Lucy Sullivan
speaker
311 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 10 Sep
Lucy Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He's a cookbook writer. She's also a writer. So for me, it was like on many levels was just really... kind of a special bond instantly. And I don't know if this is normal for you, but I'm not usually chatting it up with people at the coffee shop.
Nothing romantic. Strictly friends who are just like, wow, we have so much in common.
So Missy is excited. She goes home and she tells her husband, oh my gosh, I've met this great friend and I found this great coffee shop to work. Like, things couldn't be better. And so for the next few days, Missy and JJ sit together, work together, crucially always at this same spot in the front. But one day she comes in and their usual table is taken.
So she just heads to a different one in the back.
He ghosts her. She was like, we made eye contact. I was like, maybe he didn't see me, but no. He saw me. Our eyes locked. I went to wave. He turned around. So now Missy's like, what is going on here? Like, she had just met his wife a couple days before, and she's like, maybe the wife wasn't comfortable with, like, or maybe she's thinking something's going on. Maybe I said something weird to him.
Like, she's really, like, spinning her wheels.
So Missy is obviously super bummed about this.
She considered trying to find a new place to work, but like I said, the coffee shop is just too good. And so after a few days, she decides, you know what, I'm just going to go back. I'm going to ignore the weirdness. And this time their usual spot in the front is open. So she sits down and then right on cue, JJ walks in.
And it wasn't too long after that that she discovered what was really going on and why it seemed like this new friend was just totally ignoring her.
And this is the part that made me think of you, Malcolm, face blindness. Because I've heard that you also might be a little face blind yourself.
Like you're not just going to remember someone that you've met once or twice in passing.
See, it's interesting because this never happens to me. Like I'm often on the other side of it being like, all right, I'm just going to pretend like I don't know this person. You always remember. I always remember. And I always remember people who are completely insignificant to me, like not in any sort of like value judgment way.
It's just like, oh, I met you once at my friend's party four years ago and now you are standing next to me in line at Target.
And this is why actually Malcolm, to be honest, like when I had first heard, because I think I heard from someone in passing before we started working together, like, oh, Malcolm, he's face blind. He has trouble recognizing people. And I was like, okay, like, yeah, he's face-blind. Like, because I was thinking, like, I've never forgotten. I just don't forget people's faces.
So I was like, if I were you and I was meeting a million people all the time and people recognized me from book covers, that would be kind of a disorienting experience and it would be kind of nice to have an excuse, like, oh, I don't remember you because I'm, like, face-blind or whatever. But I just couldn't believe that that was true until I heard this story.
Yeah. And so like this perception problem is exactly what fascinates me about face blindness. Which I've now spent way too many hours learning about after hearing this story of Missy and JJ. Because I've always thought that being able to recognize someone was about, you know, having a good or a bad memory, whatever that means. Or just, frankly, caring enough to remember them.
Like, you worry that you might be perceived as cold or aloof if you don't say hi to Michael. Or Missy thought her new friend was ignoring her. I seem to remember way more faces than I want to. I really wanted to understand what's actually going on in our brains when all this happens.
J.J. Good, Missy's friend from the coffee shop, doesn't know exactly when he realized he had a problem with faces. He just kept having these strange experiences. Like this one time when he ran into a woman on the train, and he knew he was supposed to know who she was, but he had no idea.
JJ said he also realized something was off when he'd watch movies and TV shows. He'd sometimes completely miss a big plot point.
All of this has led to many awkward situations. And it's made JJ very aware of other people's feelings. What happened with Missy still haunts him.
Showing 241–260 of 311 · page 13 of 16
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