SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: Doppelgängers: Hey you, you're me!

Seeing your near twin is probably pretty weird. But could there be a genetic commonality as well? You bet there could! See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:34Josh Clark?

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• 2:42Josh Clark?

  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 grownup, AKA 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 to be very interesting. I'm out, this is the last one for me, so let me say thanks for listening to our playlist.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 3:24Josh Clark?

  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.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, Emily showed me that article that informed part of this episode the other day.

• 3:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 04

  And we'll get to it, but I started looking at this photographer's doppelganger photo series.

• 3:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  And boy, some of those are crazy similar.

• 3:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah, what about the two bears with their shirts off?

• 4:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:02Josh Clark?

  Those guys struck me as extremely close.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  The, uh, the two women with the bangs and the black tank tops looked like identical twins to me. I could not tell them apart.

• 4:13Josh Clark?

  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, but, 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 they had a doppelganger and rode 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, addresses them and everything, it like, it creates like a sense of intimacy between them, and it makes you think you're looking at identical twin photos.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and I mean, like, that is gotta 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've 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 this dude's whole jam, it's called, um, "I'm not a look-alike," with an exclamation point. It sounds like a Disney movie from the 60s or something. But that's, that's Francois Brunel's 20-year series.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, and not just, "Hey Chuck, you look like every tubby guy with a beard and glasses." It's like, that's, that's lazy.

• 5:57Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  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 look-alikes.

• 6:06Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  Which I, you know, I think I've gotten a couple here and there over the years that, that I was like, "Okay, I could see that for sure," but doppelgangers are different.

• 6:17Josh Clark?

  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 an author named Jean Paul, which is an unlikely German name, if you ask me. But he wrote a book called, uh, "Sibenkass." Yeah, Sibenkass. I nailed it. And that book was about a man who had a doppelganger, right?

• 6:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think Jean Paul's hiding something with that name.

• 7:01Josh Clark?

  I do, too. He's actually a double.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  I think there's a Dusseldorf at the end or something that he left off.

• 7:07Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he wrote about it in that novel, but as Livia is keen to point out, Livia helped us with this one. The, uh, he sort of mixes up the words. When he was actually talking about a look-alike human, he used the word with a T, doppelganger, but did use the word doppelganger in there as a, as a meal with two 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 look-alike. 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.

• 7:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and the other thing about a doppelganger is, again, like you said, it's not like, oh, 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.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:06Josh Clark?

  But Jean Paul, I can't say his name any other way. He coined those terms, so it's funny that he kind of got it wrong. Everybody else is like, "No, we're gonna 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 medieval age, maybe before Chuck, where if you saw your doppelganger three times, it meant you were about to die. And that's still, I think people still kind of believe that one.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  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, uh, I mean, there was one, I think, in the Norse mythology, where a spirit appears, this one's just a little weird. It appears just like you, but it, 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.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  I don't know if that's the, the self-tardiness for the, in Norse mythology, but that one's not super evil, but it's usually, especially when you get into literature, some sort of, you know, evil force or evil twin that's coming along to wreck things for you.

• 9:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that Norse one that arrives, I just want to put a button on that, because I did a little research. It, it's called the Vardugger, 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 an umlaut.

• 9:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:01Josh Clark?

  I didn't know that before, did you?

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:03Josh Clark?

  Well, you might be a little more of a metal fan than me.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  It's cool-looking, just like the umlaut.

• 10:09Josh Clark?

  Super cool. I think it's cooler than the umlaut. It's got like a slash through it, you know, like, "Ah, take that O," whereas the umlaut's like, "I'm adorning this O." It's a little different.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  All right.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story called William Wilson. It's sort of like I mentioned before about, you know, evil things happening. A narrator meets a boy at school, 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 it seems like all through literature, it's always some sort of a creepy, shadowy figure.

• 10:45Josh Clark?

  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.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  I like that.

• 11:07Josh Clark?

  Which I could totally see that, you know, like if this impostor comes along or this other version of you comes along and people are like, I like you a lot more. Yeah. It reminds me, have you seen that Paul Rudd show, Living With Yourself?

• 11:20Speaker 04

  No.

• 11:21Josh Clark?

  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.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  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, whether, you know, I don't think Three's Company had a doppelganger episode, but it wouldn't surprise me because it can be played for a sort of mixed identity hijinks as well.

• 11:55Josh Clark?

  Totally. Like one where Mr. Furly was into Jack, but it was really his doppelganger.

• 12:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I mean, it'd probably be like his twin brother who came to visit in that case, but.

• 12:06Josh Clark?

  This still counts? An unknown twin still in the canon counts as a doppelganger?

• 12:11Speaker 04

  Do you think?

• 12:13Josh Clark?

  Well, yeah, I think so.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  All right. Well, you just negated what I said, that they're not related, but.

• 12:18Josh Clark?

  Well, okay, 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.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 12:27Josh Clark?

  Mystery solved. No longer a doppelganger. It becomes a twin. But up to that point, when they're like crossing paths with one another and never in the same room at the same time.

• 12:35Speaker 04

  Right. That's a central mystery.

• 12:36Josh Clark?

  It seems doppelganger-y. Yes, exactly.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  But Furly doesn't have a brother. Or does he?

• 12:42Josh Clark?

  Why is he acting so weird?

• 12:44Speaker 04

  Uh, 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.

• 12:59Josh Clark?

  It was the age of spiritualism.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  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?

• 13:18Josh Clark?

  Mary Todd.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  Mary Todd said, you know, you're going to serve two terms as president and that's what that means, but you're going to die before the end of the second term.

• 13:27Josh Clark?

  And he said, well, good night, dear.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  But see, I take issue with some of these listed historically because they're more ghostly specters.

• 13:37Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Than real human doppelgangers.

• 13:40Josh Clark?

  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.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:50Josh Clark?

  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.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  That counts.

• 14:00Josh Clark?

  I would say that one counts in the lore. And then Catherine the Great was pretty good too, right?

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I think Percy Bysshe Shelley's doppelganger had a T-shirt on that said, I'd rather be sailing.

• 14:10Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  Which made it even weirder.

• 14:11Josh Clark?

  No, he had, his T-shirt said, no plates, because that was his third, third choice.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Who was the other one?

• 14:17Josh Clark?

  Catherine the Great.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  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 there and was like, I'm going to sit on the throne and I got past the guards because I look like you.

• 14:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I also saw it interpreted as like phantasmagoric too.

• 14:47Speaker 04

  Oh, like it didn't happen?

• 14:50Josh Clark?

  No, that it was like a phantom or a dop, like a supernatural doppelganger rather than like a double or something like that.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  Again, not a real doppelganger to me.

• 14:58Josh Clark?

  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. He was riding one time from Alsace to, I want to say Dusseldorf, but I think that's wrong. But it works, right?

• 15:24Speaker 04

  I mean, sure. It's the name of that author.

• 15:26Josh Clark?

  And he passed himself on the road and the other, 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.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  And that was a Time Life Books thing?

• 15:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I remember it very well.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, that sounds about right.

• 15:51Josh Clark?

  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.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Uh, all right. 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 life humans, walking around that look like you, right after this.

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• 17:29Josh Clark?

  Sure.

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• 19:38Speaker 04

  All right, so we mentioned the photographer Francois Brunel, who's been doing this project. It's called "I'm Not a Look-Alike," where he takes pictures of these people.

• 19:49Josh Clark?

  I'm sorry, Chuck. There's an exclamation point at the end of that.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, "I'm not a look-alike."

• 19:55Speaker 04

  I encourage people to go check this out when they're in a safe space and you're like 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?

• 20:14Josh Clark?

  The shirtless ones?

• 20:15Speaker 04

  No. The picture I saw, they had on like little, sort of like, newsboy caps.

• 20:22Josh Clark?

  I don't know if I saw those guys.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  They look, I mean, they look like identical twins. And

• 20:28Josh Clark?

  So cool.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  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 realized 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, 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 you're bound at some point to get someone who maybe favors somebody a little bit, or even more, or to the point

• 21:13Speaker 04

  where they look just alike. 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?

• 21:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I guess Brunel's work caught the attention of a researcher named Manel Esteller from Spain, from the Carreras Luchemia 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, 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 another part of the study.

• 22:08Josh Clark?

  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.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  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, the 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 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 SNP's, single nucleotide

• 23:11Speaker 04

  polymorphisms, which 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 SNP's, whereas I'd like to see sort of the actual data, which I couldn't get to. But what they did find was that epigenetically and with their microbiomes, they were basically random. So it was only genetically that they shared something.

• 23:44Josh Clark?

  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 in their epigenome. And this, this study basically found the same thing with doppelgangers. They can share a lot of similar genes that, 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, or, you know, they carried their weight about the same way.

• 24:28Josh Clark?

  But they found that, like you said, that the differences were 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.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  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."

• 25:00Josh Clark?

  Gotcha.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  That's what they said in the paper, "randos."

• 25:02Josh Clark?

  They did. I'm trying to find real quick the

• 25:07Speaker 04

  The data?

• 25:07Josh Clark?

  The number of SNP's. I can't find it that quick. There's a lot of numbers and weird like, like, capital C, lowercase p, large is capital G. I'm like, I don't know what that is. But I will tell you this, I looked up those, those older guys in the news caps.

• 25:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:25Josh Clark?

  They are spitting image.

• 25:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:27Josh Clark?

  And not only are they spitting image of one another, they're spitting image of the Lennox air conditioning man.

• 25:36Josh Clark?

  They look exactly like that guy, down to the hat.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  Well, I guess if that guy ever, you know, leaves the earth, then they've got two backups.

• 25:44Josh Clark?

  I mean, what's it called when you get three doppelgangers together?

• 25:47Speaker 04

  Oh, a troppelganger?

• 25:49Josh Clark?

  I guess so.

• 25:50Speaker 04

  What I'd be curious to see is if, and maybe I'll look more just from 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.

• 26:11Josh Clark?

  I think so, too. And again, like, that's, that's the kind of stuff that can take a real, a real turn, I guess, depending on how you were raised, or even like,

• 26:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 26:20Josh Clark?

  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 clear and clear. It's not just genetics, it's not just epigenetics, it's, it's all of that stuff put together. And it seems like so wildly unattainable, that information, 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 what makes a person them, which I find really exciting.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  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, like, unveils a "Make America Great Again" t-shirt or something.

• 27:22Josh Clark?

  Drops their fork.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  They just get up and part ways silently.

• 27:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that would be the best-case scenario, I think.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  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 named Tegan Lucas, who looked at, got off to a great start, looked at 4,000 faces from the US Anthro, Anthropometric Survey Database, which is something the US Army puts together.

• 27:54Josh Clark?

  And Tegan Lucas is listening to this now, she's like, "Oh, you got off to a great start on that US Anthropometric Survey, Chuck."

• 28:00Speaker 04

  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 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.

• 28:33Josh Clark?

  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.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:52Josh Clark?

  But if we're creating these things, if we're billing computers to recognize people's faces, are there 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 measures of your face.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:20Josh Clark?

  And she wouldn't, she wouldn't reveal what the eight measures were, because apparently her work was that, like, groundbreaking, that they, she's like, "I can't let anybody know what to, what to hide or disguise."

• 29:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 29:32Josh Clark?

  But those, the, the point is, it's eight different dimensions, and like you said, I think, like nostril width, ear length, that kind of stuff.

• 29:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:39Josh Clark?

  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, and that's

• 29:51Speaker 04

  So that means there's no doppelgangers.

• 29:53Josh Clark?

  It's not, 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 alike is basically nothing. But as you get closer to a trillion,

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:09Josh Clark?

  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, 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, 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.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Right, well, yeah, we're artificial, and I think we're intelligent.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  But we're not those two things together.

• 30:47Josh Clark?

  Are we artificial?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Sure. I just wanted to try and freak people out a little bit.

• 30:51Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 30:52Speaker 04

  The Josh Bot and the Chuck Bot are hard at work here.

• 30:54Josh Clark?

  Does not compute.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  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?

• 31:11Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  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.

• 31:22Josh Clark?

  Okay, so one of the reasons why I think people would kind of look at you and then the bass player for...

• 31:29Speaker 04

  Jason Isbell in the 400 unit.

• 31:31Josh Clark?

  Sure. And put you guys together and said, oh, they really look alike, is because we use like shortcuts when we're looking 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?

• 31:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I want to name him because I don't want to just keep calling him that because I love that group. His name is Jimbo Hart. And when you look at a picture of Jimbo Hart, he...

• 31:57Josh Clark?

  That's a great name, dude.

• 31:59Speaker 04

  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, you know, various sort of cowboy hats and fedoras.

• 32:10Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the guy looks like me.

• 32:12Josh Clark?

  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. 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.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  I can tell you, I can see him without a beard and he's not nearly as close.

• 32:33Josh Clark?

  Okay, right. So there you go. Like, we make these shortcuts with our faces 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 bassist for...

• 32:55Speaker 04

  The 400 unit.

• 32:57Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  Right, and you know, you've seen this, and here's a good example of how this can play tricks on people. And this is just one example. A lot of people have done that kind of fun thing where you switch out 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 of that person.

• 33:20Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  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 gotta look 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 mop

• 34:03Speaker 04

  or that big Al Gore mop that he had, or Cheney's bald head, and that's a big clue.

• 34:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and also, like, I think one of the foundations of this swap is that it can't be like an egregious change.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:16Josh Clark?

  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 looked like. That's an egregious change. It's not going to work.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  That was great.

• 34:27Josh Clark?

  Dick Cheney and George Bush's eyes look similar 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, a swing and 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 at the nose.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:53Josh Clark?

  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, I got that. Let me see the mouth.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:08Josh Clark?

  Okay, looking at that, and then the nose.

• 35:09Speaker 04

  That makes you a serial killer.

• 35:11Josh Clark?

  Right, right. Oh, I want to kill that person.

• 35:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:14Josh Clark?

  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, in fact.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  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, 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.

• 36:02Josh Clark?

  Sure. And that actually raises a recent internet sensation. A guy named Neil Douglas was, I think, flying to Ireland on a Ryanair flight.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:13Josh Clark?

  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.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  That's so great.

• 36:22Josh Clark?

  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, okay, 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,

• 37:01Josh Clark?

  I think the brown eyes, that there's something like maybe 80,000 people walking around out there that look just like them, essentially.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, 74,000. That's a lot of people.

• 37:11Josh Clark?

  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.

• 37:23Speaker 04

  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 looked pretty similar. The one sort of difference here is in height, is 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.

• 37:55Josh Clark?

  Well, I read they kept running into each other and finally they're 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.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  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?

• 38:15Josh Clark?

  Right. If the movie Serendipity with John Cusack really spoke to you?

• 38:21Speaker 04

  I don't, I never even saw that. You mentioned that movie a lot. What happened in that movie?

• 38:25Josh Clark?

  Great, I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but...

• 38:27Speaker 04

  Was he a doppelganger?

• 38:29Josh Clark?

  No.

• 38:29Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 38:30Josh Clark?

  But it was, they kept running into one another and like it just kind of was like...

• 38:33Speaker 04

  Oh, it's just the chance of true love over and over.

• 38:37Josh Clark?

  It was a good movie, okay?

• 38:39Speaker 04

  Didn't they go to some ice cream shop in New York, famous ice cream shop?

• 38:42Josh Clark?

  I don't remember that. I think you're talking about Midnight Cowboy.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah, that's right.

• 38:49Speaker 04

  Let's go get some ice cream.

• 38:51Josh Clark?

  That was a great John 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 McCardle, who is hanging around a pool in Vegas and his double, Chuck, just look it up, Sean McCardle doppelganger. His double happened to be floating along in the same pool, wearing the exact same glasses. Apparently they were the only two people at the pool wearing glasses, not sunglasses, but glasses glasses. 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.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  So funny.

• 39:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 39:34Speaker 04

  I think my first thought would be like, what kind of crimes can we commit?

• 39:39Josh Clark?

  Well, yeah, we'll get to that in a different episode.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  Let's rob a bank.

• 39:44Josh Clark?

  That's my first thought.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  That's terrible. We're just kidding. Are we due for another break? Yeah, or should we wait?

• 39:49Josh Clark?

  I think so. Yeah, let's take a break.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  All right, we'll take a break and come back and sort this all out.

• 40:06Josh Clark?

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• 40:29Josh Clark?

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• 40:45Speaker 04

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• 41:09Speaker 04

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• 41:16Josh Clark?

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• 41:35Josh Clark?

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• 41:57Speaker 04

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• 42:16Josh Clark?

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• 42:31Speaker 04

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• 43:00Josh Clark?

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• 43:27Josh Clark?

  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 is starting to become clear is intended exclusively for seeing faces. 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 gonna be like, alright, fine, I'll handle sound from now on.

• 44:10Josh Clark?

  This, it seems you're born with this ability to recognize faces. The region's called 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.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Hubba hubba.

• 44:28Josh Clark?

  Can you tell I'm hot?

• 44:31Speaker 04

  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?

• 44:46Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 44:46Speaker 04

  And they said, you know, we're gonna do this and just look at me and tell me what you see. And basically, they shape-shifted 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 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.

• 45:19Josh Clark?

  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?

• 45:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:29Josh Clark?

  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 the fusiform gyrus lit up.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 45:53Josh Clark?

  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 stuffs 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 pick out doppelgangers so easily, because our brains are kind of attuned to look for faces everywhere.

• 46:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. 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 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.

• 47:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah. There was 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 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.

• 47:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 47:41Josh Clark?

  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. 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.

• 48:02Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, that's one of the problems with it all is it's just, 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 gotta be on a database somehow.

• 48:14Josh Clark?

  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 people of, 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, that's how I take it.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, that's how I took it, too.

• 48:39Josh Clark?

  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.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  I was like, uh.

• 48:56Josh Clark?

  Oh, God. I was thinking back to Ratso Rizzo, I think.

• 49:02Josh Clark?

  So if you're a doppelganger of lizzos, what would you do with that talent?

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Well, you could go hang out on Hollywood Boulevard near Mann'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 look-alike, then you can go to their party and make a couple of hundred bucks, probably.

• 49:30Josh Clark?

  Probably. You could also work on movies, apparently. There's lots of jobs for you.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, 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, they're lighting you for camera and stuff like that. Like, you can't, you know, The Rock can't have a body double, or a stand-in that looks like me, you know?

• 50:09Josh Clark?

  I don't know if you wore one of those, like, ripped t-shirts?

• 50:11Speaker 04

  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 it's more body size and skin tone and stuff like that is more important as for doubling.

• 50:29Josh Clark?

  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.

• 50:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:43Josh Clark?

  Because throughout history, the more hated you are, either within your country or internationally, or both, the more you need more than probably one political decoy, 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."

• 51:02Speaker 04

  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," than Kim Jong-un says, "Hey, you guys, come with me."

• 51:11Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  "You're gonna double me now, this is your new job." Because he is, 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 that was his son's double, Uday. And they made a, I meant to see it, actually, it looked kind of good.

• 51:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I haven't seen it.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  That was out in 2011, it was called The Devil's Double, and Latif Yahia basically spoke out a lot afterward that like, "I was Uday Hussein's double," and he was a very bad guy, so it was not probably the best job.

• 51:58Josh Clark?

  Apparently Stalin had at least four doubles. And then, this one is amazing to me, there was a British general named Bernard Montgomery, and he hired a double by the name of Emmy Clifton James, great name. He was Australian, and he posed as Bernard Montgomery and went around, 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, the storming of Normandy.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  That's pretty cool. There's, there's a movie in there somewhere, or at least a scene.

• 52:45Josh Clark?

  It's surely, easily. They could have thrown it in as bonus material in the Operation Mincemeat movie, you know?

• 52:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. Did you see that?

• 52:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 52:53Speaker 04

  Was it good?

• 52:55Josh Clark?

  I liked our episode better, but yes, it was good. It was, it was a fine, it was a fine movie, sure.

• 53:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I need to check that out.

• 53:03Josh Clark?

  I saw one recently, this one, it 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 Palma. And it is really fascinating, because they think that one of the main witnesses was actually the assassin. And they 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.

• 53:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:35Josh Clark?

  You got anything else?

• 53:36Speaker 04

  I got nothing else.

• 53:39Josh Clark?

  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 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.

• 53:59Speaker 04

  This is in response to the Kissin' Cousins episode from a friend from the Ashkenazi Jewish community.

• 54:07Josh Clark?

  I've got 0.2% Ashkenazi in me.

• 54:10Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah?

• 54:11Josh Clark?

  I also have some Neanderthal, too.

• 54:14Speaker 04

  All right. Hey, guys, just listened to the episode Kissin' Cousins. I am from an insular Ashkenazi Jewish community. I'm sure you understand this being insular makes 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 Ashkenazi Jews.

• 54:38Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 54:38Speaker 04

  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 that it's safe for them to go ahead with the matchmaking.

• 54:53Josh Clark?

  It's amazing.

• 54:54Speaker 04

  It is. 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?

• 55:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah, no, I mean, I'll bet that was pretty nerve-wracking.

• 55:09Speaker 04

  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, 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.

• 55:52Speaker 04

  And this is a lovely sign-off here, wishing you the strength to continue for a long time coming.

• 55:58Josh Clark?

  Nice.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  And that's from Elky.

• 56:00Josh Clark?

  Thanks a lot, Elky, that was a great email, I appreciate that big time. And if you want to be like Elky and send us a super fascinating email, you can do that, too. All you have to do is write to [email protected], press send, and see what happens. Right, Chuck?

• 56:19Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 56:23Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 56:38Josh Clark?

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• 58:12Speaker 05

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.