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
And then Clinton gets to where Frank and his friends are standing.
Frank said that he almost passed out. There he was in the middle of a disaster zone in his college town, shaking hands with the president of the United States, who has just recalled a small anecdote from meeting him 13 years earlier when he was nine years old and several feet shorter.
I asked Frank how he thought Clinton could possibly have remembered him.
People always talk about this mythical charisma Clinton possessed. He dazzled voters on the campaign trail. And believe it or not, there are tons of stories just like Frank's. The comedian John Mulaney has a whole bit in his 2015 comedy special about Clinton's ability to remember people.
Mulaney tells the story of this disagreement between his parents, who went to college with Clinton at Georgetown University, over whether or not Clinton would remember his mom, Ellen. Apparently, he would sometimes walk her home from the library in college. Mulaney talks about his mom dragging him to a campaign event in the 90s to see if the presidential hopeful still remembered their walks.
Here's what happens.
Remember, facial recognition abilities are on a spectrum. Researchers are pretty sure it's a normal distribution, with prosopagnosics on the low end. Most of you listening are probably somewhere in the normal range. But there are also these people on the very high end, the super recognizers, those who never forget a face, ever.
Something that the super recognizers are uniquely good at is being able to identify people even after a lot of time has passed or they've made changes to their appearance. This is something that Bill Clinton is very good at.
Now, we can't know for sure, and Bill Clinton has never said anything about this super recognizing ability, but I'd venture to say that he is almost certainly a super recognizer. Dr. Joe DeGutis, the neuroscientist, told me that one of the ways they test facial recognition abilities is by showing people pictures of celebrities when they were kids, the before-they-were-famous test.
While I was reporting the story, I came across a bunch of tests online, like the before they were famous one. You can take them to gauge how good or bad you are at recognizing faces. And I kept getting really good scores on them. Suddenly, everything started to make sense. Remember earlier when I was telling Malcolm that I never forget people?
That I sometimes feel creepy after recognizing someone in line at Target? I started to suspect that maybe I was one of these super recognizers. While JJ misses the plot of some movies and TV shows, I get distracted by extras.
Like, for instance, when I notice that a passing character in a 2001 episode of Sex and the City is the guy who, spoiler alert, gets murdered in the first season of the show White Lotus 20 years later. Face-blind people can't find their friends on the street, while I sometimes walk past someone that I recognize as my high school friend's cousin who I've only seen pictures of.
In one of our early calls, I told Degutis about my theory. And being the good scientist he is, he wasn't sold right away.
He needed cold, hard data, not random BuzzFeed quizzes. So I hopped on Zoom with his research assistant, Kayla Kusel, and took a three-hour battery of tests designed to definitively say whether or not I was a super recognizer. All right, so the next one is called Face Name. You can go ahead and click on that link. The test started off super easy. I was breezing through.
So they're showing me that same face from, like, different angles. And I would say that is extremely easy. But things got weirder as the hours went on, and I started to get a little stressed.
I had to do things like remember jobs and names of people whose faces would flash across the screen really quickly. And at one point I was matching spiky blobs with other spiky blobs. That one was so hard.
Kayla and I wrapped up, and she said they'd get back to me in a few days with my results. I was eager to hear them and unsure of what they would be. By the end, I didn't think I did very well, and I was kind of embarrassed about the whole charade. What if I was just average? A few days later, the verdict was in. Degutis and I hopped on a Zoom call to go over my results.
Okay, I have to admit, I was over the moon at being called the complete package. I said, please, go on.
Oh, that one was so hard.
Getting my suspicions confirmed was so gratifying. It was cool to know that I have this superpower. Less than 2% of people can say the same. I had to share all this with Malcolm.
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