Transcript of Ken Burns

Hi, my name is Ken Burns, and I feel hopeful about being Conan O'Brien's friend.

Well, Ken, you shouldn't be because this is the takedown of Ken Burns.

Right.

You have coasted way too long.

50 years of coasting.

Uh, just, oh, everybody loves their Ken Burns.

That's why all the henchmen are here.

Yeah, get him, boss!

Get him, boss!

I have with me two people who don't read. I'm pretty sure they don't write.

We read magazines.

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot about Us Magazine. That does count as— my 1990s is showing. Hey there, welcome to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, joined by Sona Movsesian.

Hi.

Matt Gourley is out, he is on paternity leave, and we wish him and his lovely family the best. God, I'm smooth. And then David Hopping joining us. How are you, David?

I'm good, how are you?

Uh, Sona, you said that you heard from your father. Yes, Gil. Gil, uh, was this yesterday or the other—

this was last night.

Yeah, last night he called you and he was unhappy What happened?

He texted me. He was angry. He saw a clip online and he got angry about something I said. And, you know, my parents are, you know, they're traditional people.

Yeah.

And I am. I'm— I have— I got a mouth. And why are you laughing so hard?

No, but you know what, Sona? You're a modern woman of the world. Thank you. You've been here. You've been there. You've been to Porter Square. You have been. You've seen it all. Some say you've done it all. And Your father was born in a very small village.

Yes, he was.

Where was this?

This was in Turkey, what used to be Armenia. Thank you very much. But yeah, he was born in Turkey and he was in a small village, immigrated here. They're traditional people, my parents. And I say a lot of things on this podcast that are not traditional things. And so yesterday he texted me and he's like, I can't believe you talk like that on the, on the podcast. And he said, you're a mother, you have kids. Like, he went on for— and I was like, oh my God, my dad's actually upset.

Yeah.

But I couldn't think of which clip he would have been upset about. I say jizz so many times on this podcast.

You say everything.

I talk about dicks. Yeah, I talk about vaginas. I talk about, like, heated rivalry all the time. I couldn't— I was like, telling Tack, I was like, did I— is there one thing that was egregious?

It's like saying to Santa Claus, thanks for the gift. And Santa's like, what? You know what I mean? And then he's got to think about the 55 billion gifts he's given out. Right. But you are. Yeah. You're the Santa Claus of filth. You're just constantly— it's butts, it's buns. You know, you, you love it. And so what did you say? Did you defend yourself to your dad?

No, I was just like, I really needed to figure out which thing upset him. So I said, which clip? And then he said me, I appeared on my friend Rick's podcast.

I know Rick.

Yeah, Rick Glassman. And I was on his podcast and we released a clip not even from this one. So I'm like, clearly he never watches this podcast because otherwise he'd be really pissed. Yeah, it was that podcast. And I—

what were you talking about?

I said the word fuck like twice.

Okay, my dad was upset about it. So he can't ever listen to this podcast?

Never.

Because I saw some of you with Rick and it was very tame compared to what you do every day here.

Yes.

Now let me paint a picture for the people listening. Your father is very distinguished, very handsome. Yes. An older gentleman.

Yes.

He's got a big white mustache.

Okay.

No. Does he not?

I knew you were going to the mustache.

No, no, I know. I'm just saying.

Yes, he's always had a mustache.

Does he not look like— he looks a lot like the guy who carves Pinocchio, Geppetto. He does. Does he not? Does he bear a resemblance to Geppetto? Just say, yeah, a little.

He's a little Geppetto-esque.

Yeah. Have you ever noticed that your brother has hinges where his joints should be? Have you ever noticed that? And does your— remember when you were growing up, your brother would say, I wish I could be a real boy? Do you remember? Do you remember?

Oh, you're actually asking me?

I'm saying your father carved your brother.

Okay.

That he is, in fact, Geppetto. And I do hope that someday Danny becomes a real boy. You know what? Yes.

I'm fine with you saying these things because my dad does not watch this podcast, obviously, because how can he not be mad about the thousands of things I've said?

No, no, no. You are just— I'm thinking of like a sprinkler shooting water. You're a sprinkler that just shoots filth, but you get filth on every single part of the lawn. You know, the lawn is— is saturated with filth.

Why are you acting like you're an innocent guy? Which one of us has a voice for their penis? Not me. What's your penis's voice like?

Hey, leave me out of this. Hey, everybody, back off. Cut it out. I was just in here in these briefs, minding my own business. My penis is always reading a tiny copy of The New Yorker. Oh, this is great. There's some good cartoons in this one.

This is your— you created this environment.

He's got little glasses. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that your parents need to accept who you are.

I know.

I think that's important.

Yes.

They need to see the real you. And I know you get into it with your mom a lot. You guys have your differences because I think that you were quite— I think you were a lot to handle when you were growing up, were you not?

I was.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was.

And how are you and Nadia doing these days?

We're cool.

I love her.

I love her and I love my dad.

Of course you do.

And I do. There are times when I say things where I think, oh man, their friends will listen to this one day. But then I kind of forget what I say. And also, I mean, my dad, like, he was just like, tone it down a little. And I was like, I don't know how to do that.

No, you can't.

I don't know how to do that.

You can't do that.

If you say something about— if we have a conversation about dicks and stuff, like, how are we not supposed to talk about dicks?

I'm going to point out that you're usually the one that brings it up. You know, the topic is not dicks and then you chime in in a little bit and say, I've seen a dick or two. That's not what happens. You bring— I'm usually talking about Woodrow Wilson, and then you say, did he have a cock? And I'm like, well, I guess he did.

Oh my God.

Uh, but you know what I mean? That's usually how it goes. So this is on you, and you'll have to pay for this.

I like poo poo pee pee humor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do.

I—

that's me. I have to say, I can relate somewhat because, um, my parents very, very staunch, good, old-school Catholics.

Yes.

And they watched every episode of my show starting in 1993. And what a cavalcade of horrific sights, sounds, and smells. Yeah. And they were always— they would always just— my mother would say, we do a show with the masturbating bear and then a talking whatever.

Money Shot Lincoln.

Money Shot Lincoln and all this stuff. And my mother would say, Well, I just thought you looked lovely last night. That tie you were wearing. And she would always go to the thing that she— because she— and so she never, not once said, oh, you know, you got to stop that. Not once. She knew I was bringing in the Benjamins, and that meant they'd get a ham for Christmas. Anyway, hey, Gil, we love you. I love you. And your daughter's doing a great job. And I agree with you. She's horrible. Okay. Almost nice.

Say I was horrible.

This is the end.

My dad didn't say I was horrible.

No, but I, I also give him a lot of credit. He carved— yes, your brother, he carved him.

You start off being nice to my dad and then you started talking about how he's—

how many times in my life have we been in a restaurant or anywhere and I have secretly taken my napkin, scrunched it up and turned it into a giant mustache, put it under my nose and said, hey, Sona, Gil wants to to talk to you. Yes. And I have a maybe 2.5-foot-long white mustache under my nose.

I don't think we've ever had a meal without you doing it.

Without me doing it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

It's like you worry about us not being able to do a bit.

And if there's no— if I didn't have a napkin for any reason, they hadn't put out the napkin yet, or there was a mistake, I would tear the tablecloth off the table, smashing all the plates, put it under my nose and say, Your father's here to speak to you. Yeah, that's the beauty of our friendship. I'll never be able to watch this. Or it's a podcast. You really should be listening. Here we go. Today's guest is one of the most influential documentary filmmakers of all time. His latest docuseries, The American Revolution, is available to stream on PBS.org and the PBS app.

And I can't believe he's the guest.

He is the guest. After this intro. He is the guest. And I'm curious to hear what he has to say about cocks and jizz and butts and buns and poo poo and pee pee. This wonderful, wonderful historian who has brought the fabric of what is America into our lives, refreshed it, and is just the very best that America has to offer. Poo-poo pee-pee. Ken Burns, welcome. Ken, I am thrilled that you're here. We've spoken a couple of times, but your series on the American Revolution was an absolute delight. Loved it. And fascinating for me because I grew up in Massachusetts, right outside Boston in Brookline, Mass. And there's a couple of times when you're explaining the siege of Boston where you cut to a map, and in the slight low left corner, it says Brookline and shows a few hills. And I stand up like a nerd and cheer, and I'm like, "Brooklyn!" And then try to act like I can take credit, though my people were still firmly in Ireland at the time, hitting each other with sticks. So, there's no way I can claim any credit for—

Well, if you look in the bigger maps as they pull out in New Hampshire, there's always Walpole, this tiny little village. The only reason why I justified it, I've lived there for 47 years, is that Walpole Gazette was this very well-respected, well-read, up and down the colonies sort of rag sheet that had opinions and thoughts and was part of it. So I justified the little hometown shout out too.

Well, and I saw what you were doing and I thought it was pathetic. I told you this would be the takedown.

This is the takedown, right?

It's such an easy point to make Everything that everyone's dealing with in your series are things that we are dealing with now. And at the time— I don't know, when does this come out?

It's been out.

No, I know yours is out, but I'm saying about this. This isn't live. Yeah, this podcast.

I was told this was live.

Yeah, yeah, this is going to—

I did Joe Rogan, it was live.

No, no, it wasn't. No, Joe Rogan's a different situation. No, Joe Rogan's different. He's brave. He puts it out live. We sit with— These are sent to a laboratory where they're scrubbed of any opinions or— possible woke diatribes. So that's just not going to happen here. But at the time, and I'm sure there'll be another crisis when this is airing, but at the time that this drops, this episode will be about a month from now, right?

This episode's probably going to be 2 to 3 months from now.

2 to 3 months?

April. Yeah.

Why are we even here?

This is insane.

Yeah, 2 to 3 months from now. I mean, I don't know where we'll be.

We have a very packed release schedule, but we wanted to make sure this happened.

Okay, well, I would like to— I mean, I was really excited about this one. I hate the other guests we're talking to. I mean, I loathe them.

Jesus.

The one that— whatever one is out now, or the one last week, or the one two weeks from now, these people are my enemies.

Good friends of yours?

Dreadful people. I was excited about this, and now you tell me that it's coming out a year from April?

The release schedule is always movable if we want to— The 256th is really important too.

I said let's do this.

Look, look, look, we're going to be celebrating 250 if we survive until 2039, which is when the U.S. government starts. So don't get me started because there's— Yeah, there's '31, which is Yorktown. There's '33, which is the—

You're right.

You know, the British leave.

Well, we are taping this as we approach the 250th anniversary of our nation. With hope. And one of the things I've always loved about history is that it constantly reminds me we've been here before.

Yeah. So this is the thing. We like to say history repeats itself. It never does. No event has happened twice. Ecclesiastes, which is the Old Testament, said, "What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun," which means human nature doesn't change. And so that human nature is going to superimpose itself over the seemingly random chaos of events, and we're going to see themes and recurring echoes and what Mark Twain called rhymes. I have never worked on a film, whether it's about the Brooklyn Bridge or jazz music or whatever, that isn't rhyming constantly in the present. And I used to have a stump speech going off for whatever film it was. I'll give you one. This is 2011. I said, "What if I told you that I've been working for years about a film about a single-issue political campaign that metastasized with horrible unintended consequences, that it was about the demonization of recent immigrant groups to the United States, that it was about a presidential election cycle with unbelievable violence and kind of rancor and sort of muckraking and stuff, and that it also represented a whole group of people who felt they had lost control of their country and wanted to take it back.

You'd say, "Wow, you're talking about the Tea Party or this and that." I said, "These are only 4 themes of my film on Prohibition." And they go, "But what about the flappers and the gangsters?" I said, "But the more interesting thing is this underlying resonance." The thing you have to do as a filmmaker though, in order for the thing to speak more directly, is to be disciplined. Like Odysseus tied to the lash to the mast where you can see, hear those echoes, but you don't go, "Oh, isn't this so much like today?" I mean, The Revolution has a failed invasion of Canada. It has a standing army that precipitates this war in Boston. It has a big continent-wide epidemic or epidemics plural that kills more people than the Revolution and also engenders a huge debate on the part of Washington about inoculating the army. And finally he decides, which many historians think is the best military decision he made. So plus ça change as the French who came to our aid and without whose help we don't have a country. Would say.

Again, watching it, and as you said, smallpox is a— there's a terrible scourge that looks like it's going to cost us the war. What to do about that? And they're making decisions about inoculation that we're struggling with today, which is a little mind-blowing to me as the son of a scientist and physician. I have a hard time with that. But, you know, so many people will say to me, oh, but, you know, Now we have the internet. And I think, yeah, that's true, but they had broadsides back then. They had their version of the internet. They had people saying irresponsible, inflammatory things all the time, and everybody's reading it.

Sam Adams is a failure as a brewer and a tax collector, but he's really good as a propagandist who says, "My job is to keep my fellow citizens alive to their grievances." Yes. Sound familiar? There are people today within whose interest it is to keep up the divisions between people, rather than show the fact that these divisions, which accounts for your and my 51, 52%, are a mile wide but an inch thick. And that what you want, the ability to transcend the dialectic of yes and no, 1 and 0, red state, blue state, is to tell a good story because it has a benign Trojan horse effect. It says, "Oh yeah, this is who we were, this is who we are. It's very, very similar. Same degree of virtue and venality, same degree of generosity and greed, same degree of make up your own alliteration.

Yeah. And I think when I grew up, there used to be this kind of hagiography about the American Revolution. And we would get these textbooks, George Washington chopped down the cherry tree and I cannot tell a lie. And these people were represented to us as these marble men who were infallible. And then what I've loved about my lifelong obsession with history is you see George Washington is a very impressive man in a lot of ways, He's also a slaveholder. We always have to accept both sides of the story. We have to accept that. And I like these humans to be human beings.

And I think that's the only way we can actually take a measure of inspiration from them. If they're just the gods, then they don't do something. We just feel like mortals. We're flawed. We know that. They're not. They're perfect. They'd never tell a lie. But I I think we go back to heroism. The Greeks were trying to talk about it as something that was a war within people between warring factions, that Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths. And that what they're setting up are stories, good stories that remind us that we are all likewise divided within ourselves and we have chances to tilt towards that virtue or tilt towards that venality. And so I think with the revolution, it's understandable why We've made it bloodless and gallant. We got some big ideas in Philadelphia. We don't want them to be diminished, which we think if we admit this is a bloody civil war, a bloody revolution, and a bloody world war, the 4th or 5th over the prize of North America, and that George Washington, the man without whom we don't have a country, and there's very few times in world history where you can say it's literally one person that holds them together.

Deeply flawed, as you point out, rash, rides out on the battlefield risking his life, which means the entire cause, makes a couple of really bad tactical mistakes.

Really screws up in New York.

He really screws up in New York and at Brandywine, and a couple of other places where just the luck doesn't fall. But he's able to inspire people to fight in the dead of night, pick subordinate talent without any worry about whether they're better generals than him. Just happy to have them.

Can I just say something? This is what I do. Now, you're going to say, "Oh, this is insane." But I'm very like Washington. First of all, I'm tall.

Very tall.

He was maybe 6'2". I've made sure everyone here is inoculated against smallpox. Right. I pick— looking around for the people I've picked who I think are good. Okay, well, this isn't a good example, this room. Oh, man! No, but I think I'm very much like Washington. 'Cause you're tall.

His biggest and most important thing, besides convincing people that they were not Georgians or New Hampshirites, but Americans, and deferring to Congress, is that he gave up his power twice. So, these people are gonna really be so proud of you when you just walk away.

Yeah! Well, I don't like the way this has gone. I do want to say one thing about Washington that's long, uh, interested me. He was kind of wide in the hips, wasn't he? Kind of a pear-shaped guy. I'm sorry, but he was. I hate to body shame our first president. And someone hard to know—

there are no photographs, and you got to try Gilbert Stuart or Copley or others.

Gore Vidal was the one who really pointed it out in one of his books.

Well, Gore Vidal has some axes to grind, some founders to take down. Yeah.

He really— He portrays Washington as humorless and goes out of his way to talk about his wide hips and his big butt. No, I'm sorry. Those are just things I needed to get out there. Now, Ken, you're probably regretting being here. You think I'm—

You got enough friends.

You're saying, "How did this turn this quickly?" But— "How did you get me into this?" You know, more publicists have been fired after a Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend taping. It's always the first thing. "Why? Whose idea? You said!" We do have something— We have a few things in common. One thing is that I read— I'm addicted to reading history. And my wife loves fiction, and she's always trying to get me to read fiction as if eating my vegetables. You know, "Eat your vegetables." And I just have this burning desire to know what happened. And if she's reading this wonderful, powerful novel, I'm like, "Yeah, but what happened? That's just made up!" And so, she has wonderful photos of me when we've gone on vacations over our long marriage, on different beaches and in different beautiful settings, reading the most turgid, dark books about, you know, the Gulag. And I'm sitting there with, like, a rum punch next to me.

But she could be reading, you know, Schulze-Neitzen.

No, no, she's very well read, and she's always reading, you know, she's reading great stuff. And she has convinced me.

She's gotten me to read better. No, no, no. There is as much drama in what was and what is as anything the human imagination makes up. But it's not a choice. Because you're going to lose Shakespeare if you're not going to let people make stuff up, right? You're going to lose a lot of wonderful insight that comes from whatever the license is that people take to sort of focus on our interior lives and why we're here and what we're supposed to be doing and making of it. Yeah.

I have to say, even one of my— probably my favorite book is a historical novel, The Killer Angels, which is—

This is what got me into do The Civil War. I finished reading that.

Is that true?

Let me tell you this. David McCullough gave it to me. To me. I finished reading it on Christmas Day, 1984. I was visiting my dad in Michigan, and I said, "I know what I'm going to do for my next film." And he said, "What's that, son?" And I said, "The Civil War." And he goes, "What part?" And I said, "All of it." And he just shook his head and walked out of the room. And it was because the Civil War had been looming over all the subjects of the film I'd made in really bizarre ways on The Brooklyn Bridge, on the Shakers, on the Statue of Liberty, on the Congress, on Thomas Hart Benton, on all the stuff, Huey Long, all of the stuff I had done or were doing, and that I just couldn't figure out that this seemed to be, as Shelby Foote once said, American history is this clear river that flows into a bloody lake that flows out clear again. Not true, but the idea that everything has to pass through the Civil War was important to it. Yeah. I mean, Killer Angels. Have you read The Raven by Marcus James?

I have not.

Very antiquated book, 1920s. He won the Pulitzer Prize, I think, for this or another one. He did a biography first on Andrew Jackson, but then he did one that The Raven is on Sam Houston. And there is so much that happens to Sam Houston before he's even heard of the word Texas. I mean, he is this close to the presidency. He's sort of holding the governorship while Andrew Andrew Jackson is president. He's going to be the next president for sure. He marries this young girl, his wife, and at some moment she leaves him. We do not know to this day why she did. Something sexual, an old lover, whatever it was. He resigned the governorship. He went to what is now Memphis, swam across the Mississippi, and became Big Drunk, a kind of dangerous, loose cannon Indian agent across the Mississippi. And he still hasn't heard. He's fought duels in Congress. I mean, best guess about— if somebody gave me $180 million and said you had to do a feature film, I'd do the life of Sam Houston based on this— On The Raven. On The Raven.

Well, you know, there's so many things that really happened in our history and just in history in general that if you wrote it as a screenplay, someone would say, "Eh, this is too much." You know what I mean? "This is— You lost me. You know, Avatar is more believable than this." You know what I mean? "You got a little crazy here when he swims across the river." and you think, "No, no, this is all—" All true. And I think that's what's always attracted me so much to it. My dad was really into history, and I got into it, and I realized, "Oh, it's just stories." And, you know, Sona's always giving me a hard time. You always make fun of me for reading so much history.

Well, you read a lot of history, but you don't read like Fifty Shades of Gray, for instance. I've recommended books to you, and you completely ignore me.

Have you read Fifty Shades of Gray? Haven't. Okay, this is your next— Your next— This is your next documentary, Ken.

I did the blue and the gray, but I—

No, no. It's like the blue and the gray, but a little different. It's bluer. Imagine the Civil War with spanking. Yeah.

Yeah. So Shelby Foote said to me once, I was struggling over how to tell something, and he goes, how to tell a very complicated thing between Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, and Gettysburg. And he just said, "God is the greatest dramatist." Meaning, stop doing what everybody else does, which is do either all of Vicksburg before Gettysburg, or do all of Gettysburg after Vicksburg. You divide it up and say when it happened. And just stop and go— Tell what happened. Tell what happened. And then he said, "Just think about it. Lee surrenders to Grant, and a few days later, Lincoln, who's been working 18 hours a day, has enough time to go to the theater." I mean, I've had a few projects, which shall remain nameless, with various places in this town where people are wanted to adapt adapt something we've done. And the stuff that's good is the stuff that's true. And the stuff that's made up is the stuff that just doesn't work. It doesn't work. You could say, "He would never say that," or, "He would never do that," or, "Why did you need to add that?" Because there is already a life that has that kind of— If you brought it to a producer, they go, "That can't possibly have happened." Like the whole story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, which was my first film that PBS showed, was exactly that.

You could not not make it up.

Yeah. I like anything that makes you stop because I spent so much of my life in New York City living there. And every time I pass the Brooklyn Bridge, I think about what went into making that. And it used to be just this thing. It's the Brooklyn Bridge. And we can all do that. But when you realize that this is before people know what happens when you submerge humans at great depths.

You get caissons.

Yes. And you put them in these caissons and you submerge them down, but they don't know And people are dying these horrible deaths. All the thought that went into it and the lives that went into it, and then what it meant when it was completed, and it's beautiful. And so I just appreciate when I read history, one of the things it does is it usually makes me a little more optimistic, which is a strange thing to say because most of the history I'm reading is very— many dark things happen. It happen. But I meet a lot of young people who have this attitude that these are end days and the world is on fire and it's all over for us.

I had a friend in the financial industry in 2008 in the fall said, "This is a depression." And I said, "You know, in our depression, in many cities in America, the animals in the zoo were shot and the meat distributed to the poor. When that happens, I'll agree we're in a thing." To me, the optimism is a natural recourse because you've seen, I mean, there's something unprecedented about the level of the perfidy and where it's taking place at this moment, but I've seen it in the story of Huey Long. I've seen it in other places. And so you just realize, you know, you want to be on guard. You just, you know, that other 49% is talking really loudly, but you can't— History is a great, great teacher.

Great, great teacher. Yeah. And it's also, it's like a friend that can calm you down and give you a little bit of perspective. When things are very dark. I've had so many people say to me, "It's never been worse in this country than it is now." We were more divided in the Revolution.

Yeah.

And I'll say, "Okay, have you heard of the Civil War?" And, "Do you know what was going on in the Civil War and was going on in Vietnam?" But we have a lot of work to do, and we have to be on guard, and we have to speak up, but there's so much to be hopeful about. Yeah, great. And I think one of the things that I've liked so much about your work is that it's taking, whether it's jazz or baseball, you're taking these things that are a really important part of America and who we are, and you're telling us about this wonderful gift, but at the same time, you're telling us all the darkness that's involved. You're just telling the truth. You're not trying to push it one way or the other. Yeah, calling balls and strikes. I always walk away feeling this sense of nourishment that I've been taken care of.

We live in a world, and that waitress and so many people are— It's a highlight reel. That's all it is. So Babe Ruth, to take somebody ancient in baseball, only hits home runs. Right. Highlight reel. Babe Ruth struck out almost 3 times as many times as he hit a home run. He also comes up once every 9 times at bat. Bat, which means that sometimes everything falls to a middle infielder or a second baseman. The recent 7th game of the World Series was exactly that case where the big superstars didn't do the thing that the second baseman did, and that was the difference. And I think that's a really good simplistic analogy to history. You've got to call balls and strikes, and you have to be able to understand. I mean, you see the ballplayers who all, they hit the home run and they cross home plate and they thank 'God, for delivering that.' They never do that when they hit into a game-ending double play. Right? Right. So if there is that— No, no, it's—

I always think if you're going to thank God, you also have to blame him. Yeah.

And I want to see people doing that, striking out and going, 'I defy you, God!' You know, the only time I've ever seen is Pedro Martinez is pulled off the mound when the Red Sox are beginning to lose something, and he looks up as he's being pulled off. I've never seen— I talked to him about it. I've never seen anybody do it. But you go back to the Revolution, most of the founders become, particularly Jefferson, deists. They believe that there is some sort of supreme being, supreme architect, divine providence, the supreme architect of the universe, whatever they call it, who is disinterested in the affairs of us and makes no distinction between faiths. What an unbelievably great way to understand it. So it's my obligation to sort of be better. Pursue happiness was not objects in a marketplace of things, but lifelong long learning in a marketplace of ideas, to be more virtuous, to earn the right of citizenship, but then also present myself as moving closer through my actions to whatever that higher being is. It's a really great way to conduct yourself. And they also understood the First Amendment, which we say free speech and because of Minneapolis, right to protest and assembly.

The number one thing is we shall make no establishment of a religion. Every other country on Earth had been born with a official religion. Here's the stamp. And we didn't have it. And it has been one of the blessings for us. And we speak about the political benefits and their legion. This is the enlightenment applied to a physical thing, a government. But it's also the religious thing in which you're just trying to pull the fuel rods out of what everybody does is they make a they, a them. It's the playbook of the authoritarian. This is a bad, the radical this or the They are the cause of all our problems. Enemy within. For Hitler, it was the Jews and the Jehovah's Witness and homosexuals and Marxists and Bolsheviks and whatever it might be. Everybody looks to say it's them. And I've made films about the US, but I've also made films about us. There's an intimacy there as well as a majesty and complexity and even controversy to the US. But the thing I've known after doing this for 50-plus years is there is no them. There's no them. No them. And our obligation is to try to remember to tell people there's no them in some way, in story form.

And that's what you were talking—

you're just leading off— It's all us.

—with just how much a story can have this sense of, boy, this is just like it was before. And just like it was before is very much like what's happening now.

Well, it's also, if you don't read history or you think You're not interested. There's this belief that the way things are now is the way they've always been, also in an inaccurate way. So there's this notion, I think a lot of young people probably think, well, the Republican Party has always been tied to fundamental Christianity. And I think, no, no, they would've been— I mean, for a long time, that is exactly the Republican Party and Republican Americans, start from the beginning of the party's establishment, would've been kind of horrified by that idea that we were tied to that. Do you know what I mean? That's more of a recent invention, 1980.

I've got a map of the political parties and the just twist. I mean, there was the last Cabot Lodge to run against a Kennedy or anybody was '62 when Ted Kennedy took the seat vacated by the Senate seat in Massachusetts and he lost. He loved Ted Kennedy. He said, "Yeah, we voted for the same things. I don't think I disagreed with him on anything. I voted for civil rights." And you think, wait a second, the Republican Party was founded in 1854 in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin to end slavery. The Whig Party had died. They were looking out of the ashes to start something. They put up a candidate, John C. Fremont, the Pathfinder. In '56, he loses. And then this guy, this bizarre, tall, thin lawyer prone to bouts of debilitating depression, Wins the election in 1860. As a Republican. 40% of the vote. As the beginning of the Republican Party as a national force, the most successful party, unfortunately also because it often tacks to different places and basically is really good at convincing people to vote against their own interests. I mean, that's been the last 50 years of the Republican Party.

But I mean, up until when Johnson took Kennedy's civil rights, which Kennedy couldn't have passed, took it and got it through, and then the Voting Rights Act, he knew he was losing the South, but he was a Southerner Democrat. You woke up on January, or you woke up on Election Day and you had every one of the 11 states of the former Confederacy in the Democratic Party column. You could count on those electoral votes. And now you wake up on Election Day and the Republicans count on it. Ronald Reagan began his traditional post-Labor Day campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. That's in Choctaw County. He did not go there to honor Goodwin Cheney Shermer, the three civil rights activists who were murdered there. He went and began within the first few paragraphs in to talk about states' rights, which was virtue signaling. I don't know if virtue is the right word, but signaling to his audience. And then one by one, you watch, you'd already seen it happen, the former states of the Confederacy that have been solidly anti-Republican because they were trying to promote racial equality switch over. And it's breathtaking to watch just the changes that the 2 parties, let alone the various 3 parties that kind of like fish live parasitically off the various parties.

It's a wonderful, dynamic, fluid thing. Harry Truman said, "The only thing that's really new is the history you don't know." That's really great. I mean, confounding thing because we live in this narcissistic present. So therefore we're all Chicken Littles. The sky is falling. It's worse than it ever could be. And you don't have the agency to pull yourself out of the nosedive that you put yourself been to.

Well, there's never been a— one of the sentiments I agree with is there's never been a better time to be alive than right now. And it's actually the only time to be alive right now. Yeah. But I'll have people say, well, come on, Conan, things are really bad. Why do you think it's— give me one reason why this is the best time to be alive. And I'll always start with child mortality rates. Yeah. Do you realize that for almost all of human history, If you had children, there was a very good chance that most of them would die. That was just the way it was. That's why there are few— there's no industry around making toys for kids or portraits of kids for a long time because they don't last that long. Very few of them make it. Big market for small caskets.

Yeah, it's just awful.

No, it's really, but it's awful. Sorry to bring this up. This is really dark.

You go into graveyards in New England and you've got 4, 3, 18 months, 6, 8, 12, and then 96 and 100.

Are you like— No, no. If you got past into your teens, you probably lived to be 98 and wrote the Declaration of Independence. But what's— No, it was just— I would like people to be a little more conscious of all the ways in which we are very blessed. And also, when I watch the American Revolution series, one of the things that impresses me is just this stunning good luck. I mean, the idea that so many things broke our way during the American Revolution does make you believe in providence. Providence. And it reminds me of this quote that I'm going to butcher right now. I think it was Otto Bismarck said, "There is a divine providence that protects drunkards, children, and the United States of America." And it's just like this wonderful quote where I don't know what is going on with America, but they always seem to get away with stuff.

Well, this has happened in the early days of the revolution when the improbable successes along with mostly failures happened. They all saw it as a sign of providence that they would be like the walls of Jericho. You would just blow the trumpet and they'd fall down. Think about it. The odds on Lexington Green and that morning of April 1917, '75 are zero of success. And 6.5 really long, bloody— this is what we don't admit to— bloody years later, Civil War, revolution, and global war, it's 100%. And the phenomenal good luck in the midst of some really bad luck and bad decisions and stuff. A lot of it has to do with the size of the continent. It has to do with the weather. It has to do with the distance, 3,000 miles from the home office. So a letter coming takes longer than a letter going back because of the Gulf Stream. And so you just— I mean, Franklin, this rider comes up to his place in Paris and he's trying to get the French in and he needs some little victory just to convince them. And then the rider goes and he walks out and he says, Philadelphia fell?

And he goes, yeah. Which had through Washington's neglect at Brandywine. And he turns away and he goes, "But wait, there's better news that a couple months after that, the Battle of Saratoga took place." Washington had nothing to do with it other than sending two of his best generals, Daniel Morgan and a guy named Benedict Arnold, who was the hero of Saratoga. And it's not only a little thing, it's gigantic. The surrender of an entire British army. And Franklin goes, "Whoa." He goes right to the culmination.

00:41:19

Why didn't you read me that one first?

00:41:21

He asked him first. I mean, he was pessimistic in disposition towards the news he was about to get. And then they go to Louis XVI, and within a couple months, they've got two alliances, one of which is essentially $30 billion worth of aid, an army, a navy, guns, whatever you need that are going to be the key to the American Revolution.

No, the French completely saved our bacon, something we probably occasionally like to forget. Oh, always. And also, the French, because they gave us so much money and so much help during the Revolutionary War, go bankrupt, leading to their revolution?

They had other problems too. When the Declaration came, yeah, I mean, the British constitutional monarchy was a pretty good place, form of government to live under. And that's why you're a loyalist in the colonies and you're excused. We didn't make loyalists bad people. We just made them, you know, your prosperity, your education, your good health, your property that you own, whatever it might be, has come from that. The French are more oppressive and Then when Franklin's there, they adore him and he's speaking the same language. He was a rock star in France, Benjamin Franklin. He's the most famous American on earth because of his scientific stuff, but he's charming and he's witty and he also shares sympathy with Montesquieu and the others of the French Enlightenment, not just the Scottish Enlightenment. Then when the Declaration happens, he prints it up and asks all the newspapers to print it, so they print it. Ordinary people are reading, "Yeah." The power of this, the importance of the revolution just in the ideas cannot be denied. This thing promotes revolutions. Our Declaration promotes revolutions for more than 2 centuries. When Ho Chi Minh on September 2nd, 1945, that's the date that the Japanese are surrendering unconditionally on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, he declares Vietnamese independence and he is quoting Thomas Jefferson from that second sentence.

And standing next to him are OSS officers who have saved his life earlier in the year and are supporting him. And within a month, they're going to be told by the State Department, oh, he's a commie, you can't do that.

He, you know, and you would just shift so much.

If we had stayed with him and then followed the Geneva Convention and allowed the election of him in '56, there'd be 6 million more human beings haunting the Earth.

Yeah. Well, it's amazing just how many times things just keep flipping and flipping and flipping. So, you know, Stalin, our best friend and our buddy up until about 1946. Yeah. You know, or 1945, '46, '46, and then it switches. And so, I have a propaganda poster of Uncle Sam and I think it's Chiang Kai-shek and Churchill and Stalin as all these good buddies who are tormenting a little Hitler. And it's like Uncle Sam's arm is draped around our good buddy Stalin, and then they get the word after the war, "We're switching that now." He's now the villain of the story. "We got it! Okay, he's the bad guy." And this happens so many times in history, it's kind of fascinating. I mean, I'll be later seen as a good guy.

You'll see. So, okay, the 20th century, uh, is the bloodiest, and it has the biggest killers are Mao, followed by Stalin, and a distant third is Hitler. It's really unbelievable. And, uh, they were our ally. The Second World War is won by American manufacturing, followed by Soviet sacrifice, followed by Western allies' sacrifice. It's really— it's, it's a triumph. In 1945, more than 50% of all things manufactured in the world were manufactured in the United States. And I mean, to understand exactly what happened, and Stalin had the Russian fear, as Putin does, of needing all the buffer states. And so he was going to hang onto it. And there was no army that was the size of his. There was no energy to decide, as Churchill's fulminating, go take it back, to go take it back. Nobody was going to do it. And so we ended up with a post-war paralysis, but we ended up with the Marshall Healthcare plan, one of the greatest things Americans have ever done. We do things for other people because that's a good thing to do, not because we're not serving ourselves.

Historically, we have done a lot because it was the right thing to do.

And then we had a stasis. Now, you can spend your entire life, and many people do, listing the crimes of the United States. But as you were suggesting earlier, if you start with the Declaration and the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights and land grant colleges and the Homestead Act and national parks and child about labor and GI Bill and Social Security and interstate highway and man on the moon and affordable care. I mean, you're just like, the list of positive things that we've done, and yet we've been told that the enemy is our government. And it is in the interests of people to make that happen, to remind people that we're divided and there's them and there is no them.

I have to just ask you, and this seems very superficial, but you just listed about 35 things with great eloquence and fluidity. I'm guessing we're sort of the same age. I can't do that anymore. I can start to list things and then I go, "Well, you know what I mean." It's really— How do you do that?

It's really bad because I'm 10 years older than you. So are you really? 72? Are you 62? I'm 42.

Yeah, I saw a doctor this morning. No, I'm 60. I'm 62. That was—

Did you see him do that? I'm very— You But never. I can't.

If I was listing the ingredients in my smoothie, I couldn't do that.

I did them in kind of chronological order too.

I saw that. I'm looking at you do that, and I know I'm supposed to be like, no, these are really good points, but I'm sitting— I was just stunned. He just said so much stuff without looking at notes. I'm very shallow, Ken.

I'm thinking of the acts that were passed, the GWC, the MIO, the WWN.

Laba, the— see, you know your shit.

I was so impressed, and then the whole time you're just like, my brain no working.

So good. You want to feel bad about yourself, have a conversation with Ken Burns. Now I picture, I picture cameras sweeping past, black and white photos of me looking sad, and you hear a Shokin farewell.

What we often Start in the photograph, off in the dark, a vague thing. And then panned to the extra close up of the eyes. And you begin to feel the tragedy of it.

As Conan's mind slipped away, he knew. Mama. That he had to retreat to the idiocy of a podcast. Mama, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma. Let's make that documentary. Yes. You'll have three viewers. Yep. You will be stripped of every award you've ever won. Let's talk.

Did I say a podcast for a second? Yeah. Like this year promoting, I mean, I always do that. There's no money in PBS to go out and promote stuff to speak of. So you can't put billboards on Melrose and Beverly saying, or the busses or the subways or whatever across the country. So you go out and we did 40 cities, 80 screenings, 250 interviews, radio satellite tours, TV and radio. And also this time, more podcasts. I think there are 352 million podcasts in the United and I now have done half of them today. Today is the half—

half the— so what you're saying is we're the last stop? No, no, I'm sure they're gonna give me more.

Conan realized that he was the last stop. I'll do that.

I'll do the music if you want. It's hard for me to talk and do the music. Not that I can't. Conan knew that there was— he was the lowest of the low.

My dearest Sarah.

Conan writing home. My dearest Liza, Ken Burns today said he had done every podcast and now he was doing—

well, I was This is all—

this is making me so happy right now.

I thought you were going to fill in.

Oh, sorry, my dearest Liza.

Yeah, his brain doesn't work anymore.

Yeah, so I'm just making me so happy that you're singing that tune.

Um, I've been singing that tune and dining out on that tune for 36 years.

I often— I downloaded it onto my, uh, I have, I have this This sounds self-serving, but I do like to work out. Check this thing out, this body. But that's not the point. The point is I like to listen to hard, fast, like, rock and roll music when your heart rate's up, because that really gets me going. And then I kind of run on the treadmill and lift the weights and do everything I have to do. But I dropped in there a long time ago into my workout feed, Ashokan Farewell, and it will come on. I'm just— I won't take it out, but when it comes on, I stop working out.

Maybe it's just to restore your heart rate.

Yeah, exactly. I just stop whatever I'm doing.

To cry in the middle of your workout, they say, is really good.

Yeah. And to think about everything this country has been through.

Yes.

So Ashokan Farewell was not— It's not contemporary to the Civil War. It's not contemporary to the Civil War. That's a song that one of your session musicians came up with?

Yeah. So his name is Jay Unger. He's a Jewish kid from the Bronx who wrote the most beautiful Scotch-Irish lament I've ever heard in my life. I'm not even sure at the beginning he knew what he had. It was so filled with heart. A friend of his, one of his co-musicians, had given me an album they'd put out, and I was just doing needle drops. And on the fourth song of the first side, I I heard this thing and I went, "Wow." He runs a music camp, still does, in the Catskills near the Ashokan Reservoir, part of the New York City thing. And they were breaking up for the summer and everybody was heading back to the new school year. And he sat down and in 15 minutes or so wrote "Ashokan Farewell." And it is— I guarantee that today, whatever today is, it is being played 100 times at a funeral or a memorial service or a wedding. Wedding or a renewal of vows. And sometimes it's with this letter that Sullivan Blue, a Rhode Island soldier, wrote back to his wife before his death at the First Battle of Bull Run. And I've just never come across a piece of American music that works.

And I like the fact that it was a Jewish guy from the Bronx who turned out a Scotch-Irish lullaby. Yeah.

He wrote it for a bar mitzvah. Yeah, right. The original title was The Horror. Look at you! More comedy! The Horror. The Horror. Very good. You're killing it. I feel very threatened right now. Very threatened.

But you got to pick subordinate talent that you know is better than you, right? That's what George Washington did. And look what he got to be. The father of our country. Like, he didn't know he was George Washington. He didn't know there was going to be a dollar bill or a quarter, a big spiky thing in the national capital named for him, or a state on the other side of the continent that's named for him, and every other state has a county or a town. He had no idea that that's what was going to happen.

No, he just— it's so fascinating to me that some of them must have been aware. Some of the Founding Fathers must have been aware that I'm going down in history as a great man, whether it was Jefferson or— Humility.

You know what it is? They're aware of you. They're aware of you. They talk. John Adams talks about the millions yet unborn. They are all speaking about like this is This is not just for right now. We're doing this. Like Tom Paine says, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to make it over. This is why the world turned upside down. Everything had been the same for 1,000 years. Your family had worked the same plot of land in Wales or Scotland or Ireland or England, and now you had the possibility of owning somebody else's land, Indian land, but you could see that things could change and that all of a sudden All of a sudden, everybody up to this point had been subjects, and now they were this new thing called citizens. And a few sentences after "Pursuit of Happiness," a few phrases, Jefferson says, "All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable." It's not hard to parse. It means that heretofore, everybody just puts up with the authoritarian boot. And you know what? We're not going to do that anymore. We're not going to do that.

It's going to take extra energy. And I think whenever we're in a bad spot, it's because that energy is absent. Atrophied and that we've forgotten that we have that energy. Not you within me, not that somebody else is going to take care of it, but I'm going to do. And you're seeing one of the good things about all these young people, or, you know, what's the matter with kids today? They're running for office. They're, you know, they're mayor of New York. They're, you know, they're doing stuff. And that, that is a democratic impulse in the face of the idea that no evils are not insufferable. We don't have to do this. We do not have to put up with this. This is not the war. What Tennyson wrote, that nature is red, meaning R-E-D, in tooth and claw, meaning everything's bloody and everything's— Stephen Miller says, the mightiest win. It's not about that. We invent civilization to forestall the law of the jungle. And what you have are guys who are saying, no, it's just the law of jungle. That's what authoritarians say.

Yeah. One of the things that I most admire about your work is I watch it and I feel reinvested. That's the word I come up with is that I'm reinvested in— Us. —this experiment. And it is an experiment, and we just have to keep working on it.

The last line of the film, and it's not giving it away, Benjamin Rush, the only physician to sign, said, "The American War is over, but the American Revolution is still going on." Doesn't mean, like Jefferson, I'm sure he would wish he could take it back, that the tree of liberty has to be watered with the blood of Patriots every 20 years? No, it means that we designed a system so we can figure out how to do that without the bloodshed.

Right, right. Unbelievable. Well, thank you so much for being here. And this is remarkable. You have to come back. I know you want to do all the other podcasts first.

No, no, let me get to some of the half a million more that I've got to do. Yeah.

You know, we have a pretty big audience on this one. So, you know, you might want to skip some of those other ones. 5 plus you and me, that's 7. No, Eduardo doesn't listen to this. Oh, he doesn't listen? He has no patience for this shit.

So we're 6, including you and me. Exactly. Well, that's good.

But 6 that really go out and buy stuff. So that's important. Ken, I could talk to you for maybe 40 hours and just be the happiest guy in the world. I'm totally down with that. And not— Yeah.

Well, I have a brief 9-part response to every question.

Listen to Ken Burns' 14-part response. But I've taken such solace in your work. It does nourish me in the very best way. And I do think all of this goes beyond politics. I like to try and step out of that divide and try to say to people that I believe we all want similar things. We do. And I think there's many more good people than bad people. And this is— I mean, I love this country, and I always think we can do better. We can. And I think we will. And I just get that from your work, and I get so inspired.

I think, obviously, if you know where you've been, you can know a little bit better where you are. That's the optimism in the face of the Chicken Littles of this narcissistic moment. But you also know where you're going. And so you can begin to see in the midst of being like that little kid in Schindler's List, completely submerged in shit, that he's submerged in shit because he's dedicated to living, and so that our next job is repair and restoration. And we should be thinking about that rather than, oh, the sky is falling. Oh, it's really, it's been worse. This is the worst it's ever been in American history. It's not. And things will, there's a fluidity. And the only thing that's certain is that it's gonna change in some way. And you have to actually be prepared to catch that change. That's the big thing. That's the biggest thing. There's, uh, "Better times are coming, and we have to prepare for that." Happy days are here again. Yeah.

All right. Well, Ken, again, if anyone out there hasn't listened to the American Revolution series—

We actually— They can watch it too, because listening is a podcasty kind of thing, you know? But we spent 10 years assembling images Even when there were no photographs. I swear to God.

I swear to God. I didn't realize that there were images that went along with the show. I watched it on television, but my face was averted from the screen. And I'm told it was quite beautiful. As Conan's eyesight failed and he listened to the broadcast of Ken Burns, Burn special. Conan was filled with joy. It's okay. It's okay.

They're pretty dense, literate things. You can listen to them too. It's okay. But there's some nice— There's some great paintings and some cool reenactments.

You know, it's beautiful, and I don't know why I said listen. I think— Because we're doing a podcast? No, I think I was really thrown when you made that long list fluently. I think I was in shock that my brain has atrophied to this degree. Degree. Should we run a practice, the list? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Declaration of Rights. Bill of Rights. Jump ahead. Land grant colleges. Homestead Act. National Park. Child labor. I forgot to say even antitrust laws. That's pretty good. Then I think there'd be all the New Deal programs and then certainly Social Security, labor's right to organize. WPA, which created 10,000 landing strips and the Civilian Conservation Corps with all that work on the parks. I mean, if you landed at LaGuardia Airport, New Deal, went through the Triborough Bridge, New Deal, Lincoln Tunnel, New Deal, right? Skyline Drive, New Deal, right? All the bridge, all the dams in the Lincoln Highway, all the dams in the Northwest, that's all 10,000 landing strips, a billion trees. We're not even out of the New Deal.

The Peanut is neither a pea nor a nut. It's a legume. Thank you very much. That I still know. And that's my list. Ken, please go out and do more amazing work. Also, this book is gorgeous.

So Jeff Ward, the illustrator that I've worked with for 45 years, this is the most wonderful book. He has put his heart and his soul into it.

And there's gorgeous artwork, to your point. And I spent— I've just— I opened it randomly to a page of some Revolutionary War powder horns that were etched, engraved, and I was just geeking out over them thinking, I gotta get a powder horn. Went on Amazon. Nope. No powder horns. No, no Revolutionary War powder horns. You took a powder horn. Uh, exactly. Okay, I'll do the comedy round. Now you're doing the comedy too? I'm getting I don't know.

You were here for the takedown of me.

Yeah, I know.

It's not happening.

This is jiu-jitsu. Ken, thank you so much. This is amazing.

This is really fun. Thank you.

Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend with Conan O'Brien, Sonam Sethian, and Matt Gourley. Produced by me, Matt Gourley. Executive produced by Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross, and Nick Leão. Theme song by the White Stripes. Incidental music by Jimmy Vivino. Take it away, Jimmy. Our supervising producer is Aaron Blair, and our associate talent producer is Jennifer Samples. Engineering and mixing by Eduardo Perez and Brendan Burns. Additional production support by Mars Melnick. Talent booking by Paula Davis, Gina Battista, and Brit Kahn. You can rate and review this show on Apple Podcasts, and you might find your review read featured on a future episode. Got a question for Conan? Call the Team Coco hotline at 669-587-2847 and leave a message. It too could be featured on a future episode. You can also get 3 free months of SiriusXM when you sign up at SiriusXM.com/Conan. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend wherever fine podcasts are downloaded.