Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello, Hello, Hello, thank you for coming. My name
Speaker 1: is Malcolm Baba. I am the most history baught to
Speaker 1: you by pushing the industries. I think there's a whole
Speaker 1: Not long ago, in a probably illogized experiment, all of
Speaker 1: us at Revision's History decided to do two live shows,
Speaker 1: one in New York and one in Philadelphia. All kinds
Speaker 1: of people came to watch a little treat for the diehards,
Speaker 1: and in the spirit of the experimentation, we thought we'd
Speaker 1: share a few excerpts from those shows with all of you,
Speaker 1: the real audience. And what hearing is me standing up
Speaker 1: in front of the crowd confessing I have no idea
Speaker 1: what's about to have. They tried to get me to
Speaker 1: rehearse tonight. Didn't want to do it, so you're all
Speaker 1: kind of guinea pigs, for which I apologize, but I'm
Speaker 1: very excited. I broke out snazzy Adidas, Adidas seersucker, the
Speaker 1: whole thing. This is. I rarely dress up, so this
Speaker 1: is a very very big occasion for me. So what
Speaker 1: we're gonna do is we At the time, I was
Speaker 1: working on an episode of Revisionist History about a very
Speaker 1: well known movie, almost a perfect movie, except the writers
Speaker 1: had screwed up the ending. If you want to listen
Speaker 1: to that episode, it's called Starstruck. You can check it
Speaker 1: out in the feed. It goes in a million directions,
Speaker 1: Gone with the Wind, Star was Born, Samuel Goldman Car
Speaker 1: Accidents Atlanta. We hung out in graveyards and took a
Speaker 1: group road trip to Margaret Mitchell's archives of the University
Speaker 1: of Georgia, very revisionist history in mash up. But at
Speaker 1: the live show, I just wanted to zero in on
Speaker 1: the core question raised by the episode, which is what
Speaker 1: makes an ending work? Because the truth is, most endings
Speaker 1: don't work right. You sit in the movie theater and
Speaker 1: at hour three of the Blockbuster, you think, did no
Speaker 1: one at the studio give any thought about how to
Speaker 1: wrap this thing up? That's what I wanted to get at.
Speaker 1: Why are endings so hard? So in our New York
Speaker 1: show at the town Hall, I invited the comedian Mike
Speaker 1: Birbiglia up to the stage to join me in the discussion. Brilliant,
Speaker 1: brilliant comedian, a member of the famous Georgetown University comedy Mafia,
Speaker 1: which we can talk about with Mike if we want.
Speaker 1: It's basically every indie comic worth their salt went to Georgetown.
Speaker 1: I don't know why, what we do with frustrated Catholicism.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: He's about to go on tour with his show Old
Speaker 1: Man in the Pool, The Old Man in the Pool.
Speaker 1: It's a brilliant, brilliant title, and so he we can
Speaker 1: start with Mike, Mike, come on out.
Speaker 2: I hope you back there.
Speaker 3: Thanks.
Speaker 4: This is my favorite podcast.
Speaker 5: So it's a very strange sensation to be inside of
Speaker 5: my favorite podcast.
Speaker 6: I don't know how it is.
Speaker 1: Go that man of mine. By the way, you weren't
Speaker 1: offended when I said you were part of the Georgetown
Speaker 1: University comedy move the legit. No, it's a description.
Speaker 5: I mean, gosh, it's John mulaney and uh nik Krol,
Speaker 5: Gavin Nick Krawl, Jackman Novak.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's just a whole bunch of them. Marling, Britt Marling,
Speaker 4: There's just there's so many.
Speaker 1: And by the way, Cooper, it's kind of unbelievable, you
Speaker 1: remember that.
Speaker 5: I'll tell you a funny thing about when I was
Speaker 5: I intersected with Bradley Cooper. I never knew him except
Speaker 5: that we were in theater at Georgia at the same time,
Speaker 5: I may think maybe one year as a little older
Speaker 5: than me, and he was most famous on campus for
Speaker 5: being the most attractive person anyone had ever seen that.
Speaker 6: I'm not even kidding. I'm literally a People would say,
Speaker 6: have you seen Bradley Cooper? I swear to God, not
Speaker 6: in a play? Have you seen him?
Speaker 1: Yeah? That's gotta be hard.
Speaker 4: My life could be really hard sometimes, Mike.
Speaker 1: Okay. So, and the reason I wanted to talk to
Speaker 1: you with endings because I feel like I've often felt
Speaker 1: that no one's more obsessed with endings than I am.
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you why. But and I say this
Speaker 1: also to say that I think you might be as
Speaker 1: obsessed as I am. I am someone who I will
Speaker 1: very often read a thriller and stop five pages before
Speaker 1: the end because I'm concerned that the author isn't going
Speaker 1: to pull it off, and I I just don't want
Speaker 1: to be there for that. I was like, all right,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter that I've spent three days getting to
Speaker 1: page three hundred and ninety five. Yeah, I just I
Speaker 1: can No.
Speaker 5: No, I'm similarly obsessed, you know, but I go through
Speaker 5: four or five endings before I land on an ending.
Speaker 1: You don't start with the ende of of them.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 5: No, As a matter of fact, the old man in
Speaker 5: the pool, I'm deliberating right now between two different, distinctly
Speaker 5: different endings.
Speaker 1: And what we describe the two options simply describe them emotionally.
Speaker 1: Is there a difference in the emotional.
Speaker 5: It's I can't give away what the ending is. It's
Speaker 5: a little fundamentally, but you know what I'm kidding, But
Speaker 5: you know what I'll do. I can tell you that
Speaker 5: the two different endings for my last show, which is
Speaker 5: called The New One and uh and one of them
Speaker 5: is me and my wife and my daughter sort of
Speaker 5: laughing together on the couch together in our house, and
Speaker 5: I early you're in the show.
Speaker 4: I talked about how the premise.
Speaker 5: Of the show is I never want to have a child,
Speaker 5: and the show is about and it's all the reasons
Speaker 5: why I never want to have a child, and then
Speaker 5: it's about how we had a child and how I
Speaker 5: was right, uh and then and then and then the
Speaker 5: emotional turn of it is that I was wrong and
Speaker 5: and uh and and and and there. But there were
Speaker 5: two different endings that we had along the way that
Speaker 5: we're uh and and one of them is the one
Speaker 5: that it is, which is my wife and daughter and
Speaker 5: I are laughing together on the couch and I basically
Speaker 5: I don't say this, but I say I basically become
Speaker 5: all the cliches that of parents who I find so annoying,
Speaker 5: which is like, I just want to see the world
Speaker 5: through babies eyes.
Speaker 1: You know, wait, we have that. Yeah, we actually show them,
Speaker 1: we show oh yeah please, yeah, okay, okay, let's show this.
Speaker 1: Let's just show this.
Speaker 5: Who loved the couch?
Speaker 1: She goes couchs wog ow, Wow.
Speaker 7: She's a genius.
Speaker 5: Three of us sit on the couchs in the department store.
Speaker 5: None is hiding behind each of us, and we could where' zuona?
Speaker 4: Where's Zuona?
Speaker 5: She's clinging into my back because I spend The more
Speaker 5: she clings, the more I'm committed.
Speaker 1: Like where is Oh? Where is it?
Speaker 5: And she starts laughing so hard, like the hardest I've
Speaker 5: ever seen anyone laugh my whole life.
Speaker 4: And I'm in the joke's business.
Speaker 5: At this idea that she's tricking us, the people in power,
Speaker 5: the people who know everything. She's fooled us completely at
Speaker 5: least this once. And look, I know she's gonna grow
Speaker 5: up and find out that the earth is singing in
Speaker 5: the ocean. We might have to live in an almond
Speaker 5: milk jug in Pennsylvania, and people can be horrible. But
Speaker 5: as I'm staring at this monkey on a couch, I
Speaker 5: feel like she might be one of the people who
Speaker 5: changes that trajectory. She's laughing so hard that I start
Speaker 5: laughing in a new way from my perspective and Jen's
Speaker 5: perspective and Owner's perspective all at once, we're.
Speaker 7: Laughing as one. And in that moment, I feel full.
Speaker 7: I'm seeing the world through babies.
Speaker 1: So what what's the work that ending's doing?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 1: So that ending is cheering up, cheering, cheering up, you
Speaker 1: cheering up, watching yourself?
Speaker 4: How dare you, sir?
Speaker 1: At the town hall?
Speaker 4: You call me out where we have our town meetings
Speaker 4: every week? We're all at them right.
Speaker 1: The uh, No.
Speaker 7: It is.
Speaker 5: It's emotional because it's it's about when my daughter was
Speaker 5: eighteen months older and and she said, you know, seven
Speaker 5: years old now, So it's a yeah, so that part
Speaker 5: of its emotional. But yeah, So the goal of this
Speaker 5: ending is the show really mocks to the point it
Speaker 5: mocks people with children so mercilessly. If you never want
Speaker 5: to have children and want to mock people who have children.
Speaker 4: You're gonna love the first half.
Speaker 1: Of this special.
Speaker 4: For example, like when I like a year after this
Speaker 4: came out. This came out a few.
Speaker 5: Years ago, I was sent a Reddit thread that was
Speaker 5: from like a child free community on Reddit, and I
Speaker 5: have never seen a group of people more excited about
Speaker 5: the first half of a comedy special because they don't
Speaker 5: know it turns to me having a child, and then
Speaker 5: they feel completely betrayed when I have then they hate it.
Speaker 1: It's you know, that's one of my definitions of a story.
Speaker 1: The definition of a story and an anecdote is a
Speaker 1: story is a narrative that betrays through the listener's expectations. Right,
Speaker 1: there must be an act of betrayal for the story
Speaker 1: to work. Oh interesting, that's but.
Speaker 5: Wait, so there's a bit, so there is a betrayal,
Speaker 5: and then but then ultimately, with this ending, the goal
Speaker 5: is to point out after all the cliches of like
Speaker 5: seeing the world through baby's eyes and all this stuff,
Speaker 5: and it's the most joy I've ever experienced, all these
Speaker 5: things that you hear these.
Speaker 4: Annoying parents say all the time. I concede that.
Speaker 5: I have a moment of that, Yeah, a moment where
Speaker 5: I'm seeing the world through of his eyes and and
Speaker 5: and and to me, that's the essence of an the
Speaker 5: type of ending I enjoy, not everybody enjoys. I enjoy
Speaker 5: an ending where there's a hint of we understand that
Speaker 5: the that the emotional journey of the story is this big,
Speaker 5: we've we've swun to ball over the pendulum, but ultimately
Speaker 5: the person, the character who we invest in changes this much.
Speaker 5: So like one of my favorite endings of all time
Speaker 5: is from the movie Big.
Speaker 4: You know, Penny Marshall move with.
Speaker 5: Tom Hanks and I wish I was big, And then
Speaker 5: he goes to the carnival and then he's like.
Speaker 4: A grown up and he has a girlfriend and a
Speaker 4: job and all these things, and he literally and he
Speaker 4: does the whole thing.
Speaker 5: And then he gets to choose at the end, and
Speaker 5: he's gonna he's gonna be big, he's gonna be small again,
Speaker 5: and he chooses small, and there's this devastating moment where
Speaker 5: she looks back at him and it's his child self
Speaker 5: in a suit, and it's the visual metaph for of
Speaker 5: what we've experienced. Because he's both he's both of those things,
Speaker 5: and the change in him is imperceptible, but we know he's.
Speaker 1: Changed probably this much. I'm going to go back to
Speaker 1: your show for a moment. When you were doing that show,
Speaker 1: did you have that turn in mind to that idea
Speaker 1: that you were going to be moving just a little?
Speaker 3: Was that in?
Speaker 1: Did you start with that?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I think yeah, we because the alternate ending. I've literally
Speaker 5: never spoken about this. We I performed an alternate ending
Speaker 5: because I tore these shows for like numbers of years,
Speaker 5: like Old Man in the Pool, the Joe i'mtarn Now.
Speaker 5: I've toured for you know, for probably three plus years,
Speaker 5: probably three and a half years, have been workshopping it,
Speaker 5: and so this one was called the New One. I
Speaker 5: had another ending where this true story where my wife
Speaker 5: and daughter and I are on we go on a
Speaker 5: vacation together to the beach in California and we're on
Speaker 5: the beach and we're having this beautiful moment on the
Speaker 5: beach and UNA's like, it's similar to this.
Speaker 4: It's like it's like sand you know, like.
Speaker 5: Osha waa, you know, it's similar as like she's a genius.
Speaker 4: It's the same. It's sort of the same joke.
Speaker 5: But then she picks up like a piece of plastic
Speaker 5: from the beach and she's the spice garbage and it
Speaker 5: invokes it evokes all of those feelings I have about
Speaker 5: like we're just living in the dystopia and why are
Speaker 5: we having children?
Speaker 7: This is insane?
Speaker 1: Right, I could see why you didn't go that.
Speaker 5: End, Malcolm, how dare you in the location of our
Speaker 5: weekly meetings?
Speaker 4: You no, I know it was it was too sad,
Speaker 4: too sad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's too much movement. You wanted a little movie? Yes,
Speaker 1: you don't want to.
Speaker 5: So that's why that ending went away because ultimately people
Speaker 5: would leave the theater and they would go like.
Speaker 4: That made me feel sort of bad about stuff. But
Speaker 4: the ending that but the ending that we went with.
Speaker 5: Just to be clear, I mean, endings are very personal
Speaker 5: for people. Like some people, I don't in that ending.
Speaker 5: You just watch some people left the theater and said,
Speaker 5: you're still kind of a jerk, you know what I mean.
Speaker 5: Like I would get very personal responses where people are like, yeah.
Speaker 4: You're like an ungrateful dad, You're a bad dad.
Speaker 5: All this stuff, and I'm like, no, no, I'm being
Speaker 5: honest with my experience.
Speaker 4: And this is pretty close.
Speaker 1: This is exactly what we're talking about, which is that
Speaker 1: endings carry massive disproportionate weight. You don't go to a
Speaker 1: show or a movie or read a book and decide
Speaker 1: after the first ten pages that you love it. That's it.
Speaker 1: I mean, you might say that, but it's a contingent conclusion.
Speaker 1: You will rescind that opinion in a heartbeat if the
Speaker 1: last five pages or the last five minutes don't work.
Speaker 1: And what's weird about this, of course, is that it's
Speaker 1: the opposite of the way we evaluate human beings. There's
Speaker 1: a famous set of studies about college professors where they
Speaker 1: take student evaluations of their teachers that are generated over
Speaker 1: an entire semester and compare them to teacher evaluations made
Speaker 1: by students who've only seen a tiny video clip of
Speaker 1: the professor, like ten seconds. What do you find that
Speaker 1: the two sets of evaluations are the same. In other words,
Speaker 1: you're sitting in a class, you listen to your teacher
Speaker 1: for the shortest moment, and you decide I like them,
Speaker 1: I don't like them, and you never revisit that conclusion.
Speaker 1: The ending doesn't matter. If you have thirty classes with
Speaker 1: your history professor, your experience in the final class, or
Speaker 1: the final five classes, or even the final twenty nine
Speaker 1: point nine to nine classes does not alter your impression
Speaker 1: about the teacher. Our evaluations of other people are front loaded.
Speaker 1: That's why, correctly, our parents told us again and again
Speaker 1: about the value of making a good first impression. But
Speaker 1: our evaluation of stories is the opposite. It's backloaded. What
Speaker 1: happens in the last five minutes colors every conclusion we
Speaker 1: drew in the first two hours. Now, why is this?
Speaker 1: I have no idea, but I will guarantee you that
Speaker 1: every screenwriter and author and podcaster frets endlessly about how
Speaker 1: their stories begin, rewrites the beginning a million times, but
Speaker 1: aren't nearly as fastidious about the ending, which is nuts.
Speaker 1: We're all idiots, with the exception, of course, of micro biglail.
Speaker 1: When we come back endings Part two, a week after
Speaker 1: we did our town hall show, we took the train
Speaker 1: down to Philadelphia, rented out the Filmore Theater, eight cheese steaks,
Speaker 1: got into the mood, and for the opening of the
Speaker 1: Philly show, I decided to reflect back on some of
Speaker 1: revisionist history's most and least successful endings. What we're talking
Speaker 1: about tonight is endings, because I happen to be obsessed
Speaker 1: with endings. If I'm watching a movie and you know,
Speaker 1: three quarters the way through there's just too many balls
Speaker 1: in the air, I'm.
Speaker 7: Out.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to be party to that kind of
Speaker 1: destruction of the narrative form. You know, I can go
Speaker 1: on forever about this, and we will, actually this evening
Speaker 1: be going on forever about this. But you know, the
Speaker 1: crucial distinction in my mind is a distinction between an
Speaker 1: anecdote and a story. An anecdote is a narrative that
Speaker 1: conforms with your expectations. So the braasiest thing happened to
Speaker 1: me last night I found one hundred dollars bill on
Speaker 1: the street. That is not a story. That is an anecdote.
Speaker 1: The first sentence, craziest thing happened is the equal of
Speaker 1: the second sentence, one hundred dollar bill on the street. Right.
Speaker 1: A story, by contrast, is a narrative that betrays the
Speaker 1: audience's expectations. So a story would be the craziest thing
Speaker 1: happened to me last night. I found one hundred dollars
Speaker 1: bill on the street. I gave it to a tried
Speaker 1: to give it to a homeless man, and he said,
Speaker 1: I don't want your effing money. That's a story, right.
Speaker 1: It betrayed your expectation. That's not how you expected it
Speaker 1: to end. And the challenge of Revision's history is we
Speaker 1: always want to tell a story. We always wanted some
Speaker 1: way to betray our audience's expectations. So I wanted to
Speaker 1: give you a couple of examples of how we approach
Speaker 1: that at Revision's History. You know, a couple years of
Speaker 1: seasons ago, we did an episode called Free Brian Williams,
Speaker 1: which some of you will remember.
Speaker 5: And.
Speaker 1: You'll remember Brian Williams was the NBC anchor who was
Speaker 1: fired from his job because he went on Letterman one
Speaker 1: night and he told a story about being in a
Speaker 1: helicopter during the Gulf War, flying low over the desert
Speaker 1: and he was fired upon by the enemy and he
Speaker 1: was terrified, And then turns out he wasn't fired on,
Speaker 1: And so all kinds of people brought this up and
Speaker 1: called him a liar and a self aggrandizing and he
Speaker 1: was for he was forced out of his job. And
Speaker 1: if you've listened to it, the whole episode of the
Speaker 1: Defense of Brian Williams, it's a sort of argument about
Speaker 1: memory that says that our memory, particularly in high stakes
Speaker 1: moments like that, is profoundly flawed, and all of us
Speaker 1: make mistakes of memory along the lines of Brian Williams.
Speaker 1: So he wasn't a self a grand advertising liar, he
Speaker 1: was just a human being. And now none of that,
Speaker 1: of course, trace the expectations of the audience.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 1: The show's called Free Williams. Brian Williams. You know I'm
Speaker 1: going to defend Brian Williams. But here's how it ended.
Speaker 1: It's a clip of the very end of the show.
Speaker 1: It's a clip of Brian Williams apologizing for his mistake
Speaker 1: looking back.
Speaker 3: It had to have been ego that made me think
Speaker 3: I had to be sharper, funnier, quicker than anybody else,
Speaker 3: put myself closer to the action, having been at the
Speaker 3: action in the beginning.
Speaker 1: Oh, please stop apologizing for a crime you didn't commit.
Speaker 1: Free Brian Williams. Yeah, do you see the betrayal there?
Speaker 1: You thought this was a defense of Brian Williams. But
Speaker 1: the last thing I do in the entire episode is
Speaker 1: attack Brian Williams for not defending himself. He's not a liar,
Speaker 1: but he's a coward.
Speaker 4: You didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker 1: Stand up for yourself, big man. Stop all right. Now,
Speaker 1: we don't always pull this out. There are times when
Speaker 1: the endings don't work. And a really good example of
Speaker 1: this is we did an episode last season called I
Speaker 1: Love You. Weimo which was you know. Weimo is a
Speaker 1: division of Google that makes autonomous cars, the kind that
Speaker 1: drive themselves, and they have them in Phoenix. You can
Speaker 1: go to Phoenix and you can order a Weimo and
Speaker 1: it just shows up the snow driver and you hop in.
Speaker 1: And so we went there, many of my producer, Jacob,
Speaker 1: and we drove around these Wemos, and our whole point
Speaker 1: was that people worry about autonomous cars because they think
Speaker 1: that they are will make a mistake, you know, and
Speaker 1: run over pedestrians. They think they're imperfect, but that's actually
Speaker 1: completely wrong. The problem with autonomous cars is that they're perfect.
Speaker 1: They don't make mistakes. I mean, they got twenty cameras
Speaker 1: and light ar and radar. They're so perfect that they
Speaker 1: allow everyone else to misbehave so that if you're if
Speaker 1: you see it, if you're a jaywalk, you want to
Speaker 1: you want to cross the street, and you see a
Speaker 1: Weimo coming, you just jaywalk. Because you know it will stop, right,
Speaker 1: It's perfect. And if you're a kid and you're playing
Speaker 1: soccer in the middle of the street with your friends
Speaker 1: and a Weimo comes, you keep playing soccer. You don't move.
Speaker 1: And if you're a cyclist and you want to cycle
Speaker 1: to work down, I'm ninety five. You cycle to work
Speaker 1: Down ninety five because the Weimo will drive very patiently
Speaker 1: behind you. It's not ever. So it's been sold to
Speaker 1: us by Silicon Valley as this kind of epical technological breakthrough.
Speaker 1: It's not. It's it's a complete non starter. You can't
Speaker 1: drive a Weimo through any urban area because people are
Speaker 1: just gonna go nuts when they see the Weimo. So
Speaker 1: we thought the Weimo was the I Love you Weimo
Speaker 1: was sarcastic. Right, So here's how it ends. Jacob and
Speaker 1: I we order a Weimo to this park, to this
Speaker 1: parking lot of uh the Almo Steakhouse in Tempe, Arizona,
Speaker 1: and it comes and then we just start forget my language,
Speaker 1: fucking with the weymow and we throw beach balls at it,
Speaker 1: and it like a four dollars beach ball, and it
Speaker 1: just stops because it's Weymo. It's like super polite, not
Speaker 1: gonna harm a hair on the head of the beach ball.
Speaker 1: And then then I decide what I really want to
Speaker 1: do is I want to run next to the Waimo
Speaker 1: and then just constantly cut in front of the weymouth
Speaker 1: to see what the Weimo will do. Right, So here,
Speaker 1: where's run the clip? Well he's taking up Oh, we
Speaker 1: come through waymore is freaked out, freaked out. He thinks
Speaker 1: he's going. He's got ahead of me.
Speaker 7: I'm going to catch him.
Speaker 1: Hold out you hold let you get in.
Speaker 7: Waimo.
Speaker 1: Stop. Weaimo was the perfect gentleman. He let me be
Speaker 1: the crazy one. Remember this the next time some Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley visionary promises you a future of perfect mobility, efficiency
Speaker 1: and clarity from the backseat of an autonomous vehicle. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's much better than that. It's me and Lance and
Speaker 1: Jonathan Vaughters and Jacob with his beach ball taking back
Speaker 1: the road. I love you Weimo. So retweet out the
Speaker 1: announcement of the show, and you know what happens. Wamo
Speaker 1: retweets the tweet. They're like, we love the show. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1: So we said that autonomous vehicles don't actually work and
Speaker 1: Weymo's like you called the show I Love You Wemo.
Speaker 1: That's all. They refuse to have their expectations betrayed. Right now,
Speaker 1: whose fault is that? I think it's my fault. And
Speaker 1: then we started to get emails from I'm reading some
Speaker 1: of the emails we got from readers, big fan of
Speaker 1: Revision's history. I'm trying to figure out if I Love
Speaker 1: You Weimo is sponsored content. Wait, I thought we were
Speaker 1: attacking Weimo email number two. I'm sure Malcolm and whoever
Speaker 1: is managing the show is smart enough to disclose when
Speaker 1: they're being sponsored. But this really felt like an AD. No,
Speaker 1: it wasn't an AD number three. At first, I thought
Speaker 1: my podcast episode didn't download correctly. Love it was just
Speaker 1: a thirty minute Weaimo love fest. No, it went on
Speaker 1: for thirty eight minutes. You had to listen to the
Speaker 1: last eight. Number four? What the hell was that? Number five?
Speaker 1: Was that an infomercial for a what? Now? These people dumb?
Speaker 7: No?
Speaker 1: I don't know one who listens to Revision's History can
Speaker 1: be dumb.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 1: They don't believe in stories. They believe in anecdotes. Right.
Speaker 1: They think that you can only have a narrative that
Speaker 1: conforms with your expectations. They don't understand that. No, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: What a real story does is betray your expectations. You
Speaker 1: screw up if that's the story you tell, right. If
Speaker 1: you can't convince people to make that turn, sometimes you
Speaker 1: really have to grab people the listener by the scrap
Speaker 1: of the neck and say no, no, you blockhead, this
Speaker 1: is going off in another direction. The perfect ending, the
Speaker 1: perfect story, to my mind, is the story. Will you
Speaker 1: start with the ending and work backwards? Well, you know
Speaker 1: absolutely the turn you want to make. And there's one
Speaker 1: of my absolute favorite episodes was exactly this. It's it's
Speaker 1: called the King of Tears from episode from season two
Speaker 1: or three, and it was about the saddest song in
Speaker 1: the world. Anyway, I'm I'm rooting around late one night
Speaker 1: on YouTube, and I run across George Jones's funeral, which
Speaker 1: is one of the By the way, if you if
Speaker 1: you have three extra hours, like if you're incarcerated and
Speaker 1: have time in your hands, you must watch George Jones's funeral.
Speaker 1: It's one of the most ethic, extraordinary, fantastic national events.
Speaker 1: They're all there, they're all weeping, they're all it's just
Speaker 1: it's just schmaltz upon schmaltz upon schmaltz. So I'm watching
Speaker 1: it like I'm weeping in my pajamas. Is two animals.
Speaker 1: Every single person in all of Nashville is there in
Speaker 1: full regalia. Cowboy hats up the wazoo. Everyone's like finding
Speaker 1: a way to weep out, wheep each other on stead.
Speaker 1: But the climax is the great George Jones song was,
Speaker 1: of course, the saddest song ever written by Bobby Braddock.
Speaker 1: It's he Stopped Loving Her Today about a guy who
Speaker 1: he's in love with a woman and he stopped loving
Speaker 1: her today when he dies. He only stops loving her
Speaker 1: when he's And the whole song leads up to you
Speaker 1: realize you think he's alive, and he realized, oh no, no, no,
Speaker 1: he's dead, and that's why he stopped on him. So Alan,
Speaker 1: we actually want to play this, play Alan Jackson. Wells
Speaker 1: Alan Jackson, who's at the end of the funeral. It's
Speaker 1: the climax sings he stopped Loving her Today for George
Speaker 1: Jones's wife, who's in the front row right. So it's
Speaker 1: so geniusly met play the beginning of Alan Jackson as
Speaker 1: years when clo and you realize as he sings that
Speaker 1: Braddock's song has gotten even more specific. It's no longer
Speaker 1: about a long ago love affair. It's about right now.
Speaker 1: This is the day George Jones stopped loving Nancy Jones.
Speaker 1: Alan Jackson takes off his hat and places it over
Speaker 1: his heart.
Speaker 4: He stop loving her.
Speaker 1: Today. And if you aren't crying, I can't help you.
Speaker 4: I love you, George.
Speaker 1: If only every story ended as well as that one.
Speaker 1: Revision's history is produced by Eloise Linton, Leeman Gistu and
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our showrunner is
Speaker 1: Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by Jason Gambrel,
Speaker 1: engineering by Sarah Brugaer and Nina Lawrence, fact checking by
Speaker 1: Kishelle Williams, and live production by Kate Downey. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to the Pushkin crew who helped pull off this live experiment,
Speaker 1: Kerry Brodie, Pether Fame, Blair Gilkes, Jason Gambrel, Nina Lawrence,
Speaker 1: Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler, John Schnarz, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 1: And a big thank you to Mike Berbiglia as well
Speaker 1: as the town Hall in Manhattan and The Fillmore in Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more of revisionist History Live, coming soon
Speaker 1: to a city near you. I'm Malcolm Glabo.