Ken Burns is a documentary filmmaker, writer and historian known for his many films with PBS. His latest, “The American Revolution” premieres November 16th.
Ken joins Theo to talk about why he believes the American Revolution was the most important event since the birth of Christ, how George Washington organized America’s first army, and what the founding fathers really had in mind when writing the Declaration of Independence.
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He's covered some of the biggest events in U.S. history and his new film, The American Revolution premieres in November.
I had a great chat with the one and only Mr. Ken Burns.
I'm going to say it.
Yeah, and if you like to sit back, whatever you feel like, Ken, if you start to feel uncomfortable, just let us know and we'll get you.
I'm kind of in an edge of the seat guy.
You are?
Yeah.
Wow.
Excited.
That's an I've never heard somebody say like I'm an edge of the seat guy.
Yeah.
Like you're edging or whatever.
That's like it's just I'm excited.
Like uh, you know, oh yeah.
If I were an animal, I'd be a puppy.
Oh, yeah.
You know, kind of by the door.
Yeah.
Come on, come on, come on.
Yeah.
What are we doing?
Yeah it must be horrible that an animal, they don't even give it a key on its wrist or anything.
That's right.
For it to think it could have any, it's just sitting by the door.
Yes.
Exactly.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Yeah.
Like if your wife or husband were like that, and they're just sitting by the door.
You'd get them help.
Yeah, you or you'd you at least give them like a hug.
Yeah.
Or a spare key.
So they could at least have a chance.
Right.
You get them a little button they could hit.
Yes, right, just to walk out.
Yeah, that would help.
Yeah.
Um, we good, Zach?
Ken Burns, thank you so much for hanging out, man.
Pleasure.
My pleasure.
Good to be with you.
And thank you for all your uh your examination of um humanity, I guess, through documentaries.
I I was like, I I know about you as most people did, you know, kind of when you uh burst onto the scene with the Ken Burns effect.
I think that's when it's when it kind of hit a lot of my cult culture, you know.
You're like, instead of hiring actors and everything, we're just gonna slightly want to hear the story of how that happened.
Yeah, it's really pretty cool.
So, you know, I've been trying to make films about American history since like the mid-70s, and I'd had some success, a couple Academy Award nominations, but I'd hit the jackpot when this big series in 1990 came out on the Civil War series.
Yeah, which you know, used the photographs and stuff like that.
And and our idea was to energetically explore the landscape of a painting and treat an old photograph like it was a feature filmmaker's master shot, having a wide, a medium, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, an insert of detail.
So we were just sort of very energetically exploring the landscape of of each image.
And so I got a call in 2002, November, and it said it was Steve Jobs.
I went, Really?
And he goes, Yeah, he said, Will you come out and visit me?
And I said, Yeah, that's me knocking at the door.
So a few weeks later, in December of 2002, I'm in a room with him.
We're talking, and he brings in a couple of pretty nervous uh engineers.
Yeah.
And they're sh and I'm a Luddite.
And uh particularly You're a Luddite?
Yeah, meaning we're not a big computer person.
It represents a group in England in the 19th century who were opposed to technological changes.
And so Minnonite, Luddite, Amish, similar.
Well, not quite, it wasn't religious as much as it was a kind of a social anyway.
Okay, so Amish without the dairy kind of.
That's right.
Exactly.
So it's it's basically folks who are opposed to it.
I I'm not, I'm just inept.
So the children and my grandchildren help me with all the things.
Anyway, Steve is saying, look, we've been working on this thing, and every Mac computer that comes out next month, January of 2003, is gonna have this feature on it.
And he's showing me in it sort of like you can upload your photographs and pan and zoom on them.
Very, very simply, a kind of crude superficial uh version of um what we do or try to do with our stuff to wake up the image, to wake the dead, you know.
So um, I'm looking at it and I'm kind of going, cool, because I don't really know what's going on.
And um, and he says, So we'd like to keep the working title.
And I said, What's that?
And uh and he said, The Ken Burns effect.
I said, you know, I don't do commercial endorsements.
He goes, what?
And the engineers kind of blanch.
And I'd known a little bit that he had a temper.
He never showed it to me, but we went back to his office, and after an hour, I I worked out agreement that he could use it, but I'd um Yeah, I already had a temperature.
I already his his iPhone always had a crack screen.
Maybe.
But I know some folks who got yelled at.
He never he said, What?
So at the end I walked out and he basically agreed to give us what turned out to be over a million dollars of hardware and software that we gave away to nonprofits, except for one or two computers that stayed in the office because we didn't have a good Mac computer in the office.
And then we became friends for the rest of his life.
And so whenever I visited Silicon Valley, I'd stay with him, you know, his kids, his daughter uh became an intern for us for uh a couple of semesters.
So it was a really good relationship, but it is really funny.
It's the technological tale that wags the dog of what I'm trying to do, which is take these old things where you don't have newsreels or you don't have living witnesses and try to wake up moments in the past and make them as dramatically compelling as you would if you you could talk to some veteran, say of of the Iraq war who's still alive.
Well, you certainly mastered it, man, you know?
I mean, and yeah, and the Ken Burns effect, it's like that was at the time where everybody was trying to be could suddenly everybody could suddenly be a filmmaker, right?
That's right.
Well, what this is what Steve did.
I mean, by inventing this, he made us all filmmakers.
He made us it democratized it all.
And what you needed were the tools to be able to polish it.
I mean, my kids now and my grandkids can do stuff with this that I wouldn't have any idea how to do it.
And one of the cruder tools is the Ken Burns effect, which has saved lots of vacations, lots of birthdays, lots of memorial services, lots of bar mitzvahs, you know.
That's a great point.
You know what I mean?
And people say, oh, like, man, you didn't ask him for a cut.
And I said, No, I don't do commercial endorsements.
But if I'd said, like, I want one one hundredth of a penny every time it's used, he'd go, okay, we'll call it the pan and zoom effect.
You know what I mean?
It was like the the great thing was to just sort of split the difference in the middle and not be so obstinate that I couldn't yield.
I don't do commercial endorsements, so it was sort of awkward.
But at the same time, I wasn't endorsing a thing.
I was endorsing an idea of how you use and manipulate images, is which is what I do for an image.
Right.
And also you manipulate the past, right?
Just in a way to bring it to life, right?
That's true.
It's almost like you're giving CPR to it in a way, you know.
I can't believe that you said that because um my mom was sick uh from the time I was born, like a couple years in.
And you grew up here in New York City, which is where we are.
No, no, no.
I was born in Brooklyn.
I grew up in Delaware and Michigan and came east uh to Massachusetts for college.
But uh my mom had cancer from the very, very beginning.
And she died from when you were a child?
Yeah, when I was 11.
And it was just a horrible, just the worst, shittiest growing up.
And my dad had some mental illness stuff, so it was really hard.
I'm I'm not alone and having a hard childhood.
But it's not self-pity, you're just shit.
But I watched my dad cry at a movie after my mom died, and he had never seen him cry when she was sick or when she died, or at the impossibly sad funeral.
And I realized it was 12 years old.
I go, I'm gonna be a filmmaker.
This is 1965.
This is, you know, a long time ago, uh, 60 years ago.
Oh great time.
It's way too long to be without a mom.
But I but I said I that meant I'd be John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock, Hollywood directors, and stuff like that.
And then I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and they were all documentary, still photographers and filmmakers that reminded me that there's as much drama in what it what is and what was is anything to human imagination.
So I'm a documentary filmmaker.
By 22, I'm making films in history, and I've been doing that for 50 years.
So I I had a crisis of going through a crisis.
My late father-in-law was an eminent psychologist, and I said to him one night, I said, I seem to be keeping my mom alive.
And he goes, Yeah, I bet you blew out your candles on your birthday, wishing she'd come back.
And I go, How'd you know?
And then he named two or three other things that only I knew, you know, really intimate stuff.
Because that's how children like that operate.
Yes.
And and it's just, you know, what grief does and what the inability to express it when you're 11 years old or when you're two years old and realize there's never a moment when there's not a sword of Damocles hanging over your head that's going to ruin everything.
So I just I I I said, What do you mean?
And he goes, Well, look what you do for a living.
You wake the dead.
You make Jackie Robinson and Abraham Lincoln come alive.
Who do you think you're really trying to wake up?
And then all of a sudden, I knew that's what I do.
I'm waking the dead, and it's everything is a conversation with this woman that has not been around, Theo, for 60 years.
60 years, which is way too long to be without a mom.
It's all a love story, isn't it, in a way?
It's all a love story.
You know, there's a there's a musician, Steven Wilson Jr., who's really great.
He's a great poet.
Um he says that grief is only love that's got no place to go.
Yeah.
It's that's man.
I just well, just think about the energy, the propulsion of this loss, just for me, is and and also my father's sort of what he's the smartest guy I knew, but kind of a Maserati without a clutch, you know, looked really good, sounded voom boom really good, but couldn't get into first gear.
That that made me, you know, such, you know, keep working.
I mean, I've got 40 films, you know, I'm not stopping.
All my friends are retiring, and I'm like, what?
What's retiring?
You know, I'm you know Yeah, you're drinking plasma at the house and taking electrolytes.
I got stuff to do.
I got you know, if I were given a thousand years to live, I would never run out of topics in American history.
Like, so this is sort of a, you know, I make films about the U.S. But I make films about us.
You know what I mean?
Got you, yeah.
Lowercase two-letter, plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the U.S. And it is a magnificent space to operate in.
I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to be have the responsibility, it's a huge responsibility to dive into something like the Vietnam War, right now the American Revolution, which we just finished, and you know, or the Civil War, or World War II, or the biographies we did.
Huey Long, you know, we're talking about from your state of Louisiana, which is just like one of the great unknown stories.
It's such an amazing story.
Yeah.
There he is.
Good job.
Yeah, man.
Oh, he was like uh he was definitely a big he had amassed more personal power than anyone else in the history of the United States in a state context.
He was both governor and United States Senator, which is not legal.
And he was already running for president against uh Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 when he was assassinated in in September of 1935 in the state house in Baton Rouge, in the big magnificent Art Deco statehouse he'd built as a kind of monument to himself when he was governor.
Yeah, kind of wild to build a monument while you're alive.
And then it also immediately kind of turned into a mausoleum.
Yeah, exactly right.
Pretty wild how that works.
Well, as children, we would go there and uh yeah, it was like a big part of the field trips and stuff like that.
We're growing up in uh in Louisiana.
But yeah, there was something really amazing about him that he he riled the poor, but he also was able to operate with the elite.
You know, you have like um but it was hard to know if he was just out for himself.
That's how I felt at the end of watching your documentary ultimate corruption of power, you know, and and and Jefferson said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And so I think Huey has that.
But unlike all the other demagogues that we know, he actually did provide schools.
He did provide school books, he did build bridges, he did pave roads so that the poor of Louisiana could bring their products to market.
He did um, you know, create hospitals.
He did do all the things that he's that he said he was gonna do, but he didn't edit on corrupt fashion and and basically leveled as the journalist uh I have Stone said in our film, all the liberties of the Republic.
You know, he was kind of like a Caesar who took charge and thought it was his right to destroy the democratic institutions that had more or less work.
And so we have this woman from the garden district uh in in Louisiana, beautiful woman, high to the manor born, and she says in the film, right in the first couple of minutes there wasn't a Saturday night when we didn't talk about killing Yue E Long.
It didn't mean you were gonna do it.
You just wish there was some way to rid the state of this incubus, which is like an old, you know, evil thing.
And because he wasn't born into wealth.
He no, no, he's so that's another thing.
If you're not in that, if you're not part of that echelon, especially in a traditional area like New Orleans, like Louisiana, then you there's you never really can get to those rungs of that ladder.
Well, you know, it's really many different states, but certainly there's New Orleans, there's the Catholic South, there's the Protestant North, and he's from uh a wind parish in North Louisiana.
Oh, yeah.
There's nothing up there and And was able to articulate the aspirations of people who then surrendered to him and then also had to then pay the price for the kind of dictatorial stuff.
I mean, he was surrounded by jack booted state troopers.
He was, you know, had bodyguards.
He's eventually killed by the son-in-law of a judge that he fired, got out of his job.
And so uh, or or so we think.
Right.
Because with all, you know, things like that.
There's an attached conspiracy theory that maybe he didn't even have a gun, Carl Austin Weiss was his name.
Maybe he didn't do anything except confront Huey about this and that the bodyguard shot him and the ricochang but bullet in the close quarters of the of the hallway of this state house um uh ricocheted and killed him.
But, you know, we we just don't know 100% what happened, but it's one hell of a an American story.
Yeah.
I love it, man.
Yeah, I think one thing about documentaries is it makes people think that you you feel cared about, you know.
Yeah, I think the past feels cared about.
And there's something that's very beautiful about that.
Um the American Revolution, it's a new series.
It comes out next month.
It comes out in in November, November 16th.
And I've been working on it for when it comes out, it'll be nine years and eleven months.
I started it.
I said yes to it when Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency.
And you know, Mark Twain says history doesn't repeat itself.
He's absolutely right.
No event has happened twice.
But the Bible, Old Testament says there's nothing new under the sun, meaning human nature doesn't change.
So Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
So I've never worked on a film in which it wasn't rhyming in the present moment.
And so the revolution is just another one of these extraordinary stories, our origin story, which we've lost touch with.
Oh, I think yeah, there's no doubt about it.
It's at arm's length because there are no photographs, there's no newsreels, they're they're in buckled shoes, they got O's, they got breeches, they got waistcoats, they got powdered wigs, and somehow we don't want to fuss with the the great ideas.
And the great ideas are the greatest ideas ever.
I actually think the American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of the world.
Birth of Christ.
I heard you say that.
I really, really firmly believe that because if you think about it, up until that moment, everybody was under an authoritarian rule.
They were subjects, they were superstitious peasants, and we created citizens.
And that's a big deal.
When we say we hold these truths to be self-evident, there was nothing self-evident about what Jefferson was about to say that all men are created equal.
No one on earth had made that proposition that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Let's go.
That is not stuff that the world had ever really heard.
He had distilled a century of enlightenment thinking.
He'd been goaded on by what was happening in in the breakdown of relationships with the British over stuff and what became a quarrel between Englishmen, suddenly got broken out into natural rights.
Like this is what we all not only deserve, but the world needs to change.
And it did from that on moment on.
And that was Jefferson.
And that's Jefferson distilling it, but it's the sensibility of everybody.
The other thing is that it's a process thing.
It's like democracy isn't something that you it's a thing.
It's a process, it's something you do.
So when it says pursuit of happiness, the key is we can get to happiness in a second, but the key is pursuit.
It's like after a more perfect union, as the Constitution says, the pursuit means it's a process.
You're never getting there.
And happiness did not mean the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning, so that you would be virtuous enough.
They borrowed from the classical traditions to earn the right of citizenship.
And everybody taught you here as we were working on that virtue, virtue, virtue.
It's all about character.
It's all about the idea that character is destiny.
John Adams is petrified that there's too much ambition and avarice, too much pro uh lust for profit, that that we won't be virtuous enough to sustain this republic.
It's so interesting because they're all the ideas that we wrestle with today, you know.
So the declaration is kind of like a love letter to the future in a way.
Oh god, my God, that's the best uh expression I've I I've ever heard.
That's exactly what it is.
It's Tom Payne, Thomas Paine, an Englishman who came off the boat in Philadelphia, failure and everything, and he and he contracted uh dysentery or typhus on the way.
And he writes this pamphlet uh that's published in January, early January 1776.
At that point, the war has already started at Lexington and Concord the previous April, but nobody's really sure what we're gonna do with this rebellion.
And certainly independency, as they called it, is not on the mind of everybody.
But he writes this thing called common sense.
It's this pamphlet, the most important pamphlet in American history, and just comes out and says the king is an ass.
This is Thomas Pain.
Yeah, Thomas Payne, you know.
And he then says, not since the time of Noah, you know what happened with Noah.
Do we have a chance to remake the world?
And that's the American revolution.
It's suddenly you're no longer quarreling over uh Native American land or taxes or representation.
You're actually into the biggest idea that human beings have suggested that we could actually govern ourselves.
No, that had never happened before.
And that we could we could sustain or and we then sponsor these ideas, sponsor revolutions for the next 200 plus years.
And you know, we've been going along for 249 years uh pretty well, thank you.
And we're in it, thank you very much.
That's that's a great answer.
I love the love letter to the future, though, man.
I'm not gonna forget that.
That's a great gift you gave me today.
Thank you.
Oh man.
That's that's what it is because it's all about the.
Well, you said it's the pursuit of happiness, right?
It's like right.
We e even now you're challenging the way that I've thought about some of this because it's like um and you and you're and you're the documentary does this, and I think it's eight parts.
I'm not trying to six parts.
I haven't watched all of it.
But um, but uh but it it challenged you to think about that.
It's like you're not just here to just be here, right?
You're not just here like you got this Willy Wonko ticket, like to be in a uh a citizen or a part of a society.
It's something that is alive and that's evolving, and you need to constantly put it under the microscope.
That's correct.
And you need to put you under the microscope, right?
We don't have a relationship with ourselves.
That's one thing I think a lot of people don't have a relationship with themselves anymore.
And so I think when you're not sitting there and thinking and contemplating where you're at and how the world's affecting you and how you can affect the world, I think it starts to limit us to just looking at our at our declaration of independence almost as like a receipt of times instead of as a uh living document, you know, or more of like a living will and testament.
I don't know how it could be said any better than that.
I think we wear too many things instead of be too many things.
We wear our faith and we use it as a cudgel, you know.
If there's one thing I learned about um making films about the US and us, is that there's only us.
There's no them.
I mean, and people are always creating a them to make an enemy in order to to to postpone the active work that I have to do, that self-investigation.
And that's interestingly enough, that that self-reflective sense that I need to improve, you know.
Um Mark Twain once said, uh, nothing so needs uh improving as other people's habits.
Like we're always ready to say how man, you should do this differently, you should do that differently, but we're not willing to, you know.
My I have an ancestor, the Scottish poet Robert Burns, who said, Oh, it's empowered the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us.
And I think that this whole work of not just wearing your ideas like a piece of clothing of fashion, but absorbing them and living it is the big uh dynamic.
So everybody, it is in the interest of an authoritarian to have everybody be a kind of superstitious peasant, right?
Uneducated, not improving, not in pursuit of happiness and and lifelong learning, which is what that what they all meant.
I'm not right.
That's where they want us.
That's where that's where that's where the the rulers want you there.
They want you in a place where you're passive, where you're distracted by your your things and your whatever and this scandal and stuff like that.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that that great people discuss ideas, um, average people discuss events, and small minds discuss other people.
You know, and you realize the extent to which our whole culture is based on kind of judgment, not of ourselves, not with the with the self-reflective scrutiny that all of Our religious teachings, all of our philosophy and all of the common sense of negotiating this complicated thing that we call our lives suggest, but abandoning that in favor of I can tell you what you're doing, and I could tell you what he's doing wrong, but oh no, I'm I'm I'm I'm fine here.
You know, I believe it's nice.
It's nice to reflect because it's fucking a painful to look at yourself.
That is.
And I think it's painful, or I don't know if it's painful, it was inventive of these guys at the time.
And the American Revolution, um, it also it all it all it often gets classified as like 1776.
That's the year everybody has everybody has.
But your documentary, it kind of goes, I think from 75 or to 83.
Well, we start at 55 and back up and show you, you know, the French and Indian War, what we call the French and Indian War, it was really called the Seven Years' War, which is probably the third global war over the prize of North America.
So yes.
And our revolution is the fourth global war.
We don't like to think of it as a global war, so it leads up to it.
But at the end of the first episode, Lexington Concord happens in 1775.
By 1776, the land we're sitting on, by the way, is farmland.
The biggest battle of the revolution will take place in long on the Battle of Long Island, which we lose because of George Washington, who's the most important person in the history of the United States.
Without him, we don't have a country because of his mistakes.
So nobody's perfect.
Everybody's pretty complicated.
And we don't have a country because of his mistakes?
Well, no, no, no.
We if he didn't live, if he didn't survive or if he was surrendered, we wouldn't have a country.
He's central to it.
And at the same time, he's flawed, he's rash, he rides out on the battlefield at Kipps Bay, just over there, and um and his his aides grab the reins of the horse because he's gonna get killed if he gets killed.
It's all over.
He rides out in Princeton uh in the next January in this middle of the battle, and some aid clo you know covers his eyes, he's gonna get killed.
But he makes a classic mistake at the Battle of Long Island in Brooklyn, what is now Brooklyn, and he doesn't protect his left flank and the British clerl him up.
Makes the same mistake again the next year at the Battle of Brandywine.
And yet he keeps his army together and he suddenly realizes he doesn't have to to win.
He just ha can't not completely lose.
The British have to win, and they're 3,000 miles away from headquarters, and nobody knows what weather is coming, and it takes six weeks to get back the news to get back to England.
It takes even longer because the Gulf Stream's not working in your favor, coming the other way.
And so what are you gonna do?
So it's it's an amazing story.
So New York, uh 104 249 years ago is in British hands, and it stays in British hands through the rest of the war, ends in the fall of 1781 at Yorktown, and another two years and two months before the Treaty of Paris and the British evacuate.
Evacuation Day is November 25th.
So it's two months and ten days.
That's when the Brits had to take a hike.
Eight years when they finally leave, and it just drove Washington crazy.
And in fact, everybody's going saying, go to Virginia.
The French are going, go to Virginia, let's cat him there, which they do.
And he's going, no, no, no, what about New York?
Why don't we take back New York?
Because he's the humiliation of having lost this city, and this is the big British stronghold and loyalist stronghold for the war.
And people don't remember that our revolution was a civil war.
More than our civil war was our civil war was a sectional war, one part of the country against the other.
But this is a civil war in which people in your own town, in your own family might be loyalists and you might be a patriot, or you might be disaffected.
Please leave me alone.
I just want to keep my head down and not be bothered by it.
So there's a constant um set of interesting struggles that we don't tend to do with.
I think we don't want to accept the violence of the revolution because we think it might diminish those big ideas we've been talking about.
Right.
They're not in any way diminished.
They're made even more inspirational and more impressive.
Right.
It's better when you look at because of how incredibly violent and bloody the this this revolution was.
Well, people were willing to die for something, you know.
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Take me into those 20 years before there's two groups, right?
The Patriots and the Loyalists.
We discovered America, right?
We did we develop these colonies along the Eastern Seabor.
So there's 13 colonies.
But there's also the Native Americans.
I mean, there's so many things going on.
So many elements going on.
So what happens is everybody wants to bust out, cross over the Appalachians and take more Native American land.
And it isn't just them, they are many, many nations that are lined up again.
And there is different you mean so is it many nations wanted to go over there?
No, no, no.
Many Native American nations are there.
So you might have the Delaware, the Shawnee, you might have the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Seneca Onondaga, Tuscarora, Nida and Mohawk.
You've got, you know, all the Cherokees in the South, you have all these different, and there is separate and as unique as, say, Virginia is, or say, France is or the Netherlands.
And so you need to treat them not as a monolithic them.
You need to treat them as themselves.
In fact, Franklin's whole idea, Benjamin Franklin has the idea of uniting the colonies because he reads about the Iroquois Confederacy.
And they said we are a powerful confederacy, never fall out one with the other.
So they had their individual interests, we call that states' rights, but they had the federal connection that protected them in their general rights.
So it's the great irony is the American Revolution destroys the uh their their Confederacy.
But what what's going on here is people are wanting to move West.
The British win the French and Indian War, their treasury is bankrupt, and they have no way to protect uh the settlers as they're pouring across the land trying to take land.
So the British are trying to control everything from over there.
Yes, but remember they have no money to protect their own people.
They're all Brits uh from that.
They also have 13 other colonies in the Caribbean, which are much more profitable.
They're all based on slave.
Oh, yeah.
Only Virginia and South Carolina are profitable.
All the rest aren't.
But we're the most populist, we're the most literate, we make things, we trade with them, and so and we're also on the continent, which is what everybody wants.
The French want it, the Spanish want it, the Dutch want it.
Everybody wants to be in the Americas.
And to own what we call North America.
And of course, the Native peoples who've been there for, you know, uh 20,000 years, want to keep it.
And so there's all these tensions.
And so they're big land speculators too.
Like normally, you and I, we'd have, we'd be working our land for a thousand years for somebody else in Wales or Scotland or Ireland or England.
But now we're over here, and we can get 125 acres of our own.
But there's big speculators like Franklin and Washington and and they they just decided that Native American land is mine.
Uh why don't I divide it up and sell it and be the middleman for land they didn't yet own?
The British are like, we can't protect you.
Our treasury is whatever.
So not only can you not cross the Appalachians in 18 in 1763, they made a rule you can't go over there.
That enraged the colonists.
And then they said, We need you to help pay.
The Stamp Act, is that it?
And they various things that they were going to tax us, Tamp Act, they proposed, and everybody went back.
That was amazing.
That was a good sign of how the people had a lot of control.
Well, this is what happened.
Those individual colonies that had no interest in connecting with one another.
Franklin had suggested back in the 1750s, let's get together and do a union like the Native peoples can't do.
And we all said, no, we're not giving up our autonomy.
Nobody came, nobody wanted to do it.
But then, as these taxes happened, as the the decision to not allow uh colonists to go into Indian land uh was enforced.
They just suddenly started coming together.
And there's committees of correspondence, the Sons of Liberty.
There's resistance.
Women are hugely part of it.
You never hear about this.
They keep this thing going.
They say we can do without this imported goods.
We'll make our own homespun cloth.
And so people are in competition.
The ladies of this province are this.
And so what happens is eventually, as always happens, and this happens in history so much is that I tell you, you know, you're acting radical.
You may not be acting radical, but then you start acting more radical.
You say me, you're being tyrannical.
And I may not be tyrannical, but I start acting more tyrannical, and you get to this point where somebody says, We think they're storing arms in Lexington and Concord.
Let's go and capture their leaders.
This firebrand, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and let's collect this stuff.
So the weapons of mass destruction.
Well, it's it's their rifles and muskets and flints and gunpowder.
And they go and, you know, the Patriots meet them on the on the green at Lexington, and the British say disperse, and they'd start to, and shot fires out, somebody's hit, it's a massacre.
The British kill eight or nine of us and wound others, and then they march on to Concord and then finally I conquered everybody said, F this, you know, we're going, and so they fight back.
And the whole way, the retreat back to Boston is just a slaughter for the British.
And then they're hemmed in.
They're not, they can get out.
They've got their the most powerful Navy on earth, but they can't they can't move out because there's just thousands of patriots who've rushed from Rhode Island and Connecticut and New Hampshire as well as Massachusetts towns to the defense of Boston, and they ring them and they've got them in.
And then it begins a war that is going to take six and a half years until Yorktown.
And anytime you're in telling a story, you have to remember that everyone's who's in it doesn't know how it's going to turn out.
And that if you're a good storyteller, you have people tune in, pay attention to the story, because you think it may not turn out the way you know it did.
That's the essence of it.
So I have people telling me about my Civil War series.
They say, you know, I went into the Ford's Theater hoping the gun would jam this time.
And I went, yes, that's exactly what you want, right?
That's exactly what you want.
Because even when the French decide to come in after the Battle of Saratoga, this is still not a given that we're going to win.
Washington isn't totally sure that we're going to win.
And when Charleston falls in in the spring of 1780, it's like I think the game is over.
I'm not sure how we can continue.
And he does.
And then the French, we have a few engagements.
The first couple of engagements with the French are disasters.
And we're thinking, maybe we don't, their help isn't going to be helpful.
And then their army comes and they march with Washington, not to New York to liberate it, but around and down, and they trap Cornwallis and the French Navy defeats the British and allows the big guns to come in from new.
I mean, it is as riveting a story as you could ever tell.
And it's our story, and nobody knows it.
It's our origin story.
It's our origin mythology.
It's our, it's our our, you know, Valhalla.
It's our, it's our Thor and Odin.
This these are all the the founding stuff.
And what could be more important?
And particularly today, when we feel like we're divided, so divided, well, you go, well, we're pretty divided back then, and we were pretty divided during the Vietnam.
We were really divided during the Great Depression.
And we were really, you know, in America first, and we were really defy divided during the Civil War.
So maybe we're always divided.
And maybe the essence is not to just keep pointing and escalating it, but say, how do what do we share in common?
Well, I'll tell you what we share in common.
We share an origin story that on July 4th and 1776, very few countries know exactly when they were born, where Philadelphia, when July 4th, 1776, and what we hold these truths to be self-evident.
That's our story.
What's our zodiac sign?
So we are cancer.
That's our zodiac sign.
Yeah, July 4th.
Although I read an article the other day that suggests that actually these borders of the signs might have been shifting.
So now I'm gonna now I'm gonna put an asterisk next.
Okay.
So America's a cancer.
Cancer with an asterisk.
Okay.
I love that.
Um take me character, cancer is characterized as highly emotional, imaginative, and loyal.
Weaknesses are moodiness, insecurity, pessimism, and being easily hurt.
So there's a word.
So we this is us, right?
This is the U.S., this is us.
This is us.
So this is uh we have, you know, there's a there was a cartoonist named uh Walt Kelly, and he had a cartoon series called Pogo strip.
And uh, and at one point he he, the main character who's this odd animal figure says, uh, we have met the enemy and he is us, right?
Because it's a variation on a military uh moment, and it's um it's really true.
Uh Lincoln, as a young lawyer, not yet 29 years old, 28 years old, addresses the young men's Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, and he's and they're discussing foreign policy.
And he says, Whence shall we expect the approach of danger?
Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow?
And then he answers his own question.
Never.
All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink in the Ohio River or make a track in the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.
If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.
We are a nation of free men who will live forever or die by suicide.
Wow.
So there's our challenge, right?
You want to get self-involved, you want to make the your neighbor your enemy, you want to make lots of them.
Then you are headed towards that self-destruction that Lincoln's talking about.
You want to figure out what we share in common, this corny sort of civic virtue, civic energy that is comes from the Declaration of Independence, like how you can work together to do it.
And you know, a lot of people who are unbelievable citizens, it's like they go to the school board meeting.
They like they participate in, you know, we I live in New England, and we have a town meeting, and and you know, sometimes the biggest decision is whether to buy a new pumper for the fire department.
That's a big deal.
That's civics, that's dealing with the stuff.
And it's also saying, I've got a vote, and I and I have a responsibility as a citizenship to do it.
And then we'll save our country.
Then, you know, if if you like the abstraction of disagreement and violence and all that sort of stuff, where suddenly just because your your feed tells you one thing that somebody's an enemy, then you're lost.
But if you look across the room and you say, you know, I don't share in common that much with somebody who comes from Louisiana and lives in Tennessee.
I I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Delaware and Michigan, and now I've lived in New England for the last, you know, uh 54 years.
What would we have in common?
We share a love of those ideas.
We share a love of that process, the pursuit of happiness.
God.
Yeah, it comes so much back to like your own integrity with yourself, you know.
And I think it's it's interesting whenever, like, as I'm watching your documentary, it's like you learn that like even as you were saying earlier that this is like the first time that people thought of themselves um as not under rule, but of like it's almost like they were we were away at summer camp or something, and you kind of your imagination started to bloom.
That's right, you know, like that's kind of the feeling that I get of those uh of the first colonists here.
So it's so exciting.
There's a moment.
I mean it's blooming on somebody else's land as well.
It's definitely blooming on Native Americans' land.
We have to not say so.
Here's here's the deal.
You ask any school chick kid, how's the um how were the colonists who threw the tea in Boston Harbor dressed?
And they say, as Native Americans, why were they dressed as Native Americans?
And they go, to deflect the blame.
And you go, no.
They were dressing, and it's so ironic and poignant and sad and also ennobling that we were saying to Britain, we're no longer part of you.
The scholar Phil Deloria says, We're aboriginal.
We choose to dress this way because we're severing our feelings and our affections with the motherland because of what you're doing to us.
Wow.
And who do you choose?
Oh, the people that you've spent the last 150 years dispossessing of their land.
And oh, by the way, are going to spend the next 150 years continuing to dispos them of their land.
So there's a great irony.
But there was a point you made a second ago, a little bit later in the declaration after he says pursuit of happiness.
There's the phrase he says, Jefferson says, all experience has shown that me mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.
It's not that difficult to do.
Take me through that a little bit, but can you break that down for me a little bit?
It's like an understanding.
So he says, basically, he says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.
Meaning heretofore, all human beings have been under the boot of an authoritarian.
And it basically it's the human lot to just put up with it.
And we are creating something new called a citizen.
It's gonna take hard work.
It's gonna take that self-examination.
It's gonna take that self-criticism, which we're so unwilling to do.
It's rather criticize the other than ourselves rather the to assume the discipline necessary to have the virtue, getting better as a human being, um, to to be a citizen.
But he's he's putting it right down there.
You will devolve back to that state where when somebody comes in who is acting as an authoritarian, you'll go, fine, take it over for me, Mussolini.
The trains are running on time.
That's all I need is for the trains to run on time, you know.
You think that's what it's about?
It's not about.
We know what the story of tyranny is, and we know what this our story is.
And our story is not the story of tyranny.
And that we, and it never happens with a light switch.
It happens incrementally.
Yes.
You know, you don't, it's like two frogs sitting in the boiling pot of water, and somebody says, they're still saying to each other, I really like a hot bath, you know, until they're cooked.
Yeah.
Right.
And so you at some point, what Jefferson is saying is do not be so disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.
Meaning, do not put up with the yoke of authoritarianism.
J, you know, be more active as a citizen and understand that that person that you disagree with, we want them to disagree.
Remember, we're the first country on earth that didn't establish a religion.
Like almost all of the wars that are fought are over some interpretations of religion or some other such thing that devolves from that.
And we were saying, make no notice of it.
Thomas Jefferson himself said, if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no god at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
And like New York and Pennsylvania have got worked into their state constitutions, just not paying attention to a particular religion means you are free from all the tyrannical thou shall rather than this is.
Like the the thing that you're talking about, that individual responsibility.
That's another them and me.
That's exactly when when it when it is this is and it is an acceptance, thou shall is telling somebody else how to be and how how that's wrong.
So the whole story is trying to figure out.
We you could say that we're a nation in the process of becoming.
Like, and what do you want to be?
Ever see the movie?
It's a wonderful.
You should always be a nation in the process of becoming.
Otherwise, what are you?
You are static, you're, you know, Putin's Russia, you're she's China.
You've just got people telling you what to do, and and nobody wants that.
You want to develop ideas, you want to pursue science, you want to pursue arts, you want to have a lot, you want to tolerate lots of different points of view.
And and right now we've gotten to the place where we don't even want to listen to another point of view.
We only want to hear the information that you know, sad as oh, yeah, that's what I agree with, you know, and not sort of expand ourselves and say, I can listen to someone that I totally disagree with, and I don't have to then make that person the enemy.
That's the key to the American experiment.
Yeah.
Well, I think even just a conversation like this, man, it's so good for me.
Like it's so good.
It takes me out of this, like I don't get too caught up in the like us and them thing, but it puts me back in a place of like, oh yeah, well, I'm here with a purpose, right?
Like it gives you a purpose of like being a citizen, of being a human, right?
Of like of like a Rubik's Cube that'll never be solved, right?
It's like I don't need to win, right?
Like, but I I do need to keep playing and also be a good competitor and an earnest competitor.
And um, yeah, it just it puts it more back on you, right?
It makes the mirror a little bit stronger.
I think it's nice.
That is a beautiful thing, and it goes along with your dream of the.
I mean, Jefferson wrote that to Adams.
You know, they were friends and they were enemies, and then they were friends again at the end of their life.
They both died on July 4th, 1826, 50 years to the moment of the signing of the declaration, and they both thought the other was alive.
Uh, Jefferson had died first, Adams survived him by a couple of hours.
But just before he died, he said, you know, I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
And and and we, and so we shall go on, uh, so we will go on and shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of mankind.
And I love that idea that's puzzled and processed by I gave a commencement address last year at Brandeis University.
And I was talking about how we're so preoccupied with these binaries, you know, red state, blue state, Democrat, Republican, young, old, black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, east, west, north, south.
We always have these divisions.
They don't exist in nature.
They're just arbitrary divisions that we've imposed on things.
And so I said, when you look at things and you see how it's going, the opposite of faith is not doubt.
Doubt is central to faith.
The opposite of faith is certainty.
I was gonna say certain certainty destroys the mystery of this thing that you and I have been talking about.
Who wants to stop at unless it's a vo shall?
You can't dance, you can't do this, you can't do this, you can't all the things that were told, or because you do this, you are not a good person, or you are not a real American, or what's a real American?
I mean, I they're a group of Native Americans, and I'm very pleased to report that there are more Native Americans now in the United States, not in the best of circumstances in many cases, but more than there were when uh the American Revolution took place.
However, they do have a legitimate claim to saying, you know, we're the real Americans.
And so all of the stuff in the revolution then has to parse that.
Who are we in Massachusetts?
Who are we in Georgia?
Who are we in New Hampshire and South Carolina?
What are the native people in our midst?
What are the native people at our borders?
And there are lots of different cultures, as distinct, I said, as any other cultures.
And we've also imported by force, 500,000 enslaved African Americans.
Where are they gonna go?
And what are they gonna do?
And then we have all this pressure from all these big superpowers like Britain that owns us and France that is sorry that they lost us, and Spain that wants that got the bottom and they wants more, and the Dutch, who used to be in there, you know, New York was a this this was a Dutch city.
Um, and so in Brooklyn is a Dutch name.
Harlem is a Dutch name.
That I mean, so you've got this overlay of all of these cultures competing here.
And so the revolution is the place where we coalesce, we bring together the best ideas that had ever been thought in humankind about human organization amongst a huge variety of people.
Yeah.
And we've made it work for at least 249 years.
And I'm super proud to be an American.
I mean, I I with the exception of one film, all of the things I've done have been about American history because I'm trying to ask this deceptively simple question.
Who are we?
Who are these strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans?
And what does an investigation of the past, that particular moment, that particular person, that particular war.
Tell us about not only where we were back then, but where we are now and where we may be going.
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Um let's look at a little bit of the minutiae.
So just to make just to like add, uh just to get into a little bit of the storytelling, um, to add some like blush to the cheeks of this conversation.
Uh what about uh Paul Revere's ride?
What was real about that?
Was he just a loudmouth?
Some people said it was autism.
He got a hold of a horse and some booze.
There's a lot of like a lot of rumors going on out there.
Some of that's TikTok, but still, yeah.
Well, so let me dispel the most important thing, which is he did not say the British are coming, the British are coming.
He didn't.
He didn't say the red coats are coming or the red coats are coming.
What he yelled was the regulars are coming out.
The regulars are coming out, meaning the regular British army that has been stationed in Boston for whatever it is, almost two years, um, are coming out.
And so he is a patriot.
He has made, he's a silversmith and an engraver, and he's made an engraving of the eight uh uh uh 1770 event in March called the Boston Massacre.
Uh he calls it the Bloody Massacre.
We end up calling it the Boston Massacre when some of these occupying a standing army.
I mean, this is the big deal, right?
You didn't send an army to a place unless you were protecting them.
You didn't send an army there to police the population.
That's not what free people have, right?
Is the army in your midst.
So the British Army's in there in the college because there's so much only in Boston or in all the they've they've got a presence to protect the stuff, but they are in Boston, particularly to try to put down the resistance to their taxes, the resistance to that.
So the people realize that the military is there kind of against them.
Uh-huh.
And that's kind of what we have a lot going on right now.
So hypothetically.
A lot.
I I had a premiere of the film at uh the Telluride Film Festival, episode.
Tell your ride beautiful over there.
Gorgeous, gorgeous.
And we go every year, even whether we have a film or not.
Anyway, so they were doing it.
And when they got to the point when General Gage imported these number of ships from Halifax, Nova Scotia to go to Occupy Boston, not to protect it, but to police it.
And then you hear the voices from the past saying, a standing army in peacetime?
This is horrible, you know, like that.
And the audience in tell you right, erupted Because they're going, wait, that's happening now.
That's where history can be your best teacher.
To go, wait a second.
Did we just get, did they just raise the temperature on that pot I'm sitting in?
Am I about to be boiled?
You know, where what what what's going on?
So anyway, the the he does a uh an engraving, Paul Revere does an engraving of the massacre.
Well, before you move on, actually, you do you mind, Ken?
Oh, yeah.
I'm sorry.
But let's they just had a thing in Britain the other day where people showed up and I don't know if it was half a million, a million people showed up to support like the British um just what it what being British.
Yes.
And so like, um, I'm not sure exactly what we're doing, but this is just incredible.
Um wow.
Unite the kingdom rally in Britain.
And it wasn't, they weren't putting this on a lot of news channels.
I think a lot of the news we're trying to label this as like a far right thing.
You know, the news, I don't think has done a good job.
I feels like they want us to be at odds a lot of times.
I think I think that's do you think that's a fair statement?
Yeah, I think that in many ways, media, regardless of its, you know, orientation, depends on conflict.
And that we we spend a lot of time, that's the essence of a story is we think, conflict rather than, you know, it's oh it's you know, it's so funny.
You you get involved.
It's just street after street.
You get involved in a war, and then after the war, you get involved in negotiations and you just wonder.
We were making our film on Vietnam and they were introducing a Marine who just did some amazing thing, got a chest full of medals, just you know, almost the Congressional Medal of Honor, just amazing stuff for his action.
We kept pressing him, wanting to hear the stuff.
And he finally looked up and he said, it's the history of the world, meaning warfare.
It's what we do.
And you would think that at some point we get to a place all of our religious teachings, all of them, are just big tributaries flowing into the same sea.
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, that we would just jump from the argument to the negotiation and the solution rather than what we seem to have.
And and I'm guilty of focusing as, you know, I'm I tell other things, but you know, history of country music, history of jazz music, baseball, all of that stuff.
But I've but I focus on civil war and World War II and Vietnam and the American Revolution now because they're so instructive about human behavior, bad, of course, but also really good.
This these ennobling ideas that we've been talking about, first ever, which is why I feel comfortable saying it's the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ.
And um and yet the violence is unnecessary.
And certainly political violence is unnecessary, and certainly reactive violence.
Well, that because they did that, then we have to do that.
And it's you realize that it's like the old testament, an eye for an eye, you know, and you realize you keep going with that, and everybody's blind.
Yeah, everybody has a seeing eye dog or something that's getting um go back to that rally record.
I just wanna even read who was there.
Just I just want to even know a little bit about it.
I just saw videos of this, and it blew my mind.
I think a lot of well, what this what I liked about this is it's people showing up for something, right?
Yes, it's people in the streets.
Well, they're expressing what they're allowed to do.
Right.
And that's what in a democratic society, which Britain is, you get a chance to, you know, as our first amendment says, it's it's well the government will establish no religion.
You have freedom of the press and freedom of assembly.
You have the ability to the these are the hallmarks of the the number one thing.
Well, after the Constitution was done, everybody said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, time out.
We've got a constitution, we got an operating manual, but we're not gonna go forward in this unless we get a bill of rights that tells us what, you know, that that enshrines the things we just fought for, the things we just died for.
There's, you know, there's one, you know, the saving private Ryan story of, you know, sons are dying.
It's based on a true story where a woman, I think from Iowa, whose last name is Sullivan lost four sons in a battleship that went down, and the Department of War said, you know, we're now gonna separate everybody, all the brothers.
Rebecca Tanner, a Mohegan woman, meaning probably Connecticut, lost five sons, not four, but five sons fighting for the Patriot cause.
This is a Native American woman.
So you realize that's the sacrifice that people have made in order for us to be able to hold a uh a demonstration, express our point of view nonviolently, uh, and to be able to uh tolerate lots of ideas.
I mean, it you you you can't say uh we're only gonna tolerate our ideas, and everybody else who doesn't agree with us are therefore bad, you know.
I mean, across the street from us on 23rd Street in New York City, where we are right now, is the headquarters of the communist party of the United States that has as much right to its office space as the Republican National Committee or the Democratic National Committee.
Doesn't it?
In a country in which all ideas are free.
Is it is the head of the communist party?
The the uh the American Communist Party has its headquarters across the street.
And they have had their headquarters there for decades and decades and decades.
Well, you know, what's funny to me, Ken, is that it feels like just being a regular American that's hopeful.
You're almost a communist these days in our own country.
Well, that's you know what I'm saying?
That that idea, that's what I think is interesting about these um Let me just start here.
The Unite the Kingdom rally was a massive, and this says far right demonstration held in London on September 13th, 2025, organized by anti-immigrant activist Tommy Robinson.
Uh the event attracted between 110,000 and people make one of the largest protests in British history.
Um the rally was built as a free speech festival, and the demonstration featured chants like we want our country back.
Uh uh, what I think is interesting about this, it's people who have a set of beliefs and ideals of what British life is, right?
And history is to them, and that they want to speak out for it, right?
That's one thing that I thought was pretty cool, you know.
That this is the democratic right.
Right.
I mean, I remember when I was growing up people tweeting with their feet, right?
I said this the other day in a conversation, but it's like it's not people sitting in the fucking background yelling stuff or screaming or you know, uh, but it's people who are actually out, right?
And this this to me is always inspiring because it's you're putting your face out there with your voice, right?
And and you're putting your feet out there with your voice, and that to me feels like a real tweet.
Any any they could be left wing, they could be right wing.
I agree.
They could be immigrants saying we're as much Britons as any of that is possible within a peaceful context.
Yeah.
And it's people that like, you know, if people get an idea of what a culture is, right?
Yeah.
And especially, I mean, Britain was predominantly white, probably, I would guess, until they took in slaves and Native Americans and that.
Well, they they there was not as or Caucasian, I guess they would have called it at the time, or European.
They were European, but they're also a mixture of lots of uh European cultures, and they their whole worldwide economy was dependent on slavery mostly in the Caribbean, as the spa Spanish had it mostly in South and Central America.
Um, and then we had it in the Southern states.
It was slavery was legal uh in the colonies from New Hampshire to to Georgia.
And then one by one, the northern states sort of realized it.
And George Washington freed his slaves.
I mean, Jordan, they all knew uh, he kept a couple, somebody said.
I don't know if that's true.
Thomas Jefferson understood they were they understood that slavery was morally wrong.
Right.
And and yet it was an impossible uh what's the right word?
It was a con they're making too much money not to give it up.
And it's only later in the 19th century when the abolitionist movement comes we should abolish slavery, that then you find slaveholders now making really big arguments about how, oh, they're inferior, they're children, they can't handle freedom and all of this stuff, all of which they they didn't really express.
Thomas Jefferson did a little bit in his notes on the state of Virginia.
It's very, very complicated.
But we're always looking for a way to say that some people are more equal than others.
And and if you believe in equality, that's not the case.
That if you believe in the second line of the declaration, which is our catechism, then it's everybody.
And that people have the ability to rise according to their abilities And and opportunities.
And you try to provide as many opportunities for as many people.
But the minute you transform this civic, you know, just explosion, this beautiful civic compact that we have and racialize it.
It can only be white, it can only be black, and it can only be this, it can only be that, it's already lost.
It is not one thing or one type of people.
That's where you go wrong.
I mean, but but history does add a like, it's kind of interesting because it's like even like um, even whenever they were uh declaring America, right, and deciding what it meant to be American, and they were in this period that you that you investigated in the American Revolution documentary.
It's like they were saying this is who we are, right?
At the same time, they're also colonizing.
It's just it's interesting when colonization and human and being human started to sort of I don't know, do you know what I'm kind of saying?
I know what you're talking about.
It's just such a weird uh it's the dichotomy.
It's the difference between the ideal and the human possibility at any given moment.
And what the founders were saying is that in order to have a uh a government that operates, not only do all people have to be created equal, but you have to be pursuing this self-examination.
We should be interested in improving ourselves.
So when Thomas Jefferson wrote All Men Are Created Equal, he meant all white men of property free of debt.
He did not mean a majority of the white population of the colonies, women.
He did not mean the 500,000 free and enslaved African Americans.
He did not mean the Native peoples both intermixed with people and part of the rest of the continent.
And remember, we didn't say when we started our Congress and when we started our army, we didn't say the Eastern Seaboard Congress.
We didn't say the Eastern Seaboard Army, we said the Continental Congress, the Continental Army.
We knew where we were going, and we knew who we were going to run over to get it.
And even when the Constitution was started, women were let out.
There's a one of the leading women of Philadelphia, Elizabeth Willing Powell met Benjamin Franklin as he came out in in mid-September in 1787 from Independence Hall, where they had been, you know, figuring out the Constitution and getting it down and said, What have you created, Dr. Franklin?
A monarchy or a republic.
And he said, a republic if you can keep it.
Meaning, we're going to do this.
Now, when they went into it in 1776, they were not after a democracy.
Democracy meant mob rule to a lot of people.
They were interested in an aristocracy of the elites, right?
But in order to win the war, they had to enlist not the sturdy militiamen who often left to go plant a crop or often left to go harvest that crop, but they ended up with an army,
the Continentals, the regular army of the United States of America, the Continental Army, were teenagers, second and third cents without a chance of an inheritance, felons, ne'er do wells, recent immigrants from Germany and England, and they won the war.
Wow.
And so as they're beginning, the dogs won the war, and as they're beginning, and we follow them, as you'll see, you know, in this story, 14-year-old kid from Boston named John Greedon, 15-year-old kid, Joseph Plum Martin from Connecticut, you know, a 10-year-old girl from um Yorktown who's a refugee all of the war, you get to meet them.
So it's not just George Washington and all of that stuff.
But when they start trying to figure out their state constitutions, Pennsylvania says, well, why don't we give votes to every white man who's 21 or older, whether they're own property or not.
And then John Adams is like, wait, wait, wait, we're not gonna, what about the aristocracy?
Not, you know, not the land.
So what happens is is that democracy is not an object of our revolution, it's a consequence of it, which is okay, because if you've got an unintended consequence of democracy, that's pretty good.
Pretty cool.
Pretty cool, pretty cool.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's it's just so exciting.
I mean, I I have the best job in the country.
I have the best job in the country.
It educates all my parts.
I don't go in knowing about the revolution and telling you what you should know, because Theo, that is like saying there's a test on on next Tuesday on.
I'm sharing with you the process of discovery.
Like Betsy Ross isn't mentioned in here.
We don't actually know who made the first flag.
No one says don't fire till you hear the whites of our eyes.
Paul Revere did not say the red coats are coming, the red coats are coming.
The regulars are coming out.
The regulars are coming out.
Well, you meant the regulars are coming out of their homes.
Out of Boston to the pro to out to Lexington and to and to Concord.
Concord was the place where they thought everything was hidden.
And they were right, and they just never found it.
And then we and then we started fighting back.
We didn't fight back so much on Lexington Green.
It was it was a massacre on Lexington Green and then Concord at the North Bridge.
Um we meet a guy named Isaac Davis, who's a gunsmith from Acton, Massachusetts.
And he leaves early in the morning, and he's at the North Bridge, and he is along with a fellow uh guy, Abner Hosmer, is one of the first Americans to be killed at the North Bridge.
But then the fury of uh of the of the militia patriot militia just overwhelms the British and they start a retreat, and it's if there hadn't been some reinforcements that caught up with them when they limped, were limping back, retreating back through Lexington, it would have been a route.
And it was still all the way, every spot of ground all the way back to Boston was contested.
And everybody's sitting there going, like yesterday, these were our brothers.
Yesterday, these were our fellow countrymen.
Yesterday we were, you know, arguing.
Today we're at war, and there's a there's a great sense of thing.
I mean Abigail's, I mean Adams says something.
We're in the midst of a revolution, the most glorious and ever, and the fate of millions yet unborn are being decided, meaning you and me.
So great.
And then Abigail, his own wife, greatest converter correspondence between anybody and the city.
Oh, yeah.
And she maybe wrote better than anybody.
She said we should be very cautious about tearing down empires because of all the blood and suffering that attends to it.
That's in the first minutes of our film, which means be careful what you wish for.
You know, she's something else.
Yeah.
She's and and you know, when people say who's the best writer, is it is it um Thomas Payne?
Is it Thomas Jefferson?
Is it George Washington?
Great writers or John Adams, great writer.
Um Abigail's uh holds her own.
She's pretty good.
That's cool, man.
And she's got a friend named, I bet you can call this up too.
Yeah, name uh Mercy Otis Warren.
Pull up with a friend, girl.
Mercy Otis Warren.
Lokiki.
Oh, O T I. Yeah, there she is.
There you go.
Um histories of it.
There she is.
She's in our film.
There.
Oh, yeah.
She opened it.
She uh Meryl Streep reads her verse.
That's the one thing we haven't talked about.
We got Peter Coyote as the third person narrator, but we have the best cast that has ever been assembled.
They all reading off camera of any film or every television.
Okay, we'll see.
So the longest uh the the longest day about D-Day had a cast list.
But we've got Tom Hanks and Merrill Streep, who reads Mercy Otis Warren, and uh Claire Danes, who's uh reads uh Abigail Adams, and Paul Giamatti and Josh Brolin and Sir Kenneth Branow and Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson and Leev Schreiber and Ed Norton and um that have all voiced in your docs.
In this doc.
Oh, in the case, in American Revolution Alone, and Dom Nell Glee and uh Jeff Daniels, he's the voice of Thomas Jefferson.
It is uh I I've probably listed a a fifth of the voices that are in.
Yeah, we ask him.
And and you know, a lot of people have read for us before, a lot of new people have read this time, but we ask him.
Tom Hanks has read for us for almost 25 years.
Well, he's a he did the D-Day museum in New Orleans, he's their whole D-Day.
Yeah.
Oh man, amazing.
That's uh I took my little girl a year ago to a year and a half ago, my then 13-year-old, she and we just loved it.
And I and I've been there many, many times.
Stephen Ambrose, the late historian, um uh really started it, but Tom and many other people made it possible, and he's just so so phenomenal.
And he's uh also like like Meryl Streep and and and Jeff Daniels and others, Josh Brolin couldn't be nice.
Samuel, you know, I I I recorded uh long distance um a Morgan Freeman, who's you know, in his in his mid to late 80s, he's getting up there and he lives on the Gulf Coast and in Mississippi, and I'm saying, um, and so I'm just making idle chat.
I said, Morgan, so why are you in Mobile?
He says, I'm recording For Ken Burns.
Like he'd driven up to come and do this thing.
And that it just made me feel really good.
That's cool.
And you know, and I I'll bump into someone and they go, why haven't you called me?
Like, because this they're not making anything.
We pay them SAG minimum.
And I always tease Tom, I always go, and I'm giving you a check for $313.22.
Please don't spend it all in one place.
Please, you know, save it.
But you know, they come and they work.
Look at look at that list, right?
That's remarkable.
You know?
Yeah.
Josh Brolin is an exceptional man.
Oh, he's great.
He's George Washington.
And what I did is I told him George Washington is unknowable and opaque, and yet he's able to motivate men in the dead of night when they're losing.
And you somehow have to be somebody that is both unknowable, like only as a historian one of the historians in the film says, um, maybe Martha gets in there, his wife, maybe Lafayette, maybe Hamilton.
But very, very few people get into that inner space of him, and yet his rectitude, he's taller than most of the folks, but he has a bearing that is so powerful that men that are leaving, men that are deserting, men that are mutinying, stop when he starts and talks, and they sign up and say, okay, we'll fight for another six weeks, or you're right, I'm gonna put down my arms.
This is crazy.
And there are moments when the entire fate, even after the revolution, the entire fate of the United States of America is dependent on the army, angry that they haven't been paid by Congress, not marching on Philadelphia and turning this into a military dictatorship, and it's George Washington who stops.
And then what does he do when everything's got together?
He resigns his military commission, and then he is asked to be the president of the Constitutional Convention.
He lends his stuff.
He is voted unanimously president.
Wow.
And what does he do after two terms?
He leaves it.
He's kind of the coach of the bad news bears kind of George the Third, who's not the idiot that we try to make him out to be George.
George W. Bush?
No, George the Third.
I was gonna say he's the King George the Third.
I think he says when he hears that.
When when Washington resigned his military commission and then resigned to presidency, he said, then he is the most powerful character of the age.
So this imagine what that means today, that we're in an age where everybody wants me, and that he is no, you.
He understood that the actual highest office is citizen.
And he was determined to go back to that and to not claim for himself wealth, didn't make money during the war, you know, didn't um try to amass personal power.
He just said, it is my service to this new idea.
You know, as Payne was saying, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to reset and go back to zero and create something new, as he called it an asylum for mankind.
That's the second episode of our film.
Every one of our episodes is named after a phrase from Thomas Payne.
The first is in order to be free, you know, that the feeble uh engines of despotism only work, he said, unless you you can will it in order to be free.
You just need to will it, and then asylum for mankind, and then when things are dark, uh the times that try mansoul, and then a great title called Conquer by the Drawn Game.
It's what Washington understood.
Britain, they they have to win and they can't do it.
They can't sustain armies 3,000 aways from home in an area that they don't they misunderstand how big we are.
And of course, nobody's got a weather report.
So that storm right, he realized a battle's not it's not, it's it's not right here in this moment.
It is, but there's a if you look at the different legs of it, there's more than there's more than a couple of ways to win this thing, you know.
The historian Jane Kaminsky says he knows what every insurrectionary leader means, meaning gorilla, you know.
That you just you go you you you eat at them there, you know, like more British and Hessian, their mercenaries, soldiers die in New Jersey from being picked off in guerrilla moments foraging, than they are in three big set battles of Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth Courthouse.
So it is a down and dirty war.
And they're terrorist organizations of loyalty.
It's like Grand Theft America.
Okay, yeah.
It's It's pretty wild.
It's pretty wild.
And yet out of it comes an extraordinary order.
And yet out of it comes the echo of Lincoln, who understood the founding better than anyone else, and delivers the Declaration of Independence 2.0 at Gettysburg, in which he said we really do mean all men are created evil.
Oh, yeah.
Right?
He's like, Lincoln was that white eye person.
We're gonna live through all time or die by suicide.
Like nobody's coming to attack us and and conquer us.
If we dissolve, it's on us.
And so that's the message for today.
It is.
It's the it's it's what it's what Washington's example of giving up power.
It's it's of the non-authoritarian stuff of Thomas Payne and Jefferson, and this sense of of the power of the power of the civic example, and then of course Lincoln's warning that you have to stay together.
And he presided over the close we ever came closest we ever came to national suicide or civil war.
And without him, like without Washington, who knows what happens.
Yeah.
Yeah, Lincoln was the guy that like just that really that kept the pilot light of what these other guys had lit going, right?
Um I have like one or two questions.
Do you think there's been this thing in my lifetime where you felt like colonialism ended, right?
You kind of felt like that through articles that were written and just looking like that's bad, this is wrong, right?
But then you still have things that happen, like um, you still have genocides happening, you still have like ethnic cleansing in Gaza that some people uh believe is happening.
Um, you still have colonial.
Is that just something the media tricked us to think?
Is it safe for us to think that that kind of thing is ended?
Like, you know, because you almost want to evolve as a species and think that that's not happening anymore because it seems so brutal, right?
That war and conquering isn't happening anymore because it seems so brutal.
But do you think it will always be a part of us?
And then a second question is like, yeah, like these guys like lit like this pilot light a long time ago of like being a citizen and reflection of yourself and how that's gonna be.
That's gonna need to always be a part of what it means to be an American.
Yes.
And for this to evolve and to stay alive.
And then the only way it can die is by suicide, right?
It really puts it immediately back on you, especially with that word suicide.
But what can we do now?
Where do you feel like we're at now?
And not in a judgmental way, but just in like a hopeful way, even.
Where do you think that we're at now and what can we do?
Because it feels scary now.
Yeah, it is scary.
I think we pull out the fuel rods of our own self-righteousness, and just take it down a notch and realize that all the people we're saying are evil and whatever are just fellow citizens who disagree with us, and then just let it go.
The first part of your question is the sadder one.
Ecclesiastes, that's the old testament says, what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again.
There's nothing new under the sun.
War, ethnic violence, religious disagreements, the pain of slavery, of some form of subjugation of another totalitarianism.
It's as my marine, Tommy Valerie was his name, Corporal Tommy Valerie.
It's the history of the world.
And what we, the United States represent is the beacon, the pilot light.
I love that phrase of yours, Theo, better than the beacon.
It's the pilot light of where we could be, who we could be.
So if we are a nation in the process of becoming, we got a lot of work to do.
And we take a few steps forward, and you think, ah, it's the end of colonialism, it's the end of partisan rancor, it's the end of this, it's progress.
Uh, we're at some, you know, we're colorblind, you know, isn't if we like a black person, isn't it all, you know.
Right, we solved it.
Yeah.
Well, I I have friends would say I I I've centered race in a lot of my films, and I've gotten some criticism for it, you know, telling the story that, you know, uh of that, the our our asterisk, our yes but um and um and then when Obama was uh was inaugurated, they said, Now will you stop talking about that?
And I held up the Onion Onion magazine and it said, black men given worst job in nation, you know.
And I just said, just watch what happens.
And what it did is it actually awoke in some people the darker sides in which you judge people not by the content of their character, as Dr. King suggested, but by the color of their skin.
That somehow I could know everything about you by the color of your skin.
Oh, what your type is, what it is.
And that's of course.
I think Obama got us out of that in a lot of ways.
I think he moved it in a way, and then all of a sudden there was a reactive thing, which is almost lawful as well, if it's physics in a way, that allowed people to play to their worst basis instincts, basis instincts that had been in some ways by both parties sort of suppressed.
No, no, no, we're not gonna manifest that way.
Kids, behave.
We've still got two hours before we get to the beach, right?
And suddenly, by the time we got to the beach, we're at war again.
And you know, we're not okay, we're turning around, we're going home.
There's no ice cream today, whatever it is.
There's got to be that thing that you and I, that the essence of what we've talked about, it seemed to me, has been about this incredibly difficult thing, which is self-discipline.
Like I need to actually do the work on myself.
I cannot assume, I cannot insist that you do the work for you before I'm willing to do it for myself.
But there are people now where it seems like a lot of people are doing people like the people who have been doing the work and following the rules hypothetically and be trying their best to be an American.
I feel like some of those people are starting to wear thin because it seems like everybody doesn't want to.
Um then maybe that their idea of what being an American isn't the same as the other people, right?
Well, I don't think that's the case.
I I think a lot of it has to do with this device in our back pocket and all the atomized sources of of information that we have.
Like when I grew up, there were three channels and PBS, which I work all my films on PBS, and maybe an independent channel.
You basically got your local newspaper that had a staff of lots of people who covered the school board meeting and the and so people knew what it was.
Now, you know, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York here said, everybody's entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.
Right?
We do know that the Battle of Gettysburg happened on July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, 1863.
But what we're now in a situation is, and this is the greatest danger, is that we are being told things that aren't true.
And there's not amongst the exponentially greater number of possibilities of outlets that everyone has, anybody saying, well, actually that's not true.
And so what happens, that demoralization that you're talking about, or that sense that I played by the rules and whatever, it may be more imbalanced by the fact that they have been convinced of a lot of things that aren't necessarily true.
You know, one in one has got to equal two, yeah, right, except in our faith, in that faith where one and one has to equal three, that we say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
So here are the sum of the parts, and here's the whole.
And so what's the difference?
That's where we want to spend our lives here, not in parsing how you really don't get it, and you're wearing that, and you've got this thing, you got your hat backwards.
So I know exactly who you are.
Right.
Right.
And that's not who I am.
And and we are all the same.
You know, Shakespeare has it when the Shylock in the the Merchant Event, our are we not human, having not eyes, organs, senses, dimensions, affections fed by the same foods, subject to the same diseases.
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
I mean, if you poison us, do we not die?
We are all the same.
And unless you can stop and turn and not say, oh, you're a radical leftist destroying, and you're looking at this person who's like this Midwestern, whatever, or you are a right wing, you know, you know, fascist that we you don't have a chance to do.
Yeah, you're boiling gay people in your apartment or whatever.
Yes.
But just shit like that.
It's like, what is going on?
It is crazy.
Well, you think about what happens in an unchecked information world.
That is to say, where you don't have the self-discipline of the traditional media outlets that was reliable too.
That was reliable.
I mean, I would still, when people say, what would you do?
I would say I would watch one of the nightly news of the three networks, or all of them if you can get them.
And I would read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or the Washington Post, or maybe all three, and don't look at anything else.
Because the other things will tell you that all Democrats are into pedophilia and all re you know, and you just after a while you have to go, stop.
Yeah.
This noise is crazy.
What you've done is by telling the lie up on top of the mountain and formed it into this snowball, it's rolled down the hill and it's now this giant thing where uh truth is lies and knowledge is is ignorance and everything is the opposite of what it actually is.
And what you have to get back is to what is what is verifiable.
And as much as people say, oh, the the mainstream media, the lame stream media or whatever it is, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that are you know, have opposite editorial positions, their actual papers.
If you really want to follow what's going on and pretend that it's not just, oh, well, their interest is this in promoting the elites.
It's it's just they're actually really good at what they do.
And and I think if Americans were to sort of say, I mean, Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, just in the middle of our tragedy, he said, turn your phones off, turn off social media because you know what?
I want to have him on here.
Spencer Cox, I would love to get to have you have a conversation with him.
I met him last January at the Governor's Association.
He was, I was talking about the revolution, and we showed some clips at the National Governors Association, and he came up and he asked a question.
He said, You talk about virtue.
I want to pursue this question of virtue.
And I said, Thank God, here's a place where we can have it.
But he's the guy who said, turn off your social media.
Go out into nature, hug uh somebody that you know.
Because if you look at it, social media isn't.
You ever been in a room of teenagers where they've all got their phones?
Yeah, it's nothing social about it.
There's nothing social about it.
It's all an interior dialogue with yourself.
It's schizophrenic.
It's it actually creates a thousand people in you when our object, as we've been talking for the entire time we talked about, is to find out who this person is inside.
Who am I?
Yeah.
Is the central question.
I start with an easier question, very hard.
Who are we?
The US United States of America.
But then inevitably, all of those questions form a mirror.
And I don't know if you get out in nature much, but nature is perfect.
And nature puts a mirror back to all of your imperfections.
And that's that's tough.
A lot of people would rather be, you know, less completely occupied by other stuff all the time, rather than say, what is it that I could do that that could make me a better person?
Um, thank you.
Some of these some of these thoughts are so great.
A group of friends and oh, you've given me the I mean, just this dream of the future, the pilot light, all of that stuff.
Thank you.
Well, it's important that we're thinking about this stuff together.
And I would even like I would disagree like on the news outlets that you mentioned, right?
I would disagree for for me.
I don't need to disagree with you about it.
But I see when you and I are here talking, we probably have a lot of the very same ideas and hopes.
But I don't need to sit there and tell to you, hey, I don't, I don't I disagree with a news source.
You might like, you know, it's like it just shows that like what you're even saying is just like us conversating about something is what really matters.
That's all this is real media right here.
Exactly.
When we talk about each other, all I meant about choosing stuff is that you want to make sure that the source is fact-checking itself, that it has its own responsibility, you know, because like when the cat's away, the mice will play, and that's all we have now are mice out there, and you just need a little bit of people who go, we have to check this to make sure it's true.
Yeah, I wonder if we'll get to a place where there's some sort of a purity test of some, you know, that we could all agree on.
I wonder if AI or something in some way gets us to a purity test.
Well, that would be a wonderful unintended consequence because right?
Isn't it supposed to destroy us?
Because I know that's what I'm thinking about.
It's gonna drive us crazy.
And maybe maybe maybe the opposite will happen.
We're gonna be data slaves.
You and I are gonna have pickaxes, we'll be in a bit mine somewhere, and we'll literally be hammering out like statistics from old NBA games, so some guy can upload him for his DraftKings account.
That's right.
It's all that's what's exactly how it's where we're gonna go.
And you and years later, your son or some orb that you created will be doing a documentary on that, or your daughter, who you just had a nice time with at the D-Day Museum uh last year.
You she will be doing a documentary on uh on you and I working as um mining miners in a bit mine somewhere.
I'm I'm running back to New Hampshire so that I can go back to my little tiny town where things work and people are civil and they've got their their signs out, but nobody says, you know, you're wrong.
They just say, that's what you believe.
I disagree with that.
It's really yeah.
And I think there's there's a lot of good places out there that do have a lot of peace in them.
Uh where so since we're talking about kind of information and stuff, where do you get your information?
How do you do it?
Do you have a team that helps you source?
Like what do you guys do?
It's pretty walk into the library of Congress and you know, we're like, Kenny boys, you know, what they do know my face.
Um in the American Revolution, we've got materials drawn from 340 sources, archives, libraries around uh the world.
We have drawn on thousands of volumes, and we have gone to scholars who spent their lives delving deep into one aspect of it.
Maybe it's the British Empire's economic structure, right?
Just to understand the difference between the 13 colonies that we are and the other 13 colonies that really make their money for them because in Jamaica they got 90% of the population is enslaved and Barbados, same thing, as opposed to, you know, very few in Massachusetts and maybe half in South Carolina.
So you know, we just want to find out that.
We want to check the dates.
So we always have lots of different sources.
We want to source thing from scholars who've been working in, and you find there's sometimes a little dispar desperate stuff, different stuff.
So we will say, um, even after we lock the film, we might have the word 16.
It might be battleships, it might be days, it might be dead, whatever the number is.
But we've got footnotes on our script of all the sources that have contributed to why we believe it's 16.
And then you read a fifth source, and it says, not sure.
So I so we go somewhere in all the narration that Peter Coyote has read and found the word perhaps, cut it duplicate it and pull it and go, perhaps 16.
That we do not sleep at night until we know we're absolutely dead certainly.
We don't want to slander even the past.
We don't even want to, we particularly don't want to slander the past because the past is our greatest teacher.
And people manipulate the past.
We know what it's like in a Soviet system where they cut somebody else out of the picture or there on the uh Presidium, you know, in the Politburo in front of the May Day parade and that somebody's out of favor, so suddenly they edit it out of the pre pre uh libraries in Cuba, you can't even get history books before certain years.
Because people want to manipulate this stuff, and what's so great about a free country is we go, yeah, we screwed up there.
You know what I mean?
It's so funny that we're in a we live in a in a uh a country that is totally devoted to football, right?
Understandably so.
Every level, Friday night, high school, Saturday, college, Sunday, pro.
And if that coach comes up and says, Yeah, well, you know, we're we're we're okay.
You go, he's fired.
You go, we really sucked on special teams this time.
We really need to do some work here, and we do, and there's a sense of, and we do this in business all the time.
Earnestness.
And we just say what you're saying, how do we get better?
Well I what is it that we did wrong?
And so there is that incredible American drive to be super honest and just say, I really messed up here and I can do better the next time.
If you think that Tom Brady wins his first Super Bowl and he goes, okay, cruise control for the rest of my career, right?
And I'll get six more Super Bowls.
He is phenomenally dedicated to self-criticism and where you can improve.
Yeah.
If we extended that into our civic and our political world, we would not be in the kind of argumentative mud that we're in right now where we feel stuck and unable to move and this and it's always the other person, not me.
And I'm in the mud because of you, not because of I stepped in it.
It's just if we if we brought that ethic of self-improvement, it's what we've been talking along all along.
It's it's my response.
My mom used to say that to me.
You know, if if he's got a problem with you, it's your responsibility.
Oh, yeah.
If you've got a problem with him, it's your responsibility.
Right.
Which means I don't need you to change.
I need to figure out what it is.
If this is worth repairing, which I think our experiment is, then it always begins with myself.
And it's so rare to see people, particularly in politics, take a stand that says, you know, a George Washington stand.
I'm leaving.
I'm giving up power.
Or you know what?
My party is wrong in this, right?
I am not going to do that.
More people would vote for that guy.
Of course.
Of course.
I think it's one of the reasons why it's like, um, I think we're getting down to people don't trust entities for information, right?
I think it's one of the problems that you have with news and stuff.
And because some of those are uh, you know, they make money based on advertising.
So there's a bit of there's somewhat of a conflict of interest in a way.
Not really, it didn't seem like there used to be, but then that kind of evolved.
So I think people now are trying to find a person that they believe, right?
Because it's easier for them to like to like um contempt to to analyze, right?
Like I can figure out if I believe this person, so I'll get information from them.
Well, you see.
Whereas I think entities, it's people don't trust entities anymore as much, you know.
Well, I I have spent my entire professional life as an independent filmmaker, but all of my films are made for PBS.
And let me tell you why.
They are the Declaration of Independence, the pursuit of happiness applied to communications.
There's rigorous fact-checking.
I cannot put a film out unless I have been vetted by scholars from all different uh perspectives and understandings and and and knowledge.
And they also are not, they're free of that advertising thing, right?
So that I am able to do it.
Like I could tell you, like the uh let me just say our Vietnam series took 10 and a half years to make, cost 30 million bucks.
I spent 10 of the 10 and a half years with my cup out going to foundations and corporations, Bank of America has been a corporate underwriter.
They're not a sponsor, so they're not saying, hey, we don't like that content.
They accept whatever content I'm going to do because they know my process is rigorous.
Foundations, individuals of wealth, government granting agencies until they were just killed.
So that P that CPB kill, you know, the death of CPP is is a big thing.
If I ask you about that, your funding, how's that been affected by it?
It's huge, it's huge.
But it's, you know, more importantly, it's such a short-sighted decision because you know what's gonna hurt most?
Most of CPB's money went to rural stations.
What is CPB?
The corporation for public broadcasting, which was just not only they took back money they'd already appropriated four million for an upcoming project, but they we had been in discussions for another 10 million.
So I just lost 14 million for about three or four projects coming up in the future.
I'll I'll I'll recover.
But the problem is most of the money goes to rural stations, which would be and will be when these stations die, a news desert, right?
They're used to the PBS, not just for the children's programming, not just for the great prime time, but for their homeland security, their alerts.
They may be, you know, the the most important signal they get, and you don't want to be a news desert where you've got somebody telling you because you want somebody there covering the school board.
You want somebody there.
You want somebody performing.
You want a personal person that you know.
So I have worked with them.
So go back to my my Vietnam uh example.
I I spent 10 of the 10 and a half years trying to raise that.
I could have walked into a streaming service or a premium cable and with my reputation, walked in and given them a description of Vietnam and walked out in half an hour with a check for 30 million dollars.
They would not have given me the 10 and a half years it took me to do the good job.
Now that film came out in the fall in September of 2017.
If I do my math right, that's eight years ago.
It is still, even though it's a film, one-stop shopping for the most aggregation of the most recent information about the Vietnam War, still after eight years.
Wow.
I am so proud of that.
But it I didn't take the money, do it in a year or year and a half, and have it be a piece of shit.
Oh, you're not a T bill, you're a bond, dude.
Yeah, I am long term.
That's exactly it.
And I'm and I need to marinate and mature and come to term, and I need to just redeem it at its face value.
I'm not making up.
I am trying to share this.
And you know what PBS stands for?
It's not system.
The S is not.
It's public.
I like that part, meaning you and me, broadcasting, obviously, service, service.
It's not the Columbia broadcasting system.
It's not the public broadcasting self.
It's it's a not a top-down, right?
Like it's not a network saying, what part of our our primetime schedule don't you understand?
You're taking it all.
It's individual stations working with independent filmmakers, making stuff and sending it up, and then it's going out.
And there's no you have to take this.
It's it is exactly the declaration of independence applied to um uh the communications world, just as the national parks are the declaration of independence apply to the landscape.
Because we, for the first time in human history, and you could have only done that, operating under a declaration of independence.
We set aside the most beautiful landscape in the world, not for kings, not for noblemen, not for the very rich, but for you and for me, and for more importantly, our posterity, our children's children's children.
That's what Theodore Roosevelt says.
We are not saving this for a day.
You know, we're saving it for all time.
And that's beautiful stuff.
Because if we didn't have that, if we had a different kind of system, um, Zion and Yosemite would be gated communities.
The rim of the Grand Canyon, there may be one little place where you could go and look out, but the rest would be owned by other people.
Um, the Everglades would have been drained and be endless strip malls and golf courses and condominiums, and um Yellowstone would be a down on its luck um sort of amusement place called Geyser World.
Yeah.
You know, and and just think about it.
There'd be a lot of hippies, there are a lot of EDM customers out there.
Manifest destiny.
Manifest destiny says, we're gonna take the whole continent and you're gonna have to get out of the way, whoever you are.
And that stand of trees, I look at and I think bored feet.
That river, I think damn.
That canyon, I think mineral rights.
That's fine.
But some of those places you can set aside free from that so that we can go.
So there are places in the United States like the South Rim or the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, or Zion or Yosemite, what I think is one of the most beautiful places on Earth, if not the most beautiful place, or Yellowstone.
And you can go there and look at it and see exactly what Theodore Roosevelt saw.
And more importantly, you can see in the case of the Native people who occupied Yosemite, what they saw 2,000 years ago.
Right.
And that gives you an access to all time, which then gives you a perspective.
Some journalist, when he went up to Alaska and he saw what was then called Mount McKinley and has been called Denali, said, McKinley never saw the mountain.
Um said, it reminds me of my atomic insignificance, meaning the way nature dwarfs you.
You just look up at a night sky and when it's 10 below zero and you just see all those stars and you go, Oh, I mean, I'm like nothing.
Yeah, I need a different or whatever.
But the thing is about that, it's paradoxical, nature and and I would suggest our national parks because they that feeling of insignificance inspirates you, makes you larger, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard, right?
You know that.
Like you see somebody who's so full of shit, so full of themselves, and you think they just get smaller and smaller.
But the person who goes, Wow, you know, I'm nothing in the scheme of things.
And that's true, seems bigger.
Yeah, you know, seems like somebody I want to listen to.
You know what?
Oh, yeah.
All all the great gurus of the national parks, like Emerson and and and particularly John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, they're all they have distance in their eyes.
That's what Stuart Udol, who's a former Secretary of the Interior out of Kennedy and Johnson.
He said he had distance in his eyes.
I just love that phrase.
As if somebody could almost look around the curve of the earth and see not only physically what's going to happen, but in time.
So he's this blustery, you know, guy that we love for all his belligerence, walks off like, but carry a big stick.
But what does he do?
He he sets up the Grand Canyon, the grandest canyon on earth, I assure you.
And had that longevity of thought to have the other one.
And I want my great great-grandchildren to enjoy it.
And guess what?
They are.
We touched on Spencer Cox really quickly.
I think we're in a new space for an American revolution in the sense uh, you know, I know part of it was the bill of rights.
Um we don't have an internet bill of rights.
We don't have a social media bill of rights.
Right.
And it's I think it's stuff like that that's killing us.
You know, it's like I agree.
You can have if I'm a restaurant and you come there and I poison you.
Yes, you can sue me.
You can file charges against me that will shut me down.
But there's all these algorithms that are poisoning people, right?
Feeding people, um, literally poisoning them, and they know what they're feeding.
They have a log of it.
They have a log of the recipe.
If you go here, we're gonna send you here.
They're poisoning people to the point where people are sick.
People are literally sick, addicted and sick, and there's no way to um to kind of stop them, it feels like.
I agree completely.
I think that's beautifully said.
And so one would hope that there was a health uh department that might have noticed that that restaurant had uh ingredients, or there was you know, mice or rats around in the kitchen that might be uh poisoning, they're gonna contribute to this that shuts them down or gives them a bad grade as they do in New York City.
You see the A or the B or the C and be forewarned.
I'll eat a little C. You'll need a C now and then I draw the line at B. I'm sorry, this is where you and I disagree on this.
But you know, maybe there is some overarching sense of discipline, or maybe there's self-discipline.
Maybe I realize that, you know, in in Fantasia in the Sorcerer's Apprentice, where he's got the endless number of brooms carrying the buckets of water, like it's just so proliferated.
We're just so out of control and unable to um make sense of anything that at some point you need someone, in this case the wizard, to come and recast the spell, so it it goes back to being one broom that's carrying these things.
And then you've got, you know, we've got that possibility.
And I that's my impulse is always to just reduce, reduce, get down to something that you know you can trust.
And I think what you're saying is could we agree to maybe a set of rules that would govern facts, that we would say that facts were primary, that we couldn't just constantly not just speculate, but wildly lie, because the toxicity of that is, as you say, as lethal over the long term as that poison is in your restaurant.
Yeah.
And the algorithms, the fact that you can continue to point.
Imagine a 15-year-old.
But it pays.
If it bleeds, it leads.
So then right now, that used to be the thing in the 70s when there's still just three stations and whatever.
But then you've got millions of outlets who have no responsibility, and they can say that up is down and down is up, and what's your problem?
You're you know you're wrong.
It's a big conspiracy that you've been thinking that up is down all of your life.
And I can prove to you why you're absolutely dead wrong.
So follow me over this cliff.
Well, I guess it goes to show, like, even as we said in the beginning that it this doesn't end, right?
The the the uh the idea to be free, to think free, to feel all those things.
Well, you're gonna constantly have to come into uh bring those into the present day to keep America evolving.
And I think it that's it's no more evident than ever than right now, with uh just a new front line if like war for information for pure for facts for the ability for our children not to be contaminated.
You know, maybe it used to be by dirty water, but now it's by bad information.
It's by algorithms that aren't like uh shackled by any um facts, you know?
Or or they're f or they're that that that they don't want to poison people, you know?
So I think one of the impulses ten years ago was to go back to the story of our founding, to our creation story, and ask essential questions.
What happened?
It isn't just Lexington and Concord, and then he uh he crosses the Delaware and captures Trenton and then they surrender at Yorktown, boom done.
And in the middle, these great documents were signed.
But say it is a really complicated story about very complicated and very interesting people who were able to, as you said at the very beginning, what cause are you willing to to serve?
What what are you willing to risk your life for?
And these people coming from a wide variety of backgrounds.
It's not like the purity of it's only one type of person that makes up our country.
We've been a huge variety from the very beginning and from and and of many different faiths and of many different perspectives, were able to figure out how they could govern themselves and it set an example for the world.
And so maybe going back and collecting, you know, is maybe as unsexy as it sounds like American history.
Oh, Jesus, last thing I need to know.
I'm so glad I'm out of high school because I don't have to take another history.
Maybe as Harry Truman said, the only thing that's really new is the history you don't know.
And that by telling a story of our creation, we might have the ability to save the experiment because we could rededicate ourselves to the things that the people who are willing to give, as they said in the declaration, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor too.
I think it's worth a shot.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
Ken Burns, thank you so much, man.
It's been so much fun.
It's been so cool, dude.
So happy to meet you.
Yeah.
Really, really happy to meet you.
You too.
And thank you for all your commitment and uh your undying desire.
And I bet your mother's very proud of uh Can I tell you?
So my my mother's name was Lila, L Y L A. So that name forever was just draped in black crepe, right?
We didn't say it.
We called her mommy.
Um my daughter, oldest daughter, who's now 42, in on uh January 18th, 2011, had her first child, my first grandchild, and named her after a grandmother she never met, named Lila.
So now we say Lila every day.
Uh and we smile and flowers bloom and birds chirp, and it's it's um the music plays.
So it's it's a wonderful kind of um, you know, nosedive and then the pilot lights relit.
The pilot light is relit.
Lila.
We'll have to put a picture of her up there at the end if you'll send us a cue.
L L Y L A, we'll get it to you.
Oh, that'd be awesome.
Uh thank you so much.
Keep working, stay alone.
No, no, no.
Get on peptides.
We need more.
We need more Ken Burns forever.
We need the uh the pilot lights keep burns.
Thank you so much, brother.
Thank you.
Now I'm just falling on the breeze, and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.
I must be cornerstone.
Oh, but when I reach that round, I'll share this piece of my mouth.
