Speaker 1: Pushkin. So I'm calling you because I'm doing a little
Speaker 1: thing on how I don't like my birthday. Yes, and
Speaker 1: I have questions for you.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm eagerly waiting to hear of this because I
Speaker 2: have spaid a lot of time one ding what it's
Speaker 2: all about.
Speaker 1: That's my mom, Joyce. She's very short, speaks very softly.
Speaker 1: You would like her. Do you remember ever having a
Speaker 1: birthday party for me when I was a child.
Speaker 2: I think we did. We didn't do exotic things. I
Speaker 2: think you had people sleep over, or you had some
Speaker 2: people to tea, a few friends from school.
Speaker 1: I remember there was once a big party, and really
Speaker 1: and I and I said, and afterwards I said, that's enough.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, now, well you're going to exclaine what you were?
Speaker 3: What was enough?
Speaker 1: In case you're wondering, my mom is a therapist. I
Speaker 1: just thought it was a I thought it was a
Speaker 1: needless production to have all these people over.
Speaker 2: What should it have been instead?
Speaker 1: Well, what would I do now? Is perfect? Which is nothing?
Speaker 2: Oh, so you didn't enjoy any part of having friends
Speaker 2: to eat with you?
Speaker 1: No, I haven't had a birthday party since. It's worse
Speaker 1: than that. I don't remember anyone's birthday. I know my
Speaker 1: mother's but not my father's, one of my brothers, but
Speaker 1: not the other. One of my daughters was born in
Speaker 1: July and the other in August, but I'm not sure
Speaker 1: which is which. If I were to name my five
Speaker 1: closest friends, I think I know the birthday of one
Speaker 1: of them. And that's because it's January first. And I
Speaker 1: just saw him on January first, and he said to me,
Speaker 1: with tones of great injury and reproach, today is my birthday.
Speaker 1: But I am sure I'll forget that fact really soon
Speaker 1: on this particular subject. The overloaded lifeboat that is my
Speaker 1: memory is refusing all further passengers. And by the way,
Speaker 1: my mother reminded me, it's not just birthdays that I
Speaker 1: have a problem with, it's any kind of arbitrary celebration.
Speaker 4: So you were.
Speaker 5: A very thoughtful child.
Speaker 2: The fact, for example, was that you child is your teacher,
Speaker 2: Miss Brown.
Speaker 1: Missus Brown was my first grade teacher. I was very
Speaker 1: fond of Missus Brown. But one day at school she
Speaker 1: brought up Christmas and Santa Claus.
Speaker 2: You put your hand up and said, there is no
Speaker 2: center flower. This was when she had the fair problem,
Speaker 2: because here she was speaking to a group of small
Speaker 2: children who wanted to believe.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's they're linked by the way my disdain for
Speaker 1: Santa Claus and my disdain for my birthday. Is this
Speaker 1: part of the same impulse?
Speaker 5: Yes, of course, Yes, of.
Speaker 1: Course, says mom the therapist. Why am I telling you
Speaker 1: all this because last year, twenty twenty five was the
Speaker 1: tenth anniversary of when we started making Revisionist History, and
Speaker 1: I forgot all about it, totally skip my mind until
Speaker 1: I was randomly on the Revision's history dot Com website
Speaker 1: looking up some forgotten fact from an episode from season
Speaker 1: one one of my favorite food Fight, and I noticed
Speaker 1: the release date July fourteenth, twenty sixteen, and I realized,
Speaker 1: holy mackerel, we've been around for ten years. The Internet
Speaker 1: tells me that this is the ten or Aluminum anniversary,
Speaker 1: which I have to say, kind of proves my point.
Speaker 1: What are you supposed to do in your tenth anniversary?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: I love you in magic marker on a sheet of tinfoil.
Speaker 1: This was back in the summer. So what did I do.
Speaker 1: I didn't say anything, kept it to myself. It's better
Speaker 1: this way, I thought, But then I remember to date.
Speaker 1: I went on many years ago with a girl who
Speaker 1: told me that she turned her birthday every year into
Speaker 1: a seven day marathon. She called it, wait for it,
Speaker 1: Princess Week. Picture me in the darkened bar making sense
Speaker 1: of that revelation. Good lord, But if someone wants Princess Week,
Speaker 1: shouldn't we just give them Princess Week. So, all of
Speaker 1: you insufferably sentimental people out there in listener land, this
Speaker 1: is for you, a little revisionist history tenth anniversary celebration.
Speaker 1: To get started, I did little homework, sent out a tweet,
Speaker 1: asked listeners for feedback, scoured some Reddit threads, talk with
Speaker 1: people who've been involved in the show over the years,
Speaker 1: trying to generate a highlight reel for the big birthday party.
Speaker 1: What was her favorite moment memory? First thing I got
Speaker 1: back was from my colleague Bend daph Haffrey, who talked
Speaker 1: to my old producer Elowise Linton about a reporting trip
Speaker 1: we took back in twenty twenty one for the episode
Speaker 1: The Dog Will See You Now.
Speaker 3: Okay, So Malcolm wanted to do an episode on these
Speaker 3: dogs who were trained to small COVID and we found
Speaker 3: this center in Alabama that trained these specialized dogs and
Speaker 3: we all decided to go on a road trip and
Speaker 3: it was me, Malcolm and Jacob Smith, so Malcolm and
Speaker 3: two producers. And part of the thing that was fun
Speaker 3: but also kind of crazy about it was that we
Speaker 3: were just sort of coming out of COVID, so we
Speaker 3: hadn't It was fun to take a trip in a
Speaker 3: moment when there wasn't a lot of socializing or traveling
Speaker 3: going on.
Speaker 1: Let me just butt in here and say that no
Speaker 1: one loves doing Alabama stories more than me. Back in
Speaker 1: season two, we did The foot Soldier of Birmingham. Season eight,
Speaker 1: we did an episode called Footnote Remember for our gun
Speaker 1: series about a guy living on an old plantation outside
Speaker 1: of Tuskegee. Season ten, we went to Scottsboro, Alabama for
Speaker 1: an episode of our nineteen thirty six Olympic series. And
Speaker 1: we just did The Alabama Murders, a seven part series
Speaker 1: about crime and punishment and redemption set in a little
Speaker 1: town in northwestern Alabama. Bet and I went twice. Ben
Speaker 1: went a third time on his own. No one loves
Speaker 1: Alabama more than I love Alabama. So in the middle
Speaker 1: of COVID, I want to do a story about how
Speaker 1: dogs are much better detecting COVID, then even the most
Speaker 1: sophisticated molecular bio essay, and I find out that one
Speaker 1: of the biggest COVID canine training centers is an hour's
Speaker 1: drive from Birmingham, way up in the hills, Alabama. Cute puppies,
Speaker 1: viral epidemics. My feeling was that this might be the
Speaker 1: perfect revision's history story.
Speaker 3: One fun thing that I learned about Malcolm on this
Speaker 3: trip is that he doesn't believe in using maps, which
Speaker 3: caused you know, nah, he doesn't want He doesn't mean
Speaker 3: you can ask him his philosophy on it. I'm sure
Speaker 3: he has some great answer, but he would not use
Speaker 3: an app. So it was kind of me and Jacob
Speaker 3: secretly checking our you know, Google maps and sort of
Speaker 3: suggesting that he takes certain turns, picking your fingers, sticking
Speaker 3: it to the wind and being yeah, exactly, yeah, this
Speaker 3: is true.
Speaker 1: Since we're talking about my parents, one of my fondest
Speaker 1: memories of being a kid is driving with my family
Speaker 1: somewhere and clearly getting hopelessly lost and my father announcing
Speaker 1: gleefully from the front seat, I'm following my nose. I
Speaker 1: felt that my young producers deserved a similar experience.
Speaker 3: And on this long drive road trip, we had to
Speaker 3: stop for gas, and we stopped at a very desolate
Speaker 3: gas station, kind of in the middle of nowhere, very
Speaker 3: in the middle of nowhere, and Malcolm and Jacob both
Speaker 3: went in to grab something, and I went to the
Speaker 3: bathroom and I came back out and they were gone,
Speaker 3: and I left my cellphone in the car, and I
Speaker 3: just kind of remember calculating what my options were in
Speaker 3: terms of what I could do. So I remember I
Speaker 3: went into the I went into the sort of gas
Speaker 3: station and was concentplating calling my family, calling my roommate
Speaker 3: and saying, listen, my boss left me at a gas.
Speaker 1: In fairness to me and Jacob, Elowis had been sitting
Speaker 1: in the back seat, and she is by nature quite
Speaker 1: as a church mess, so it makes sense that we
Speaker 1: might assume that she was back there all the time,
Speaker 1: reading a book or something. And it did not take
Speaker 1: that long for us to realize our mistake, maybe ten
Speaker 1: miles max and the frantic drive back, both Jacob and
Speaker 1: I felt really, really guilty. Anyway, why am I telling
Speaker 1: you this story because when I meet listeners, I think
Speaker 1: they have the impression that this show is some big,
Speaker 1: well oiled corporate machine, and clearly it's not.
Speaker 3: I was like, did you try calling me? Like what?
Speaker 5: One?
Speaker 3: I don't think we really talked about it, because we're.
Speaker 1: Also read all right. Speaking of Ben, here's a note
Speaker 1: from my Twitter call out from a listener named Rob Gilfillian.
Speaker 1: Here's my question. Malcolm pronounces his colleague's name as Ben
Speaker 1: Nadaph Haffrey, while Ben calls himself Ben a de Haffrey.
Speaker 1: It's similar to the difference in pronouncing pecan or pecan,
Speaker 1: or Caribbean or Caribbean. These two obviously spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time together. Seems odd. This is so true. It's
Speaker 1: because I just love a double barreled last name. I
Speaker 1: wish I had one. My mother's maiden name was Nation.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine if I were known as Malcolm Nation Gladwell,
Speaker 1: I would be unstoppable. So I'm deeply appreciative of that
Speaker 1: nadaph in the middle of Ben's name. I want to
Speaker 1: give it the kind of relish I believe it deserves.
Speaker 1: Nadafha is like pickles on a sandwich. It's transformative. The
Speaker 1: other reason, while I'm on this subject is that this
Speaker 1: is the price I pay for being the child of
Speaker 1: a Jamaican and an Englishman who was raised in Canada
Speaker 1: and then moved to the United States. I have four
Speaker 1: different pronunciation and accent models bouncing around my head at
Speaker 1: all times. Everything is up for grabs. The person who
Speaker 1: knows this better than anyone is my producer, Nina Lawrence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have a real problem with with ambulances.
Speaker 1: And what do you say? But when the ambulance arrived
Speaker 1: a few minutes later? What do I say?
Speaker 6: When the ambulance?
Speaker 1: And that's the that's what it says, ambulance. What where
Speaker 1: were we? One more memory. We're celebrating our tenth anniversary,
Speaker 1: and you were You were the principal figure in the
Speaker 1: founding of revisionist history.
Speaker 6: It's crazy, I guess.
Speaker 7: I mean, yeah, I was there.
Speaker 1: I was there from the very very start.
Speaker 7: I remember our very first meeting Bell.
Speaker 1: The person who taught me everything there is to know
Speaker 1: about podcasting. I want you to go back. So we
Speaker 1: we were interviewing people and you waltzed in.
Speaker 5: Is that? How is that how it felt that?
Speaker 1: I want that I waltzed in. I know who you were.
Speaker 1: I did not I did not read your resume in advance.
Speaker 1: I never do the wait, but I want to know
Speaker 1: what were you? We had never met.
Speaker 7: Before, we had never met before.
Speaker 1: What were your impressions there? I was skinny, Malcolm, what
Speaker 1: you say?
Speaker 7: Well, I knew your work coming in, and I had
Speaker 7: read the outline of your I'd.
Speaker 1: Given you an outline of some suggested ideas I had
Speaker 1: for the first season.
Speaker 7: Yes, yes, and there were some great you know, there
Speaker 7: was some great stuff in there, but I also saw
Speaker 7: a lot of sports and cars, and all the sources
Speaker 7: that you referenced were dudes. And I was just like, Okay,
Speaker 7: here we go.
Speaker 1: And so I'm not a mean person, but.
Speaker 7: I needed to speak my truth, my truth, which was
Speaker 7: there's some great stuff here, but no woman is ever
Speaker 7: going to listen to this podcast.
Speaker 1: So I remember. I remember that perfectly. I I the
Speaker 1: minute I heard that I fell in love with you.
Speaker 1: I was like, I was like, so, so, I so
Speaker 1: want to work with this woman. This is fantastic. It
Speaker 1: was a show called Revisionist History. The tagline was because
Speaker 1: sometimes the past deserves a second chance. The premise of
Speaker 1: the show was that you needed to go back over
Speaker 1: things that had happened, because chances are you got them wrong.
Speaker 1: The first time, and Mia walks in, looks at the
Speaker 1: proposed lineup of episodes and says, you need to go
Speaker 1: back over them. You got them wrong the first time.
Speaker 1: Under the circumstances, who could say no? After talking to Mia,
Speaker 1: I thought of one of my all time favorite songs,
Speaker 1: David allen Coe's you Never Even Called Me by my Name,
Speaker 1: which begins with the perfect country opening line, Well.
Speaker 8: It was all.
Speaker 5: I could do.
Speaker 9: You keep from crying.
Speaker 1: If you've never heard of David allen Coe, By the way,
Speaker 1: he just read you, a line taken at random from
Speaker 1: his Wikipedia page. After concluding another prison term in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, Co embarked on a music career in Nashville,
Speaker 1: living in a hearse which he parked in front of
Speaker 1: the Rymann Auditorium while he performed on the street. How
Speaker 1: can you not love David allen Coe anyway? Halfway through
Speaker 1: you never even called me by my name? Coe just
Speaker 1: stops and says, well.
Speaker 9: A friend of mine named Steve Goodman wrote that song,
Speaker 9: and he told me it was the perfect Countrey and
Speaker 9: Western song. I wrote him back a letter and I
Speaker 9: told him it was not the perfect Conkrey and Western
Speaker 9: song because he hadn't said anything at all about mama
Speaker 9: or trained, or trucked, or prison.
Speaker 10: Or getting drunk.
Speaker 1: So then Goodman writes a new verse, sends it to
Speaker 1: co and Coe says, Okay, now this really is the
Speaker 1: perfect country and Western song.
Speaker 9: The last verse goes like this here.
Speaker 8: And I was drawn to d My mom got out
Speaker 8: of prison, and I with the picker up.
Speaker 3: In the right, but before.
Speaker 8: I could get to the station, now the picker throw
Speaker 8: she got rid over by a damn the train.
Speaker 1: I think you can see where I'm going with this.
Speaker 1: A singer insists on going back over a song, a
Speaker 1: song that has already been written, because he thinks the
Speaker 1: songwriter got it wrong the first time. And what's the fix?
Speaker 1: Nothing elaborate, the most prosaic of things, the bare essentials
Speaker 1: for a country singer, Mama, trains, trucks, prisons, and getting
Speaker 1: That's what I think we've learned over the first ten
Speaker 1: years of the show that getting something right doesn't require heroics,
Speaker 1: is just following your nose and turning around when you
Speaker 1: mistakenly left someone behind. After the break, the celebration continues, Okay,
Speaker 1: I have some thoughts about the first ten years of
Speaker 1: Revision's history why it has been so much fun, Because
Speaker 1: it's been way way more fun than I ever imagined
Speaker 1: for me. It starts with the difference between reading a
Speaker 1: story and hearing a story. In reading, the writer is
Speaker 1: in charge of what appears on the page. If you
Speaker 1: read one of my books and you liked it, you're
Speaker 1: giving me a direct compliment. You're saying, I like what
Speaker 1: you made. But when you listen to a story made
Speaker 1: up of interviews with all sorts of people, archival tape
Speaker 1: sitch together with bits of narrative here and there, you
Speaker 1: aren't saying I like what you made. You're saying I
Speaker 1: like what you found. And that's a very different thing.
Speaker 1: One episode listeners ranked as a favorite on my Twitter poll,
Speaker 1: for example, is My Little one hundred Million from season one,
Speaker 1: an episode all about the strange phenomenon of wealthy people
Speaker 1: giving millions of dollars to colleges that already have millions
Speaker 1: of dollars as opposed to schools that don't have millions
Speaker 1: of dollars. There's a moment in the episode where I
Speaker 1: call up John Hennessy, who was the president of Stanford
Speaker 1: University at the time. Stanford is a tiny fraction of
Speaker 1: the size of its neighbors in the University of California System.
Speaker 1: And yet in twenty sixteen, Stamford's endowment was twenty two billion.
Speaker 1: The UC systems endowment much much smaller, by about eight
Speaker 1: and a half billion dollars. So I asked Hennessy, do
Speaker 1: you ever imagine that a president of Stanford might go
Speaker 1: to a funder and say, at this point in our history,
Speaker 1: the best use of your money is to give to
Speaker 1: the UC system, not to Stanford. Well, that would be
Speaker 1: a hard thing to do, obviously, to.
Speaker 5: Turn them turn them away.
Speaker 6: And I think the other question we'd be asked is
Speaker 6: how can I.
Speaker 1: Have confidence that they'll use my money?
Speaker 8: Well, which we're obviously the president of Stanford is not
Speaker 8: in a position to vouch for. I think.
Speaker 1: It's an amazing answer. And what's amazing is that he
Speaker 1: had every reason to duck that question, or brush it aside,
Speaker 1: or tell a lie, but he doesn't. He decides to
Speaker 1: be completely honest. He owns up to the fact that
Speaker 1: even though he is an educator, he is not primarily
Speaker 1: in the education business. He's in the Stanford business. And
Speaker 1: I suspect that one of the reasons so many people
Speaker 1: listed my Little one hundred million, as one of their
Speaker 1: favorites is because of that little bit of tape from Hennessy.
Speaker 1: I didn't make that moment. I didn't anticipate it. I
Speaker 1: didn't manipulate Hennessy into saying it. I stumbled into it.
Speaker 1: And the wonderful thing about audio is that it allows
Speaker 1: you to capture those found moments exactly as they're happening.
Speaker 1: There's an even better example of this. It's from another
Speaker 1: episode on the List from Listeners, Elvis Analysis Parapraxis season three.
Speaker 1: If you haven't heard it, the premise is pretty simple.
Speaker 1: One of Elvis's trademark songs was are You Lonesome Tonight?
Speaker 1: And in the middle of the song, there's a bridge,
Speaker 1: a couple of spoken sentences, a little soliloquy, and over
Speaker 1: and over again, whenever Elvis had to say the bridge,
Speaker 1: hit screw it up, get the words wrong, break out
Speaker 1: into totally inappropriate laughter.
Speaker 2: The World's of stags and East must play a part.
Speaker 1: The Freudian term for what Elvis was doing is called parapraxis,
Speaker 1: a slip of the tongue that reveals something about the speaker.
Speaker 1: So the episode was trying to answer, what does Elvis's
Speaker 1: issue with the bridge. Tell us about Elvis. Now, I
Speaker 1: should say I had all kinds of trouble doing this story.
Speaker 1: There was a great essay written about Elvis's parapraxis by
Speaker 1: the psychologist Alan Elms, so I flew to Sacramento to
Speaker 1: meet with Elms, but he wasn't well and couldn't really speak,
Speaker 1: so I kind of gave up put the story aside
Speaker 1: for months until I had the random idea of just
Speaker 1: going to Nashville and having professional musicians sing are You
Speaker 1: Lonesome Tonight and explain to me why the bridge is
Speaker 1: so complicated. I went to see Bobby Braddock, one of
Speaker 1: the legendary Nashville songwriters, and he brought with him a
Speaker 1: good friend, a singer named Casey Bowles. Casey sang are
Speaker 1: You Lonesome Tonight? And then we got on the subject
Speaker 1: of another song, one of her own. Do you find
Speaker 1: yourself making the kind of errors sometimes even subtle ones
Speaker 1: that you know you've been talking about?
Speaker 5: That's so interesting. I wrote a song about my mother
Speaker 5: called Somebody Something, and my mother is adorable. And whenever
Speaker 5: you heard about things going wrong or like some tumultu
Speaker 5: a story, it was my dad, and so I finally
Speaker 5: was like, you know what, wantn't we the only person
Speaker 5: in the family that there's nothing I have it written about?
Speaker 5: So it's trying to dig dirt on.
Speaker 6: Her and there was nothing.
Speaker 5: And so I ended up writing this song about her,
Speaker 5: called Somebody Something, and I cry every time I do it.
Speaker 5: And there is a line that says, you know, she's
Speaker 5: always been somebody something. She's lived every life but her own,
Speaker 5: and it's gone. I can't remember it right now. I
Speaker 5: don't know that feeling. I can't remember it.
Speaker 6: She's always been somebody something. It's been everything but.
Speaker 5: Alone, a daughter, a mother, a lot, a daughter, a lover,
Speaker 5: a wife, and a mother. She's lived every life but
Speaker 5: her own. Yeah, she's always been so it's something. And
Speaker 5: there's a line that says, you know, she she wonders
Speaker 5: what it might be like to be somebody else, and
Speaker 5: she wonders what it feels like to be free, but
Speaker 5: she's always imagined being nobody's nothing, and that's something she
Speaker 5: never want to be. But that line usually is just gone.
Speaker 5: And a lot of times I'll go hold on and
Speaker 5: divert and tell a funny story really quickly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wait, what's the specific line that's gone is which one?
Speaker 5: Uh? What's going again? She's always been somebody's synth. That's
Speaker 5: been everything but alone, daughter, lover, a daughter, a lover,
Speaker 5: a wife, and a mother. She's been everything.
Speaker 3: But alone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, why is it that lone?
Speaker 5: I don't know. I think that.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I think when you even she's so when you see
Speaker 5: somebody to give so much of themselves, and that's truly
Speaker 5: the only thing that she will never experience. And I
Speaker 5: think it's what I've experienced the most of.
Speaker 1: I go to Nashville to write a story about parapraxis,
Speaker 1: and what happens I find pair of praxis. It occurs
Speaker 1: before my eyes, and I was lucky enough to have
Speaker 1: the tape recorder running. And the reason I love that
Speaker 1: episode and why so many listeners over the years have
Speaker 1: said it's their favorite, is that you the listener, and
Speaker 1: me the host get to participate in this little golden
Speaker 1: moment of serendipity together we Casey, can you play that
Speaker 1: song for us? Is it gonna be two?
Speaker 6: Let's say, okay, okay, well, I will say if this happens,
Speaker 6: what did I just say?
Speaker 5: I'm thinking about Mama.
Speaker 6: She grew up playing cowgirl.
Speaker 4: She grew up playing cowgirl in a railroad town, dreaming
Speaker 4: she'd see Hollywood someday. She knew some distant Friday night.
Speaker 10: With a cigarette hole just right, Fate would come in
Speaker 10: and carry away. As far as she could see from
Speaker 10: the air, those were just facts.
Speaker 6: So that's all right.
Speaker 1: Hold one second, there it is again. Pair of Praxis.
Speaker 10: Married in December.
Speaker 4: Anywhere you can address her, Mama maid. She looked dog
Speaker 4: grown up standing there like that.
Speaker 1: I've been making things my whole life. What I've learned
Speaker 1: over the last ten years of doing this is that
Speaker 1: I much prefer finding things.
Speaker 10: It's all around.
Speaker 4: May love and the greyhound coming back. As far as
Speaker 4: she could say from there, those were just the facts.
Speaker 1: Lie, We'll be right back.
Speaker 4: You went from somebody's daughter.
Speaker 6: Somebody.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to go over our greatest found moment,
Speaker 1: and I want to see whether you believe this is
Speaker 1: our greatest found moment. I called up Ben Nadaph halfway
Speaker 1: again to talk about at the time we went to
Speaker 1: Los Angeles for our nineteen thirty six Olympics series, and
Speaker 1: we go and see the legendary Milan Tiff who I've
Speaker 1: been obsessed with since I was a kid, and.
Speaker 2: I knew I'd never heard of true form.
Speaker 1: No one almost no one has ever heard of Milan
Speaker 1: Tiff because he was briefly the had a triple jumper
Speaker 1: in the world in some point in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: So you understand, it's a small universe. There's a small
Speaker 1: universe of people who remember track and field in the seventies,
Speaker 1: and an even smaller universe of people who followed the
Speaker 1: triple jump.
Speaker 8: And above that, at the top of the funnel is
Speaker 8: people who know, yeah right, what triple Yeah right?
Speaker 1: But Milan was this kind of spectral brilliant. He was
Speaker 1: an artist. He spoke in these kind of these kind
Speaker 1: of gnomic utterances.
Speaker 2: He was one of the trippiest mornings of my life.
Speaker 1: It was he was he was just a he was drugs.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 1: He's so fascinating and kind of just like I immediately
Speaker 1: knew we were in some magical universe when we went
Speaker 1: to see Milan Tiff. Milan takes us to the UCLA
Speaker 1: track and he wants to show us the secrets to
Speaker 1: the triple jump, and my interest in all of this,
Speaker 1: I'm actually because I'm a huge truck and field fan.
Speaker 1: I am. I'm just so happy to be at the
Speaker 1: UCLA track, and I'm aware of the fact that you don't.
Speaker 1: You're not a track and field fan, and I'm desperate
Speaker 1: to kind of impress upon you why this is the
Speaker 1: greatest sport of all time and I want you to
Speaker 1: appreciate the beauty of running, which to my mind, is
Speaker 1: the reason you watch track and field. And so I
Speaker 1: see out of the corner of my eye a woman
Speaker 1: running two hundred meter intervals on the track, and I
Speaker 1: say to you, Ben.
Speaker 2: I could see it.
Speaker 3: I could see it.
Speaker 1: You could see it. You could see it. And I
Speaker 1: said to you, I actually went back over the tape.
Speaker 1: I said to you, I don't know who that is,
Speaker 1: but that's a great runner. And then she got closer
Speaker 1: and stopped and was chatting with Milan, and we go
Speaker 1: over there and we realize it's Sydney McLoughlin's liberal here.
Speaker 1: It's the greatest. For those who don't know who Sidney
Speaker 1: McLaughlin is, maybe the greatest female runner of the last
Speaker 1: one hundred years. I mean, she's the world record holder,
Speaker 1: a zillion times, double gold medal winner in the Olympics.
Speaker 1: Clearly the greatest American runner of her generation. And it
Speaker 1: was a found moment here I was trying here is
Speaker 1: I went with you to the UCLA track to try
Speaker 1: and prove to you that there was something beautiful and
Speaker 1: transcendent about running. And I point out my example, and
Speaker 1: my example turns out to be the greatest runner of
Speaker 1: her generation. It was like, it was insane serendipity.
Speaker 3: It is incredible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one more thought about made things versus found things.
Speaker 1: Not long ago, I tweeted out the following a question
Speaker 1: that has haunted me ever since I've been forced to
Speaker 1: read Cinderella a zillion times. Why does the coach turn
Speaker 1: into a pumpkin, the coachman into mice, and the dress
Speaker 1: to rags, but the magical glass slippers are fine? Did
Speaker 1: the fairy godmother have a carve out for shoes? A
Speaker 1: ton of people weighed in with their answers because I
Speaker 1: don't know. It seems like a question that really needs
Speaker 1: an answer. And my favorite was this from med lecture,
Speaker 1: who I think is a neurologist in Switzerland, although who knows, oh, Malcolm,
Speaker 1: Because magic and fairy tales follows symbolism, not physics. The
Speaker 1: coach dress and servants are borrowed transformation. The slippers are
Speaker 1: proof of identity, not escapism. If they vanished, the story
Speaker 1: loses its logic and its justice, which is beautiful right.
Speaker 1: And I didn't come up with that. I put the
Speaker 1: question to all of you out there, to the listeners
Speaker 1: of revisionist history, people who are as interested as we
Speaker 1: are in solving lives enduring and consequential and sometimes not
Speaker 1: so consequential mysteries. One of you, who've never met, gave
Speaker 1: me a little gift which I can in turn share
Speaker 1: with all of you. Forgive me. I'm going to violate
Speaker 1: all my principles here and get sentimental. But the great
Speaker 1: revelation of the last ten years has been how much
Speaker 1: all of us here re visions history, have enjoyed telling
Speaker 1: stories for all of you, you, stories about the unexpected,
Speaker 1: captured in real time, with real voices and real emotion
Speaker 1: and a real sense of awe, about the endless surprises
Speaker 1: the world has in store for us. I run into
Speaker 1: you as I'm walking down the street. We're going through
Speaker 1: an airport, and from emails in my inbox. Let me
Speaker 1: just say it's been one of the great joys of
Speaker 1: my life to meet all of you Happy ten Anniversary
Speaker 1: Revisionist History, Well it was on that.
Speaker 10: Six farm Crime.
Speaker 1: Revision's History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, bend at Aff Haffrey,
Speaker 1: and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shakerji. Fact
Speaker 1: checking by Onica Robbins. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
Speaker 1: Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original music by Luis Kara,
Speaker 1: Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorsky. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: my mom and to Jim Sullivan, my producer, Lucy's father
Speaker 1: for recording his very own rendition of you never even
Speaker 1: called me by my name, which Lucy tells me her
Speaker 1: dad sang to her all the time when she was
Speaker 1: growing up. I'm Malcolm Baba.
Speaker 10: And I never minded Arland but never.
Speaker 1: Maybe this is exactly this is exactly what I needed. Oh,
Speaker 1: very good, good, very lovely to be you welcome, Thank you, mommy.
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2: We'll talk to again, Okay, yeah,