Paul McCartney Dead? And it was written September seventeenth, nineteen
sixty nine this gentleman named Tim Harper, who was the
editor of the Drake Times Delphic. It was a student
newspaper of Drake University over in Des Moines, Iowa. Now
this article, it, uh, it addressed the rumor, essentially the
(47:32):
rumor mill that was kind of going around the school
that all these clues, if you put them together, it
means that Paul McCartney has somehow died. And let's let's
look at some of these uh messages here. So it
includes a message that says, turn me on, dead man.
And this comes from the White album from the song
Revolution nine. And it's when you play it backwards. It's
(47:56):
that old backwards masking thing that we've talked about before.
And uh, this uh apparently if you like look at
all of the rumors and the things that were published,
if you try to trace it all the way back.
You get to this article, the the one that we
just mentioned in Iowa, right right right by Tim Harper. So,
according to music journalist Merrill Nowdon, this was the first
(48:19):
published work on the idea that Paul McCartney was dead
because of some backward masks lyrics turned me on dead man.
It's weird, weird flex So we have let's do one
more example. What about Abbey Road? He wasn't wearing shoes
and he was smoking. What about Abbey Road? Just saying
you didn't standing with four people who all looked kind
(48:39):
of like what you gotta differentiate yourself. But just Paul,
I don't know, man. What about that car crash? I
don't know. He wasn't a car crash, and as many
I don't know. So I have got to say a
lot of people still think that is a fringe theory,
among them being the man who, as we record this podcast,
(49:00):
claims to be Paul Paul McCartney. He would say he
claims to be that because he is Paul McCartney. Yeah,
he would. It's I I am profoundly inspired by your
commitment to this. I know it's do you seriously think
it's the case I don't I will, I will. I
will send you and Diana on an adventure in a
(49:23):
foreign country if it turns out that he is not
really Paul McCartney. Okay, accepted deal. I will work will
be to prove that that is not Paul. Uh. So
we'll do one more before Matt Diana put me in
the poorhouse, and that is Taylor Swift. People, this is
(49:46):
a weird one. I felt people were arguing, based entirely
on the photographs, that Taylor Swift is in fact the
clone of a former Satanic priestess. Yeah, right, as you do.
This dates back to two thousand and eleven, and people
say that Swift is actually a clone of one Zena
love A, the daughter of the founder of the Church
(50:07):
of Satan, Anton LaVey. And there are a bunch of
videos on YouTube comparing the two. I would suggest I
would take a look at them if you want. They
don't look very similar. But a lot of that is interpretive,
and I the beholder and so on. So right now,
it doesn't seem that there's too much sand to the
(50:27):
idea that celebrities could be killed, replaced, or taken out.
We're not quite at that black mirror level, yet at
least not in person. It is going to happen, though
it's going to happen, it's not gonna maybe happen in person,
but we are in the world of deep fakes. What
is what is deep fake? Aside from another episode, well so, yeah,
(50:50):
that's a way to digitally manipulate the sound and image
on you know, in digital photography and audio, to make
it seem as though a person, in this case a
celebrity or well known individual is saying or doing something
that they are actually not. And it's quite effective. If
(51:12):
you go back to I'm by the way just watching Mr.
Robots season three and back in season two, they had
just a quick little piece of video that happens on
a television screen where President Obama is talking and he
mentions one of the characters, Tyrrell Wellick and it at
(51:33):
the time in I remember being taken aback by it,
I didn't understand, like, how did they get the president
to say that? Why would they why would he agree
to that? What do you pay a president when he
makes a quick little cameo counterpoint? You don't pay presidents.
You donate to their foundations, charities and campaign funds. There
(51:56):
you go, there you go. I was perplexed by it,
and I I remember I think we even I can't
remember we mentioned it on the show like when it
came out, but we we have talked about it since then.
And you can see there are YouTube channels online with
the deep fakes that are super just believable and scary,
(52:18):
making putting other people's faces on bodies, making those bodies
say things, putting words into the mouths of other people
who are being interviewed. If you if you want to,
let's just stay on the President Obama thing. If you
go to two years later, after the Mr. Robots Season
two things, you go to this video that Jordan Peel
(52:41):
made and he he impersonated President Obama quite a bit
in his career, or he continues to do that, but
for a while there was one of uh, you know,
one of the funniest things he was doing. At least
according to me, he nailed the voice, just so so
good with the voice. Well, he made a video of
him talking and a deep faked video of President Obama
(53:04):
saying all the things that Jordan Peel was saying. I
remember that, yeah, And it was in warning to everyone
that you have to really trust the news sources that
you look at. You have to trust the videos you've watched.
Um and it's becoming harder and harder to do that.
I would say the ups, I would say, you have
to distrust more stuff. Well, yeah, you you have to
(53:26):
trust the humans that are behind the things, right exactly,
You have to trust the source or you have to
at least do your own due diligence on this. And Hollywood,
of course, it's very, very excited over the moon about this.
Can you imagine how much more affordable films will become?
Why would you need to pay whomever you know, like
(53:50):
Julia Roberts or um Idris Elba. What would you need
to pay them millions and millions of dollars every time
you make a movie when you could just buy the
rights to their likeness and their voice and then use
deep fake technology. Holograms are there that they're pretty sophisticated,
but we're not on the point where they can replace
(54:11):
human beings yet. Well, and at this point almost all
consumption occurs on our phones. True. Also, I gotta go
on this one pitch pitch one thing. Okay, so imagine
we combine deep fakes with AI kind of limited AI.
(54:31):
This leads us to a strange place, very very quickly.
I have a prediction. I predict that in the mid future,
you know, mid term future. So it's completely possible that
we could democratize screenwriting and filmmaking in a very strange way,
a way that would not require more than one human
(54:54):
being to be involved. Imagine if you had something that
was like Alexa or Sirie or Google Home or whatever,
and instead of just messing with audio, this would mess
with audio and visual. So you could just say to it.
You could say, hey, Google or Alexa, combine Police Academy
(55:15):
for and just name another film, back to the Future
three and Back to the Future three. Just combine those
together and make a film for me. And then this
algorithm would be able to write the script for that
that combines these things, take the references from the other
visual aspects and combine those so that we would have
(55:37):
something like, you know, back to the Police Academy for
or back to the Police Academy three, you know what
I mean, or Police Academy to the future. You know,
it's completely possible, And then that means the only human
being involved in that entire process once this technology exists
is the person who asked the question, and I think
(55:58):
we're on the way there. Wow, pretty pretty stunning stuff. Yeah,
it's funny too, because all you'd have to do is
combine some of the top grossing films over the past
fifty years basically, and then you could just have new
hits and change the proper nounds and scriptwriting is so
formulaic anyways for a lot of those films. But it
(56:23):
appears that at least four now, at least in the
cases we've outlined, there's no solid proof of celebrities being
actively murdered and replaced. Yet we do see the numerous
possibilities for replacement, if not, if not assassination. Uh. And
we do know that there are likely body doubles out
(56:45):
there in other other forms other uh, I mean there's
still bodies other forms or other applications would be a
better way to say it, you know. And I just
have to say something here. I believe that a lot
of these allegations that come up with body doubles, especially
with um celebrities who were younger women at the time
(57:09):
when they became celebrities, like your Taylor Swifts and your
Avril Levine's and all this. Um, A lot of this
feels like, I don't want to say, I don't know
if it's body shaming isn't the right term, but the
disbelief that a celebrity, especially a female celebrity, looks differently
(57:30):
than she did when she was, you know, seventeen eighteen,
whenever she became popular or younger. UM, I think has
to do with our own perceptions of that and how
we've been manipulated by media to view women as they age.
Is that I feel like there's something there because there's
(57:51):
there's an interview with Avril Levine where she was being asked,
you know, have you heard the rumors that you were
replaced in everything that we were discussing, and the images
of her she does not look like she did at
least in too whatever that whenever she was interviewed or something.
She does not look anything like the Avril Levine that
we all grew up watching on MTV. And it's just
(58:12):
the nature of growing up and changing. And I don't know,
I feel like there's something in there with the way
we treat celebrities and follow them over all of this time, UM,
that maybe we just lose sight of who the person
is when you're looking at them. The fact that human
beings age and changes. Yeah, I don't see that. So
(58:35):
that's where we're leaving the conversation today. I know this
was a really long one. I think this is our
longest episode we've done in a while us. So we
want to hear from you what celebrity replacement theories, if any,
do you feel have some true grit? What do you
think would be the most likely, uh scenario wherein this
(58:59):
could occur? And if you have proof of it, let
us know if you are if you are Paul McCartney
and you're just tired of hearing this, Uh, that's that's fine.
Let us know. We we hope we were fair about
that case. Or just send us pictures of your favorite
doppel gangers. It's often said that everyone in the world
has someone who looks exactly like them. Have you ever
(59:20):
met your doppelganger? Was it cool? Were they cool? How
did it go? Tell us? You can find us on Facebook,
you can find us on Instagram, you can find us
on Twitter. You can also give us a call directly.
We are one h three three st d W y
t K. Leave a message. We will hear it, we
might get on the show. Yeah. And if none of
that quite bags your badgers, you want to contact us
(59:43):
in what is now the old fashioned way, there's good news.
You can reach us directly via email. We are conspiracy
at iHeart radio dot com. M hmmm. Stuff they Don't
(01:00:10):
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