A Treat for the Die-Hards

Episode Summary

Paragraph 1: The podcast host Malcolm Gladwell introduces a live show that Revisionist History did in New York and Philadelphia as a treat for diehard fans. He shares excerpts from those shows where he discusses with the audience and comedian Mike Birbiglia what makes an ending of a story work. Gladwell explains that most endings don't work because authors don't put enough thought into wrapping things up. Paragraph 2: Gladwell argues that endings carry a disproportionate weight in our evaluation of stories. He notes that while we judge people based on first impressions, our assessment of stories is entirely dependent on the ending. Gladwell brings Birbiglia on stage, who talks about deliberating between two different endings for his show. Birbiglia then shows a clip from the ending he went with for his show The New One, which shows him laughing with his wife and daughter, representing his emotional change. Paragraph 3: After the clip, Gladwell and Birbiglia discuss how the ending Birbiglia chose aimed to convey only a small change in his character after mocking parental cliches. Gladwell argues a great ending involves a hint of transformation without drastic change. He uses the movie Big as an example of a superb ending showing subtle change. Gladwell then asks Birbiglia if he had the ending in mind when writing his show, to which Birbiglia says yes. Paragraph 4: A week later in Philadelphia, Gladwell reflects on Revisionist History endings that did and didn't work. He plays the ending of an episode defending Brian Williams, which unexpectedly criticizes Williams for apologizing. Gladwell also shares the ending of an episode on self-driving cars, which failed to get the message across that the cars enable bad behavior. He reads critical emails from listeners showing the ending didn't betray expectations. Paragraph 5: Gladwell argues the Waymo episode failed because he couldn't convince listeners to make the turn in perspective he wanted. He says the perfect ending involves knowing the turn you want to make from the start. He shares the ending of an episode on the saddest song, which plays the song at George Jones' funeral to capture the intended emotion. Gladwell says the best stories start with the ending and work backwards.

Episode Show Notes

Every writer, podcaster and storyteller obsesses about how they begin a story. But they rarely pay enough attention to endings. Nothing matters more. Malcolm and Mike Birbiglia solve endings for you.

From our first-ever Revisionist History: LIVE events at the Town Hall in New York City and the Fillmore Philadelphia, Malcolm revisits how he’s tried to land the narrative plane.

If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts, be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_04: AI has the power to automate. But if it's using untrusted data, can you trust the results? Your business doesn't just need AI, it needs the right AI for your business. Introducing Watson X, a platform designed to multiply output by tailoring AI to your needs. When you Watson X your business, you can train, tune, and deploy AI all with your trusted data. Let's create the right AI for your business with Watson X. Learn more at ibm.com slash watsonx. IBM, let's create. SPEAKER_06: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on this show, you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back, and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_05: These days, there are tons of studies exploring what it takes to keep people happy at work, and the science shows that to be happier, workers need to feel appreciated and valued. They also need to feel protected. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. From supplemental health benefits to coverage for life and loss and more, the Hartford has flexible products and personalized service solutions to meet the diverse and unique needs of your employees. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. SPEAKER_08: ["The Hartford Journal-A-Tone"] ["The Hartford Journal-A-Tone"] Pushkin. SPEAKER_01: ["The Hartford Journal-A-Tone"] ["The Hartford Journal-A-Tone"] ["The Hartford Journal-A-Tone"] ["The Hartford Journal-A-Tone"] ["The Hartford Journal-A-Tone"] Hello, hello, hello. SPEAKER_08: Thank you for coming. My name is Malcolm Glavon. I am the host... ["The Hartford Journal-A-Tone"] ...of The Vision of History, brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Not long ago, in a probably ill-advised experiment, all of us at Revision of 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 that experimentation, we thought we'd share a few excerpts from those shows with all of you, the real audience. SPEAKER_08: And what you're hearing is me standing up in front of the crowd, confessing I have no idea what's about to happen. They tried to get me to rehearse, and I just 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 the snazzy Adidas, old school Adidas, the 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 is Born, Samuel Goldwyn, car accidents, Atlanta. We hung out in graveyards and took a group road trip to Margaret Mitchell's archives at the University of Georgia. A very Revisionist History mashup. SPEAKER_08: 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 a 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 do we do with frustrated Catholicism? Not sure. 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 we're gonna start with Mike. Mike, come on out. Hope you're back there. SPEAKER_07: Thanks. Thanks, Bob. This is my favorite podcast. So it's a very strange sensation to be inside of my favorite podcast. I don't know how it's gonna go. Madam, Mike. SPEAKER_08: By the way, you weren't offended when I said you were part of the Georgetown University comedy mafia. No, not at all. It's legit. No, it's not. I mean, gosh, John Mulaney and Nick Kroll. SPEAKER_07: Jim Gaffigan, Nick Kroll, Jeff Monovak. Yeah, there's just a whole bunch of them. Brit Marling. Brit Marling, there's so many. And by the way, Bradley Cooper. SPEAKER_07: It's kind of unbelievable. You remember, I'll tell you a funny thing about when I intersected with Bradley Cooper. I never knew him except that we were in theater at Georgetown at the same time. I think maybe one year. He's a little older than me. And he was most famous on campus for being the most attractive person anyone had ever seen. I'm not even kidding. I'm literally, people would say, have you seen Bradley Cooper? I swear to God. Not in a play. Have you seen him? SPEAKER_08: Yeah, that's gotta be hard. Life can be really hard sometimes. Mike, OK, so the reason I wanted to talk to you with endings is 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. 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 just don't want to be there for that. I was like, all right. Doesn't matter that I've spent three days getting to page 395. I just can't. SPEAKER_07: No, no, I'm similarly obsessed. But I go through four or five endings before I land on an ending. SPEAKER_08: You don't start with the ending and look back. No, no. As a matter of fact, the old man in the pool, SPEAKER_07: I'm deliberating right now between two different, distinctly different endings. And what would describe the two options? SPEAKER_08: Describe them emotionally. Is there a difference in the emotion? SPEAKER_07: I can't give away what the ending is. Oh, come on. Because it's fundamental. But you know what? I'm kidding. But you know what I'll do? I can tell you that I have two different endings for my last show, which was called The New One. And one of them is me and my wife and my daughter sort of laughing together on the couch together in our house. And earlier in the show, I talked about how the premise of the show is I never wanted to have a child. And the show is about 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. And then the emotional turn of it is that I was wrong. But there were two different endings that we had along the way. 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 basically become all the cliches of parents who I find so annoying, which is like, I just want to see the world through babies' eyes. We have that. SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Should we show the clip? Oh, yeah, please. OK. Let's just show this clip. SPEAKER_07: Una loves the couch. She goes, couch! SPEAKER_06: Wug! Pillow! SPEAKER_07: She's a genius. Three of us sit on the couch in the department store. Una's hiding behind each of us. And we go, where's Una? Where's Una? She's clinging to my back as I spin. The more she clings, the more I'm committing. Like, where is Una? Where is she? SPEAKER_06: And she starts laughing so hard, like the hardest SPEAKER_07: I've ever seen anyone laugh my whole life. And I'm in the jokes business. 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 going to grow up and find out that the Earth is sinking in the ocean. We might have to live in an almond milk jug in Pennsylvania. 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 at a new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, way from my perspective, and Jen's perspective, and Una's perspective, all at once. We're laughing as one. And in that moment, I feel full. I'm seeing the world. I'm just like, through baby's eyes. SPEAKER_08: What's the work that ending's doing? SPEAKER_07: Oh, so that ending is. You're tearing up. SPEAKER_08: Are you tearing up? You're tearing up. You're tearing up watching yourself. SPEAKER_07: How dare you, sir? At the town hall? You call me out where we have our town meetings every week? We're all at them, right? No, it is emotional, because it's about when my daughter is 18 months old, and she's seven years old now. So that part of it's emotional. So the goal of this ending is the show really mocks, to the point of it mocks people with children so mercilessly. If you never want to have children and want to mock people who have children, you're going to love the first half of this special. SPEAKER_07: For example, a year after this came out, this came out a few years ago, I was sent a Reddit thread that was from 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 a child. SPEAKER_07: Then they hate it. SPEAKER_08: That's one of my definitions of a story. The difference between a story and an anecdote is a story is a narrative that betrays the listener's expectations. There must be an active betrayal for the story to work. Interesting. SPEAKER_07: But wait. So there is a betrayal. But then ultimately, with this ending, the goal is to point out after all the cliches of seeing the world through babies' eyes and all this stuff, and it's the most joy I've ever experienced, all these things that you hear these annoying parents say all the time, I concede that I have a moment of that, a moment where I'm seeing the world through babies' eyes. And to me, that's the essence of the type of ending I enjoy. Not everybody enjoys. I enjoy an ending where there's a hint of we understand SPEAKER_07: that the emotional journey of the story is this big. We've swung to all over the pendulum. But ultimately, the character we invest in changes this much. So one of my favorite endings of all time is from the movie Big, Penny Marshall movie with Tom Hanks. And I wish I was big. And then he goes to the carnival. And then he's a grown up. And he has a girlfriend and a job and all these things. And he does the whole thing. And then he gets to choose at the end. He's going to be big or he's going to 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 metaphor 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 changed probably this much. SPEAKER_08: I want to go back to your show for a moment. When you were doing that show, did you have that turn in mind or that idea that you were going to be moving just a little? Did you start with that? Yeah, I think, yeah. SPEAKER_07: Because the alternate ending, I've literally never spoken about this. I performed an alternate ending because I toured these shows for like numbers of years. Old Man in the Pool, the show I'm starring now, I've toured for probably three plus years. Probably three and a half years I've 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 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. It's like sand, like, osha, wada. It's similar, it's like she's a genius. It's sort of the same joke. But then she picks up a piece of plastic from the beach and she's just, it's garbage. And it evokes all of those feelings I have about like, we're just living in the dystopia. And why are we having children? This is insane, right? I could see why you didn't go that in. SPEAKER_07: Malcolm, how dare you? In the location of our weekly meetings. Is it because now it's too much? It was too sad. Too sad. SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it's too much movement. You want a little movement. You don't want to. SPEAKER_07: So that's why that ending went away, because ultimately people would leave the theater and they would go like, that made me feel sort of bad about stuff. But the ending that we went with, just to be clear, I mean, endings are very personal for people. Like, some people, I don't, in that ending you just watched, some people left the theater and said, you're still kind of a jerk. You know what I mean? I would get very personal responses where people are like, you're like an ungrateful dad. You're a bad dad, all this stuff. And I'm like, no, no, I'm being honest with my experience. And this is pretty close. SPEAKER_08: Bye. 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 10 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 10 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 30 classes with your history professor, your experience in the final class or the final five classes or even the final 29.99 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 back loaded. 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 Mike Bigman. When we come back, endings, part two. People are excited about what AI will do for them. SPEAKER_04: At IBM, we're excited about what AI will do for business, your business. Introducing Watson X, a platform designed to multiply output by training AI with your data. When you Watson X your business, you can build AI to help coders code faster, customer service respond quicker, and employees handle repetitive tasks in less time. Let's create AI that trains AI to help users build their own business. We're going to talk about what AI will do for them. In less time, let's create AI that transforms business with Watson X. Learn more at IBM.com slash Watson X. IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_08: Do you know that right now, as you listen to this, there's an astronaut named Frank Rubio in some tiny spacecraft way, way up there in space. He left for the International Space Station in September of last year, thought he was going for six months. And then once he was up there, NASA called him up and said, actually, Frank, we want you out there for a year, 371 days to be exact. My question is, if you're NASA and you pull that bait and switch once, how do you recruit the next crop of astronauts? I mean, you say to your recruits, I need you to leave your family and friends and everything you know and love dearly, eat food out of a tube, but only for six months. And they're like, wait, look at Frank. That's what you told him, and he's still up there. Recruiting for astronauts, if you're NASA, is hard. If only there was some sophisticated job recruiting site capable of finding those few Americans who are perfectly happy to float around in space for an undetermined length of time. Sadly, for NASA, there's no such tool. But for the rest of us, oh, yes, there is. ZipRecruiter, new hires cost, on average, $4,700 for all of us non-spaceflight companies. And with that kind of money at stake, you have to get it right. So what's the most effective way to find the right people for your roles? ZipRecruiter. See for yourself. Right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash gladwell and experience the value ZipRecruiter brings to hiring. Once you post your job, ZipRecruiter's smart technology works quickly to identify people whose skills and experience line up with exactly what you want. It's simple. ZipRecruiter helps you get hiring right. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free before you commit. ZipRecruiter.com slash gladwell. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash G-L-A-D-W-E-L-L. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Somewhere out there, believe it or not, there's someone who wants Frank Rubio's job. SPEAKER_06: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new podcast about the viruses that shape our lives. It's a show about how viruses attack us and how we fight back. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on Incubation, we'll hear how scientists have pioneered new techniques in the fight against viruses. SPEAKER_00: There was just something about the way the virus was shaped. It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine. SPEAKER_06: Until now. Until now. We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth. SPEAKER_03: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists. SPEAKER_06: Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_08: A week after we did our town hall show, we took the train down to Philadelphia, rented out the Fillmore Theater, ate cheesesteaks, 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 of the way through, there's just too many balls in the air, I'm out. I'm not gonna 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 the distinction between an anecdote and a story. An anecdote is a narrative that conforms with your expectations. So, the craziest thing happened to me last night, I found a hundred dollar 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, a 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 a hundred dollar 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 Revisionist History is, we always want to tell a story. We always want, in some way, to betray our audience's expectations. So, I wanted to give you a couple of examples of how we approach that at Revisionist History. You know, a couple years ago, seasons ago, we did an episode called Free Brian Williams, which some of you will remember. And 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 it turns out he wasn't fired on. And so, all kinds of people brought this up and called him a liar and self-aggrandizing, and he was forced out of his job. And if you've listened to it, the whole episode is a defense of Brian Williams. It's this 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-aggrandizing liar. He was just a human being. And now, none of that, of course, betrays the expectations of the audience. The show's called Free Brian Williams. You know I'm gonna 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. SPEAKER_01: Looking back, 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. SPEAKER_08: Oh, please, stop apologizing for a crime you didn't commit. Free Brian Williams. Now, 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. He didn't do anything wrong. Stand up for yourself, big man. Stop. All right, now, we don't always pull this off. 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, Waymo, which was, you know, Waymo 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 Waymo and it just shows up. There's no driver and you hop in. So we went there, me and my producer Jacob, and we drove around these Waymos. And our whole point was that people worry about autonomous cars because they think that they will make a mistake 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 20 cameras and LIDAR and radar. They're so perfect that they allow everyone else to misbehave. So that if you're a jaywalk, you wanna cross the street and you see a Waymo 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 Waymo comes, you keep playing soccer. You don't move. And if you're a cyclist and you wanna cycle to work down I-95, you cycle to work down I-95 because the Waymo 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 a complete non-starter. You can't drive a Waymo through any urban area because people are just gonna go nuts when they see the Waymo. So we thought the Waymo was, the I love you Waymo was sarcastic, right? So here's how it ends. Jacob and I, we order a Waymo to this parking lot of the Alamo Steakhouse in Tempe, Arizona and it comes and then we just start, forgive my language, fucking with the Waymo. And we throw beach balls at it and it, like a $4 beach ball and it just stops because it's Waymo, it's like super polite. Not gonna harm a hair on the head of the beach ball. And then I decide what I really wanna do is I wanna run next to the Waymo and then just constantly cut in front of the Waymo to see what the Waymo will do, right? So here, run the clip. Now he's taking off, oh, he comes through. Waymo is freaked out, freaked out. He thinks he's going. He's got ahead of me. I'm gonna catch him. Waymo, Waymo, Waymo. SPEAKER_03: Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. SPEAKER_08: Hold on, Jim. Oh, let me get in. SPEAKER_01: Waymo, stop! SPEAKER_08: Waymo 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 Waymo. So. We tweet out the announcement of the show and you know what happens? Waymo retweets the tweet. They're like, we love the show. It's fantastic. So we said that autonomous vehicles don't actually work and Waymo's like, you called the show, I love you Waymo. 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'll read you some of the emails we got from readers. Big fan of Revisionist History. I'm trying to figure out if I love you Waymo is sponsored content. Wait, I thought we were attacking Waymo. 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. It was just a 30 minute Waymo love fest. No, it went on for 38 minutes. You had to listen to the last eight. Number four. What the hell was that? Number five. Was that an infomercial for a while? Now are these people dumb? No, I don't, no one who listens to Revisionist History can be dumb. No, 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 scruff 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 where you start with the ending and work backwards. Where you know absolutely the turn you want to make. And there's one, one of my absolute favorite episodes was exactly this. It's called The King of Tears from season two or three. And it was about the saddest song in the world. Anyway, 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 have three extra hours, like if you're incarcerated and have time on your hands, you must watch George Jones's funeral. It's one of the most epic, 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, it's too amo. Every single person in all of Nashville is there in full regalia, cowboy hats up to wazoo. Everyone's like finding a way to weep, out weep each other on stage. But the climax is the great George Jones song was of course the saddest song ever written by Bobby Braddock. He Stopped Loving Her Today about a guy who'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 you realize, oh no, no, no, he's dead and that's why he stopped loving her. So actually we're gonna play this, play Alan Jackson, Alan Jackson who's at the end of the funeral, it's the climax, sings He Stopped Loving Her Today for George Jones' wife who's in the front row, right? So it's so geniusly met, hold it, play the beginning of Alan Jackson. SPEAKER_01: As the years went slow, and you realize as he sings, SPEAKER_08: 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. He stopped loving her today. SPEAKER_08: And if you aren't crying, I can't help you. SPEAKER_04: Love you George. SPEAKER_08: If only every story ended as well as that one. Revisionist History is produced by Eloise Linton, Leman Gistu and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney, original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Jason Gambrell, engineering by Sarah Bruguerre and Nina Lawrence, fact checking by Kecia Williams and live production by Kate Downing. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew who helped pull off this live experiment. Carrie Brody, Pether Fain, Blair Gilkes, Jason Gambrell, Nina Lawrence, Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler, John Schnarz, Maggie Taylor and Jacob Weisberg. And a big thank you to Mike Birbiglia 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. Malcolm Glabo here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got you back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. 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And streaming on Paramount+.