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

Josh Clark (0:02)

I think I even say in the episode that I remember learning about Doppelgangers from those Time Life books about the paranormal back when I was a kid. Well, fast forward to when I'm a grown up, 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.

Well, I'm out, this is the last one for me, so let me say thanks for listening to our playlist.

SPEAKER_2 (0:35)

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Josh Clark (0:45)

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the day after Labor Day edition, which Chuck loves.

Charles W. Bryant (0:57)

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

Josh Clark (1:05)

Yeah.

Charles W. Bryant (1:06)

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

Josh Clark (1:12)

Yeah.

Charles W. Bryant (1:13)

And boy, some of those are crazy similar.

Josh Clark (1:17)

Yeah. What about the two bears with their shirts off?

Charles W. Bryant (1:21)

Yeah.

Josh Clark (1:22)

Those guys struck me as extremely close.

Charles W. Bryant (1:25)

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

Josh Clark (1:33)

Yeah. I feel like we shouldn't tease anybody anymore. There's a guy, and like you said, we'll get to him in a little bit, but he'll figure in in a little bit, I should say. But he's a Montreal, I guess a Quebecois photographer, Francois Brunel.

And for 20 years, he's been assembling pictures of Doppelgangers. People who already knew they had a Doppelganger and wrote in. Doppelgangers he's looked for and found on the street, and he brings them together into his studio and photographs them together. But he does some 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 a sense of intimacy between them. It makes you think you're looking at identical twin photos.

Charles W. Bryant (2:15)

Yeah, I mean, some of them, people favor one another. And then when you have them style to look alike and pose to like, that informs what you're seeing. But a handful of them, it was, they look so much like identical twins that it's just, it's weird to think that you could walk down the street one day and meet someone who looks exactly like you.

Josh Clark (2:35)

Yeah, and I mean, that has got to be pretty eerie. Luckily, one of the great things about social media is that people can post their random encounters. You got a phone with a camera on it. You got access to social media through that phone. You can just snap a picture of you and your doppelganger, post it to the Internet and let everyone go crazy. And that does happen, it seems like, from time to time. But this dude's whole jam, it's called, I'm not a lookalike with an exclamation point. It sounds like a Disney movie from the 60s or something.

But that's Francois Brunel's 20 year series.

Charles W. Bryant (3:08)

Yeah, and not just, hey Chuck, you look like every tubby guy with a beard and glasses. It's like, 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 lookalikes.

Josh Clark (3:26)

Right.

Charles W. Bryant (3:27)

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

Josh Clark (3:38)

Yeah. So, doppelganger, if you haven't just surmised already, it's a German word at its origin. And it's not one of those really clever German words. It really just means double goer or a different interpretation as double walker. And it's not some super old 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 the Siebenkasse.

Yeah, Siebenkasse.

I nailed it. And that book was about a man who had a doppelganger, right?

Charles W. Bryant (4:17)

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

Josh Clark (4:21)