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