A Treat for the Die-Hards

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello, Hello, Hello, thank you for coming. My name is Malcolm Baba. I am the most history baught to you by pushing the industries. I think there's a whole Not long ago, in a probably illogized experiment, all of us at Revision's History decided to do two live shows, one in New York and one in Philadelphia. All kinds of people came to watch a little treat for the diehards, and in the spirit of the experimentation, we thought we'd share a few excerpts from those shows with all of you, the real audience. And what hearing is me standing up in front of the crowd confessing I have no idea what's about to have. They tried to get me to rehearse tonight. Didn't want to do it, so you're all kind of guinea pigs, for which I apologize, but I'm very excited. I broke out snazzy Adidas, Adidas seersucker, the whole thing. This is. I rarely dress up, so this is a very very big occasion for me. So what we're gonna do is we At the time, I was working on an episode of Revisionist History about a very well known movie, almost a perfect movie, except the writers had screwed up the ending. If you want to listen to that episode, it's called Starstruck. You can check it out in the feed. It goes in a million directions, Gone with the Wind, Star was Born, Samuel Goldman Car Accidents Atlanta. We hung out in graveyards and took a group road trip to Margaret Mitchell's archives of the University of Georgia, very revisionist history in mash up. But at the live show, I just wanted to zero in on the core question raised by the episode, which is what makes an ending work? Because the truth is, most endings don't work right. You sit in the movie theater and at hour three of the Blockbuster, you think, did no one at the studio give any thought about how to wrap this thing up? That's what I wanted to get at. Why are endings so hard? So in our New York show at the town Hall, I invited the comedian Mike Birbiglia up to the stage to join me in the discussion. Brilliant, brilliant comedian, a member of the famous Georgetown University comedy Mafia, which we can talk about with Mike if we want. It's basically every indie comic worth their salt went to Georgetown. I don't know why, what we do with frustrated Catholicism.

00:03:05
Speaker 2: I'm not sure.

00:03:07
Speaker 1: He's about to go on tour with his show Old Man in the Pool, The Old Man in the Pool. It's a brilliant, brilliant title, and so he we can start with Mike, Mike, come on out.

00:03:20
Speaker 2: I hope you back there.

00:03:35
Speaker 3: Thanks.

00:03:37
Speaker 4: This is my favorite podcast.

00:03:38
Speaker 5: So it's a very strange sensation to be inside of my favorite podcast.

00:03:44
Speaker 6: I don't know how it is.

00:03:44
Speaker 1: Go that man of mine. By the way, you weren't offended when I said you were part of the Georgetown University comedy move the legit. No, it's a description.

00:03:55
Speaker 5: I mean, gosh, it's John mulaney and uh nik Krol, Gavin Nick Krawl, Jackman Novak.

00:04:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's just a whole bunch of them. Marling, Britt Marling, There's just there's so many.

00:04:08
Speaker 1: And by the way, Cooper, it's kind of unbelievable, you remember that.

00:04:12
Speaker 5: I'll tell you a funny thing about when I was I intersected with Bradley Cooper. I never knew him except that we were in theater at Georgia at the same time, I may think maybe one year as a little older than me, and he was most famous on campus for being the most attractive person anyone had ever seen that.

00:04:30
Speaker 6: I'm not even kidding. I'm literally a People would say, have you seen Bradley Cooper? I swear to God, not in a play? Have you seen him?

00:04:42
Speaker 1: Yeah? That's gotta be hard.

00:04:45
Speaker 4: My life could be really hard sometimes, Mike.

00:04:49
Speaker 1: Okay. So, and the reason I wanted to talk to you with endings because I feel like I've often felt that no one's more obsessed with endings than I am. And I'll tell you why. But and I say this also to say that I think you might be as obsessed as I am. I am someone who I will very often read a thriller and stop five pages before the end because I'm concerned that the author isn't going to pull it off, and I I just don't want to be there for that. I was like, all right, it doesn't matter that I've spent three days getting to page three hundred and ninety five. Yeah, I just I can No.

00:05:24
Speaker 5: No, I'm similarly obsessed, you know, but I go through four or five endings before I land on an ending.

00:05:31
Speaker 1: You don't start with the ende of of them.

00:05:33
Speaker 6: No.

00:05:33
Speaker 5: No, As a matter of fact, the old man in the pool, I'm deliberating right now between two different, distinctly different endings.

00:05:39
Speaker 1: And what we describe the two options simply describe them emotionally. Is there a difference in the emotional.

00:05:46
Speaker 5: It's I can't give away what the ending is. It's a little fundamentally, but you know what I'm kidding, But you know what I'll do. I can tell you that the two different endings for my last show, which is called The New One and uh and one of them is me and my wife and my daughter sort of laughing together on the couch together in our house, and I early you're in the show.

00:06:09
Speaker 4: I talked about how the premise.

00:06:11
Speaker 5: Of the show is I never want to have a child, and the show is about and it's all the reasons why I never want to have a child, and then it's about how we had a child and how I was right, uh and then and then and then the emotional turn of it is that I was wrong and and uh and and and and there. But there were two different endings that we had along the way that we're uh and and one of them is the one that it is, which is my wife and daughter and I are laughing together on the couch and I basically I don't say this, but I say I basically become all the cliches that of parents who I find so annoying, which is like, I just want to see the world through babies eyes.

00:06:54
Speaker 1: You know, wait, we have that. Yeah, we actually show them, we show oh yeah please, yeah, okay, okay, let's show this. Let's just show this.

00:07:01
Speaker 5: Who loved the couch?

00:07:02
Speaker 1: She goes couchs wog ow, Wow.

00:07:12
Speaker 7: She's a genius.

00:07:18
Speaker 5: Three of us sit on the couchs in the department store. None is hiding behind each of us, and we could where' zuona?

00:07:25
Speaker 4: Where's Zuona?

00:07:26
Speaker 5: She's clinging into my back because I spend The more she clings, the more I'm committed.

00:07:29
Speaker 1: Like where is Oh? Where is it?

00:07:33
Speaker 5: And she starts laughing so hard, like the hardest I've ever seen anyone laugh my whole life.

00:07:37
Speaker 4: And I'm in the joke's business.

00:07:41
Speaker 5: At this idea that she's tricking us, the people in power, the people who know everything. She's fooled us completely at least this once. And look, I know she's gonna grow up and find out that the earth is singing in the ocean. We might have to live in an almond milk jug in Pennsylvania, and people can be horrible. But as I'm staring at this monkey on a couch, I feel like she might be one of the people who changes that trajectory. She's laughing so hard that I start laughing in a new way from my perspective and Jen's perspective and Owner's perspective all at once, we're.

00:08:17
Speaker 7: Laughing as one. And in that moment, I feel full. I'm seeing the world through babies.

00:08:51
Speaker 1: So what what's the work that ending's doing?

00:08:55
Speaker 5: Oh?

00:08:55
Speaker 1: So that ending is cheering up, cheering, cheering up, you cheering up, watching yourself?

00:09:04
Speaker 4: How dare you, sir?

00:09:06
Speaker 1: At the town hall?

00:09:08
Speaker 4: You call me out where we have our town meetings every week? We're all at them right.

00:09:15
Speaker 1: The uh, No.

00:09:18
Speaker 7: It is.

00:09:18
Speaker 5: It's emotional because it's it's about when my daughter was eighteen months older and and she said, you know, seven years old now, So it's a yeah, so that part of its emotional. But yeah, So the goal of this ending is the show really mocks to the point it mocks people with children so mercilessly. If you never want to have children and want to mock people who have children.

00:09:45
Speaker 4: You're gonna love the first half.

00:09:47
Speaker 1: Of this special.

00:09:49
Speaker 4: For example, like when I like a year after this came out. This came out a few.

00:09:53
Speaker 5: Years ago, I was sent a Reddit thread that was from like a child free community on Reddit, and I have never seen a group of people more excited about the first half of a comedy special because they don't know it turns to me having a child, and then they feel completely betrayed when I have then they hate it.

00:10:21
Speaker 1: It's you know, that's one of my definitions of a story. The definition of a story and an anecdote is a story is a narrative that betrays through the listener's expectations. Right, there must be an act of betrayal for the story to work. Oh interesting, that's but.

00:10:37
Speaker 5: Wait, so there's a bit, so there is a betrayal, and then but then ultimately, with this ending, the goal is to point out after all the cliches of like seeing the world through baby's eyes and all this stuff, and it's the most joy I've ever experienced, all these things that you hear these.

00:10:56
Speaker 4: Annoying parents say all the time. I concede that.

00:11:03
Speaker 5: I have a moment of that, Yeah, a moment where I'm seeing the world through of his eyes and and and and to me, that's the essence of an the type of ending I enjoy, not everybody enjoys. I enjoy an ending where there's a hint of we understand that the that the emotional journey of the story is this big, we've we've swun to ball over the pendulum, but ultimately the person, the character who we invest in changes this much. So like one of my favorite endings of all time is from the movie Big.

00:11:41
Speaker 4: You know, Penny Marshall move with.

00:11:42
Speaker 5: Tom Hanks and I wish I was big, And then he goes to the carnival and then he's like.

00:11:48
Speaker 4: A grown up and he has a girlfriend and a job and all these things, and he literally and he does the whole thing.

00:11:53
Speaker 5: And then he gets to choose at the end, and he's gonna he's gonna be big, he's gonna be small again, and he chooses small, and there's this devastating moment where she looks back at him and it's his child self in a suit, and it's the visual metaph for of what we've experienced. Because he's both he's both of those things, and the change in him is imperceptible, but we know he's.

00:12:21
Speaker 1: Changed probably this much. I'm going to go back to your show for a moment. When you were doing that show, did you have that turn in mind to that idea that you were going to be moving just a little?

00:12:34
Speaker 3: Was that in?

00:12:36
Speaker 1: Did you start with that?

00:12:37
Speaker 7: Yeah?

00:12:37
Speaker 5: I think yeah, we because the alternate ending. I've literally never spoken about this. We I performed an alternate ending because I tore these shows for like numbers of years, like Old Man in the Pool, the Joe i'mtarn Now. I've toured for you know, for probably three plus years, probably three and a half years, have been workshopping it, and so this one was called the New One. I had another ending where this true story where my wife and daughter and I are on we go on a vacation together to the beach in California and we're on the beach and we're having this beautiful moment on the beach and UNA's like, it's similar to this.

00:13:16
Speaker 4: It's like it's like sand you know, like.

00:13:19
Speaker 5: Osha waa, you know, it's similar as like she's a genius.

00:13:24
Speaker 4: It's the same. It's sort of the same joke.

00:13:27
Speaker 5: But then she picks up like a piece of plastic from the beach and she's the spice garbage and it invokes it evokes all of those feelings I have about like we're just living in the dystopia and why are we having children?

00:13:43
Speaker 7: This is insane?

00:13:44
Speaker 1: Right, I could see why you didn't go that.

00:13:47
Speaker 5: End, Malcolm, how dare you in the location of our weekly meetings?

00:13:55
Speaker 4: You no, I know it was it was too sad, too sad.

00:13:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's too much movement. You wanted a little movie? Yes, you don't want to.

00:14:03
Speaker 5: So that's why that ending went away because ultimately people would leave the theater and they would go like.

00:14:08
Speaker 4: That made me feel sort of bad about stuff. But the ending that but the ending that we went with.

00:14:16
Speaker 5: Just to be clear, I mean, endings are very personal for people. Like some people, I don't in that ending. You just watch some people left the theater and said, you're still kind of a jerk, you know what I mean. Like I would get very personal responses where people are like, yeah.

00:14:35
Speaker 4: You're like an ungrateful dad, You're a bad dad.

00:14:38
Speaker 5: All this stuff, and I'm like, no, no, I'm being honest with my experience.

00:14:43
Speaker 4: And this is pretty close.

00:14:50
Speaker 1: This is exactly what we're talking about, which is that endings carry massive disproportionate weight. You don't go to a show or a movie or read a book and decide after the first ten pages that you love it. That's it. I mean, you might say that, but it's a contingent conclusion. You will rescind that opinion in a heartbeat if the last five pages or the last five minutes don't work. And what's weird about this, of course, is that it's the opposite of the way we evaluate human beings. There's a famous set of studies about college professors where they take student evaluations of their teachers that are generated over an entire semester and compare them to teacher evaluations made by students who've only seen a tiny video clip of the professor, like ten seconds. What do you find that the two sets of evaluations are the same. In other words, you're sitting in a class, you listen to your teacher for the shortest moment, and you decide I like them, I don't like them, and you never revisit that conclusion. The ending doesn't matter. If you have thirty classes with your history professor, your experience in the final class, or the final five classes, or even the final twenty nine point nine to nine classes does not alter your impression about the teacher. Our evaluations of other people are front loaded. That's why, correctly, our parents told us again and again about the value of making a good first impression. But our evaluation of stories is the opposite. It's backloaded. What happens in the last five minutes colors every conclusion we drew in the first two hours. Now, why is this? I have no idea, but I will guarantee you that every screenwriter and author and podcaster frets endlessly about how their stories begin, rewrites the beginning a million times, but aren't nearly as fastidious about the ending, which is nuts. We're all idiots, with the exception, of course, of micro biglail. When we come back endings Part two, a week after we did our town hall show, we took the train down to Philadelphia, rented out the Filmore Theater, eight cheese steaks, got into the mood, and for the opening of the Philly show, I decided to reflect back on some of revisionist history's most and least successful endings. What we're talking about tonight is endings, because I happen to be obsessed with endings. If I'm watching a movie and you know, three quarters the way through there's just too many balls in the air, I'm.

00:17:41
Speaker 7: Out.

00:17:42
Speaker 1: I'm not going to be party to that kind of destruction of the narrative form. You know, I can go on forever about this, and we will, actually this evening be going on forever about this. But you know, the crucial distinction in my mind is a distinction between an anecdote and a story. An anecdote is a narrative that conforms with your expectations. So the braasiest thing happened to me last night I found one hundred dollars bill on the street. That is not a story. That is an anecdote. The first sentence, craziest thing happened is the equal of the second sentence, one hundred dollar bill on the street. Right. A story, by contrast, is a narrative that betrays the audience's expectations. So a story would be the craziest thing happened to me last night. I found one hundred dollars bill on the street. I gave it to a tried to give it to a homeless man, and he said, I don't want your effing money. That's a story, right. It betrayed your expectation. That's not how you expected it to end. And the challenge of Revision's history is we always want to tell a story. We always wanted some way to betray our audience's expectations. So I wanted to give you a couple of examples of how we approach that at Revision's History. You know, a couple years of seasons ago, we did an episode called Free Brian Williams, which some of you will remember.

00:19:15
Speaker 5: And.

00:19:17
Speaker 1: You'll remember Brian Williams was the NBC anchor who was fired from his job because he went on Letterman one night and he told a story about being in a helicopter during the Gulf War, flying low over the desert and he was fired upon by the enemy and he was terrified, And then turns out he wasn't fired on, And so all kinds of people brought this up and called him a liar and a self aggrandizing and he was for he was forced out of his job. And if you've listened to it, the whole episode of the Defense of Brian Williams, it's a sort of argument about memory that says that our memory, particularly in high stakes moments like that, is profoundly flawed, and all of us make mistakes of memory along the lines of Brian Williams. So he wasn't a self a grand advertising liar, he was just a human being. And now none of that, of course, trace the expectations of the audience.

00:20:11
Speaker 7: Right.

00:20:11
Speaker 1: The show's called Free Williams. Brian Williams. You know I'm going to defend Brian Williams. But here's how it ended. It's a clip of the very end of the show. It's a clip of Brian Williams apologizing for his mistake looking back.

00:20:28
Speaker 3: It had to have been ego that made me think I had to be sharper, funnier, quicker than anybody else, put myself closer to the action, having been at the action in the beginning.

00:20:48
Speaker 1: Oh, please stop apologizing for a crime you didn't commit. Free Brian Williams. Yeah, do you see the betrayal there? You thought this was a defense of Brian Williams. But the last thing I do in the entire episode is attack Brian Williams for not defending himself. He's not a liar, but he's a coward.

00:21:12
Speaker 4: You didn't do anything wrong.

00:21:14
Speaker 1: Stand up for yourself, big man. Stop all right. Now, we don't always pull this out. There are times when the endings don't work. And a really good example of this is we did an episode last season called I Love You. Weimo which was you know. Weimo is a division of Google that makes autonomous cars, the kind that drive themselves, and they have them in Phoenix. You can go to Phoenix and you can order a Weimo and it just shows up the snow driver and you hop in. And so we went there, many of my producer, Jacob, and we drove around these Wemos, and our whole point was that people worry about autonomous cars because they think that they are will make a mistake, you know, and run over pedestrians. They think they're imperfect, but that's actually completely wrong. The problem with autonomous cars is that they're perfect. They don't make mistakes. I mean, they got twenty cameras and light ar and radar. They're so perfect that they allow everyone else to misbehave so that if you're if you see it, if you're a jaywalk, you want to you want to cross the street, and you see a Weimo coming, you just jaywalk. Because you know it will stop, right, It's perfect. And if you're a kid and you're playing soccer in the middle of the street with your friends and a Weimo comes, you keep playing soccer. You don't move. And if you're a cyclist and you want to cycle to work down, I'm ninety five. You cycle to work Down ninety five because the Weimo will drive very patiently behind you. It's not ever. So it's been sold to us by Silicon Valley as this kind of epical technological breakthrough. It's not. It's it's a complete non starter. You can't drive a Weimo through any urban area because people are just gonna go nuts when they see the Weimo. So we thought the Weimo was the I Love you Weimo was sarcastic. Right, So here's how it ends. Jacob and I we order a Weimo to this park, to this parking lot of uh the Almo Steakhouse in Tempe, Arizona, and it comes and then we just start forget my language, fucking with the weymow and we throw beach balls at it, and it like a four dollars beach ball, and it just stops because it's Weymo. It's like super polite, not gonna harm a hair on the head of the beach ball. And then then I decide what I really want to do is I want to run next to the Waimo and then just constantly cut in front of the weymouth to see what the Weimo will do. Right, So here, where's run the clip? Well he's taking up Oh, we come through waymore is freaked out, freaked out. He thinks he's going. He's got ahead of me.

00:24:02
Speaker 7: I'm going to catch him.

00:24:13
Speaker 1: Hold out you hold let you get in.

00:24:19
Speaker 7: Waimo.

00:24:21
Speaker 1: Stop. Weaimo was the perfect gentleman. He let me be the crazy one. Remember this the next time some Silicon Valley visionary promises you a future of perfect mobility, efficiency and clarity from the backseat of an autonomous vehicle. No, no, no, it's much better than that. It's me and Lance and Jonathan Vaughters and Jacob with his beach ball taking back the road. I love you Weimo. So retweet out the announcement of the show, and you know what happens. Wamo retweets the tweet. They're like, we love the show. It's fantastic. So we said that autonomous vehicles don't actually work and Weymo's like you called the show I Love You Wemo. That's all. They refuse to have their expectations betrayed. Right now, whose fault is that? I think it's my fault. And then we started to get emails from I'm reading some of the emails we got from readers, big fan of Revision's history. I'm trying to figure out if I Love You Weimo is sponsored content. Wait, I thought we were attacking Weimo email number two. I'm sure Malcolm and whoever is managing the show is smart enough to disclose when they're being sponsored. But this really felt like an AD. No, it wasn't an AD number three. At first, I thought my podcast episode didn't download correctly. Love it was just a thirty minute Weaimo love fest. No, it went on for thirty eight minutes. You had to listen to the last eight. Number four? What the hell was that? Number five? Was that an infomercial for a what? Now? These people dumb?

00:26:22
Speaker 7: No?

00:26:22
Speaker 1: I don't know one who listens to Revision's History can be dumb.

00:26:26
Speaker 5: No.

00:26:26
Speaker 1: They don't believe in stories. They believe in anecdotes. Right. They think that you can only have a narrative that conforms with your expectations. They don't understand that. No, no, no, no. What a real story does is betray your expectations. You screw up if that's the story you tell, right. If you can't convince people to make that turn, sometimes you really have to grab people the listener by the scrap of the neck and say no, no, you blockhead, this is going off in another direction. The perfect ending, the perfect story, to my mind, is the story. Will you start with the ending and work backwards? Well, you know absolutely the turn you want to make. And there's one of my absolute favorite episodes was exactly this. It's it's called the King of Tears from episode from season two or three, and it was about the saddest song in the world. Anyway, I'm I'm rooting around late one night on YouTube, and I run across George Jones's funeral, which is one of the By the way, if you if you have three extra hours, like if you're incarcerated and have time in your hands, you must watch George Jones's funeral. It's one of the most ethic, extraordinary, fantastic national events. They're all there, they're all weeping, they're all it's just it's just schmaltz upon schmaltz upon schmaltz. So I'm watching it like I'm weeping in my pajamas. Is two animals. Every single person in all of Nashville is there in full regalia. Cowboy hats up the wazoo. Everyone's like finding a way to weep out, wheep each other on stead. But the climax is the great George Jones song was, of course, the saddest song ever written by Bobby Braddock. It's he Stopped Loving Her Today about a guy who he's in love with a woman and he stopped loving her today when he dies. He only stops loving her when he's And the whole song leads up to you realize you think he's alive, and he realized, oh no, no, no, he's dead, and that's why he stopped on him. So Alan, we actually want to play this, play Alan Jackson. Wells Alan Jackson, who's at the end of the funeral. It's the climax sings he stopped Loving her Today for George Jones's wife, who's in the front row right. So it's so geniusly met play the beginning of Alan Jackson as years when clo and you realize as he sings that Braddock's song has gotten even more specific. It's no longer about a long ago love affair. It's about right now. This is the day George Jones stopped loving Nancy Jones. Alan Jackson takes off his hat and places it over his heart.

00:29:15
Speaker 4: He stop loving her.

00:29:20
Speaker 1: Today. And if you aren't crying, I can't help you.

00:29:29
Speaker 4: I love you, George.

00:29:36
Speaker 1: If only every story ended as well as that one. Revision's history is produced by Eloise Linton, Leeman Gistu and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by Jason Gambrel, engineering by Sarah Brugaer and Nina Lawrence, fact checking by Kishelle Williams, and live production by Kate Downey. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew who helped pull off this live experiment, Kerry Brodie, Pether Fame, Blair Gilkes, Jason Gambrel, Nina Lawrence, Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler, John Schnarz, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. And a big thank you to Mike Berbiglia as well as the town Hall in Manhattan and The Fillmore in Philadelphia. Stay tuned for more of revisionist History Live, coming soon to a city near you. I'm Malcolm Glabo.