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

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I'm Gemma Speck, host of the Psychology of your 20s podcast, and this month we're helping you make sense of the person that you are becoming, from setting boundaries and navigating friendships, to understanding anxiety, confidence, relationships, and attachment. Sometimes our biggest decisions, without us even realizing it, aren't driven by what we truly want, but by what will prevent us from feeling lonely or being alone. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, aka now, I was really glad to learn that they're an actual thing. There are people walking around who have a twin that there are 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. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of "I Heart" Radio. Hey, 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. Yeah, Emily showed me that article that informed part of this episode the other day, and we'll get to it, but I started looking at this photographer's doppelganger photo series, and boy, some of those are crazy similar. Yeah, what about the two bears with their shirts off? Yeah, those guys struck me as extremely close. The two women with the bangs and the black tank tops looked like identical twins to me. I could not solve them apart. 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 Kebacquoi photographer, Francois Brunel, and for 20 years he's been assembling pictures of doppelgangers. People who already knew they had a doppelganger in Rodin, 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 really cool stuff with it. It's not just like here, you stay in here and you stay in next to him. The way that he poses him addresses him and everything, it creates a sense of intimacy between him. It makes you think you're looking at identical twin photos. Yeah, some of them people favor one another, and then when you have them styled to look alike and pose to like that informs what you're seeing, but a handful of them, they look so much like identical twins that it's weird to think that you could walk down the street one day and make someone who looks exactly like you. Yeah, and I mean like that has got to be pretty eerie. Luckily one of the great things about social media is that people can pose 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 the studio's whole jam. It's called, I'm not a look alike with an exclamation point. It sounds like a Disney movie from the 60s or something, but that's a Francois Brunelles 20 year series. 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. Sure. 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 alike. Right. 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. 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 go 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 Siebenkuss. Yeah, Siebenkuss. I nailed it. And that book was about a man who had a doppelganger, right? Yeah. I think Jean Paul's hiding something in that name. I do too. He's actually a double. I think there's a docile dwarf at the end or something that he left off. That's right. Yeah. So he wrote about it in that novel, but as Olivia is keen to point out, Olivia helped us with this one. He sort of mixes up the words when he was actually talking about a look-alike human. He used the word with a tee, doppeltganger, but did use the word doppelganger in there 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 tee, but doppelganger became the eventual word that we use for 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 related to these people at all. 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. You're as close to the person's body double as you can get in the closer you are, the more of a doppelganger you are basically. But John 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 going to drop the tee, 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's 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 a, I think people still kind of believe that one. Yeah. And that's, I mean, there are all kinds of old pieces of folklore. And 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, I think, in the North mythology, where a spirit appears, this one's just a little weird. It appears just like you, but it beat to 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 don't know if that's the, the solvestardiness for the, in North 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. 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 Vardueger, and the reason I know how to pronounce it is because I looked up with the O with the slash is pronounced like, and it's the same thing as the O with the Oom Lout. Yeah. I didn't know that before, did you? Yeah. Well, you might be a little more of a metal fan than me. It's cool looking, just like the Oom Lout. Super cool. I think it's cooler than the Oom Lout. It's got like a slash through it, you know, like, ah, take that O, whereas the Oom Lout's like, I'm adorning this O. It's a little different. All right. 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. Yeah. There's also Dostoevsky 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'd love this. In it, the doppelganger is like a more likable version of the main character and ends up breaking the main character, character mentally, which I could totally see that. You know, like if this, this imposter 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? 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. 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 the 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. Totally. Like one where Mr. Furley was into Jack, but it was really his doppelganger. Yeah. And that I mean, it'd probably be like his twin brother who came to visit in that case. But this still counts an unknown twin still in the canon counts as a doppelganger. Do you think? Well, yeah, I think so. All right. Well, you just negated what I said that they're not related. But well, okay. That's true. Once you find out, here's the thing that 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 like crossing paths with one another and never in the same room at the same time, that's a central mystery doppelganger. Yes, exactly. But Furley doesn't have a brother or does he? Why is he acting so weird? 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. It was the age of spiritualism. Yeah, for sure. So you have to take that 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. 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. And he said, well, good night here. See, I take issue with some of these listed historically because they're more ghostly specters than real human doppelgangers. So John Dunn'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 by Shelley, he saw his doppelganger and died a few weeks later in a sailing accident. I would say that one counts in the lore. And then Catherine the greats was pretty good too, right? Yeah. And I think Percy by Shelley's doppelganger had a t-shirt on instead of rather be sailing. It's true. It's made it even weirder. No, he had his t-shirts had no plates because that was his third choice. Who was the other one? Catherine the great. Yeah, this was a real one too, actually. Supposedly, there was a servant 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 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. Yeah, I also saw it interpreted as like phantasmagoric too. Oh, like it didn't happen? No, that it was like a phantom or a doppelganger rather than like a double or something like that. Again, not a real doppelganger to me. 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 good to one of the reasons I like this anecdote is because I love saying Gertz's name. He was writing one time from Alsace to, I don't want to say Dusseldorf, but I think that's wrong. But it works, right? I mean, sure, it's the name of that author. 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. And that was a time-life books thing. Yeah, I remember it very well. Yeah, that sounds about right. I didn't know how to say Gertz's name at the time though. So I was like, this really weird thing happened to Goath. 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. Hey everyone, it's the Jonas Brothers with the Hey Jonas podcast. 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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 they take pictures of these people. I'm sorry, but there's an exclamation point at the end of that. Yeah, I'm not a look alike. 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, to my eye, identical twins, the other two sort of gentlemen probably in their 60s with the little moustache. Did you see those guys? The shirtless ones? Now, the picture I saw they had on like little sort of like news boycaps. I don't know if I saw those guys. They look, I mean, they look like identical twins. And 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 may be favor somebody a little bit or even more or to the point 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? Yeah, I guess Bruno Nell'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, 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. 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. Yeah, and they were also, and again, this doesn't, like, lessen the study to me, but they were generally from the same country, or the same ethnic background. Although I did see 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 SNPs, single nucleotide 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 were to 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 that epigenetically and with their microbiomes, they were basically random. So it was only genetically that they shared something. 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 still 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 if it 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 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. Yeah, I think the microbiome was the same as the epigenetic finding, which was, I think who quote, was it generally wasn't any closer than two randos? Gotcha. So they said the paper randos. 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 like capital C, lowercase P 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, right? 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. Exactly like that guy down to the hat. Well, I guess if that guy ever, you know, leaves the earth and they got two backups. I mean, what's the call when you get three doppelgangers together? No, a doppelganger. I guess so. What I'd be curious to see is if, and maybe I look more just for my own funsies into the photographers project because what I'm curious about is if these like how these people get along and if they like formed friendships, if they like each other, if they had similar interests, you know, that's that's pretty fascinating to me. 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, you know, or you raised 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 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. I know it would be funny as 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 their right. And the other one, like, unveils and make America great again, T-shirts or some drops their fork. They just get up in part ways silently. Yeah. That would be the best case scenario, I think. 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 up to a great start, looked at 4,000 faces from the US anthropometrics survey database, which is something the US Army puts together. Tegan Lucas is listening to us now. She's like, Oh, he got off to a great start on that US anthropometrics survey. Well, I think Tegan Lucas overachieved because what they did was looked across eight facial features and calculated the, like, the chances that you'll look just like someone else is one 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. 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 her 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 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. And she wouldn't, she wouldn't reveal what the eight measures were because apparently her work was that, like, groundbreaking that she's like, "I don't really let anybody know what to hide or disguise." But the point is it's eight different dimensions. And like you said, I think, like, nostril with your 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. And that's, so that means there's no doppelgangers. 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 like, 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. So we're at, I think, a one in a hundred and twenty five chance that today on earth, there are two people who look exactly like 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. Right. Well, yeah. We're artificial. And I think we're intelligent. But we're not, there's two things together. Are we artificial? Sure. I just want to join freak people out a little bit. Okay. The Josh Bot and the Chuck Bot are harder work here. Does not compute. Well, I think we, 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 I like to have to look to someone to say you're a doppelganger. Right. You know, like I look like the guy, I look like the, the bass player for Jason Isbell in the 400 unit. but is he my doppelganger? Probably not. Okay, so one of the reasons why I think people would kind of look at you and then the bass player for Jason Isbel in the 400 unit. 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. Yeah, I want to name them because I don't want to just keep calling them that because I love that group. His name is Jimbo Heart. And when you look at a picture of Jimbo Heart, he's a great name too. Like, look him up. He's got the beard. You know, when I'm reading, I got him my black room glasses. I like to wear my hats these days, my various sort of cowboy hats and fedoras. Sure. Yeah, I mean, the guy looks like me. 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. I can tell you. I can see him without a beard and he's not nearly as close. 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 Heart, the basis for the 400 unit. That's right. 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 of that person. Right. 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 said, that's dates the creation of that particular meme or whatever it was. Uh, the Dick Cheney one looks like you got to look a bunch of times before you realize this George Bush's face. Um, the, the, the Al Gore one, I mean, it's so clearly it's, it's just kind of funny looking. But the, 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, uh, stuff like that as, you know, that big Clinton mop or that big Al Gore mop that he had or Cheney's bald head. And that's a big clue. 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 looked like. That's an egregious change. It's not going to work. But that was great. 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 the change. And there was a study, I think, from 1977. Swing and groovy study. And it basically tried to figure out how people register faces and 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. Yeah. 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 the eyes. Got that. Let me see the mouth. Right. Okay. And then that makes you a serial killer. 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 in fact. 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. Sure. And that actually raises a recent internet sensation. A guy named Neil Douglas was, I think, flying to Ireland on a Ryanair flight, 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. It was so great. 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 and weren't related. But they looked a lot like each other. But there's 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 his, in the other guy's seat is even more amazing. But how, 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 80,000 people walking around out there that looked just like them essentially. Yeah, 74,000. That's a lot of people. 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. 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 and close to each other and they look pretty similar. The one sort of difference here is and height is one of the dudes was 57. The other was 63 because there's other pictures of them out drinking together in Ireland. I guess they kind of hung out and stuff, which is great. Well, I read they kept running into each other and finally, okay, let's go get a pint together. Like they weren't the same hotel and like they kept running into one another so they went with it. 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. If the movie's serendipity with John Cusack really spoke to you, I don't even I never even saw that. You mentioned that movie a lot. What happened in movie? Great. I don't want to spoil it for anybody. But is there a double ganger? No. Okay. But it was it was they kept running into one another and like it just kind of was. Oh, it's just the chance of true love over and over. It was a good movie. Okay. Then they got us some ice cream shop in New York, famous ice cream shop. I don't remember that. I think you're talking about midnight cowboy. Okay. Yeah. That's right. Let's go get some ice creams. That was a great John Voichov. There was there was another one that came along recently too that I think is even better than than the other one. All right. There's a dude named Sean McCartle who was hanging around a pool in Vegas and his double Chuck just look it up. Sean McCartle double ganger. 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. Okay. The same glasses. Same hat. They actually do have like the same build and same height and everything. They are the spinning image of one another and they were just randomly in the same pool in Las Vegas at the same time. So funny. Yeah. I think my first thought would be like what kind of crimes can we commit? Yeah. We're gonna bang a different episode. Let's rob a bank. That's my first thought. That's terrible. We're just kidding. Are we due for another break? Yeah or should we wait? I think so. Yeah, let's take a break. All right. We'll take a break and come back and sort this all out. We've been catching up with some great friends Paul Rodd, Michael Blay, Seth Meyers and making some new friends while getting into what's really like to have sisters like Alex and Ashton Earl. She likes to control everyone and tell everyone. Plus we've been taking your calls, listening to your voicemails and giving advice. Oh my god, Lexi. I'm not gonna get any worse than fighting. That is wild. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and the a little wiser. - We're best friends, but we don't always agree. - Because you told us how accommodating you are. - Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. - Don't lie to me. - Don't lie to me. - Don't lie to me. - Lieur. - Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, I don't really care. - Self-Cast of Tempa is here, which means it's time to rethink what self-care actually means. 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(upbeat music) So one of the reasons I think Chuck, that we have 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. 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, 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 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. - Haba, Haba. - Yeah, I know, you can tell I'm hot. - 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? - Yep. - And they said, you know, we're gonna 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 color or anything like that. But it sounds like it literally in their own perception at least transform what their face looked like, which it's gotta be really weird. - Yeah, oh man, I can't imagine seeing that. Especially you see it while you're undergoing open brain surgery and you're conscious and then they start messing with parts of it, right? - Right. - 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 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 gyros 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 gyros. 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 doppelganger so easily because our brains are kind of attuned to look for faces everywhere. - 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. - Yeah, one guy is recently, it's 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, a 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, 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 say, let's just give them photos of white men and I'm sure it'll be fine and it just hasn't been fine. - Well, I mean, that's one of the problems with it all, 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. - 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 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 take it. - Yeah, no, that's how I took it too. - So Chuck, if let's say that you are a doppelganger of somebody, somebody famous like Madonna or Johnny Depp or Rizzo, just to get the kids involved. - No, Lizzo. (laughing) I was like, oh God, I was thinking back to Rizzo, I think. So if you're a doppelganger of Lizzo, what would you do with that talent? - Well, you could go hang out on Hollywood Boulevard near Mans Chinese Theater and make some money, walking around, charging $5 a picture. You could get employed full time with an agency to get sent out of someone once 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. - Probably. You could also work on movies, apparently. There's lots of jobs for you. - Yeah, I mean, this one is, it's less face, like when your 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 you can't, you know, the rock can't have a body double or a stand in that looks like me, you know? - I don't know if you were when it was like ripped T-shirt. - All right. - I could 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. - But the place is 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 you need more than probably one political decoys, which is essentially somebody who's saying like, yeah, I look like you all go do the boring stuff, but also risk my life because somebody might assassinate you at some point. - 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. - Right. - You're gonna 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. Sodom Hussein had a bunch of decoys. They made a movie called The Devils Double about a man that was his son's double, Ude. And they made a, I meant to see it actually. It looked kind of good, but that was out in 2011, it was called The Devils Double and Latif Yahia basically spoke out a lot afterward that like, I was Ude, Hussein's double, And he was a very bad guy, so it was not probably the best job. Apparently Stalin had at least four 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 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 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 it possibly had an influence on the storming of Normandy. That's pretty cool. There's a movie in there somewhere or at least a scene. It's surely easily. They could have thrown it in his bonus material on the Operation Mints Meat Movie, you know? Yeah. Was it good? I liked our episode better, but yes, it was, it was a fine, it was a fine movie. Sure. And you need to check that out. I saw one recently. I just want 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. 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 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. This is in response to the Kiss and Cousins episode from a friend from the Ashkenazi Jewish community. I've got 0.2% Ashkenazi in me. Oh, yeah? Mm-hmm. I also have some Aunt Meanderthal too. All right. Hey guys, just listen to the episode Kiss and Cousins. I am from an insular Ashkenazi Jewish community. I'm sure you understand us 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. Wow. 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. We're meeting for the first time both families will call the screening center with our ID number and be told if it's safe for them to go ahead with the matchmaking. Wow. It's amazing. It is. 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 already decided we wanted to be together. Can you imagine that? Yeah, no, I mean, I bet that was pretty nerve-wracking. 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 and 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 test 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 enough to date with science in the 21st century. And this is a lovely sign off here, wishing you the strength to continue for a long time coming. Nice. And that's from Elkie. 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. What we're going to do is write two stuff podcasts at iHeartRadio.com, press send and see what happens. Right, Chuck? That's right. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are where ever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everyone. It's the Jonas Brothers with The Hey Jonas Podcast. Okay. Well, control is a hard swear. Plus, we've been taking your calls, listening to your voicemails and giving advice. Listen to Hey Jonas on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Hey Jonas and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today. Hey, Jonas is sponsored by edible arrangements. What are yours today at edible.com? Lisa, tell them about our new show. I'm Lexi Juanu, we're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa de Julio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Self-care September is your reminder to slow down, check in with yourself, get off your phone, and maybe ask, why am I like this? I'm James Bayek, host of the Psychology of your 20s podcast, and this month we're helping you make sense of the person that you are becoming, from setting boundaries and navigating friendships to understanding anxiety, confidence, relationships, and attachment. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.