How did Sears go from a one-man watch company to the biggest retailer in the world to bankruptcy?
I'm Robert Smith.
And I'm Jacob Goldstein.
On our new show Business History, we tell the stories behind the inventions and entrepreneurs that shaped our economy.
And we try and understand the lessons behind their success and failure.
Our new episode is about the rise and fall of Sears, an incredible story that is really the story of America in the 20th century.
Sears.
Rise.
Fall.
America.
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 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.
Yeah.
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.
Now, well, you're going to...
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.
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 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 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, that you challenged your teacher, Mrs. Brown.
Mrs. 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.
And 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, totally skip my mind, until i was randomly on the revisionisthistorycom 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.
It'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.
To get started, I did a little homework.
Sent out a tweet, asked listeners for feedback, scoured some Reddit threads, talked with people who'd 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 Hafri, 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.
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 8, we did an episode called Footnote, remember?
For our Guns series, about a guy living on an old plantation outside of Tuskegee.
Season 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.
Alabama.
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 want, 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 take certain turns.
Licking your fingers, sticking it to the wind and being like, 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 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.
In fairness to me and Jacob Eloise had been sitting in the back seat, and she is by nature quiet as a church mouse, 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?
Like, 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-Nadav-Haffrey, while Ben calls himself Ben-Nadav-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 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.
What 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.
Where were we?
One more memory.
We're celebrating our 10th anniversary.
And you were the principal figure in the founding of Revisionist History.
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 it felt that I waltzed in?
I had no idea who you were.
Right.
I did not read your resume in advance.
I never do.
That tracks.
I think it's pointless.
Wait, but I want to know, we had never met before.
We had never met before.
What were your impressions?
There I was, skinny Malcolm.
What did you think?
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 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.
Same old, same old.
And so, I'm not a mean person, but I needed to speak my truth.
No one is saying, no one is saying.
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.
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.
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.
I 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 OK, 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 pickup truck, She got run over by a damned old 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 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.
How did Sears go from a one-man watch company to the biggest retailer in the world to bankruptcy?
I'm Robert Smith.
And I'm Jacob Goldstein.
On our new show Business History, we tell the stories behind the inventions and entrepreneurs that shaped our economy.
And we try and understand the lessons behind their success and failure.
Our new episode is about the rise and fall of Sears, an incredible story that is really the story of America in the 20th century.
Sears.
Rise.
Fall.
America.
Okay, 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.
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 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 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.
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 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, 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.
I can't.
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...
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 aren't we the only person in the family that there's nothing I haven't written about?
So 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's 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.
No.
She's always been somebody's 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.
Yes, she's always been somebody, something.
And 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'd 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.
The specific line that's gone is which one?
Uh, let's go on again.
Um, she's always been somebody, something.
She's been everything but alone daughter, a lover, a daughter a lover, a wife and a mother.
She's been everything but alone yeah yeah, why is it that long?
I don't know.
I think that um, I don't know.
I think, when you see somebody 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 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?
Or is it going to be two?
Let's see.
Okay.
Okay, well, we'll see if this happens.
What 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.
As far as she could see from there, those were just the facts.
That's not right.
Hold one second.
There it is again.
Parapraxis.
Married in December, maybe work.
In a dress her mama made.
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.
We'll be right back.
So I wanted to go over our greatest found moment.
And I want to see whether you believe this is our greatest found moment.
Okay.
I called up Ben Nadaf-Haffrey again to talk about the time we went to Los Angeles for our 1936 Olympic Series.
And we go and see the legendary Milan Tiff, who I've been obsessed with since I was a kid.
Who I had never heard of, true to form.
Almost no one has ever heard of Milan Tiff, because he was briefly, the greatest triple jumper in the world at some point in the 1970s.
So you understand it's a small universe.
There's a small universe of people who remember track and field in the 70s and an even smaller universe of people who followed the triple jump.
And, above that, the top of the funnel is people who know yeah right, who know what the triple deal is.
Yeah, that's right, that's right.
But Milan was this kind of spectral...
He was an artist.
He spoke in these kind of gnomic utterances.
It was one of the trippiest mornings of my life.
He was drugs.
He's so fascinating.
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 track and field fan.
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 200 meter intervals on the track.
And I say to you, Ben.
And 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 McLaughlin.
You're using we liberally here.
It's the greatest.
For those who don't know who Cindy McLaughlin is, maybe the greatest female runner ever of the last 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 foul moment.
Here I was trying.
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 Medlectual, who I think is a neurologist in Switzerland, although who knows?
Oh, Malcolm, because magic in fairy tales follows symbolism, not physics.
The coach, dress, and servants are a 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 life's enduring and consequential and sometimes not so consequential mysteries.
One of you, who I'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 10 years has been how much all of us here at Revisionist History have enjoyed telling stories for all of 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 or 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 10th anniversary, Revisionist History!
Revisionist History Well, it was all that I could do to keep from crying.
Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Dadaf-Haffrey, and Nina Bird Lawrence.
Our editor is Karen Shikurji.
Fact-checking by Annika Robbins.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.
Original music by Luis Guerra.
Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski.
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 Gladwell.
And I never minded standing in the rain, baby.
But you don't have to call me darling, darling.
But you never even called me by my name.
Mommy, this is exactly what I needed.
Oh, very good.
Good.
Very lovely to hear you, Markham.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mommy.
I'll talk to you soon.
We'll talk to you again.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
