Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: Doppelgängers: Hey you, you're me!

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

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 for privacy information.

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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 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. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. 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. Yeah, you know, Emily showed me that article that informed part of this episode the other day.

Yeah. And we'll get to it, but I started looking at this photographer's doppelgaping. Ganger photo series. Yeah. 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 tell 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, but he'll figure in in a little bit, I should say, but he's a Montreal, I guess a Quebec qua 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. Doppel gangers 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 creates, like, a sense of intimacy between them. It makes you think you're looking at identical twin photos. Yeah. I mean, you know, some of them people favor one another. And then when you have them styled to look alike and pose 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 make someone who looks exactly like you. Yeah. And I mean, like, that is got to be pretty eerie. And 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, 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 a francois brunel's 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 uh i think when you're in the public eye people tend to do things like that to say okay you look like all of these people we're talking like real lookalikes 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 goer, or a different interpretation as 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 Sibbenkass. Yeah, Sibbenkass. I nailed it. And that book was about a man who had a doppelganger, right?

Yeah. I think John Paul's hiding something with that name. I do, too. He's actually a double. I think there's a Dusseldorf at the end or something that he left off. That's right. Yeah, so he wrote about it in that novel, but as Livia is keen to point out, Livia helped us with this one. He sort of mixes up the words. When he was actually talking about a lookalike human, he used the word with a T, doppelteganger, but did use the word

doppelganger in there as a meal with two courses being served together. So I don't know, if things just got a little confused or people thought it was just fine. 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 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. Like, you're as close to the person's double, body double as you can get. In the closer you are, the more of a doppelganger you are, basically. Right. But, um, but Jean-Berner.

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 tea, 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 in just about every country you can explore that has some sort of, and it's usually not, if you find your doppelganger, then, you know, good luck will come your way.

It always seems like it's some kind of spooky negative thing will happen, whether you see them three times or whether, I mean, there was a, I mean, there was a lot of, you know, 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 beats you to wherever you're going. So if you're traveling on a journey, your doppelganger would beat you there and people think that you would have arrived earlier. I don't know if that solves tardiness in North mythology, but that one's not super evil, but it's usually, especially when you get into literature, some sort of evil force or evil twin that's come 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's called

the Vardugur, and the reason I know how to pronounce it is because I looked up what the O with the slash is pronounced like, and it's the same thing as an O with the Oumlaut. Yeah. I didn't know that before, did you? Yeah. Well, you might be. be a little more of a metal fan than me. It's cool looking, just like the oomlout. Super cool. I think it's cooler than the umlaut. It's got like a slash through it, you know, like, oh, take that O. Whereas the umlout's like, I'm adorning this O.

It's a little different. All right. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story called William Wilson. 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 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'd love this. In it, the doppelganger is like a more likable version of the main character and ends up breaking the... the main character mentally. I like that. I could totally see that.

You know, like if this imposter comes along or this other version of you comes along and people are like, I like you a lot more. 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 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 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. This actually proves your point, Chuck. Once the characters find out, oh, it's a twin, mystery solved, no longer a doppelganger, it becomes the 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. It seems doppelgangery. Yes, exactly.

But Furley doesn't have a brother. 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, and that's what that means. But you're going to die before the end of the second term.

And he said, well, good night, dear. But see, I take issue with some of these listed historically because. They're more ghostly specters. Right. Than real human doppelgangers. So John Dunn's story is strictly biolocation. 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. Right.

She was actually ill and their child that died. By location doesn't count. But Percy Bysshe Shelley, he saw his doppelganger and died a few weeks later in a sailing accident. I would say that one counts in the lore. And then Catherine the Great's was pretty good too, right? Yeah, and I think Percy Blisheleysh's doppelganger had a t-shirt on that said I'd rather be sailing, which made it even weirder. No, he had his t-shirt said 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, right, who discovered a double like that somehow got in there, fake their way in there, and was sitting on the throne. So this was a case where someone was, I don't know, think trying to like, you know, realistically take over his 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 doppel, like a supernatural 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 Goethe one of the reasons I like this anecdote is because I love saying Gerta's name he um was riding one time from alsas to I 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 Goethe's name at the time, though, so I was like,

this really weird thing happened to Goethe. 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. The long loading times. The glitchy video calls.

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free. 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. I'm sorry, Chuck. There's an exclamation point at the end of it. 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 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? The shirtless ones? No. The picture I saw they had on like little sort of like newsboy caps. I don't know if I saw those guys. 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 maybe 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 Brunel's work caught the attention of a researcher named Manel Esteller from Spain from the Carreras Leukemia Research Institute, who said, I want to try to figure this out. And these people are like a perfect population sample. So he took, I think, 32 pairs of doppelgangers, ran them through three different facial recognition programs.

And half of them, 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 programs. 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 any to me, but they were generally from the same country or the same ethnic background. Although I did see it gender varied because there was one where it was a man and a woman who looked a lot of like 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 S&Ps, 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 would have gotten like the raw numbers because all it says is like, you know, They shared many S&Ps, 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 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 study basically found the same thing with doppelgangers. They can share a lot of similar genes that give them the same facial traits or builds or I think even habits they found. A lot of them, like if one smoked, the other was likely to smoke. You know, they carried their weight about the same way. but they found that, like you said, the differences were 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 the quote was it generally wasn't. isn't any closer than two randos. Gotcha. So they said in the paper, Randos. They did.

They did. I'm trying to find real quick the number of SMPs. I can't find it that quick. There's a lot of numbers and weird like capital C, lowercase P, capital G. I'm like, I don't know what that is. But I will tell you this. I looked up those older guys in the newscaps. Right.

They are spitting image. And not only are they spinning image of one another, they're spinning image of the Lennox air conditioning man. They look exactly like that guy. Down to the hat. Well, I guess if that guy ever, you know, leaves the earth and they've got two backups. I mean, what's it called when you get three doppelgangers together?

I don't know. A droplet ganger? I guess so. What I'd be curious to see is if, and maybe I'll look more just for my own funzies into the photographer's project. Because what I'm curious about is 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 pretty fascinating to me. I think so too. And again, like that's the kind of stuff that can take a real turn, I guess, depending on how you were raised or even like, you know, or 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 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. You know, it would be funny is if they really got along and they were like, oh, my God, we have so many similarities, we look just alike. This is such a weird thing. And they were having lunch, and one of them was like, boy, what a shame that Hillary lost the right. And the other one might unveils a Make America Great Again T-shirt or something. Just 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 off to a great start, looked at 4,000 faces from the U.S. anthropometric survey database, which is something the U.S. Army puts together.

And Tegan Lucas is listening to us now. She's like, oh, you got off to a great start on that U.S. anthropometric survey, Chuck. Well, I think Tegan Lucas overachieve because what they did was looked across eight facial features and calculated the chances that you 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. 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. Yeah. But if we're creating these things, if we're building 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. Yeah. 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 okay but those the point is it's eight different dimensions and like you said I think like nostril width ear length that kind of stuff yeah down to the millimeter and she found that it's like a one and 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 and 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 8 million. So we're at, I think, a 1 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. Right. Well, yeah, we're artificial and I think we're intelligent. But we're not those two things together. Are we artificial? Sure.

I just want to try and freak people out a little bit. Okay. The Josh bot and the Chuck bot are hard at work here. Does not compute? 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? Right. 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. Okay, so one of the reasons why I think people would kind of look at you and then the base player for... Jason Isbell 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 him because I don't want to just keep calling that, because I love that group. His name is Jimbo Hart. And when you look at a picture of Jimbo Hart, he, you know. That's a great name, dude. Like, look him up. He's got the beard.

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. 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 Hart, the basis for... The 400 unit. That's right. 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. The one that Livya 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've got to look a bunch of times before you realize that's George Bush's face. Yeah. The Al Gore went, 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 or that big Al-Gore mop that he had or Cheney's bald head. And that's a big clue. Yeah. And also, like, I think one of the foundations of this swap is that it can't be like in a great. Right. Like if you remember back to, I think it was Conan that used to put Steve Bouchemmy eyes on different celebrities and see what they look like. That's an egregious change. It's not going to work. But 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, swinging, groovy study. And it basically tried to figure out how people register faces in what order.

And they found that first we look at the eyes, then we look at the mouth, and then we look at the nose. And those are the things we kind of take in. But there's other research, and I think this is also kind of like supported by the same study. Like when you look at someone's face, you don't go, all right, let me see the eyes. You got that. Let me see the mouth. Right. Okay.

And then the nose. 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 and fat. 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 Livvia points out is, you know, you're not six foot nine and have fly. 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're a little tubby, you've got a beard, you've 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 Ryan Air flight. Yeah. And went to get in his seat and saw that there was somebody sitting in his seat, and the person looked up, and it was his doppelganger. 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. 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 his, in the other guy's seat is even more amazing. But how unlikely is it that these two, you know, were on the same plane? And they figured out that based on a number of different factors like the hair, the face, the beard, the nose, I think the brown eyes, that there's something like maybe 80,000 people walking around out there that look 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 or two of another guy that was like, hey, I'm one of those 74,000. And they put all three of them close to each other and they look pretty similar. The one sort of difference here is in height is 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. Well, I read they kept running into each other and finally were like, okay, let's go get a pint together.

Like they were at the same hotel and 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'd should give some thought to what this means. Like, am I supposed to do something special with this person? Right. If the movie Serendipity with John Cusack really spoke to you? I never even saw that. You mentioned that movie a lot. What happened in that movie? Great. I don't want to spoil it for anybody. Was there a doppelganger? No. 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 go to 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 cream. That was a great John Voight, Chuck. Oh. There was another one that came along recently, too, that I think is even better than the other one.

There's a dude named Sean McArdle, who is hanging around a pool in Vegas. And his double, Chuck, just look it up. Sean McArdle doppelganger. His double happened to be floating along in the same 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 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. It's so funny. Yeah. I think my first thought would be like what kind of crimes can we commit? Well, yeah. We'll get to that in 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. The long loading times. The glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for better internet. Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's most reliable internet, awarded by open signal from $75 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything.

Hey, this is Robert Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick. And we're the hosts of the stuff to blow your mind podcast. This week on the show, it's Star Trek. So we're going to be talking about the Borg all week long. Are you ready to get some probes put in your flesh? That's right. Tune in. Resistance is futile. We're going to talk science. The cold. of the board, various interpretations, and we're going to talk about Star Trek First Contact on Weird House Cinema on Friday. Listen to stuff to blow your mind on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Because therapy is expensive, but our podcast is free. So one of the reasons they think, Chuck, that we have like a propensity to notice doppelgangers and also just be just crazed by them is that we are really, really good at picking out faces. So good, in fact, that we have a region of our brain that it's starting to become clear is 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 going to be like, all right, fine, I'll handle sound from now on. This, it seems you're born with this ability to recognize faces.

The region's called 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. Hubba, hubba. I know. You can you tell them 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 going to 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, transform what their face looks. look like, which it's got to be really weird. Yeah. Oh, man, I can't imagine seeing that. Especially you're seeing 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 a human face ever with their eyes. And they gave them, they put them in an MRI, and they gave them a model. of like 3D models of faces and had them rub the faces and the fusiform gyrus lit up. I love that.

So like it is strictly for faces. They also, they were like, okay, well, maybe it's just, you know, it's, it's for other things, too. They gave them 3D models of cubes and other stuff that weren't faces. Nothing happened in the fusiform gyrus. So we have a place in the brain that's strictly for recognizing faces. And I think that's probably why we can pick out doppelganger so easily because our, 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.

There's one guy, as recently is 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. Right. 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. Well, I mean, that's one of the problems with it all is it's just working from a database. So it's not like it can take a face, and find someone just somewhere on planet Earth, like you've got to be on a database somehow. Right, but I'm saying the AI is trained on photos. Yeah.

And it comes to understand a face is a face based on the photos that it's trained on. And I guess they didn't select enough photos of people of people of color, photos of women. I don't know why, but it seems like they got really good at white men because they were given more photos of white men. That's how I take it. Yeah, no, that's how I took it to. 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. I was like, oh, God. I was thinking back to Ratso 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 Man's 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. 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 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 you're body doubling someone or photo doubling or standing in, kind of in that order, or did I get that wrong? Stand-in is least important that you actually look like someone, but you should be the same size as somebody because they're lighting you for camera and stuff like that. Like 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 wore one of those, like, ripped t-shirts. 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 body size and skin tone and stuff like that is more important as for doubling.

But the places where it really kind of comes in handy if you really look like the person in the face and the build and the hair and the mustache and all that, is to serve as like a decoy, a political decoy. Because throughout history, the more hated you are, either within your country or internationally or both, the more 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 going to double me now. This is your new job. Because he, of course, has been listed as having body doubles to the point where there's been speculation fueled about whether or not he was sick in the hospital or actually dead. Saddam Hussein had a bunch of decoys. They made a movie called The Devil's Double about a man 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 Devil's Double. And Latif Yahia basically spoke out a lot afterward that I was Uday 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 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 his plans. would be, or the talks would be overheard by German spies. And the plans, of course, were fake. And they were meant to serve as a decoy or distraction for the Nazis.

And they think that possibly had an influence on the storming of Normandy. 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 as bonus material on the Operation Mincemeat movie, you know. Yeah. Did you see that? Yeah.

Was it good? I liked our episode better, but yes, it was good. It was a fine movie, sure. Yeah, I need to check that out. I saw one recently. 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? I also have some Neanderthal, 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 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. 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.

Before meeting for the first time, both families will call the screening center with their ID number and be told if it's safe for them to go ahead with a matchmaking. 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'd already decided we wanted to be together. Can you imagine that? Yeah, no.

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. I 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. I just thought you might be interested to know how a group is trying to keep tradition while staying safe and up to date with science in the 21st century.

and this is a lovely sign-off here, wishing you the strength to continue for a long time coming. Nice. And that's from Elki. Thanks a lot, Elki. 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,

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I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? Listen to Decoding Women's Help with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard.

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