Revisionist History - Introducing Revisionist History Season Two

Episode Date: May 26, 2017

From bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell, season two of Revisionist History launches June 15th. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. On my tombstone, it's going to say, Malcolm Gladwell, rest in peace. His one big idea is that there was one big idea to explain everything. I began season two of Revisionist History with the same obsession. I think I interviewed 30 or 40 people, read a few dozen books, camped out in the NYU library, all in search of that little tingle. That moment when you realize that actually this is just weird enough. This is totally some history with revising. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mark Cohen, philosopher. You can't step in the same river twice because each time you step in the river,

you're stepping into different water. And then the professor starts talking about Heraclitus, rivers, and the ship of Theseus. And light bulbs, light bulbs go off. The question is, if you have a ship and you change, it's like some ancient Greek thing, and you change one board at a time, is, at the end of the day, is the ship different? Oh, yeah. That's what this is. In the season coming up, I'm going to take you to McDonald's and the french fries they had back in the day. Texture on 637 is shatteringly crisp.

It's amazing. Perfect french fry texture. I'm going to take you on a little tour of the golf courses of Los Angeles and the dark secret behind their existence. Looks like a couple of layers of barbed wire. This looks like the Berlin Wall. I don't think they want us to get in there. And tell you a story about a truly dysfunctional friendship.

It was clearly the only person he ever loved in his life. There was no one else. It's possible, possible, that all of that is about the river. And that leads to the thought that no compound material object lasts any time at all. It's constantly being renewed and replaced by new objects. Or not. As always with revisionist history, reasonable minds will probably disagree.

Revisionist history, because sometimes the past deserves a second chance. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Season 2 of Revisionist History launches June 15th.