September 18, 2026 • 47 mins
Seeing your near twin is probably pretty weird. But could there be a genetic commonality as well? You bet there could!
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
I think I even say in the episode that I
remember learning about doppelgangers from those time-life books about the
paranormal back when I was a kid. Well, fast forward
to when I'm a grown-up, a.k.a. now, I was really
glad to learn that they're an actual thing. There are
people walking around who have a twin that they're in
no way related to, and the stories behind them tend
(00:23):
to be very interesting. I'm out. This is the last
one for me, so let me say thanks for listening
to our playlist.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck,
and Jerry's here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know,
the day after Labor Day edition, which Chuck loves.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah, you know, Emily showed me that article that informed
part of this episode the other day. Yeah. And we'll
get to it, but I started looking at this photographer's
doppelganger photo series.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
And boy, some of those are crazy similar.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah, what about the two bears with their shirts off?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Those guys struck me as extremely close.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
The two women with the bangs and the black tank
tops looked like identical twins to me. I could not
tell them apart.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yeah, I feel like we shouldn't tease anybody anymore. There's
a guy, and like you said, we'll get to him
in a little bit, or he'll figure in in a
little bit, I should say. But he's a Montreal, I
guess a Quebecois photographer, Francois Brunel. And for 20 years,
he's been assembling... pictures of doppelgangers, people who already knew
(01:54):
they had a doppelganger and wrote in doppelgangers he's looked
for and found on the street. And he brings them
together into his studio and photographs them together. But he
does some like really cool stuff with it. It's not
just like, here, you stand here and you stand next
to him. The way that he poses them and dresses
them and everything, like it creates like a sense of
intimacy between them. It makes you think you're looking at
identical twin photos.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Yeah. I mean, you know, some of them people favor
one another. And then when you have them styled to
look alike and posed alike, that informs what you're seeing.
But a handful of them, it was they look so
much like identical twins that it's just it's weird to
think that you could walk down the street one day
and meet someone who looks exactly like you.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Yeah. And I mean, like that is got to be
pretty eerie. Luckily, one of the great things about social
media is that people can post their random encounters. You
got a phone with a camera on it. You got
access to social media through that phone. You can just
snap a picture of you and your doppelganger, post it
to the internet, and let everyone go crazy. And that
does happen, it seems like, from time to time. But
(02:56):
this dude's whole jam, it's called I'm Not a Lookalike
with an exclamation point. It sounds like a Disney movie
from the 60s or something. But that's Francois Brunel's 20-year series.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, and not just... hey, Chuck, you look like every
tubby guy with a beard and glasses. It's like, that's lazy.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
I think when you're in the public eye, people tend
to do things like that to say, okay, you look
like all of these people. We're talking like real lookalikes.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Right.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Which I, you know, I think I've gotten a couple
here and there over the years that I was like, okay,
I could see that for sure. But doppelgangers are different.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Yeah. So doppelganger, if you haven't just surmised already, it's
a German word at its origin. And it's not one
of those really clever German words. It really just means
double goer or a different interpretation is double walker. And
it's not some super old, like medieval word. It was
actually coined at the end of the 18th century by
(04:01):
an author named Jean-Paul. which is an unlikely German name
if you ask me. But he wrote a book called Siebenkass. Yeah, Siebenkass.
I nailed it. And that book was about a man
who had a doppelganger, right?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Yeah. I think John Paul's hiding something with that name.
I do too.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
He's actually a double.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
I think there's a Dusseldorf at the end or something
that he left off.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, so he wrote about it in that novel, but
as Livia is keen to point out, Livia helped us
with this one, he sort of mixes up the words.
When he was actually talking about a lookalike human, he
used the word with a T, doppeltganger, but did use
the word doppelganger in there as a meal with two
(04:51):
courses being served together. So I don't know, things just
got a little confused or people thought it was just
fine to drop the T. But doppelganger became the eventual
word that we use for, you know, a non-related lookalike.
And that's I don't know if we pointed that out.
The obvious thing here is that you're not not related
to these people at all.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yeah. And the other thing about a doppelganger is, again,
like you said, it's not like you bear a passing
resemblance or you favor one another. Like you're as close
to the person's double body double as you can get.
And the closer you are, the more of a doppelganger
you are, basically. Right. But Jean-Paul, I can't say his
name any other way, he coined those terms. So it's
(05:33):
funny that he kind of got it wrong. Everybody else
is like, no, we're going to drop the T, like
you said. But the fact that he coined the term
doppelganger doesn't mean he invented the concept. It's actually a
much older concept. It just didn't have the same name
that we use now. Apparently, there was a longstanding superstition
in England, in Germany, dating back, I think, to the
(05:55):
medieval age, maybe before Chuck, where if you saw your
doppelganger three times, it meant you were about to die.
And that's still a, I think people still kind of
believe that one.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah. And that's, I mean, there are all kinds of
old pieces of folklore in just about every country you
can explore that has some sort of, and it's usually not,
if you find your doppelganger, then, you know, good luck
will come your way. It always seems like it's some
kind of spooky negative thing will happen, whether you see
them three times, or whether, I mean, there was one,
(06:27):
I think, in the Norse mythology, where a spirit appears.
This one's just a little weird. It appears just like you,
but it beats you to wherever you're going. So if
you're traveling on a journey, your doppelganger would beat you there,
and people think that you would have arrived earlier. I
(06:48):
don't know if that's the solves tardiness for the North mythology,
but that one's not super evil, but it's usually, especially
when you get into literature, uh, some sort of, you know,
evil force or evil twin that's come along to wreck
things for you. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
And that Norse one that arrives, I just want to
put a button on that. Cause I did a little research. It, um,
it's called the Varduger. And the reason I know how
to pronounce it is because I looked up what the
O with the slash is pronounced like. And it's the
same thing as an O with the umlaut.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
I didn't know that before, did you?
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Well, you might be a little more of a metal
fan than me.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
It's cool looking, just like the umlaut.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Super cool. I think it's cooler than the umlaut. It's
got like a slash through it, you know, like, take
that O. Whereas the umlaut's like, I'm adorning this O.
It's a little different.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
All right. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story called William Wilson. Uh,
sort of like I mentioned before about, you know, evil
things happening and narrator meets a boy at school. Uh,
and this one had the same name, I'm presuming William Wilson.
Otherwise it'd be a weird title. And this boy though
only speaks in a whisper. So, uh, it seems like
(08:01):
all through literature, it's always some sort of a creepy
shadowy figure.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, there's also Dostoevsky put kind of a spin on
it where he introduced a doppelganger to the main character
in a novel called, or a novella, I think, called
The Double. And I love this. In it, the doppelganger
is like a more likable version of the main character
and ends up breaking the main character mentally. I like that.
(08:28):
I could totally see that. You know, like if this
imposter comes along or this other version of you comes
along and people are like, I like you a lot more.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
It reminds me, have you seen that Paul Rudd show,
Living With Yourself? No. I don't know how it escaped,
but they did a season of it in 2019, didn't
follow up on it, but he plays himself and his
doppelganger to great comedic effect. But it's also... Like really
fascinating and interesting. It's a really great show. It's on Netflix.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Well, that's the other thing. And we'll talk about some
more in history. But, of course, with TV, oftentimes it's
flipped to a more fun thing. And it's played for laughs.
I don't think Three's Company had a doppelganger episode, but
it wouldn't surprise me. Because it can be played for
sort of mixed identity hijinks as well. Totally.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Totally. Like one where Mr. Furley was into Jack, but
it was really his doppelganger.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Yeah, and I mean, it'd probably be like his twin
brother who came to visit in that case, but.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
This still counts. An unknown twin still in the canon
counts as a doppelganger.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Do you think?
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Well, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
All right. Well, you just negated what I said, that
they're not related, but. Well, okay.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
That's true. Once you find out, here's the thing. This
actually proves your point, Chuck. Once the characters find out, oh,
it's a twin, mystery solved, no longer a doppelganger, it
becomes a twin. But up to that point when they're
crossing paths with one another and never in the same
room at the same time.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
That's a central mystery.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
It seems doppelganger. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
But Furley doesn't have a brother. Or does he?
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Why is he acting so weird?
Speaker 2 (10:05):
There have been some true historical figures over the years
that bought into this stuff. Abraham Lincoln. He and his wife,
they had all kinds of kind of interesting beliefs.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
It was the age of spiritualism.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, for sure. So you have to take that into consideration,
I think. But Lincoln supposedly saw his image three times,
I think, in the mirror in 1860, which.
What was his wife's name? Mary Todd?
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Mary Todd.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Mary Todd said, you know, you're going to serve two
terms as president. That's what that means. But you're going
to die before the end of the second term.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
And he said... Well, good night, dear.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
But see, I take issue with some of these listed
historically because they're more ghostly specters than real human doppelgangers.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
So John Donne's story is strictly by location. I would
not call it a doppelganger one where he saw his
wife a few times while he was in Paris and
she was back in England and she was actually ill
and their child had died. By location doesn't count. But
Percy Bysshe Shelley, he saw his doppelganger and died a
few weeks later in a sailing accident. I would say
(11:20):
that one counts in the lore. And then Catherine the
Great's was pretty good too, right?
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah, and I think Percy Bysshe Shelley's doppelganger had a
t-shirt on that said, I'd rather be sailing.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Which made it even weirder.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
No, his t-shirt said no plates because that was his
third choice.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Who was the other one?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Catherine the Great?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, this was a real one too, actually. Supposedly there
was a servant, right, who discovered a double like that
somehow got in there, faked their way in there, and
was sitting on the throne. So this was a case
where someone was, I don't think, trying to like, you know,
realistically take over as queen, but at least got in
(11:59):
there and was like, I'm going to sit on the
throne and I got past the guards because I look
like you.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, I also saw it interpreted as like phantasmagoric too.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Oh, like it didn't happen?
Speaker 1 (12:10):
No, that it was like a phantom or like a
supernatural doppelganger rather than like a double or something like that.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Again, not a real doppelganger to me.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
And then my favorite one of all time, I've known
this one since I was a kid back when I
was into the Time Life Mysteries books because I think
that's where I first read it. But the German poet
and philosopher Goethe, one of the reasons I like this
anecdote is because I love saying Goethe's name. Mm-hmm. He
was riding one time from Alsace to, I want to
(12:40):
say Dusseldorf, but I think that's wrong. But it works, right?
Speaker 2 (12:44):
I mean, sure. It's the name of that author.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
And he passed himself on the road. And his doppelganger
was wearing some gray outfit or whatever. And then like
eight years later, he was on his way from Dusseldorf
to Alsace going the other way. And he realized he
was wearing that same outfit that his doppelganger had been
wearing eight years before. And he was like, this is
pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
And that was a Time Life Books thing?
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Yeah. I remember it very well. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
That sounds about right.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
I didn't know how to say Goethe's name at the time, though.
So I was like, this really weird thing happened to Goethe.
All right.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Maybe we should take a little break now that we've
sort of given some past examples of what may or
may not be doppelgangers. And we'll talk about real doppelgangers,
real live humans walking around that look like you right
after this. All right, so we mentioned the photographer, Francois Brunel,
(13:56):
who's been doing this project. It's called I'm Not a Lookalike,
where he takes pictures of these people.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I'm sorry, Chuck. There's an exclamation point at the end
of that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
I'm not a lookalike. I encourage people to go check
this out when they're in a safe space and you're
not driving or whatever to look at some of these
photos because it's amazing. I mean, some of them, like
I said, look to my eye like identical twins. The
other two sort of gentlemen probably in their 60s with
the little mustache. Did you see those guys?
Speaker 1 (14:27):
The shirtless ones? No. No.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
The picture I saw they had on like little, uh,
sort of like a newsboy caps.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
I don't know if I saw those guys.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
They look, I mean, they look like identical twins and, um,
so cool. Those are the ones that this is the
article that Emily sent me where it talked about that project.
And then it got into a really interesting study because
if you think, well, you know, what is a doppelganger?
I've always, since I was a kid, I've always sort of, um,
(14:57):
realize that there are only so many facial combinations you
can have and with the amount of we talked about
this over the years in the show too like over
the years and through history uh especially seems to happen
if you're looking through like yearbooks from like the 40s
and 50s and 60s you'll like see people that look
like people you know or like yourself there are just
only so many ways you can rearrange a face until
(15:20):
you're bound at some point to get someone who maybe
favors somebody a little bit or even more or to
the point where they look just alike and And so
you might think, well, what does that have to say
about what's going on inside? Is there anything to DNA?
And they looked into that, right?
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yeah, I guess Brunel's work caught the attention of a
researcher named Manel Esteller from Spain, from the Carreras Leukemia
Research Institute, who said, I want to try to figure
this out. And these people are like a perfect population sample.
So he took, I think, 32 pairs of doppelgangers. ran
them through three different facial recognition programs. And half of them,
(15:59):
I guess 16 of the pairs, as far as the
AI was concerned in the programs, they were identical twins.
That's what the AI took them for in all three programs, right?
So they took those people and they analyzed their genomes
and they found, actually, these people have a lot of
similar genes. And even though they're not related, that was
(16:20):
another part of the study. They went through and made
sure that these people weren't like there was some unknown
relation that they had to one another. They didn't. They
were as genetically unrelated as two random strangers would be
on the street. But they shared some very similar genes
in some key places, especially like facial construction.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Yeah. And they were also, and again, this doesn't like
lessen the study any to me, but they were generally
from the same country or the same ethnic background. Although
I did see it gender varied because there was one
where it was a man and a woman who looked
a lot alike in those photos that they put together,
which is pretty interesting. But they looked into how they
(17:03):
matched up, I think, with their microbiome epigenetically, which is
basically how your behaviors in your environment is going to
affect your genes. And then just your straight up genome.
And what they found out was they did share a
lot of what are called SNPs, single nucleotide polymorphisms, which
(17:26):
are the variations in our DNA that create most of
the genetic variation that people have with one another. So
they shared a lot of them. And I wish we
would have gotten like the raw numbers because all it
says is like, you know, they shared many SNPs, whereas
I'd like to see sort of the actual data, which
I couldn't get to. But what they did find was
(17:49):
that epigenetically and with their microbiomes, they were basically random.
So it was only genetically that they shared something.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Well, yeah. And they said, well, actually, I think this
is probably what accounts for a lot of the differences
in identical twins. Like people look at identical twins and
they're like, oh, you're identical. But if you really start
to look at them closely, you're like, actually, there's a
lot more differences than you'd think between them. And even
though they share the same genes, I think 99% of
the same DNA, what makes identical twins slightly different is
(18:21):
in their epigenome. And this study basically found the same
thing with doppelgangers. They can share a lot of similar
genes that give them the same facial traits or builds
or I think even habits they found. A lot of
them Like if one smoked, the other was likely to smoke.
You know, they carried their weight about the same way.
But they found that, like you said, the differences were
(18:43):
found in their epigenome. And I don't know if, I
know they tested it, but I didn't see that their
microbiome might have provided some differences too. It's basically nature
versus nurture, or more to the point, it's like nature
and nurture working together to make us slightly different, even
when we're basically bound to look the same genetically.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah, I think the microbiome was the same as the
epigenetic finding, which was, I think the quote was, it
generally wasn't any closer than two randos.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Gotcha.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
That's what they said in the paper, randos.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
They did. They did. I'm trying to find real quick the...
The data? The number of SMPs. I can't find it
that quick. There's a lot of numbers and weird, like,
capital C, lowercase p, capital G. I'm like, I don't
know what that is. But I will tell you this.
I looked up those older guys in the news caps.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
They are spitting image. Yeah. And not only are they
spitting image of one another, they're spitting image of the
Lennox air conditioning man. They look exactly like him. that guy.
Down to the hat.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Well, I guess if that guy ever, you know, leaves
the earth and they've got two backups.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
I mean, what's it called when you get three doppelgangers together?
Speaker 2 (20:00):
I don't know. A droppelganger?
Speaker 1 (20:02):
I guess so.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
What I'd be curious to see is if, and maybe
I'll look more just for my own funsies into... the
photographer's project, because what I'm curious about is if these,
like how these people get along and if they like
formed friendships, if they liked each other, if they had
similar interests, you know, that's, that's pretty fascinating to me.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
I think so too. And again, like that's, that's the
kind of stuff that can take a, a real turn,
I guess, depending on how you were raised or even like,
you know, were you raised in your power lines? Great.
That means you're into baseball cards, that kind of thing
that we just haven't put our finger on yet. But
it does seem like, you know, it's becoming clearer and clearer.
It's not just genetics. It's not just epigenetics. It's all
(20:47):
of that stuff put together. And it seems like so
wildly unattainable, that information that because it's so complicated and
there's so many variables and so many factors. But if
you step back and think about it, there's a finite
number of variables and factors. As many as it seems
to us, it's a finite number. It's not infinite, which
means someday we could conceivably get a grasp on exactly
(21:12):
what makes a person them, which I find really exciting.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
You know what would be funny is if they really
got along and they were like, oh my God, we
have so many similarities. We look just alike. this is
such a weird thing. And they were having lunch and
one of them was like, boy, what a shame that
Hillary lost the right. And the other one might unveils
a Make America Great Again t-shirt or something.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Drops their fork.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
They just get up and part ways silently. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
That would be the best case scenario, I think.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah. So this study, this next one kind of irritates
me a little bit. It was from 2015 and I
think was well-intentioned, but there was an Australian biologist who
named Tegan Lucas, who got off to a great start,
looked at 4,000 faces from the U.S. Anthropometric Survey database,
(22:04):
which is something the U.S. Army puts together.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Tegan Lucas is listening to this now. She's like, oh,
you got off to a great start on that U.S.
Anthropometric Survey, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Well, I think Tegan Lucas overachieved because what they did
was looked across eight facial features and calculated like the
chances that you'll look just like someone else is one
in a trillion. I see these pictures of these doppelgangers.
I'm like, there's just no way because I'm looking at
the evidence. And it turns out that Tegan really got
(22:34):
into like measuring the millimeter of a nostril and stuff
like that. And the comparison, it was just too identical.
Like I think with identical twins, you wouldn't get that close.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
No, but I think that's what she was going for
is like, you know, would it be possible for two
identical people to be walking around? And one of the
applications of our research is if we're creating facial recognition systems,
which we've done an episode on before, it was pretty
eerie if I remember correctly. But if we're creating these things,
if we're building computers to recognize people's faces, are there
(23:10):
going to be any kind of like false positives out
there because there's two people out there who are that similar?
And the chances are, really low unless we just keep
going population-wise. And even with the number of people out today,
I frankly don't think it's that low of a chance
that there are two people who are identical across eight
(23:30):
measures of your face. And she wouldn't reveal what the
eight measures were because apparently her work was that groundbreaking
that she's like, I can't let anybody know what to
hide or disguise.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
But the point is it's eight different dimensions. And like
you said, I think like nostril width, ear length, that
kind of stuff, down to the millimeter. And she found
that it's like a one in a trillion chance that
there are two people walking around like that. The thing
is there's eight billion people on the planet.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
So that means there's no doppelgangers.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Well, it's not close to a trillion, but it's not
as far off from a trillion as like if there
were two people on the planet. So if you have
two people on the planet and a one in a
trillion chance that they're going to look alike, the chance
that they're going to look like is basically nothing. But
as you get closer to a trillion, there is a
really good chance that there are going to be two
people walking around that are identical. And we're at eight million.
(24:28):
So we're at, I think, a one in 125 chance
that today on Earth there are two people who look
exactly alike across those eight measures. The point is for
you and me to just be looking at stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Uh-huh.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
We don't need those eight measures to be exactly right.
If they're close enough, that's when people look like doppelgangers
to you and me. But we're not artificial intelligence. We're
sentient beings. Right.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Well, yeah, we're artificial. And I think we're intelligent. But
we're not those two things together.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Are we artificial? Sure.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
I just want to try and freak people out.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
A little bit. Oh, okay.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
The Josh bot and the Chuck bot are hard at
work here.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Does not compute.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Well, I think what we're arriving at is a point
that we failed to make earlier, which is there is
no agreed upon definition of what constitutes a doppelganger. Like
how alike do you have to look to someone to
say you're a doppelganger?
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
You know, like I look like the guy, I look
like the bass player for Jason Isbell in the 400 unit.
But is he my doppelganger? Probably not.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Okay, so one of the reasons why I think people
would kind of look at you and then the bass
player for.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
… Jason Isbell in the 400 unit.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Sure. And put you guys together and said, oh, they
really look alike is because … we use like shortcuts
when we're looking at, at people's faces or even just
people in general. So let's say you're both wearing the
same hat and the same, you both have a similar beard,
I'm guessing. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
I want to name him cause I don't want to
just keep calling that cause I love that group. Uh,
his name is Jimbo Hart. And when you look at
a picture of Jimbo Hart.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
He, you know, it's a great name too.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Like look him up. He's got the beard. He's, you know,
when I'm reading, I got on my black room glasses.
I like to wear my hats these days. My, uh,
you know, various sort of cowboy hats and fedoras.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah. I mean, the guy looks like me.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Okay. So if you put you guys together, you're both
wearing the same glasses, you got a beard, you got
hats on and all that stuff. People would be like
spitting image, but take the glasses off, shave the beard,
take the hat off and then put you guys together.
How close would you really be? And probably not that close.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
I can tell you, I can see him without a
beard and he's not nearly as close.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
OK, right. So there you go. Like we make these
shortcuts with our face or with our minds to just
kind of as like kind of a shorthand for like, oh,
that's Chuck. I don't have to analyze them anymore because
that uses up a lot of brain power and energy.
And I'm kind of low on carbs today. So I
just know that that's Chuck where it really turned out
to be Jimbo Hart. The basis for.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
The 400 unit.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Uh, right. And you know, you've seen this and here's
a good example of how this can play tricks on people. Uh,
and this is just one example. A lot of people
have done that kind of fun thing where you switch
out a, a face on someone and put it on
someone else. And it's like, it should be obvious, but
it's like, it just looks like a weird uncanny version
(27:32):
of that person.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Right.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
Uh, the one that Livia picked out was from MIT
when they put George Bush's face on Dick Cheney's head.
And Bill Clinton's face on Al Gore's head, that dates
the creation of that particular meme or whatever it was.
The Dick Cheney one looks like you got to look
(27:54):
a bunch of times before you realize that's George Bush's face.
The Al Gore one, I mean, it's so clearly Clinton.
It's just kind of funny looking. But the Bush-Cheney swap
actually kind of worked in that, I guess, goes to
sort of prove that you look at things like hair.
And stuff like that as, you know, that big Clinton
(28:15):
mop or that big Al Gore mop that he had
or Cheney's bald head. And that's a big clue.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah. And also like the I think one of the
foundations of this swap is that it can't be like
an egregious change. Right. Like if you remember back to,
I think it was Conan that used to put Steve
Buscemi eyes on different celebrities and see what they look like.
That's an egregious change. It's not going to work. That
was great. Dick Cheney and George Bush's eyes look similar
(28:43):
enough that if you put George Bush's eyes on Dick
Cheney's face, you're not really going to notice because it's
not that egregious of a change. And there was a study,
I think, from 1977. swinging, groovy study. And it basically
tried to figure out how people register faces in what order.
And they found that first we look at the eyes,
then we look at the mouth, and then we look
(29:05):
at the nose. And those are the things we kind
of take in. But there's other research, and I think
this is also kind of like supported by the same study.
Like when you look at someone's face, you don't go,
all right, let me see the eyes. You got that.
Let me see the mouth. Right. And then the nose.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
That makes you a serial killer.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Right. Right. Oh, I want to kill that person. Right. No,
like we just look at the whole thing, look at
the whole package, which is why it's so easy for
us to overlook differences between even identical twins or doppelgangers
and make people look closer together than they are because
our brains are lazy and fat.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
That's right. And it also depends on as far as
whether you might look like someone about, you know, it
just sort of makes sense if you look, and it's
hard to say that someone's average looking, but what we
mean by that is, and Livia points out is, you know,
you're not six foot nine and have flaming red hair
and freckles. Like, Those things will make you very much
stand out. Whereas if you live in a population of,
(30:03):
you know, middle Georgia and you, you know, you're a
little tubby, you've got a beard, you got dark hair,
and you dress a certain way, then you might look
like a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Sure. And that actually raises a recent internet sensation. A
guy named Neil Douglas was, I think, flying to Ireland
on a Ryanair flight. Yeah. And went to get in
his seat and saw that there was somebody sitting in
his seat. And the person looked up and it was
his doppelganger.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
It was so great.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
I mean, isn't that even more bizarre? Like it wasn't
in like the back of the plane. Like this guy
was in his seat, too, which makes it even more eerie.
And so they snapped a selfie and, like, posted it.
And everyone just went bonkers because these guys had no
idea who the other one was. They weren't related. But
they looked a lot like each other. But there was
this BBC article that covered it where they basically said, OK,
(30:55):
but let's really stop and think about this. That's amazing.
And the fact that he was in the other guy's
seat is even more amazing. But how unlikely is it
that these two, you know— were on the same plane.
And they figured out that based on a number of
different factors, like the hair, the face, the beard, the nose,
I think the brown eyes, that there's something like maybe
(31:17):
80,000 people walking around out there that look just like them, essentially.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah, 74,000. That's a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
It is a lot of people that look essentially like
those two enough that the internet would go crazy if
you put two of them together and said, these two
are strangers and they just met. And posted a picture
of it.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
It was a pretty fun picture because they're so delighted, clearly,
with seeing each other. And then another guy, there's a
triple picture somewhere, too, of another guy that was like, hey,
I'm one of those 74,000. And they put all three
of them close to each other and they look pretty similar.
The one sort of difference here is in height is
(31:58):
one of the dudes was 5'7, the other was 6'3,
because there's other pictures of them. out drinking together in Ireland.
I guess they kind of hung out and stuff, which
is great.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Well, I read they kept running into each other and
finally were like, okay, let's go get a pint together.
Like they were at the same hotel and like they
kept running into one another. So they went with it.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
See, if you believe in like weird fate or intervention,
you might wonder if like, maybe I should give some
thought to what this means. Like, am I supposed to
do something special with this person? Right.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
If the movie Serendipity with John Cusack really spoke to you.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
I never even saw that. You mentioned that movie a lot.
What happened in that movie?
Speaker 1 (32:38):
I don't want to spoil it for anybody.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
Was there a doppelganger? No. Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
But they kept running into one another, and it just
kind of was like.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Oh, it's just the chance of true love over and over.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
It was a good movie, okay?
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Didn't they go to some ice cream shop in New York?
Famous ice cream shop?
Speaker 1 (32:55):
I don't remember that. I think you're talking about Midnight Cowboy. Okay.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, that's right. Let's go get some ice cream.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
That was a great Jon Voight, Chuck. There was another
one that came along recently, too, that I think is
even better than the other one. There's a dude named
Sean McArdle who is hanging around a pool in Vegas.
And his double, Chuck, just look it up, Sean McArdle doppelganger.
His double happened to be floating along in the same
(33:25):
pool wearing the exact same glasses. Apparently, they were the
only two people at the pool wearing glasses. Not sunglasses,
but glasses glasses. Okay. The same glasses, same hat. They
actually do have like the same build and same height
and everything. They are the spitting image of one another.
And they were just randomly in the same pool in
Las Vegas at the same time.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
That's so funny.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I think my first thought would be like, what kind
of crimes can we commit? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Well, yeah. We'll get to that in a different episode.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Let's rob a bank.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Mm-hmm. That's my first thought.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
That's terrible. We're just kidding. Are we due for another break?
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Or should we wait?
Speaker 1 (34:02):
I think so. Yeah, let's take a break. All right.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
We'll take a break and come back and sort this
all out.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
So one of the reasons I think, Chuck, that we
have like a propensity to notice doppelgangers and also just
be just crazed by them is that we are really,
really good at picking out faces. So good, in fact,
that we have a region of our brain that it's
starting to become clear is intended exclusively for seeing faces, right?
(34:51):
And that actually bucks the current trend of understanding with
neuroscience where different parts of the brain get recruited to
kind of specialize in different things from sensory input over time.
You put a lot of sound in one part of
the brain, it's going to be like, all right, fine,
I'll handle sound from now on. This, it seems you're
born with. this ability to recognize faces. The region's called
(35:13):
the fusiform gyrus. And they've done some really interesting studies
about it. And I think we should actually do an
entire episode on the fusiform gyrus and face blindness.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Hubba hubba.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
I know. Can you tell I'm hot?
Speaker 2 (35:28):
I'm all about it. Because this one experiment is something
I would actually like to do. It's pretty freaky. They
got people in a room. They gave them a mild
electric current. straight to the fusiform gyrus. Isn't that right?
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
And they said, you know, we're going to do this
and just look at me and tell me what you see.
And basically they shapeshifted in front of their very face
when they gave them this electrical stimulation. So it changed
their perception of what they look like. It didn't change
their height or weight or their clothing or their skin
(36:06):
color or anything like that. But it sounds like it literally,
in their own perception at least, transformed what their face
looked like, which has got to be really weird.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Yeah. Oh, man, I can't imagine seeing that, especially while
you're undergoing open brain surgery and you're conscious. And then
they start messing with parts of it, right?
Speaker 2 (36:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
There was a follow-up study, too, that I find just
even more fascinating. They recruited some participants who were blind
from birth, so they've never seen a human face ever
with their eyes. And they gave them— they put them in
an MRI, and they gave them models of, like, 3D
models of faces and had them rub the faces, and
(36:48):
the fusiform gyrus lit up. I love that. So, like,
it is strictly for faces. They also— they were like, okay, well,
maybe it's just, you know, it's for other things, too.
They gave them 3D models of cubes and other stuff
that weren't faces. Nothing happened in the fusiform gyrus. So
we have a place in the brain that's strictly for
recognizing faces. And I think that's probably why we can
(37:11):
pick out doppelgangers so easily, because our brains are kind
of attuned to look for faces everywhere. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
And, you know, if you're thinking this might be, like
I mentioned, committing a crime sort of in passing, but
if you think this could be a big problem as
far as the advent and more widespread use of facial recognition, AI,
especially with CCTV and trying to catch bad people doing
bad things. And we've talked about this in the past on,
I think, a couple of different episodes. But that stuff
(37:42):
works okay, but it doesn't work great with dark skin.
It doesn't work great for people of color, black people,
Asian people. It gets confused a lot. And this is already,
you know, people have been wrongly imprisoned because facial recognition
AI has made a mistake.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Yeah. There's one guy as recently as 2019 from New
Jersey named Najir Parks, and he had to end up
spending five grand to defend himself, spent, I think, 20
days in jail possibly because he was accused or I
guess an AI facial recognition system accused him of shoplifting
(38:22):
and then trying to hit a police officer with his car.
And it turns out he'd been 30 miles away, but
he had been misidentified by this. And I think in
our episode, we talked about this at length, that facial
recognition systems are really good at recognizing white men's faces.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
But other people, it just starts to go down and
down until you get to the point where a black
woman's face is 40 times likelier to come up with
a false positive than a light-skinned man. Right. And apparently
it's just the data that they're trained on. They just said,
let's just give them photos of white men and I'm
sure it'll be fine. And it just hasn't been fine.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Well, I mean, that's one of the problems with it
all is it's just working from a database. So it's
not like it can take a face and find someone
just somewhere on planet Earth. Like you got to be
on a database somehow.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Right. But I'm saying the AI is trained on photos
and it comes to understand a face is a face
based on the photos that it's trained on. And I
guess they didn't select enough photos of people of color,
photos of women. I don't know why, but it seems
like they got really good at white men because they
were given more photos of white men. That's how I
(39:34):
take it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
No, that's how I took it too.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
So Chuck, if let's say that you are a doppelganger
of somebody, somebody famous like Madonna or Johnny Depp or- Rizzo.
Let's say Rizzo, too, just to get the kids involved. No, Lizzo.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
I was like, oh, God.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
I was thinking back to Ratso Rizzo, I think. So
if you're a doppelganger of Lizzo's, what would you do
with that talent?
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Well, you could go hang out on Hollywood Boulevard near
Man's Chinese Theater and make some money walking around charging
$ 5 a picture. You could get employed full time with
an agency to, you know, get sent out. If someone
wants Bill Gates at their party and you are a lookalike,
then you can go to their party and make a
(40:26):
couple hundred bucks probably.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Probably. You could also work on movies, apparently. There's lots
of jobs for you. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
I mean, this one is, it's less face, like, When
you're body doubling someone or photo doubling or standing in,
kind of in that order, or did I get that wrong?
Stand in is least important that you actually look like someone,
but you should be the same size as somebody because
they're lighting you for camera and stuff like that. Like
(40:58):
you can't, you know, The Rock can't have a body
double or a stand in that looks like me. You know?
Speaker 1 (41:05):
I don't know if you wore one of those like
ripped t-shirts.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Yeah, right. I can get away with it. But, you know,
if you do look like a celebrity and you want
to get work as a photo double, then that certainly
doesn't hurt if you look like them in the face.
But body size and skin tone and stuff like that
is more important as for doubling.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
But the places where it really kind of comes in handy,
if you really look like the person in the face
and the build and the hair and the mustache and
all that, is to serve as like a decoy, a
political decoy. Because throughout history, the more hated you are,
either within your country or internationally or both, the more
(41:48):
you need more than probably one political decoys, which is
essentially somebody who's saying like, yeah, I look like you,
I'll go do the boring stuff, but also risk my
life because somebody might assassinate you at some point.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah, and I get the sense in some of these
that it's a little less like, I look like you,
I'd like to do this, Then Kim Jong-un says, hey,
you guys, come with me.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
You're going to double me now. This is your new job.
Because he, of course, has been listed as having body
doubles to the point where there's been speculation fueled about
whether or not he was sick in the hospital or
actually dead. Saddam Hussein had a bunch of decoys. They
made a movie called The Devil's Double about a man
(42:31):
that was his son's double. Uday. And they made a, uh,
I meant to see it actually. It looked kind of good,
but I haven't seen it. That was out in 2011.
It was called the devil's double and Latif Yahia, um,
basically spoke out a lot afterward that like I was
Uday Hussein's double and he was a very bad guy.
(42:52):
So it was not probably the best job.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Um, apparently Stalin had at least four, um, doubles. And then,
This one is amazing to me. There is a British
general named Bernard Montgomery, and he hired a double by
the name of M.E. Clifton James. Great name. He was
Australian and he posed as Bernard Montgomery and went around,
(43:18):
I would guess, Europe talking about allied plans in the
hopes that like his his plans would be or that
the talks would be overheard by German spies. And the plans,
of course, were fake. And they were meant to serve
as a decoy or distraction for the Nazis. And they
think that possibly had an influence on the storming of Normandy.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
That's pretty cool. There's a movie in there somewhere, or
at least a scene.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
Surely. Easily. They could have thrown it in as bonus
material on the Operation Mincemeat movie, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Did you see that?
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Yeah. Was it good? I liked our episode better, but yes,
it was good. It was a fine movie, sure.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Yeah, I need to check that out.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
I saw one recently. This one has nothing to do
with anything, but it was a five-part series in Swedish
about the assassination of their prime minister in 1986, Olaf Palme.
And it is really fascinating because they think that one
of the main witnesses was actually the assassin. And they
(44:22):
kind of recreate how it would have happened and they
dive into his life. It's really, really good. It's worth watching.
I think that's on Netflix too. By the way, I
don't work for Netflix. Right. You got anything else? I
got nothing else. That's Doppelgangers then, everybody. I hope you
enjoyed this one. I sure did. I know Chuck did.
And if you want to know more about Doppelgangers, you
(44:43):
can start searching on the internet. And there's a lot
of cool posts from social media of people meeting their
Doppelgangers that will just knock your socks off. And since
I said that, of course, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
This is in response to the Kissin' Cousins episode from
a friend from the Ashkenazi Jewish community.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
I've got 0.2% Ashkenazi in me. Oh, yeah? I also
have some Neanderthal, too.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
All right. Hey, guys, just listen to the episode Kissin' Cousins.
I am from an insular Ashkenazi Jewish community. I'm sure
you understand us being insular makes sense. the gene pool
that much smaller. We also tend to marry younger than
the rest of the Western world. Thus, in pretty much
every high school in our community, we do genetic testing
for recessive genes for defects or serious illnesses common in
(45:34):
Ashkenazi Jews. We don't get the results to the test,
only an ID number. A big part of our culture
is being set up by matchmakers. Before meeting for the
first time, both families will call the screening center with
their ID number and be told if it's safe for
them to go ahead.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
With the matchmaking. It's amazing. It is.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
I met my current partner on my own, and we
decided we were ready to settle down. It was a
little scarier to call and see if we were compatible
because we'd already decided we wanted to be together. Can
you imagine that?
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Yeah, no. I'll bet that was pretty nerve-wracking.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
The call was more to see if we need to
speak to a geneticist before having children than to see
if we should get together for the first time at all.
But thankfully, we were good to go. Separately, I had
a close friend whose husband passed away a few years ago.
She had the option of marrying her brother-in-law. Remember, we
talked about that in the episode, which she had no
interest in doing. She did take a pair of his shoes, though,
(46:29):
and spit on them rather than him. So that part
of the Old Testament is kind of still kept in
some places. And of course, I'm not speaking for all
Ashkenazi Jews, only what I see in my community. Just
thought you might be interested to know how a group
is trying to keep tradition while staying safe and up
to date with science in the 21st century. and this
(46:50):
is a lovely sign-off here, wishing you the strength to
continue for a long time coming.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
And that's from Elkie.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Thanks a lot, Elkie. That was a great email. I
appreciate that big time. And if you want to be
like Elkie and send us a super fascinating email, you
can do that too. All you have to do is
write to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com, press send, and see what happens. Right, Chuck?
Speaker 2 (47:17):
That's right. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I think I even say in the episode that I
remember learning about doppelgangers from those time-life books about the
paranormal back when I was a kid. Well, fast forward
to when I'm a grown-up, a.k.a. now, I was really
glad to learn that they're an actual thing. There are
people walking around who have a twin that they're in
no way related to, and the stories behind them tend
(00:23):
to be very interesting. I'm out. This is the last
one for me, so let me say thanks for listening
to our playlist.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck,
and Jerry's here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know,
the day after Labor Day edition, which Chuck loves.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah, you know, Emily showed me that article that informed
part of this episode the other day. Yeah. And we'll
get to it, but I started looking at this photographer's
doppelganger photo series.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
And boy, some of those are crazy similar.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah, what about the two bears with their shirts off?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Those guys struck me as extremely close.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
The two women with the bangs and the black tank
tops looked like identical twins to me. I could not
tell them apart.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yeah, I feel like we shouldn't tease anybody anymore. There's
a guy, and like you said, we'll get to him
in a little bit, or he'll figure in in a
little bit, I should say. But he's a Montreal, I
guess a Quebecois photographer, Francois Brunel. And for 20 years,
he's been assembling... pictures of doppelgangers, people who already knew
(01:54):
they had a doppelganger and wrote in doppelgangers he's looked
for and found on the street. And he brings them
together into his studio and photographs them together. But he
does some like really cool stuff with it. It's not
just like, here, you stand here and you stand next
to him. The way that he poses them and dresses
them and everything, like it creates like a sense of
intimacy between them. It makes you think you're looking at
identical twin photos.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Yeah. I mean, you know, some of them people favor
one another. And then when you have them styled to
look alike and posed alike, that informs what you're seeing.
But a handful of them, it was they look so
much like identical twins that it's just it's weird to
think that you could walk down the street one day
and meet someone who looks exactly like you.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Yeah. And I mean, like that is got to be
pretty eerie. Luckily, one of the great things about social
media is that people can post their random encounters. You
got a phone with a camera on it. You got
access to social media through that phone. You can just
snap a picture of you and your doppelganger, post it
to the internet, and let everyone go crazy. And that
does happen, it seems like, from time to time. But
(02:56):
this dude's whole jam, it's called I'm Not a Lookalike
with an exclamation point. It sounds like a Disney movie
from the 60s or something. But that's Francois Brunel's 20-year series.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, and not just... hey, Chuck, you look like every
tubby guy with a beard and glasses. It's like, that's lazy.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
I think when you're in the public eye, people tend
to do things like that to say, okay, you look
like all of these people. We're talking like real lookalikes.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Right.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Which I, you know, I think I've gotten a couple
here and there over the years that I was like, okay,
I could see that for sure. But doppelgangers are different.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Yeah. So doppelganger, if you haven't just surmised already, it's
a German word at its origin. And it's not one
of those really clever German words. It really just means
double goer or a different interpretation is double walker. And
it's not some super old, like medieval word. It was
actually coined at the end of the 18th century by
(04:01):
an author named Jean-Paul. which is an unlikely German name
if you ask me. But he wrote a book called Siebenkass. Yeah, Siebenkass.
I nailed it. And that book was about a man
who had a doppelganger, right?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Yeah. I think John Paul's hiding something with that name.
I do too.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
He's actually a double.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
I think there's a Dusseldorf at the end or something
that he left off.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, so he wrote about it in that novel, but
as Livia is keen to point out, Livia helped us
with this one, he sort of mixes up the words.
When he was actually talking about a lookalike human, he
used the word with a T, doppeltganger, but did use
the word doppelganger in there as a meal with two
(04:51):
courses being served together. So I don't know, things just
got a little confused or people thought it was just
fine to drop the T. But doppelganger became the eventual
word that we use for, you know, a non-related lookalike.
And that's I don't know if we pointed that out.
The obvious thing here is that you're not not related
to these people at all.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yeah. And the other thing about a doppelganger is, again,
like you said, it's not like you bear a passing
resemblance or you favor one another. Like you're as close
to the person's double body double as you can get.
And the closer you are, the more of a doppelganger
you are, basically. Right. But Jean-Paul, I can't say his
name any other way, he coined those terms. So it's
(05:33):
funny that he kind of got it wrong. Everybody else
is like, no, we're going to drop the T, like
you said. But the fact that he coined the term
doppelganger doesn't mean he invented the concept. It's actually a
much older concept. It just didn't have the same name
that we use now. Apparently, there was a longstanding superstition
in England, in Germany, dating back, I think, to the
(05:55):
medieval age, maybe before Chuck, where if you saw your
doppelganger three times, it meant you were about to die.
And that's still a, I think people still kind of
believe that one.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah. And that's, I mean, there are all kinds of
old pieces of folklore in just about every country you
can explore that has some sort of, and it's usually not,
if you find your doppelganger, then, you know, good luck
will come your way. It always seems like it's some
kind of spooky negative thing will happen, whether you see
them three times, or whether, I mean, there was one,
(06:27):
I think, in the Norse mythology, where a spirit appears.
This one's just a little weird. It appears just like you,
but it beats you to wherever you're going. So if
you're traveling on a journey, your doppelganger would beat you there,
and people think that you would have arrived earlier. I
(06:48):
don't know if that's the solves tardiness for the North mythology,
but that one's not super evil, but it's usually, especially
when you get into literature, uh, some sort of, you know,
evil force or evil twin that's come along to wreck
things for you. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
And that Norse one that arrives, I just want to
put a button on that. Cause I did a little research. It, um,
it's called the Varduger. And the reason I know how
to pronounce it is because I looked up what the
O with the slash is pronounced like. And it's the
same thing as an O with the umlaut.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
I didn't know that before, did you?
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Well, you might be a little more of a metal
fan than me.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
It's cool looking, just like the umlaut.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Super cool. I think it's cooler than the umlaut. It's
got like a slash through it, you know, like, take
that O. Whereas the umlaut's like, I'm adorning this O.
It's a little different.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
All right. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story called William Wilson. Uh,
sort of like I mentioned before about, you know, evil
things happening and narrator meets a boy at school. Uh,
and this one had the same name, I'm presuming William Wilson.
Otherwise it'd be a weird title. And this boy though
only speaks in a whisper. So, uh, it seems like
(08:01):
all through literature, it's always some sort of a creepy
shadowy figure.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, there's also Dostoevsky put kind of a spin on
it where he introduced a doppelganger to the main character
in a novel called, or a novella, I think, called
The Double. And I love this. In it, the doppelganger
is like a more likable version of the main character
and ends up breaking the main character mentally. I like that.
(08:28):
I could totally see that. You know, like if this
imposter comes along or this other version of you comes
along and people are like, I like you a lot more.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
It reminds me, have you seen that Paul Rudd show,
Living With Yourself? No. I don't know how it escaped,
but they did a season of it in 2019, didn't
follow up on it, but he plays himself and his
doppelganger to great comedic effect. But it's also... Like really
fascinating and interesting. It's a really great show. It's on Netflix.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Well, that's the other thing. And we'll talk about some
more in history. But, of course, with TV, oftentimes it's
flipped to a more fun thing. And it's played for laughs.
I don't think Three's Company had a doppelganger episode, but
it wouldn't surprise me. Because it can be played for
sort of mixed identity hijinks as well. Totally.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Totally. Like one where Mr. Furley was into Jack, but
it was really his doppelganger.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Yeah, and I mean, it'd probably be like his twin
brother who came to visit in that case, but.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
This still counts. An unknown twin still in the canon
counts as a doppelganger.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Do you think?
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Well, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
All right. Well, you just negated what I said, that
they're not related, but. Well, okay.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
That's true. Once you find out, here's the thing. This
actually proves your point, Chuck. Once the characters find out, oh,
it's a twin, mystery solved, no longer a doppelganger, it
becomes a twin. But up to that point when they're
crossing paths with one another and never in the same
room at the same time.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
That's a central mystery.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
It seems doppelganger. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
But Furley doesn't have a brother. Or does he?
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Why is he acting so weird?
Speaker 2 (10:05):
There have been some true historical figures over the years
that bought into this stuff. Abraham Lincoln. He and his wife,
they had all kinds of kind of interesting beliefs.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
It was the age of spiritualism.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, for sure. So you have to take that into consideration,
I think. But Lincoln supposedly saw his image three times,
I think, in the mirror in 1860, which.
What was his wife's name? Mary Todd?
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Mary Todd.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Mary Todd said, you know, you're going to serve two
terms as president. That's what that means. But you're going
to die before the end of the second term.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
And he said... Well, good night, dear.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
But see, I take issue with some of these listed
historically because they're more ghostly specters than real human doppelgangers.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
So John Donne's story is strictly by location. I would
not call it a doppelganger one where he saw his
wife a few times while he was in Paris and
she was back in England and she was actually ill
and their child had died. By location doesn't count. But
Percy Bysshe Shelley, he saw his doppelganger and died a
few weeks later in a sailing accident. I would say
(11:20):
that one counts in the lore. And then Catherine the
Great's was pretty good too, right?
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah, and I think Percy Bysshe Shelley's doppelganger had a
t-shirt on that said, I'd rather be sailing.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Which made it even weirder.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
No, his t-shirt said no plates because that was his
third choice.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Who was the other one?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Catherine the Great?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, this was a real one too, actually. Supposedly there
was a servant, right, who discovered a double like that
somehow got in there, faked their way in there, and
was sitting on the throne. So this was a case
where someone was, I don't think, trying to like, you know,
realistically take over as queen, but at least got in
(11:59):
there and was like, I'm going to sit on the
throne and I got past the guards because I look
like you.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, I also saw it interpreted as like phantasmagoric too.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Oh, like it didn't happen?
Speaker 1 (12:10):
No, that it was like a phantom or like a
supernatural doppelganger rather than like a double or something like that.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Again, not a real doppelganger to me.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
And then my favorite one of all time, I've known
this one since I was a kid back when I
was into the Time Life Mysteries books because I think
that's where I first read it. But the German poet
and philosopher Goethe, one of the reasons I like this
anecdote is because I love saying Goethe's name. Mm-hmm. He
was riding one time from Alsace to, I want to
(12:40):
say Dusseldorf, but I think that's wrong. But it works, right?
Speaker 2 (12:44):
I mean, sure. It's the name of that author.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
And he passed himself on the road. And his doppelganger
was wearing some gray outfit or whatever. And then like
eight years later, he was on his way from Dusseldorf
to Alsace going the other way. And he realized he
was wearing that same outfit that his doppelganger had been
wearing eight years before. And he was like, this is
pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
And that was a Time Life Books thing?
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Yeah. I remember it very well. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
That sounds about right.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
I didn't know how to say Goethe's name at the time, though.
So I was like, this really weird thing happened to Goethe.
All right.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Maybe we should take a little break now that we've
sort of given some past examples of what may or
may not be doppelgangers. And we'll talk about real doppelgangers,
real live humans walking around that look like you right
after this. All right, so we mentioned the photographer, Francois Brunel,
(13:56):
who's been doing this project. It's called I'm Not a Lookalike,
where he takes pictures of these people.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I'm sorry, Chuck. There's an exclamation point at the end
of that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
I'm not a lookalike. I encourage people to go check
this out when they're in a safe space and you're
not driving or whatever to look at some of these
photos because it's amazing. I mean, some of them, like
I said, look to my eye like identical twins. The
other two sort of gentlemen probably in their 60s with
the little mustache. Did you see those guys?
Speaker 1 (14:27):
The shirtless ones? No. No.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
The picture I saw they had on like little, uh,
sort of like a newsboy caps.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
I don't know if I saw those guys.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
They look, I mean, they look like identical twins and, um,
so cool. Those are the ones that this is the
article that Emily sent me where it talked about that project.
And then it got into a really interesting study because
if you think, well, you know, what is a doppelganger?
I've always, since I was a kid, I've always sort of, um,
(14:57):
realize that there are only so many facial combinations you
can have and with the amount of we talked about
this over the years in the show too like over
the years and through history uh especially seems to happen
if you're looking through like yearbooks from like the 40s
and 50s and 60s you'll like see people that look
like people you know or like yourself there are just
only so many ways you can rearrange a face until
(15:20):
you're bound at some point to get someone who maybe
favors somebody a little bit or even more or to
the point where they look just alike and And so
you might think, well, what does that have to say
about what's going on inside? Is there anything to DNA?
And they looked into that, right?
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yeah, I guess Brunel's work caught the attention of a
researcher named Manel Esteller from Spain, from the Carreras Leukemia
Research Institute, who said, I want to try to figure
this out. And these people are like a perfect population sample.
So he took, I think, 32 pairs of doppelgangers. ran
them through three different facial recognition programs. And half of them,
(15:59):
I guess 16 of the pairs, as far as the
AI was concerned in the programs, they were identical twins.
That's what the AI took them for in all three programs, right?
So they took those people and they analyzed their genomes
and they found, actually, these people have a lot of
similar genes. And even though they're not related, that was
(16:20):
another part of the study. They went through and made
sure that these people weren't like there was some unknown
relation that they had to one another. They didn't. They
were as genetically unrelated as two random strangers would be
on the street. But they shared some very similar genes
in some key places, especially like facial construction.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Yeah. And they were also, and again, this doesn't like
lessen the study any to me, but they were generally
from the same country or the same ethnic background. Although
I did see it gender varied because there was one
where it was a man and a woman who looked
a lot alike in those photos that they put together,
which is pretty interesting. But they looked into how they
(17:03):
matched up, I think, with their microbiome epigenetically, which is
basically how your behaviors in your environment is going to
affect your genes. And then just your straight up genome.
And what they found out was they did share a
lot of what are called SNPs, single nucleotide polymorphisms, which
(17:26):
are the variations in our DNA that create most of
the genetic variation that people have with one another. So
they shared a lot of them. And I wish we
would have gotten like the raw numbers because all it
says is like, you know, they shared many SNPs, whereas
I'd like to see sort of the actual data, which
I couldn't get to. But what they did find was
(17:49):
that epigenetically and with their microbiomes, they were basically random.
So it was only genetically that they shared something.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Well, yeah. And they said, well, actually, I think this
is probably what accounts for a lot of the differences
in identical twins. Like people look at identical twins and
they're like, oh, you're identical. But if you really start
to look at them closely, you're like, actually, there's a
lot more differences than you'd think between them. And even
though they share the same genes, I think 99% of
the same DNA, what makes identical twins slightly different is
(18:21):
in their epigenome. And this study basically found the same
thing with doppelgangers. They can share a lot of similar
genes that give them the same facial traits or builds
or I think even habits they found. A lot of
them Like if one smoked, the other was likely to smoke.
You know, they carried their weight about the same way.
But they found that, like you said, the differences were
(18:43):
found in their epigenome. And I don't know if, I
know they tested it, but I didn't see that their
microbiome might have provided some differences too. It's basically nature
versus nurture, or more to the point, it's like nature
and nurture working together to make us slightly different, even
when we're basically bound to look the same genetically.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah, I think the microbiome was the same as the
epigenetic finding, which was, I think the quote was, it
generally wasn't any closer than two randos.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Gotcha.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
That's what they said in the paper, randos.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
They did. They did. I'm trying to find real quick the...
The data? The number of SMPs. I can't find it
that quick. There's a lot of numbers and weird, like,
capital C, lowercase p, capital G. I'm like, I don't
know what that is. But I will tell you this.
I looked up those older guys in the news caps.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
They are spitting image. Yeah. And not only are they
spitting image of one another, they're spitting image of the
Lennox air conditioning man. They look exactly like him. that guy.
Down to the hat.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Well, I guess if that guy ever, you know, leaves
the earth and they've got two backups.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
I mean, what's it called when you get three doppelgangers together?
Speaker 2 (20:00):
I don't know. A droppelganger?
Speaker 1 (20:02):
I guess so.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
What I'd be curious to see is if, and maybe
I'll look more just for my own funsies into... the
photographer's project, because what I'm curious about is if these,
like how these people get along and if they like
formed friendships, if they liked each other, if they had
similar interests, you know, that's, that's pretty fascinating to me.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
I think so too. And again, like that's, that's the
kind of stuff that can take a, a real turn,
I guess, depending on how you were raised or even like,
you know, were you raised in your power lines? Great.
That means you're into baseball cards, that kind of thing
that we just haven't put our finger on yet. But
it does seem like, you know, it's becoming clearer and clearer.
It's not just genetics. It's not just epigenetics. It's all
(20:47):
of that stuff put together. And it seems like so
wildly unattainable, that information that because it's so complicated and
there's so many variables and so many factors. But if
you step back and think about it, there's a finite
number of variables and factors. As many as it seems
to us, it's a finite number. It's not infinite, which
means someday we could conceivably get a grasp on exactly
(21:12):
what makes a person them, which I find really exciting.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
You know what would be funny is if they really
got along and they were like, oh my God, we
have so many similarities. We look just alike. this is
such a weird thing. And they were having lunch and
one of them was like, boy, what a shame that
Hillary lost the right. And the other one might unveils
a Make America Great Again t-shirt or something.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Drops their fork.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
They just get up and part ways silently. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
That would be the best case scenario, I think.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah. So this study, this next one kind of irritates
me a little bit. It was from 2015 and I
think was well-intentioned, but there was an Australian biologist who
named Tegan Lucas, who got off to a great start,
looked at 4,000 faces from the U.S. Anthropometric Survey database,
(22:04):
which is something the U.S. Army puts together.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Tegan Lucas is listening to this now. She's like, oh,
you got off to a great start on that U.S.
Anthropometric Survey, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Well, I think Tegan Lucas overachieved because what they did
was looked across eight facial features and calculated like the
chances that you'll look just like someone else is one
in a trillion. I see these pictures of these doppelgangers.
I'm like, there's just no way because I'm looking at
the evidence. And it turns out that Tegan really got
(22:34):
into like measuring the millimeter of a nostril and stuff
like that. And the comparison, it was just too identical.
Like I think with identical twins, you wouldn't get that close.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
No, but I think that's what she was going for
is like, you know, would it be possible for two
identical people to be walking around? And one of the
applications of our research is if we're creating facial recognition systems,
which we've done an episode on before, it was pretty
eerie if I remember correctly. But if we're creating these things,
if we're building computers to recognize people's faces, are there
(23:10):
going to be any kind of like false positives out
there because there's two people out there who are that similar?
And the chances are, really low unless we just keep
going population-wise. And even with the number of people out today,
I frankly don't think it's that low of a chance
that there are two people who are identical across eight
(23:30):
measures of your face. And she wouldn't reveal what the
eight measures were because apparently her work was that groundbreaking
that she's like, I can't let anybody know what to
hide or disguise.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
But the point is it's eight different dimensions. And like
you said, I think like nostril width, ear length, that
kind of stuff, down to the millimeter. And she found
that it's like a one in a trillion chance that
there are two people walking around like that. The thing
is there's eight billion people on the planet.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
So that means there's no doppelgangers.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Well, it's not close to a trillion, but it's not
as far off from a trillion as like if there
were two people on the planet. So if you have
two people on the planet and a one in a
trillion chance that they're going to look alike, the chance
that they're going to look like is basically nothing. But
as you get closer to a trillion, there is a
really good chance that there are going to be two
people walking around that are identical. And we're at eight million.
(24:28):
So we're at, I think, a one in 125 chance
that today on Earth there are two people who look
exactly alike across those eight measures. The point is for
you and me to just be looking at stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Uh-huh.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
We don't need those eight measures to be exactly right.
If they're close enough, that's when people look like doppelgangers
to you and me. But we're not artificial intelligence. We're
sentient beings. Right.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Well, yeah, we're artificial. And I think we're intelligent. But
we're not those two things together.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Are we artificial? Sure.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
I just want to try and freak people out.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
A little bit. Oh, okay.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
The Josh bot and the Chuck bot are hard at
work here.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Does not compute.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Well, I think what we're arriving at is a point
that we failed to make earlier, which is there is
no agreed upon definition of what constitutes a doppelganger. Like
how alike do you have to look to someone to
say you're a doppelganger?
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
You know, like I look like the guy, I look
like the bass player for Jason Isbell in the 400 unit.
But is he my doppelganger? Probably not.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Okay, so one of the reasons why I think people
would kind of look at you and then the bass
player for.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
… Jason Isbell in the 400 unit.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Sure. And put you guys together and said, oh, they
really look alike is because … we use like shortcuts
when we're looking at, at people's faces or even just
people in general. So let's say you're both wearing the
same hat and the same, you both have a similar beard,
I'm guessing. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
I want to name him cause I don't want to
just keep calling that cause I love that group. Uh,
his name is Jimbo Hart. And when you look at
a picture of Jimbo Hart.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
He, you know, it's a great name too.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Like look him up. He's got the beard. He's, you know,
when I'm reading, I got on my black room glasses.
I like to wear my hats these days. My, uh,
you know, various sort of cowboy hats and fedoras.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah. I mean, the guy looks like me.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Okay. So if you put you guys together, you're both
wearing the same glasses, you got a beard, you got
hats on and all that stuff. People would be like
spitting image, but take the glasses off, shave the beard,
take the hat off and then put you guys together.
How close would you really be? And probably not that close.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
I can tell you, I can see him without a
beard and he's not nearly as close.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
OK, right. So there you go. Like we make these
shortcuts with our face or with our minds to just
kind of as like kind of a shorthand for like, oh,
that's Chuck. I don't have to analyze them anymore because
that uses up a lot of brain power and energy.
And I'm kind of low on carbs today. So I
just know that that's Chuck where it really turned out
to be Jimbo Hart. The basis for.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
The 400 unit.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Uh, right. And you know, you've seen this and here's
a good example of how this can play tricks on people. Uh,
and this is just one example. A lot of people
have done that kind of fun thing where you switch
out a, a face on someone and put it on
someone else. And it's like, it should be obvious, but
it's like, it just looks like a weird uncanny version
(27:32):
of that person.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Right.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
Uh, the one that Livia picked out was from MIT
when they put George Bush's face on Dick Cheney's head.
And Bill Clinton's face on Al Gore's head, that dates
the creation of that particular meme or whatever it was.
The Dick Cheney one looks like you got to look
(27:54):
a bunch of times before you realize that's George Bush's face.
The Al Gore one, I mean, it's so clearly Clinton.
It's just kind of funny looking. But the Bush-Cheney swap
actually kind of worked in that, I guess, goes to
sort of prove that you look at things like hair.
And stuff like that as, you know, that big Clinton
(28:15):
mop or that big Al Gore mop that he had
or Cheney's bald head. And that's a big clue.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah. And also like the I think one of the
foundations of this swap is that it can't be like
an egregious change. Right. Like if you remember back to,
I think it was Conan that used to put Steve
Buscemi eyes on different celebrities and see what they look like.
That's an egregious change. It's not going to work. That
was great. Dick Cheney and George Bush's eyes look similar
(28:43):
enough that if you put George Bush's eyes on Dick
Cheney's face, you're not really going to notice because it's
not that egregious of a change. And there was a study,
I think, from 1977. swinging, groovy study. And it basically
tried to figure out how people register faces in what order.
And they found that first we look at the eyes,
then we look at the mouth, and then we look
(29:05):
at the nose. And those are the things we kind
of take in. But there's other research, and I think
this is also kind of like supported by the same study.
Like when you look at someone's face, you don't go,
all right, let me see the eyes. You got that.
Let me see the mouth. Right. And then the nose.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
That makes you a serial killer.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Right. Right. Oh, I want to kill that person. Right. No,
like we just look at the whole thing, look at
the whole package, which is why it's so easy for
us to overlook differences between even identical twins or doppelgangers
and make people look closer together than they are because
our brains are lazy and fat.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
That's right. And it also depends on as far as
whether you might look like someone about, you know, it
just sort of makes sense if you look, and it's
hard to say that someone's average looking, but what we
mean by that is, and Livia points out is, you know,
you're not six foot nine and have flaming red hair
and freckles. Like, Those things will make you very much
stand out. Whereas if you live in a population of,
(30:03):
you know, middle Georgia and you, you know, you're a
little tubby, you've got a beard, you got dark hair,
and you dress a certain way, then you might look
like a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Sure. And that actually raises a recent internet sensation. A
guy named Neil Douglas was, I think, flying to Ireland
on a Ryanair flight. Yeah. And went to get in
his seat and saw that there was somebody sitting in
his seat. And the person looked up and it was
his doppelganger.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
It was so great.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
I mean, isn't that even more bizarre? Like it wasn't
in like the back of the plane. Like this guy
was in his seat, too, which makes it even more eerie.
And so they snapped a selfie and, like, posted it.
And everyone just went bonkers because these guys had no
idea who the other one was. They weren't related. But
they looked a lot like each other. But there was
this BBC article that covered it where they basically said, OK,
(30:55):
but let's really stop and think about this. That's amazing.
And the fact that he was in the other guy's
seat is even more amazing. But how unlikely is it
that these two, you know— were on the same plane.
And they figured out that based on a number of
different factors, like the hair, the face, the beard, the nose,
I think the brown eyes, that there's something like maybe
(31:17):
80,000 people walking around out there that look just like them, essentially.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah, 74,000. That's a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
It is a lot of people that look essentially like
those two enough that the internet would go crazy if
you put two of them together and said, these two
are strangers and they just met. And posted a picture
of it.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
It was a pretty fun picture because they're so delighted, clearly,
with seeing each other. And then another guy, there's a
triple picture somewhere, too, of another guy that was like, hey,
I'm one of those 74,000. And they put all three
of them close to each other and they look pretty similar.
The one sort of difference here is in height is
(31:58):
one of the dudes was 5'7, the other was 6'3,
because there's other pictures of them. out drinking together in Ireland.
I guess they kind of hung out and stuff, which
is great.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Well, I read they kept running into each other and
finally were like, okay, let's go get a pint together.
Like they were at the same hotel and like they
kept running into one another. So they went with it.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
See, if you believe in like weird fate or intervention,
you might wonder if like, maybe I should give some
thought to what this means. Like, am I supposed to
do something special with this person? Right.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
If the movie Serendipity with John Cusack really spoke to you.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
I never even saw that. You mentioned that movie a lot.
What happened in that movie?
Speaker 1 (32:38):
I don't want to spoil it for anybody.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
Was there a doppelganger? No. Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
But they kept running into one another, and it just
kind of was like.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Oh, it's just the chance of true love over and over.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
It was a good movie, okay?
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Didn't they go to some ice cream shop in New York?
Famous ice cream shop?
Speaker 1 (32:55):
I don't remember that. I think you're talking about Midnight Cowboy. Okay.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, that's right. Let's go get some ice cream.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
That was a great Jon Voight, Chuck. There was another
one that came along recently, too, that I think is
even better than the other one. There's a dude named
Sean McArdle who is hanging around a pool in Vegas.
And his double, Chuck, just look it up, Sean McArdle doppelganger.
His double happened to be floating along in the same
(33:25):
pool wearing the exact same glasses. Apparently, they were the
only two people at the pool wearing glasses. Not sunglasses,
but glasses glasses. Okay. The same glasses, same hat. They
actually do have like the same build and same height
and everything. They are the spitting image of one another.
And they were just randomly in the same pool in
Las Vegas at the same time.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
That's so funny.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I think my first thought would be like, what kind
of crimes can we commit? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Well, yeah. We'll get to that in a different episode.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Let's rob a bank.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Mm-hmm. That's my first thought.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
That's terrible. We're just kidding. Are we due for another break?
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Or should we wait?
Speaker 1 (34:02):
I think so. Yeah, let's take a break. All right.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
We'll take a break and come back and sort this
all out.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
So one of the reasons I think, Chuck, that we
have like a propensity to notice doppelgangers and also just
be just crazed by them is that we are really,
really good at picking out faces. So good, in fact,
that we have a region of our brain that it's
starting to become clear is intended exclusively for seeing faces, right?
(34:51):
And that actually bucks the current trend of understanding with
neuroscience where different parts of the brain get recruited to
kind of specialize in different things from sensory input over time.
You put a lot of sound in one part of
the brain, it's going to be like, all right, fine,
I'll handle sound from now on. This, it seems you're
born with. this ability to recognize faces. The region's called
(35:13):
the fusiform gyrus. And they've done some really interesting studies
about it. And I think we should actually do an
entire episode on the fusiform gyrus and face blindness.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Hubba hubba.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
I know. Can you tell I'm hot?
Speaker 2 (35:28):
I'm all about it. Because this one experiment is something
I would actually like to do. It's pretty freaky. They
got people in a room. They gave them a mild
electric current. straight to the fusiform gyrus. Isn't that right?
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
And they said, you know, we're going to do this
and just look at me and tell me what you see.
And basically they shapeshifted in front of their very face
when they gave them this electrical stimulation. So it changed
their perception of what they look like. It didn't change
their height or weight or their clothing or their skin
(36:06):
color or anything like that. But it sounds like it literally,
in their own perception at least, transformed what their face
looked like, which has got to be really weird.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Yeah. Oh, man, I can't imagine seeing that, especially while
you're undergoing open brain surgery and you're conscious. And then
they start messing with parts of it, right?
Speaker 2 (36:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
There was a follow-up study, too, that I find just
even more fascinating. They recruited some participants who were blind
from birth, so they've never seen a human face ever
with their eyes. And they gave them— they put them in
an MRI, and they gave them models of, like, 3D
models of faces and had them rub the faces, and
(36:48):
the fusiform gyrus lit up. I love that. So, like,
it is strictly for faces. They also— they were like, okay, well,
maybe it's just, you know, it's for other things, too.
They gave them 3D models of cubes and other stuff
that weren't faces. Nothing happened in the fusiform gyrus. So
we have a place in the brain that's strictly for
recognizing faces. And I think that's probably why we can
(37:11):
pick out doppelgangers so easily, because our brains are kind
of attuned to look for faces everywhere. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
And, you know, if you're thinking this might be, like
I mentioned, committing a crime sort of in passing, but
if you think this could be a big problem as
far as the advent and more widespread use of facial recognition, AI,
especially with CCTV and trying to catch bad people doing
bad things. And we've talked about this in the past on,
I think, a couple of different episodes. But that stuff
(37:42):
works okay, but it doesn't work great with dark skin.
It doesn't work great for people of color, black people,
Asian people. It gets confused a lot. And this is already,
you know, people have been wrongly imprisoned because facial recognition
AI has made a mistake.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Yeah. There's one guy as recently as 2019 from New
Jersey named Najir Parks, and he had to end up
spending five grand to defend himself, spent, I think, 20
days in jail possibly because he was accused or I
guess an AI facial recognition system accused him of shoplifting
(38:22):
and then trying to hit a police officer with his car.
And it turns out he'd been 30 miles away, but
he had been misidentified by this. And I think in
our episode, we talked about this at length, that facial
recognition systems are really good at recognizing white men's faces.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
But other people, it just starts to go down and
down until you get to the point where a black
woman's face is 40 times likelier to come up with
a false positive than a light-skinned man. Right. And apparently
it's just the data that they're trained on. They just said,
let's just give them photos of white men and I'm
sure it'll be fine. And it just hasn't been fine.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Well, I mean, that's one of the problems with it
all is it's just working from a database. So it's
not like it can take a face and find someone
just somewhere on planet Earth. Like you got to be
on a database somehow.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Right. But I'm saying the AI is trained on photos
and it comes to understand a face is a face
based on the photos that it's trained on. And I
guess they didn't select enough photos of people of color,
photos of women. I don't know why, but it seems
like they got really good at white men because they
were given more photos of white men. That's how I
(39:34):
take it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
No, that's how I took it too.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
So Chuck, if let's say that you are a doppelganger
of somebody, somebody famous like Madonna or Johnny Depp or- Rizzo.
Let's say Rizzo, too, just to get the kids involved. No, Lizzo.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
I was like, oh, God.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
I was thinking back to Ratso Rizzo, I think. So
if you're a doppelganger of Lizzo's, what would you do
with that talent?
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Well, you could go hang out on Hollywood Boulevard near
Man's Chinese Theater and make some money walking around charging
$ 5 a picture. You could get employed full time with
an agency to, you know, get sent out. If someone
wants Bill Gates at their party and you are a lookalike,
then you can go to their party and make a
(40:26):
couple hundred bucks probably.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Probably. You could also work on movies, apparently. There's lots
of jobs for you. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
I mean, this one is, it's less face, like, When
you're body doubling someone or photo doubling or standing in,
kind of in that order, or did I get that wrong?
Stand in is least important that you actually look like someone,
but you should be the same size as somebody because
they're lighting you for camera and stuff like that. Like
(40:58):
you can't, you know, The Rock can't have a body
double or a stand in that looks like me. You know?
Speaker 1 (41:05):
I don't know if you wore one of those like
ripped t-shirts.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Yeah, right. I can get away with it. But, you know,
if you do look like a celebrity and you want
to get work as a photo double, then that certainly
doesn't hurt if you look like them in the face.
But body size and skin tone and stuff like that
is more important as for doubling.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
But the places where it really kind of comes in handy,
if you really look like the person in the face
and the build and the hair and the mustache and
all that, is to serve as like a decoy, a
political decoy. Because throughout history, the more hated you are,
either within your country or internationally or both, the more
(41:48):
you need more than probably one political decoys, which is
essentially somebody who's saying like, yeah, I look like you,
I'll go do the boring stuff, but also risk my
life because somebody might assassinate you at some point.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah, and I get the sense in some of these
that it's a little less like, I look like you,
I'd like to do this, Then Kim Jong-un says, hey,
you guys, come with me.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
You're going to double me now. This is your new job.
Because he, of course, has been listed as having body
doubles to the point where there's been speculation fueled about
whether or not he was sick in the hospital or
actually dead. Saddam Hussein had a bunch of decoys. They
made a movie called The Devil's Double about a man
(42:31):
that was his son's double. Uday. And they made a, uh,
I meant to see it actually. It looked kind of good,
but I haven't seen it. That was out in 2011.
It was called the devil's double and Latif Yahia, um,
basically spoke out a lot afterward that like I was
Uday Hussein's double and he was a very bad guy.
(42:52):
So it was not probably the best job.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Um, apparently Stalin had at least four, um, doubles. And then,
This one is amazing to me. There is a British
general named Bernard Montgomery, and he hired a double by
the name of M.E. Clifton James. Great name. He was
Australian and he posed as Bernard Montgomery and went around,
(43:18):
I would guess, Europe talking about allied plans in the
hopes that like his his plans would be or that
the talks would be overheard by German spies. And the plans,
of course, were fake. And they were meant to serve
as a decoy or distraction for the Nazis. And they
think that possibly had an influence on the storming of Normandy.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
That's pretty cool. There's a movie in there somewhere, or
at least a scene.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
Surely. Easily. They could have thrown it in as bonus
material on the Operation Mincemeat movie, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Did you see that?
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Yeah. Was it good? I liked our episode better, but yes,
it was good. It was a fine movie, sure.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Yeah, I need to check that out.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
I saw one recently. This one has nothing to do
with anything, but it was a five-part series in Swedish
about the assassination of their prime minister in 1986, Olaf Palme.
And it is really fascinating because they think that one
of the main witnesses was actually the assassin. And they
(44:22):
kind of recreate how it would have happened and they
dive into his life. It's really, really good. It's worth watching.
I think that's on Netflix too. By the way, I
don't work for Netflix. Right. You got anything else? I
got nothing else. That's Doppelgangers then, everybody. I hope you
enjoyed this one. I sure did. I know Chuck did.
And if you want to know more about Doppelgangers, you
(44:43):
can start searching on the internet. And there's a lot
of cool posts from social media of people meeting their
Doppelgangers that will just knock your socks off. And since
I said that, of course, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
This is in response to the Kissin' Cousins episode from
a friend from the Ashkenazi Jewish community.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
I've got 0.2% Ashkenazi in me. Oh, yeah? I also
have some Neanderthal, too.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
All right. Hey, guys, just listen to the episode Kissin' Cousins.
I am from an insular Ashkenazi Jewish community. I'm sure
you understand us being insular makes sense. the gene pool
that much smaller. We also tend to marry younger than
the rest of the Western world. Thus, in pretty much
every high school in our community, we do genetic testing
for recessive genes for defects or serious illnesses common in
(45:34):
Ashkenazi Jews. We don't get the results to the test,
only an ID number. A big part of our culture
is being set up by matchmakers. Before meeting for the
first time, both families will call the screening center with
their ID number and be told if it's safe for
them to go ahead.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
With the matchmaking. It's amazing. It is.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
I met my current partner on my own, and we
decided we were ready to settle down. It was a
little scarier to call and see if we were compatible
because we'd already decided we wanted to be together. Can
you imagine that?
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Yeah, no. I'll bet that was pretty nerve-wracking.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
The call was more to see if we need to
speak to a geneticist before having children than to see
if we should get together for the first time at all.
But thankfully, we were good to go. Separately, I had
a close friend whose husband passed away a few years ago.
She had the option of marrying her brother-in-law. Remember, we
talked about that in the episode, which she had no
interest in doing. She did take a pair of his shoes, though,
(46:29):
and spit on them rather than him. So that part
of the Old Testament is kind of still kept in
some places. And of course, I'm not speaking for all
Ashkenazi Jews, only what I see in my community. Just
thought you might be interested to know how a group
is trying to keep tradition while staying safe and up
to date with science in the 21st century. and this
(46:50):
is a lovely sign-off here, wishing you the strength to
continue for a long time coming.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
And that's from Elkie.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Thanks a lot, Elkie. That was a great email. I
appreciate that big time. And if you want to be
like Elkie and send us a super fascinating email, you
can do that too. All you have to do is
write to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com, press send, and see what happens. Right, Chuck?
Speaker 2 (47:17):
That's right. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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