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

11:10Chuck Bryant: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. Oh, okay. 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. It seems doppelganger. Yes, exactly.

11:30Josh Clark: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.

11:51Chuck Bryant:It was the age of spiritualism.

11:53Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. So you have to take that into consideration, I think. But Lincoln supposedly saw his image three times, I think, in the mirror in 1860, which – what was his wife's name? Mary Todd? 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.

12:18Chuck Bryant:And he said, well, good night, dear.

12:21Josh Clark:But see, I take issue with some of these listed historically because they're more ghostly specters than real human doppelgangers.

12:31Chuck Bryant:So John Donne's story is strictly bilocation. 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. Bilocation doesn't count. But Percy Bysshe Shelley, he saw his doppelganger and died a few weeks later in a sailing accident. That counts. I would say that one counts in the lore. And then Catherine the Great's was pretty good too, right?

12:56Josh Clark:Yeah, and I think Percy Bysshe Shelley's doppelganger had a t-shirt on that said, I'd rather be sailing. That's right. Which made it even weirder.

13:03Chuck Bryant:No, his t-shirt said, no plates, because that was his third choice. Who was the other one? Catherine the Great.

13:11Josh Clark:Yeah, this was a real one too, actually. Supposedly, there was a servant, right, who discovered a double like that somehow got in there, faked their way in there, and was sitting on the throne. So this was a case where someone was, I don't think, trying to like, you know, realistically take over as queen. But at least got in there and was like, I'm going to sit on the throne and I got past the guards because I look like you.

13:35Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I also saw it interpreted as like phantasmagoric too.

13:39Josh Clark:Oh, like it didn't happen?

13:41Chuck Bryant:No, that it was like a phantom or like a supernatural doppelganger rather than like a double or something like that.

13:48Josh Clark:Again, not a real doppelganger to me.

13:50Chuck Bryant:And then my favorite one of all time, I've known this one since I was a kid, back when I was into the Time Life Mysteries books, because I think that's where I first read it. But the German poet and philosopher Goethe, one of the reasons I like this anecdote is because I love saying Goethe's name. he was riding one time from Alsace to, I want to say Dusseldorf, but I think that's wrong. But it works, right?

14:15Josh Clark:I mean, sure. It's the name of that author.

14:18Chuck Bryant:And he passed himself on the road. And his doppelganger was wearing some gray outfit or whatever. And then like eight years later, he was on his way from Dusseldorf to Alsace going the other way. And he realized he was wearing that same outfit that his doppelganger had been wearing eight years before. and he was like, this is pretty awesome.

14:37Josh Clark:And that was a Time Life Books thing?

14:39Chuck Bryant: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.

14:51Josh Clark: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 live humans walking around that look like you right after this.

15:13Josh Clark:Wait, this is a soda? Yeah. And it has protein? 10 grams. No sugar?

15:19Chuck Bryant:Zero. And it actually tastes good?

15:21Josh Clark:It's Sky Pop. Sky Pop Protein Soda delivers the refreshing taste you want from a real soda. Crisp and delicious with 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and just 45 calories. so you're not choosing between great taste and real benefits. You're getting both in every sip. Skypot Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Skypot Protein Soda now at Target or King Soopers. I'm Martha Stewart from the Martha Stewart Podcast. You know what I love about cooking? The endless inspiration, sharing exceptional flavors, and of course, the best ingredients. I refuse to make a dish without them. McCormick has been and is an essential in the kitchen.

16:03Josh Clark:Now McCormick's new line of signature seasonings make bringing fresh inspiration and endless versatility to everyday dishes easier than ever. There's the everyday essential, garlic and olive oil, the savory sweetness of caramelized onion, and globally inspired flavors like the herby with a touch of heat, chimichurri, and chili garlic that elevates everything from ramen to stir-fry to even grilled meats. Try the chimichurri blend to make your steaks delicious. Each signature seasoning is crafted by flavor experts to make every dish more delicious. When you want to make your best, it's got to be McCormick.

16:45Josh Clark:Find your favorite at mccormick.com. Warning, the following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grown-ups.

16:53Chuck Bryant:One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Five, six, who is it? Five, six, who is it? It's Callie and Elliot. It's Callie and Elliot.

17:11Josh Clark:Lingo Kids, only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem. Lingo Kids! Everything kids love. Download now for free.

17:27Josh Clark:All right. So we mentioned the photographer, Francois Brunel, who's been doing this project. It's called I'm Not a Lookalike, where he takes pictures of these people. I'm sorry, Chuck.

17:40Chuck Bryant:There's an exclamation point at the end of that. Yeah. I'm not a lookalike.

17:45Josh Clark: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, I mean, they look like identical twins. So cool. Those are the ones that – this is the article that Emily sent me where it talked about that project.

18:23Josh Clark:And then it got into a really interesting study because if you think, well, what is a doppelganger? I've always – since I was a kid, I've always sort of realized that there are only so many facial combinations you can have. And with the amount of – we talked about this over the years in the show too. Like over the years and through history, especially seems to happen if you're looking through like yearbooks from like the 40s and 50s and 60s, you'll like see people that look like people you know or like yourself. There are just only so many ways you can rearrange a face until you're bound at some point to get someone who maybe favors somebody a little bit or even more or to the point where they look just alike.

19:04Josh Clark: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?

19:13Chuck Bryant: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 genomes and they found actually these people have a lot of similar genes.

19:54Chuck Bryant: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.

20:16Josh Clark: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 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.

21:10Josh Clark: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.

21:34Chuck Bryant: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.

22:11Chuck Bryant: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.

22:39Josh Clark:Yeah, I think the microbiome was the same as the epigenetic finding, which was, I think the quote was it generally wasn't any closer than two randos gotcha that's what they said in the

22:50Chuck Bryant:paper randos they did they did i'm trying to find real quick the um the data the number of smps um i can't find it that quick there's a lot of numbers and weird like uh like capital c lower case p capital g i'm like i don't know what that is but i will tell you this i looked up those older guys in the news caps. Right. They are spitting image. And not only are they spitting image of one another, they're spitting image of the Lennox air conditioning man. They look exactly like that guy. Down to the hat.

23:29Josh Clark: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? Oh, a doppelganger? I guess so. What I'd be curious to see is if, and maybe I'll look more just for my own funsies into the photographer's project, because what I'm curious about is if these, like how these people get along and if they like formed friendships, if they liked each other, if they had similar interests, you know, that's, that's pretty fascinating to me.

24:01Chuck Bryant: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, were you raising your power lines? Great. That means you're into baseball cards, that kind of thing that we just haven't put our finger on yet. But it does seem like, you know, it's becoming clearer and clearer. It's not just genetics. It's not just epigenetics. It's all 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.

24:35Chuck Bryant: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.

24:54Josh Clark:You know, what would be funny is if they really got along and they were like, oh my God, we have so many similarities. We look just alike. This is such a weird thing. And they were having lunch And one of them was like, boy, what a shame that Hillary lost the right. And the other one unveils a Make America Great Again t-shirt or something. Drops their fork. They just get up and part ways silently.

25:15Chuck Bryant:Yeah. That would be the best case scenario, I think. Yeah.

25:19Josh Clark:So this study, this next one kind of irritates me a little bit. It was from 2015. And I think it 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.

25:44Chuck Bryant:Tegan Lucas is listening to this now. She's like, oh, you got off to a great start on that U.S. Anthropometric Survey, Chuck.

25:49Josh Clark:Well, I think Tegan Lucas overachieved because what they did was looked across eight facial features and calculated the chances that you'll look just like someone else is one in a trillion. I see these pictures of these doppelgangers. I'm like, there's just no way because I'm looking at the evidence. And it turns out that Tegan really got into, like, measuring the millimeter of a nostril and stuff like that. And the comparison, it was just too identical. Like, I think with identical twins, you wouldn't get that close.

26:22Chuck Bryant:No, but I think that's what she was going for is, like, you know, would it be possible for two identical people to be walking around? And one of the applications of our research is if we're creating facial recognition systems, which we've done an episode on before. It was pretty eerie, if I remember correctly. But if we're creating these things, if we're building computers to recognize people's faces, are there 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.

26:59Chuck Bryant: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 reveal what the eight measures were because apparently her work was that, like, groundbreaking that she's like, I can't let anybody know what to hide or disguise.

27:20Josh Clark:Okay.

27:21Chuck Bryant:But 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 in a trillion chance that there are two people walking around like that. The thing is there's 8 billion people on the planet. And that's not— 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 alike, the chance that they're going to look like is basically nothing.

27:57Chuck Bryant: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.

28:29Josh Clark: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.

28:41Chuck Bryant:Okay.

28:41Josh Clark: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?

29:00Chuck Bryant:Right.

29:01Josh Clark: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.

29:12Chuck Bryant:Okay, so one of the reasons why I think people would kind of look at you and then the bass player for...

29:19Josh Clark:Jason Isbell in the 400 unit.

29:21Chuck Bryant: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.

29:38Josh Clark:Yeah. I don't want to name him because I don't want to just keep calling him that because I love that group. His name is Jimbo Hart. And when you look at a picture of Jimbo Hart, he – That's a great name, too. Like, look him up. He's got the beard. He, you know, when I'm reading, I got on my black rim glasses. I like to wear my hats these days, my, you know, various sort of cowboy hats and fedoras. Sure. Yeah.

30:01Chuck Bryant: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. 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.

30:19Josh Clark:I can tell you. I can see him without a beard, and he's not nearly as close.

30:23Chuck Bryant:Okay, right. So there you go. Like, we make these shortcuts 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 him anymore because that uses up a lot of brain power and energy, and I'm kind of low on carbs today. So I just know that that's Chuck, where it really turned out to be Jimbo Hart, the bassist for – The 400 unit. That's right.

30:48Josh Clark:Right. Right, and 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 Livia picked out was from MIT when they put George Bush's face on Dick Cheney's head. and Bill Clinton's face on Al Gore's head, that dates the creation of that particular meme or whatever it was, the Dick Cheney one looks like you've got to look a bunch of times before you realize that's George Bush's face.

31:35Josh Clark:The Al Gore one, I mean, it's so clearly Clinton. It's just kind of funny looking. But the Bush-Cheney swap actually kind of worked, and 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.

31:58Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And also, like, I think one of the foundations of this swap is that it can't be like an egregious change.

32:05Josh Clark:Right.

32:05Chuck Bryant:Like, if you remember back to, I think it was Conan that used to put Steve Buscemi eyes on different celebrities and see what they look like. That's an egregious change. It's not going to work. That was great. Dick Cheney and George Bush's eyes look similar enough that if you put George Bush's eyes on Dick Cheney's face, you're not really going to notice because it's not that egregious of a change. And there was a study, I think, from 1977, a 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.

32:42Chuck Bryant:And those are the things we kind of take in. But there's other research, and I think this is also kind of like supported by the same study. Like when you look at someone's face, you don't go, all right, let me see the eyes. I got that. Let me see the mouth. 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 their brains are lazy and fat.

33:18Josh Clark: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've got dark hair, and you dress a certain way, then you might look like a lot of people.

33:51Chuck Bryant:Sure. And that actually raises a recent internet sensation. A guy named Neil Douglas was, I think, flying to Ireland on a Ryanair flight. Yeah. And went to get in his seat and saw that there was somebody sitting in his seat. And the person looked up, and it was his doppelganger. 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, 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.

34:26Chuck Bryant:but they looked a lot like each other. But there was this BBC article that covered it where they basically said, okay, but let's really stop and think about this. That's amazing. And the fact that he was in the other guy's seat is even more amazing. But how unlikely is it that these two, you know, were on the same plane? And they figured out that based on a number of different factors, like the hair, the face, the beard, the nose, 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.

35:01Chuck Bryant: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.

35:12Josh Clark:It was a pretty fun picture because they're so delighted, clearly, with seeing each other. And then another guy, there's a triple picture somewhere, too, of another guy that was like, hey, I'm one of those 74 ,000. And they put all three of them close to each other, and they look pretty similar. The one sort of difference here is in height is 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.

35:45Chuck Bryant:Well, I read they kept running into each other and finally were like, okay, let's go get a pint together. Like they were at the same hotel, and like they kept running into one another, so they went with it.

35:54Josh Clark: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 Serendipity with John Cusack really spoke to you. I never even saw that. You mentioned that movie a lot. What happened in that movie?

36:15Chuck Bryant:I don't want to spoil it for anybody. Was there a doppelganger? No. Oh, okay. But they kept running into one another, and, like, it just kind of was like.

36:23Josh Clark:Oh, it's just the chance of true love over and over.

36:26Chuck Bryant: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. Yeah, let's go get some ice cream. That was a great John Voight show. There was another one that came along recently, too, that I think is even better than the other one.

36:50Josh Clark:There's a dude named Sean McArdle who is hanging around a pool in Vegas.

36:55Chuck Bryant: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 glasses, same hat. They actually do have like the same build and same height and everything. They are the spitting image of one another. And they were just randomly in the same pool in Las Vegas at the same time. So funny.

37:23Josh Clark: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.

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38:38There's the everyday essential, garlic and olive oil, the savory sweetness of caramelized onion,

38:44Josh Clark:and globally inspired flavors like the herby with a touch of heat chimichurri and chili garlic that elevates everything from ramen to stir fry to even grilled meats. Try the chimichurri blend to make your steaks delicious. Each signature seasoning is crafted by flavor experts to make every dish more delicious. When you want to make your best, it's got to be McCormick. Find your favorite at mccormick.com. Warning, the following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grown-ups.

39:18Chuck Bryant:One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Five, six, who is it? Five, six, who is it? It's Cowie and Elliot. It's Cowie and Elliot.

39:36Josh Clark:Lingo Kids, only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem. Lingo Kids! Everything kids love. Download now for free.

39:52Chuck Bryant:So one of the reasons I think, Chuck, that we have like a propensity to notice doppelgangers and also just be just crazed by them is that we are really, really good at picking out faces. so good, in fact, that we have a region of our brain that it's starting to become clear is intended exclusively for seeing faces. 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.

40:34Chuck Bryant:And 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.

40:50Josh Clark:Hubba hubba.

40:52Chuck Bryant:I know. Can you tell I'm hot?

40:55Josh Clark: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 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, transformed what their face looked like, which has got to be really weird.

41:44Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Oh, man, I can't imagine seeing that. Especially while you're undergoing open brain surgery and you're conscious and then they start messing with parts of it, right? 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 models 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 for other things too.

42:24Chuck Bryant: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 doppelgangers so easily because our brains are kind of attuned to look for faces everywhere.

42:45Josh Clark:Yeah. Yeah, and 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.

43:28Yeah.

43:29Chuck Bryant:There's one guy, as recently as 2019, from New Jersey. named Najir Parks. And he had to end up spending five grand to defend himself, spent, I think, 20 days in jail possibly because he was accused or I guess an AI facial recognition system accused him of shoplifting 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.

44:06Josh Clark:Right.

44:06Chuck Bryant: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.

44:27Josh Clark:Well, I mean, that's one of the problems with it all is it's just working from a database. So it's not like it can take a face and find someone just somewhere on planet Earth. Like you got to be on a database somehow. Right.

44:40Chuck Bryant: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 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.

45:02Josh Clark:Yeah. No, that's how I took it, too.

45:04Chuck Bryant: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's, what would you do with that talent?

45:31Josh Clark:Well, you could go hang out on Hollywood Boulevard near Man's Chinese Theater and make some money walking around charging$5 a picture. You could get employed full time with an agency to, you know, get sent out. If someone wants Bill Gates at their party and you are a lookalike, then you can go to their party and make a couple hundred bucks probably.

45:55Chuck Bryant:Probably. You could also work on movies apparently. There's lots of jobs for you. Yeah.

46:02Josh Clark:I mean this one is – it's less face. Like when you're body doubling someone or photo doubling or standing in kind of in that order. Or did I get that wrong? Stand in is least important that you actually look like someone. But you should be the same size as somebody because they're they're lighting you for camera and stuff like that. Like you can't, you know, the rock can't have a body double or a stand in that looks like me. You know. I don't know if you wore one of those like ripped t-shirts. Yeah, right. I can get away with it. Yeah. 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.

46:49Josh Clark:But body size and skin tone and stuff like that is more important as for doubling.

46:54Chuck Bryant: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 saying like, yeah, I look like you. I'll go do the boring stuff, but also risk my life because somebody might assassinate you at some point.

47:27Josh Clark: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 Uday 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 like I was Uday Hussein's double and he was a very bad guy So it was not probably the best job.

48:23Chuck Bryant: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 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.

49:06Josh Clark:That's pretty cool. There's a movie in there somewhere, or at least a scene.

49:10Chuck Bryant:It's surely, easily. They could have thrown it in as bonus material in the Operation Mincemeat movie, you know?

49:16Josh Clark:Yeah.

49:17Chuck Bryant: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.

49:58Chuck Bryant: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

50:23Josh Clark:this is in response to the Kiss and Cousins episode from a friend from the Ashkenazi Jewish community

50:32Chuck Bryant:I've got 0.2 % Ashkenazi in me.

50:35Josh Clark:Oh, yeah?

50:36Chuck Bryant:I also have some Neanderthal, too.

50:40Josh Clark:All right. Hey, guys, just listened to the episode Kissing 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. Ashkenazi Jews.

51:03Chuck Bryant:Wow.

51:03Josh Clark: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 the matchmaking.

51:18Chuck Bryant:It's amazing.

51:19Josh Clark: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?

51:31Chuck Bryant:Yeah, no, I mean, I'll bet that was pretty nerve-wracking.

51:34Josh Clark:The call was more to see if we need to speak to a geneticist before having children than to see if we should get together for the first time at all. But thankfully, we were good to go. Separately, I had a close friend whose husband passed away a few years ago. She had the option of marrying her brother-in-law. Remember, we talked about that in the episode. Which she had no interest in doing. She did take a pair of his shoes, though, and spit on them rather than him. So that part of the Old Testament is kind of still kept in some places. And of course, I'm not speaking for all Ashkenazi Jews, only what I see in my community.

52:08Josh Clark: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 Elkie.

52:25Chuck Bryant:Thanks a lot, Elkie. That was a great email. I appreciate that big time. And if you want to be like Elkie and send us a super fascinating email, you can do that too. All you have to do is write to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com, press send, and see what happens. Right, Chuck? That's right.

52:48Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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