Face Value

Pushkin. Before we get to this episode, I want to recommend another podcast for you. Fiasco Aron Contra is another Pushkin podcast by the co creator of Slowburn, Leon Nafok. You'll learn how Ronald Reagan found himself in the middle of a scandal that looked like it just might take down his presidency. Fiasco Urn Contra is available wherever you get your podcasts. Don't miss it. Hello, Hello, Malcolm Glabell. Here today. I'm in the studio with my producer Lucy Sullivan. Lucy, Hi, Malcolm.

That is true. We're here because I want to tell you about something I'm calling the Missy incident. It totally changed the way that I think about something foundational, and it also reminded me of you.

Of me, of you.

Oh God, Okay, So it all happened at the coffee shop that I go to all the time.

Can you tell me what the name of the coffee shop.

Is, Malcolm. I can tell you the name of the coffee shop off Mike, but my fellow cafe goers did not want me to name it on this podcast because it's that good.

Oh it's that good.

Yeah, it's so good. And it's the kind of place that's always packed, so you have to be comfortable sitting with a stranger if you want to get a seat. And that's where this all starts. So the person at the center of this, her name is Missy Kurzweil. She was fresh off of maternity leave with her second kid when the incident happened.

I think one of the things that happens when you have a baby and her own maternity leave is like you lose a bit of your identity and yourself. You're spending all your time with a newborn who can't talk back to you, and so I was sort of just navigating that transition and wanting human interaction.

So Missy is looking for a place to work outside of her home office and she finds the coffee shop on her third morning of feeling out this place is this where she wants to set up camp for her HQ. She sits down at this table and in walks this guy and he's like, hey, you mind if I sit here? She says, sure, This is JJ good.

So JJ and Missy is sitting down together. What happens Missy?

Some of them with their kid's pediatrician and JJ is sitting there eavesdropping, and you know, the doctor asked for what's the patient's name, and Missy says, oh, his name's Remy.

And JJ freaked out because he was like, you have a Remy, because I have a Remy. And then of course like that, then we were off to the races.

Turns out they both have cats named Sonny. They both are freelancers. 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 like I don't usually I'm not usually chatting it up with people at the coffee shop.

But these two and there's nothing romantic going on here.

Nothing romantic, yeah, strictly friends who are just like, wow, we have so much in common.

I think, no matter where you're at in your life, meeting someone like JJ feels unusual because he's just so open and so seemingly genuinely interested in what you have to say and what are all these details about your life?

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 the 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, And maybe an hour after I sat down, I see JJ kind of walk to the back and he's looking around seemingly for a table, and we make direct eye contact and I start to say, hey, JJ, but he looks at me and sort of kind of registers it and turns around and walks the other way.

Her ghosts her.

Ghost like completely like 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 Missus's like, what is going on here? Like she had just met his wife a couple of 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.

And I went back the next day, sat in the back, and the same thing happened where he walks by sort of sees me seemingly like we make eye contact. And this time I think I probably was a little bit more reserved because of what had happened the day before. And he turns around and walks the other way again, and now I'm like, Okay, I think I might have said something that offended him.

My name is Malcolm Gobwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. And since we're talking about misunderstandings, whatever you think is going on in this story right now, I promise you you've got it wrong.

So Missy is obviously super bummed about this, you know, I mean, listen, I've been with my husband for a long time, so i haven't been like on the dating scene, but it definitely.

Had an equivalent like you put yourself out there and you like, are you know, think that you're connecting with someone but they're not experiencing that same thing.

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 gonna 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 he sees me and his face lights up and he's like, Missy, you haven't been here in like a week or two, I've missed you. Where have you been? And then he said it down and he's chit chatting and he's catching up and he's asking questions just like nothing, no time.

Passed, like nothing happened, like absolutely nothing happened.

Yeah, And I was so confused. I did not know what to make of that, but I was kind of just relieved that the freeze out was over, and so I just went with it and was like, oh, you know, good to see you again. And I just sort of picked up where we left off and I didn't say anything.

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.

I'm sitting at a table with JJ and a woman walks in, super friendly, comes over to JJ and says, hey, JJ, and I think goes to give him a hug and asks him questions about how his kids are. Their conversation lasts just a few minutes, and then she walks away to get a coffee and he looks at me and he goes, I don't know who that is. And I was like, what, you seemed like you were friends with her, and he was like, I have this face blindness thing. It gives me a lot of anxiety because I'm probably

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.

Yes, yes, that's true. This happens to me all the time. I won't remember if I need to expose to face a person on multiple occasions before their face becomes meaningful, or even there, I don't know whether their face is becoming meaningful, or that I am developing so many other ways of recognizing them that I feel unsafer ground hm hm.

Like you're not just gonna remember someone that you've met once or twice, no passing.

No, there's no chance that I will. I had a sash. She's funny because I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop and I see there's a guy who runs the wine shop across the street. His name is Michael. I

See it's interesting because this like this never happens to me, Like I'm often on the other side of it being like all right, I'm just gonna pretend like I don't. I always remember, I always remember. I always remember people who are completely insignificant to me, like not in any sort of like value judderent way. It's just like, oh, I met you once at my friend's friends party four years ago, and now you are standing next to me in line.

At target, so completely foreign.

Yeah, and this is why I actually Malcolm, to be honest, Like when I had first heard saying 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

Yeah, no, no, I do. And it makes me feel bad because I were in it. I mean, I feel for JJ because it's you in this constant state of worry about it that you're going to be perceived as cold or aloof and you're not.

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, yeah, or just frankly caring enough to remember them, like you worry that you might be perceived as cold or aloof if you don't had a Michael or Missy thought her new friend

After the break, Lucy Sullivan takes us behind the face and into the brain.

JJ 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.

And we had this conversation where I was like, how is everything? Things are good with me? Like, I didn't mention any there's no specifics because I wanted to make like I didn't want it. If you walked in and someone had no idea who were, you would feel bad about yourself.

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.

When my wife and I were watching a show, I'll be like, who's that guy? And she's like, it's the main character. He just has a hat on, like it's literally Robert de Niro from the other scene, and I was like, ooh, this is kind of strange.

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.

I am afraid that I might have an interaction with someone and I might not recognize them, and I might not give them the attention that makes them feel good.

It's worth noting that JJ himself is easy to spot. He was born with one arm.

Walking around with one arm, you are highly recognizable. It's like, how many one armed people do you meet? Probably not a lot. So everybody comes into the coffee shop and if you see me, you probably will recognize me as that guy from the coffee shop the next day. But I don't recognize a lot of the people who come in.

A while back, JJ told some friends about these weird moments he'd always had, not recognizing people, and they asked if he'd ever heard of face blindness. They said, Oliver Sachs, the science writer, had it too, and that's when it clicked for JJ.

So it is a little bit of the stealth disort. I mean, the people only to learn they have it often when they are subjected to a whole bunch of new people they have to meet.

This is doctor Joe Degudis. He's a cognitive neuroscientist and he studies facial recognition to Gouda's teachers at Harvard Medical School and runs a lab out of the Boston VA Hospital.

We've studied how people become aware that they have this, and often it's a little rocky. It's a little bit like you know in school, they're like, I just don't pay attention, or I don't care as much about people, or maybe I'm a little bit on the spectrum. They have all these attributions they can give.

The thing about people who are quote unquote face blind is that they're not actually blind. They're not seeing blurs where people's faces are. They can see eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and they can read emotions and tell whether or not someone's attractive the same way we all do. The best estimates I could find suggests that around three percent of the population has some form of face blindness. Sometimes it's the result of a traumatic brain injury, but some some

If you see somebody's face, it quickly triggers the retrieval of all this other information about them, like you know who they are, how you know them, all these other details about the person. So it has this kind of privileged role in terms of getting all this other information out.

The clinical term for face blindness is prosopagnosia. An Agnosia is an inability to recognize something. Prosopagnosia uses the Greek word for face prose obo, which also happens to be the Greek word for person. So much of who we are is wrapped up in this one part of our bodies. I want you to stop for a second. Think about your mom, or your best friend or your kid. You're not picturing their elbow, are you? I mean, maybe you are.

It's something that is also very special about humans.

This special thing that Do Goodas is talking about here has to do with our brains. We have a specific network that's just for recognizing faces, and it functions unlike any other kind of cognition.

So when I recognize a chair, I'm like, oh, okay, it has something to sit on, has some legs, and boom, it's a chair. You're recognizing things at this functional level, which is like, okay, how do I interact with this thing?

You know, usually you can do it part by part.

One of the things that we do with face is more than any other, like visual object, is you process it as a gestalt as a whole. Because we have to kind of recognize them and not just like Okay, that's a face.

That's a face.

We have to be like okay, that's my friend. Oh that's not that's so moy, that's the person at work who I need to avoid. And so it's like, I think that the individuation demands of faces maybe are why we kind of had this specialized system to process faces.

Frogs you sound, birds you smell, and we humans love this one cluster of features sitting on top of our necks. We are social animals, and researchers think that's part of why humans developed this special recognition network in our brains, because it served us. Faces have evolved to look really different from person to person, more so than any other body part. Scientists at UC Berkeley think that this had

These are all these kind of internal things that we don't talk about, and we just assume that everybody's kind of like us, right, and after.

The break, we're going to the other end of that spectrum to see what it's like for the people who never forget a face, the super recognizers. One morning back in nineteen eighty four, a little kid named Frank Vaughn was about to have a very exciting day of school.

I was nine years old and my fourth grade class was invited on a school field trip to the Governor's office in Little Rock.

That's Governor Bill Clinton's office, to be exact.

They arranged just all in a semi circle in cross leg style and we waited for the man to show up, and typical of politicians, he was around fifteen minutes late. He walks out, he sits down, and he immediately turns and he snaps his fingers and points at one of his female staffers and said, you go get my pepsi, and she took off on a dead run for his inner office to go grab that pepsi.

Frank was a scrawny nine year old boy with feathery blonde hair that grew out in all directions. Nerdy kid, always cracking jokes for attention. Frank said that he and his classmates were so excited about meeting the governor.

There was this almost throne like velvet chair sitting in the middle of the room, and he sits down in it, and he crosses his legs and he, you know, just sort of gets himself arranged.

Frank Krumember's feeling in awe of this man sitting on a throne barking out pepsi orders, he said. The governor greeted them all and started asking them questions, and then Clinton zeroed in on Frank.

I don't know if I just have one of those faces or what, but for some reason, he settled on me, and he pointed at me and he said, you, what do you want to be when you grow up? And after witnessing everything I had just seen, the only answer I could come up with was I want to be you.

Frank said that his teacher horrified at this response. He thought he was about to get in trouble like he usually did for cracking jokes.

And then the governor started laughing, and of course when he starts laughing, his staff joins in and we all joined in, and it sort of released all the tension in the room.

Clinton moved on from Frank asked some other kids questions. He lectured them about the importance of eating their vegetables and doing their homework, and then he sent the class on their way. That was that. Okay, So now we're going to fast forward thirteen years later. March of nineteen ninety seven. Clinton is just a few months into his second term as president and back in his home state of Arkansas. A series of tornadoes have just destroyed the

It's obviously you all have done a lot of work here in.

Just a couple of days. Everybody is really Frank Vaughn is no longer a little boy. He's a six foot one college student attending Wachetah Baptist University in Arkadelphia. That feathery blonde hair is now closely cropped in the style typical of his fellow members of the Reserve Officer Training Corps. Frank and his friends heard that the President was in town, so they went to try and see him. Frank said that there were hundreds of people lining the streets of Arcadelphia doing the same.

And honestly, when I saw the entourage coming up the street with the Secret Service agents and the governor was with him, I thought, well, he's going to walk down the middle of the street because there's no way they're going to let him have, you know, physical contact with people. He's the president, And I was wrong.

President Clinton, ever of the people person, starts making his way into the crowd, shaking hands and taking pictures with kids.

There was a limited about a three block area that we were allowed to stand on from street to street, eat the street. But he literally went up one block shaking hands, turned went back down the next block shaking hands, turned and went back up the third block. I mean, he spent a good four hours just walking these blocks and shaking hands with people.

And then Clinton gets to where Frank and his friends are standing.

He stopped, stuck his hand out, shook my hand, and he looked at me and he leaned in and he said, do you still want to be me?

Frank said that he almost passed out there he was in the middle of a disaster zone in his college, shown shaking hands with the President of the United States, who has just recalled a small anecdote from meeting him thirteen years earlier, when he was nine years old and several feet shorter.

The first thought in my mind was I need to go to church and pray because this is like demonic. It was just so shocking. And listen, when I tell this story, I know it's hard to believe. I understand that it seems almost impossible. But if, as we say back home, if I'm lying, I'm dying.

I asked Frank how he thought Clinton could possibly have remembered him.

Some people are just like that. I guess it's little wonder that he was born in Hope, Arkansas, to a very poor family and ended up being the most powerful man in the world. You don't get there without talent.

People always talk about this mythical charisma Clinton possessed. He dazzled voters on the Campian Trail, and believe it or not, there are tons of stories just like Frank's. The comedian John Mullaney has a whole bit in his twenty fifteen comedy special about Clinton's ability to remember people.

I want to tell you one more story before I get out of here, about the night I met a guy named Bill Clinton.

Mullaney 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 and college, and he talks about his mom dragging him to a campaign event in the nineties to see if the presidential hopeful still remember their walks. Here's what happens.

She was swinging me like a snowplow. I was just mowing down fat Chicago Democrats. I pushed past all the reporters. I pushed past all the photographers, We push past all the Secret Service. We land at Bill Clinton's feet. Bill Clinton turns, looks at my mom and says, hey, Ellen, because he never forgets a bitch ever.

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

Tests. Oh, it's a picture of like, you know, Barack Obama when he was like two years old, and super recognizers can like see it. There's this kind of cool extrapolation thing that you can be like, I can see you know how that could be a younger version of Barack Obama.

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 mean, maybe you just like convinced yourself that you're super and you're not really super.

He needed cold data, not random BuzzFeed quizzes. So I hopped on Zoom with his research assistant Kaylea 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 it's 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

Yeah, the Georgia's is really crazy.

I like made me feel like I'd took drugs or something. I was like, well, what's happening here? 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.

Degotas and I hopped on a zoom call to go over my results.

I mean, you're kind of the complete package for a super recognizer. So I'm wow, I kind of I feel like I mean maybe when I when you started taking the test, I was a little skeptical, but I think I think you're You're right on. I think this is.

Okay. I have to admit I was over the moon at being called the complete package. I said, please go on.

Actually looking at your results, you were like perfect on two of the uh on two of the diagnostic tests, like you didn't get a single itema wrong. You also did really well in this very impossible task where we had you, you know, try to learn sixty faces in a very short period of time and you had to recognize them like out of one hundred and twenty faces.

Oh that one was so hard.

Yeah, no, you did. I mean that's the thing.

We wanted to kind of push you to see what your limits are, and you do have limits, but you were really you were really quite good.

Getting my suspicions confirmed was so gratifying. It was cool to know that I have this superpower. Less than two percent of people can say the same. I had to share all this with Malcolm.

You're like the Lebron James of facial recognition.

He did say it was a complete package. So I will also take Lebron James if you want to call me that, I'm not going to argue.

My experience of you is dramatically different than your experience of me. I am forced to find alternate means of recognition. What those of us who have impairment in this area do is we're we get obsessed with all the other possible cues that we can use to identify somebody, and because they're not as reliable as the face where I was getting into trouble.

Yeah, exactly. This is what JJ Good, the guy from the coffee shop, told me that he tries to do too.

That's Caitlin at the beautiful chin. This is Daniel Lias bald Head. That's I remember him, small.

Bald So a couple of months ago I spent the morning with him at the coffee shop and he was going around introducing me to all his friends and telling me how he tries to identify them. Here other she is.

This took me a while to recognize her, but she's got like redistinct glasses, which is useful, but she's been talking about changing her glasses, so I'm worried about that.

So he told me that he tries really hard to find these cues, but you know, it's it's still hard for him, and he never wants a repeat of the Missy incident. So his solution is to just treat every person that walks in as if they are his friend.

Everybody who come in the door, I stare them down because I'm like, I hope I have to see if I recognize you and know you're not. So I'm staring at them and they look at me and they're like hi, and I'm like hi, just in case I know them, and they're like Lollo, guys friendly.

And that morning I was there, JJ was surrounded by people like you think he was the mayor or the owner of this place. I was like, did you tell all these people to show up because you knew I was coming? And he was like nope. So he really has made all these friends, even in spite of the face fline this thing. And I just think that's such a lovely way to live.

That is really beautiful.

JJ and Missy are great friends now despite the incident. You can find them working and chatting at the coffee shop most days. They got dinner every once in a while, and their spouses and kids have become friends too. But their story could have ended very differently.

Like our friendship almost ended over this, and it's this is my nightmare. So this person felt so bad because I was not giving her the right attention, that she had a whole like crisis, Like what did I do? I feel so bad and that's why I'm so weird and extra friendly.

We've all had these experiences where we don't recognize someone right away, or someone doesn't recognize us. It can be embarrassing and awkward. But the split second assumptions that we make about why, that they're aloof or that we said something that offended them, or that maybe we just aren't memorable might be wrong. Faces matter, but it all comes back to what's in our heads.

Lucy, that is you are Lucy right.

Yes, I change my shirt, but it's still me.

This has been a lot of fun.

This has been great, Thanks Malcolm. Provisionist History is produced by me Lucy Sullivan with Bennattapaffrey and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Chakerjee. Fact checking by Kate Ferbey, original scoring by Luis Gara, Scoring, mixing and mastering on this episode by Echo Mountain. Production support from Luke Lamond.

Don't forget Listen to Fiasco Auron Contra for the story of a not so secret scandal that captivated the United States. Fiasco is available where you're listening right now.