The Big Birthday Party

0:00There are moments in each of our lives that seem to change everything. an unexpected diagnosis, the sudden end of a relationship, the loss of a job. As our lives veer off course, it can feel like time is dividing into a before and an after. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist, and my new book, The Other Side of Change, Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans, is all about how we navigate these inflection points. The Other Side of Change pairs singular, real-life stories with scientific insights to help us find meaning in the tumult of change. What if we saw the hardest moments in our lives, not simply as something to endure, but as an opportunity to reimagine who we can be?

0:42I'm thrilled to share that Booklist gave The Other Side of Change one of its coveted starred reviews, saying, quote, It's impossible not to be moved. The Other Side of Change is out now. Get your copy today, wherever you like to buy books.

1:05Bushkin.

1:11So 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 this because I have spent a lot of time wondering 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. Really? And afterwards I said, that's enough. Okay.

2:10Now, well, are you going to explain what was enough? In case you're wondering, my mom is a therapist. I just thought it was a needless production to have all these people over. What should it have been instead? Well, what I do now is perfect, which is nothing. Oh, I see. 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.

3:03If 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 1st, and I just saw him on January 1st, and he said to me, with tones of great injury and reproach, today is my birthday. But I'm 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, that you challenged your teacher, Miss Brown.

3:45Mrs. Brown was my first grade teacher. I was very fond of Mrs. Brown. But one day at school, she brought up Christmas and Santa Claus. You put your hand up and said, there is no Santa Claus. And she had a real problem because here she was speaking to a group of small children who wanted to believe. Yes. They're linked, by the way. My disdain for Santa Claus and my disdain for my birthday is 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, 2025, was the 10th anniversary of when we started making Revisionist History, and I forgot all about it.

4:40Totally skipped my mind until I was randomly on the revisionisthistory.com website looking up some forgotten fact from an episode from season one, one of my favorites, Food Fight, and I noticed the release date. July 14th, 2016, and I realized, holy mackerel, we've been around for 10 years. The internet tells me that this is the tin or aluminum anniversary, which I have to say kind of proves my point. What are you supposed to do on your 10th anniversary? Write 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.

5:19It's better this way, I thought. But then I remembered a 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 10th Anniversary celebration.

6:03To get started, I did a little homework. Sent out a tweet, asked listeners for feedback, scoured some Reddit threads, talked 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, Ben Nadaf-Haffrey, who talked to my old producer, Eloise Linton, about a reporting trip we took back in 2021 for the episode, The Dog Will See You Now. Okay, so Malcolm wanted to do an episode on these dogs who were trained to smell COVID. and we found this center in Alabama that trained these specialized dogs.

6:50And 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.

7:31Season 10, we went to Scottsboro, Alabama for an episode of our 1936 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. Ben 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 at detecting COVID than even the most sophisticated molecular bioassay. 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.

8:11Alabama. Cute puppies. Viral epidemics. My feeling was that this might be the perfect revisionist 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, maps. He doesn't believe he uses a map. He doesn't want, he doesn't, I mean, you can ask him his philosophy on it. I'm sure he has some great answer, but he would not use a map. So it was kind of me and Jacob secretly checking our, you know, Google Maps and sort of suggesting that he takes certain turns. Licking your fingers, sticking it to the wind and being like, it's that way.

8:50Yeah, exactly. 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 cell phone 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 sort of gas station and was contemplating calling my family, calling my roommate, and saying, listen, my boss left me at a gas station.

10:03In fairness to me and Jacob, Eloise had been sitting in the back seat, and she is by nature quiet 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 10 miles max. And in 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?

10:40Like, what went through? I don't think we really talked about it, because we were also late. 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 Nadaf Haffrey, while Ben calls himself Ben Nadaf 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?

11:21I would be unstoppable. So I'm deeply appreciative of that Nadaf in the middle of Ben's name. I want to give it the kind of relish I believe it deserves. Nadaf 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 ambulances.

12:05What do you say? But when the ambulance arrived a few minutes later. And what do I say? When the ambulance. That's what it says. Ambulance.

12:20Where were we? One more memory. We're celebrating our 10th anniversary. Oh, my God. You were the principal figure in the founding of Revisionist History, right? That's crazy. I guess. I mean, yeah, I was there. I was there from the very, very start. I remember our very first meeting. Mia LaBelle, the person who taught me everything there is to know about podcasting. I want you to go back. So we were interviewing people and you waltzed in. is that how is that how it felt that i want that i waltzed in i had no idea who you were right i did i did not i did not read your resume in advance i never do that tracks i think it's pointless um 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 would you think well i knew your work coming in and I had read the outline of your...

13:23I'd given you an outline of some suggested ideas I had for the first season. Yes. Yes. And there was 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. I remember that perfectly. The minute I heard that, I fell in love with you. I was like, I so want to work with this woman. This is fantastic.

14:10It 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.

14:48Well, it was all that I could do to keep from crying. If you've never heard of David Allen Coe, by the way, let me just read you a line taken at random from his Wikipedia page. After concluding another prison term in 1967, Coe embarked on a music career in Nashville, living in a hearse, which he parked in front of the Ryman 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 country and western song.

15:32I wrote him back a letter, and I told him it was not the perfect country and western song because he hadn't said anything at all about mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk. So then Goodman writes a new verse, sends it to Coe, and Coe says, okay, now this really is the perfect country and western song. The last verse goes like this here. Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison And I went to pick her up in the rain But before I could get to the station in the pickle truck She got run over by a damned old train

16:38I 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 drunk. That's what I think we've learned over the first 10 years of this show. That getting something right doesn't require heroics. It's just following your nose and turning around when you mistakenly left someone behind. After the break, the celebration continues.

17:25There are moments in each of our lives that seem to change everything. An unexpected diagnosis, the sudden end of a relationship, the loss of a job. As our lives veer off course, it can feel like time is dividing into a before and an after. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist, and my new book, The Other Side of Change, who we become when life makes other plans, is all about how we navigate these inflection points. The Other Side of Change pairs singular, real-life stories with scientific insights to help us find meaning in the tumult of change. What if we saw the hardest moments in our lives, not simply as something to endure, but as an opportunity to reimagine who we can be?

18:09I'm thrilled to share that Booklist gave The Other Side of Change one of its coveted starred reviews, saying, quote, it's impossible not to be moved. The Other Side of Change is out now. Get your copy today, wherever you like to buy books.

18:28Okay, I have some thoughts about the first 10 years of Revisionist 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 and archival tapes stitched together with bits of narrative here and there, you aren't saying, I like what you made.

19:06You'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 100 Million from Season 1. 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.

19:41And yet in 2016, Stanford's endowment was$22 billion. The UC system's endowment, much, much smaller, by about$8.5 billion. 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 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.

20:30And 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 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.

21:15There'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, he'd screw it up, get the words wrong, break out into totally inappropriate laughter. The world's a stage, and each must play a part.

22:02The 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.

22:42I 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 we'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 tumultuous story, it was my dad. And so I finally was like, you know what, why are we the only person in the family that there's nothing I haven't written about?

23:21So I was 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. Yeah. She's always been somebody something. She's been everything but alone. A daughter, a mother, a life, a daughter, a lover, a wife, and a mother. She's lived every life but her own. Yeah, she's always been somebody something.

24:01And there's a line that says, you know, 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 um a lot of times i'll go hold on and divert and tell a funny story really quickly um yeah wait what's the specific line that's gone is which one uh what's gone again um she's always been somebody something she's been everything but alone daughter A daughter, a lover, a wife, and a mother. She's been everything. But alone? Yeah.

24:47Yeah. Why is it that long? I don't know. I think that...

24:55I don't know. I think when you see somebody give so much of themselves, and that's truly the only thing that she will ever 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 Parapraxis. 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. Wait, Casey, can you play that song for us?

25:35There's just going to be two. Let's see. Okay. Okay, well, we'll see if this happens.

25:55What did I just say? Sorry, I'm thinking about Mom. 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 to hold just right Fate would come and carry her away

26:31As far as she could see from there Those were just the facts of... That's not right. Hold one second. There it is again. Parapraxis. Married in December, maybe we're In a dress her mama made She looked all grown up standing there like that I've been making things my whole life. What I've learned over the last 10 years of doing this is that I much prefer finding things.