Transcript of #615 - Ken Burns

It was even bad in America.

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That's helixsleep. Com/thio. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know that we sent you. If you're running a business, today's guest is a filmmaker. He's a historian. He's a writer. He is a cartographer of time, if you will. His name is ubiquitous with documentaries. He's covered some of the biggest events in US 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 love stuff.

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 in the edge of the seat, guy.

You are? Yeah. Wow. Excited. I've never heard somebody say like, I'm an edge of the seat guy. Yeah. Like you're edging or whatever.

It's just I'm excited. If I were an animal, I'd be a puppy. Oh, yeah? You know, kind. By the door. Yeah. Come on, come on, come on.

What are we 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.

If your wife or husband were like that, and they're just sitting by the door.

You'd get them help.

Or you at least give them a hug. A hug, yeah. Or a spare key so they could at least have a chance. You'd get them a little button they could hit.

Yes, right. Just to walk out.

Yeah, that would help. We good, Zack? Ken Burns, thank you so much for hanging out, man. My pleasure.

My pleasure. Good to be with you.

Thank you for all your examination of humanity, I guess, through documentaries. I know about you as most people did, when you burst onto the scene with the Ken Burns effect, I think that's when it hit a lot of my culture. You're like, Instead of hiring actors and everything, we're just going to slightly- Want to hear the story of how that happened?

Yeah, I would love to. It's really pretty cool. I've been trying to make films about American history since the mid '70s, and I'd had some success, a couple of Academy Award nominations, but I'd hit the jackpot when this big series in 1990 came out on the Civil War series, which used the photographs and stuff like that. 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. We were just very energetically exploring the landscape of each image. I got a call in 2002, November, and it was Steve Jobs. I went, Really? He goes, Yeah. He said, Will you come out and visit me? I said, Yeah, that's me knocking at the door. 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 engineers. I'm a Luddite. Particularly- You're a Luddite? Yeah, meaning I'm not a big computer person. It represents a group in England in the 19th century who were opposed to technological changes Okay, so Minnonite, Luddite, Amish, similar.

Well, not quite. It wasn't religious as much as a social. Anyway.

Okay, so Amish without the dairy? That's right.

Exactly. It's basically folks who are opposed to it. I'm not. I'm just inept. Got it. So my children and my grandchildren help me with all the... 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 going to have this feature on it. He's showing me, and it's like you can upload your photographs and pan and zoom on. I'm very, very simply a crude, superficial version of what we do or try to do with our stuff to wake up the image, to wake the dead. I'm looking at it and I'm going, Cool, because I don't really know what's going on. He said, So we'd like to keep the working title. I said, What's that? He said, The Ken Burns, if I could. I said, I don't do commercial endorsements.

He goes, What?

The engineer is blanch. 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 worked out an agreement that he could use it, but I'd-Yeah, I already had a temper.

His iPhone always had a cracked screen.

Maybe. But I know some folks who got yelled at. He said, What? 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. Then we became friends for the rest of his life. Whenever I visited Silicon Valley, I'd stay with him. His kids, his daughter became an intern for us for a couple of semesters. 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 could talk to some veteran, say, of the Iraq war who's still alive.

Well, you certainly mastered it, man. The Ken Burns effect, that was at the time where everybody was trying to be… Everybody could suddenly be a filmmaker, right? That's right.

Well, this is what Steve did. By inventing this, he made us all filmmakers. He made us… It democratized it all. 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. 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. That's a great point. You know what I mean? People say, Oh, man, you didn't ask him for a cut? I said, No, I don't do commercial endorsements. But if I'd said, I want one 100th 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? That's a good point. It The great thing was to just 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 awkward. But at the same time, I wasn't endorsing a thing. I was endorsing an idea of how you use and manipulate images, which is what I do for a living.

Also, you manipulate the past, just in a way to bring it to life. That's right. It's almost like you're giving CPR to it in a way.

I can't believe that you said that because My mom was sick from the time I was born, a couple of years in.

You grew up here in New York City, which is where we are.

No, I was born in Brooklyn. I grew up in Delaware and Michigan and came east to Massachusetts for college. But my mom had cancer from the very, very beginning, and she died- From when you were a child? Yeah, when I was 11. It was just a horrible, just the worst, shittiest growing up. My dad had some mental illness stuff, so it was really hard. I'm not alone in having a hard childhood.

It's not self-pity, you're just sharing.

But I watched my dad cry at a movie after my mom died, and I'd never seen him cry when she was sick or when she died or at the impossibly sad funeral. I realized, 12 years I go, I'm going to be a filmmaker. This is 1965. This is a long time ago, 60 years ago. A great time. It's way too long to be without a mom. But I said that meant I'd be John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock, Hollywood directors and stuff like that. 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 is and what was as anything the human imagination. I'm a documentary filmmaker. By 22, I'm making films in history, and I've been doing that for 50 years. I had a crisis. Going through a crisis, going through a crisis. My late father-in-law was an eminent psychologist. I said to him one night, I said, I seem to be keeping my mom alive. He goes, Yeah, I bet you blew out your candles on your birthday, wishing she'd come back. I go, How'd you know?

Then he named two or three other things that only I knew, really intimate stuff.

Because that's how children like that operate?

Yes. It's just 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. I said, What do you mean? 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? Then all of a sudden, I knew that's what I do. I'm waking the dead. 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. There's a musician, Steven Wilson Jr, who's really great. He's a great poet, and he says that grief is only love that's got no place to go.

Yeah, that's perfect. Man, I just- Well, just think about the energy, the propulsion of this loss, just for me, and also my father is, he's the smartest guy I knew, but a Maserati without a clutch, looked really good, sounded boom, boom, really good, but couldn't get into first gear. That made me keep working. I mean, I've got 40 films. I'm not stopping. All my friends are retiring, and I'm like, What? What's retiring?

Yeah, you're drinking plasma at the house and taking electrolytes.

I got stuff to do. If I were given a thousand years to live, I would never run out of topics in American history. This is a... I make films about the US, but I make films about us. You know what I mean? Got you. The 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 US. And it is a magnificent space to operate in. I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to have the responsibility. It's a huge responsibility to dive to something like the Vietnam War, right now the American Revolution, which we just finished, or the Civil War, or World War II, or the biographies we did. Huey Long, we're talking about from your state of Louisiana, which is just like one of the great unknown stories. Which is such an amazing story.

There he is. Good job. Yeah, man. Oh, 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 Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, when he was assassinated in September of 1935 in the State House in Baton Rouge, in the big magnificent Art Deco Statehouse he built as a monument to himself when he was governor.

Yeah, wild to build a monument while you're alive. Then it also immediately turns to a mausoleum. Becomes your tomb. Yeah, exactly right. Pretty wild how that works. As children, we would go there. Yeah, it was like a big part of the field trips and stuff like that. We were growing up in Louisiana. But yeah, there was something really amazing about him that he riled the poor, but he also was able to operate with the elite. 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 about it.

There's a ultimate corruption of power. Jefferson said, Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely. And so I think Huey has that. But unlike all the other demagogs that we know, he actually did provide schools. He did provide schoolbooks. He did build bridges. He did pave roads so that the poor of Louisiana could bring their products to market. He did create hospitals. He did do all the things that he said he was going to do, but he did it in a corrupt fashion and basically leveled, as the journalist, I have Stone said in our film, all the liberties of the Republic. He was like a Caesar who took charge and thought it was his right to destroy the democratic institutions. That had more or less work. We have this woman from the Garden district in Louisiana, beautiful woman, to the man her born. 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 you, Elon. It didn't mean you were going to do it. You just wish there was some way to rid the state of this incubus, which is like an old evil thing.

Because he wasn't born in a wealth. No, he's- 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 never really can get to those rungs of that ladder.

You know, it's really many different states, but certainly there's New Orleans, there's the Catholic South, there's the Protestant North. He's from a wind parish in North Louisiana. Oh, yeah.

There's nothing up there.

Dirt, poor, and was able to articulate the aspirations of people who then surrender to him and then also had to then pay the price for the dictatorial stuff. He was surrounded by jackbooted state troopers. He had bodyguards. He's eventually killed by the son-in-law of a judge that he fired, got out of his job. Or so we think, because with all 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 bodyguard shot him and the ricocheting bullet in the close quarters of the hallway of this Statehouse ricocheted and killed him, but we just don't know 100% what happened. But it's one hell of an American story.

I love it, man. I think one thing about documentaries is it makes people think that you feel cared about. I think the past feels cared about. There's something that's very beautiful about that. The American Revolution, it's a new series. It comes out next month.

It comes out in November, November 16th. I've been working on it for... When it comes out, it'll be nine years and 11 months. I started it. I said yes to it when Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. 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 rimes. 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.

There's no doubt about it.

It's at arm's length because there's no photographs, there's no newsreels, they're in buckled shoes, they got O's, they got breaches, they got waistcoats, they got powdered wigs. And somehow We don't want to fuss with 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 Christ.

How do 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. 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. Really? 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 goated on by what was happening in the breakdown of relationships with the British over stuff and what became a quarrel between Englishmen suddenly got broken out into natural rights. This is what we all not only deserve, but the world needs to change. And it did from that 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 talked to hear it as we're 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 lust for profit, that we won't be virtuous enough to sustain this Republic. It's so interesting because there are all the ideas that we wrestle with today.

So the Declaration is like a love letter to the future in a way.

Oh, my God. That's the best expression I've ever heard. That's exactly what it is. Tom Payne, Thomas Payne, an Englishman who came off the boat in Philadelphia, failure in everything, and he contracted dysentery or typhus on the way. He writes this pamphlet 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 going to do with this rebellion. 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.

Is it Thomas Paine?

Yeah, Thomas Paine. 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 Native I can 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 sustain it. And we then sponsor These ideas sponsor revolutions for the next 200 plus years. And we've been going along for 249 years pretty well.

Thank you. And we're in it. Thank you very much. That's a great answer.

I love the love letter to the future, though, man. I'm not going to forget that. That's a great gift you gave me today. Thank you. Oh, man. That's what it is because it's all about You said it's the pursuit of happiness, right?

That's right. Sometimes, even now, you're challenging the way that I've thought about some of this because it's like... The documentary It does this, and I think it's eight parts. I'm not sure.

Six parts, twelve hours.

I haven't watched all of it, but it challenges 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 Wanker ticket To be in 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. You need to put you under the microscope, right? That's right. We don't have a relationship with ourselves. That's one thing I think a people don't have a relationship with themselves anymore. I think when you're not sitting there and thinking and contemplating where you're at and how the world is affecting you and how you can affect the world, I think it starts to limit us to just looking at our Declaration of Independence almost as a receipt of times instead of as a living document or more 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 use it as a cuddle. If there's one thing I learned about making films about the US and us is that there's only us. There's no them. People are always creating a them to make an enemy in order to postpone the active work that I have to do, that self-investigation. And that's interestingly enough, that self-reflective sense that I need to improve. Mark Twain once said, nothing so needs improving as other people's habits. We're always ready to say, man, you should do this differently. You should do that differently. But we're not willing to... I have an ancestor, the Scottish poet, Robert Burns, who said, Oh, would some power 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, a fashion, but absorbing them and living it is the big dynamic. So everybody, it is in the interest of an authoritarian to have everybody be a superstitious peasant, right?

Uneducated, not improving, not in pursuit of happiness and lifelong learning, which is what they all I'm not.

That's where they want us. That's where the rulers want you there.

They want you in a place where you're passive, where you're distracted by your things, your whatever, and this scandal and stuff like that. Eleanor Roosevelt once said that that White people discuss ideas, average people discuss events, and small minds discuss other people. You realize the extent to which our all culture is based on judgment, not of ourselves, not 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 fine here. I believe this.

It's nice to reflect because it's fucking painful to look at yourself. That is. I think it's painful. I don't know if it's painful. It was inventive of these guys at the time. The American Revolution, it often gets classified as 1776. That's the year everybody has. But your documentary, it It goes, I think, from '75 to '83.

Well, we start at '55 and back up and show you 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. 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 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. Nobody's perfect. Everybody's pretty complicated.

Wait, we don't have a country because of his mistakes?

No, if he didn't live, if he didn't survive, or if he was surrender, we wouldn't have a country. He's central to it. At the same time, he's flawed, he's rash, he rides out on the battlefield at Kips Bay, just over there. And his aides grab the reins of the horse because he's going to get killed. If he gets killed, it's all over. He rides out in Princeton in the next January in the middle of the battle, and some aid covers his eyes, he's going to 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 curl him up. He makes the same mistake again the next year at the Battle of Brandywine. And yet he He keeps his army together, and he suddenly realizes he doesn't have to win. He just 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. It takes six weeks to get back the news, to get back to England. It takes even longer because the Gulf Stream is not working in your favor, coming the other way.

And so what are you going to do? So it's an amazing story. So New York, 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 evacuation. Evacuation Day is November 25th, so it's two months and 10 days.

That's when the Brits had to take a hike?

Eight years when they finally leave, and it just drove Washington crazy. In fact, everybody's going saying, go to Virginia. The French are going, go to Virginia. Let's get them there, which they do. And he's going, 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 loyalest 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 set of interesting struggles that we don't tend to deal 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. They're not in any way diminished. They're made even more inspirational and more impressive.

It's better when you look at it. Because of how incredibly violent and bloody this revolution was.

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Take me into those 20 years before. There's two groups, the patriots and the loyalists. We discovered America. We developed these colonies along the Eastern Seaboard.

So there's 13 colonies.

But there's also the Native Americans. There's so many things going on.

There's so many elements going on. What happens is everybody wants to bust out, cross over the Appalachians, and take more Native American land. It isn't just them. They are many, many nations that are lined up. There is different- What do you mean?

Is it many nations wanted to go over there?

No, many Native American nations are there. You might have the Delaware, the Shawnee, you might have the Six Nations of the Iroquoia Confederacy, the Seneca, Onindaga, Tuscarora, The Onida. Onida, and Mohawk. You've got all the Cherokeies 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 Iroquoia 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 state's rights. But they had the federal connection that protected them in their general rights. So the great irony is the American Revolution destroys their Confederacy. But 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 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 from that. They also have 13 other colonies in the Caribbean, which are much more profitable. They're all based on slave labor. 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. 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 this.

To be in the Americas?

To own what we call North America. Of course, the native of peoples who've been there for 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 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 they just decided that Native American land is mine. Why don't I divide it 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 1763, they made a rule, you cannot go with it. That enraged the colonists. And then they said, We need you to help pay.

The Stamp Act, is that it?

And they did various things that they were going to tax us. T, Stamp Act, they proposed and everybody went crazy.

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 decision to not allow colonists to go into Indian land 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 said, 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 or this. And so what happens is eventually, as always happens, and this happens in history so much, is that I tell you, you're acting radical. You may not be acting radical, but then you start acting more radical. You say me, you're being tyrannical. 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.

It was the weapons of mass destruction.

Well, it's their rifles and muskets and flints and gunpowder. They go and the patriots meet them on the green at Lexington, and the British say, Disperse. They start to and shot fires out. Somebody said, It's a massacre. The British kill eight or nine of us and wound others. Then they march on to Concord, and then finally at Concord, everybody said, F this, we're going. 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 can get out. They've got the most powerful Navy on Earth, but 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 any time you're in telling a story, you have to remember that everyone 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, I went into that 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. Even when the French decide to come in after the Battle of Saratoga, it's 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 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 engagement. The first couple of engagements with the French are disasters. And we're thinking, maybe 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 the big guns to come in from you. I mean, it is as riveting as story as you could ever tell. It's our story, and nobody knows it. It's our origin story.

It's our origin mythology. It's our Valhalla. It's our Thor and Oden. These are all the founding stuff. And what could be more important, and particularly today, when we feel like we're 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 in America first, and we were really 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, what do we share in common? I'll tell you what we share in common. We share an origin story that on July fourth, 1776, very few countries know exactly when they were born, where, Philadelphia, when July fourth, 1776, and what? We hold these truths to be self-evenant. That's our story.

What's our Zodiac sign?

We are cancer. That's our Zodiac sign. Yeah, July fourth. Although I read an article the other day that suggests that actually these borders of the signs might have been shifting. Now I'm going to put an asterisk next. Okay.

So America is a cancer.

Cancer with an asterisk. Okay. I love that.

Cancer is characterized as highly emotional, imaginative, and loyal.

There you go. That's pretty American. Maybe we ought to work on those things. Tenacious, sympathetic, creative, protective. That's pretty good.

Weaknesses are moodiness, insecurity, pessimism, and being easily hurt.

So there's a- We're here. So this is us, right? This is the US. This is us, right? This is us. So this is us. There was a cartoonist named Walt Kelly, and he had a cartoon series called Pogo, And at one point, the main character is this odd animal figure, says, We have met the enemy, and he is us, right? Because it's a variation on a military moment. And it's really true. Lincoln, as a young lawyer, not yet 29 years old, 28 years old, addresses the young men's Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, and they're discussing foreign policy. And he says, Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic 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 your neighbor your enemy. You want to make lots of them. Then you are headed towards that self-destruction that Lincoln is talking about. You want to figure out what we share in common, this corny civic, virtue, civic energy that comes from the Declaration of Independence, like how you can work together to do it. And a lot of people who are unbelievable citizens, it's like they go to the school board meeting. They participate in... I live in New England, and we have a town meeting, and 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. It's also saying, I've got to vote, and I have a responsibility as a citizenship to do it, and then we'll save our country. Then if you like the abstraction of disagreement and violence and all that stuff, where suddenly, just because 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, I don't share in common that much with somebody who comes from Louisiana and lives in Tennessee.

I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Delaware and Michigan, and now I've lived in New England for the last 54 years. What will 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 your own integrity with yourself. I think it's interesting whenever, as I'm watching your documentary, it's like you learn that, even as you were saying earlier, that this is the first time that people thought of themselves as not under rule, but it's almost like we were away at summer camp or something, and your imagination started to bloom. That's That's the feeling that I get of the first colonists here.

It's so exciting.

There's a moment- It's blooming on somebody else's land as well. It's definitely blooming on Native Americans land. I don't want to not say that.

Here's the deal. You ask any school kid, How are 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 enabling, 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. Who do you choose? Oh, the people that you've spent the last 150 years dispossessing of their land. And, oh, by the way, you're going to spend the next 150 years continuing to possess 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 mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. It's not that difficult to take me through that a little bit, but can you break it down for me a little bit so I can understand it?

So he says, basically, he says, All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning, here to far, all human beings have been under the boot of an authoritarian, and basically, it's the human lot to just put up with it. And we are creating something new called a citizen. It's going to take hard work. It's going to take that self-examination. It's going to take that self-criticism, which we're so unwilling to do. It's rather to criticize the other than ourselves, rather than to assume the discipline necessary to have the virtue, getting better as a human being to be a citizen. But 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 think that's what it's about? It's not about. We know what the story of tyranny is, and we know what our story is, and our story is not the story of tyranny. It never happens with a light switch.

It happens incrementally. 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 until they're cooked. 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. 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. Almost all of the wars that are fought are over some interpretations of religion or some other such thing that devolves from that. 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. 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. The thing that you're talking about, that individual responsibility.

That's the other them and me.

That's exactly. When When it is this is and it is an acceptance, thou shall is telling somebody else how to be and how that's wrong. The whole story is trying to figure out, you could say that we're a nation in the process of becoming. What do you want to be? Have you ever seen the movie?

It's a- You should always be a nation in the process of becoming.

Of course. Otherwise, what are you? You are static. You're Putin's Russia, you're she's China. You've just got people telling you what to do, and nobody wants that. You 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. 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 Satis, oh, yeah, that's what I agree with, and not 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 as a conversation like this, man, it's so good for me. It's so good. It takes me out of this. I don't get too caught up in the us and them thing, but it puts me back in a place of like, Oh, yeah, well, I'm here with a purpose. It gives you a purpose of being a citizen, of being a human, of a Rubik's Cube that will never be solved. It's like, I don't need to win, but I do need to keep playing and also be a good competitor and an earnest competitor. It puts it more back on you. It makes the mirror a little bit stronger. It gets nice.

That is a beautiful thing, and it goes along with your dream of the... Jefferson wrote that to Adams. They were friends, and they were enemies, and then they were friends again at the end of their life. They both died on July fourth, 1826, 50 years to the moment of the signing of the Declaration, and they both thought the other was alive. Jefferson had died first. Adams survived him by a couple of hours. But just before he died, he said, I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. And so we shall go on. 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 prospering. I gave a commencement address last year at Brandeis University, and I was talking about how we're so preoccupied with these binaries, 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 going to say certainty.

Certainty destroys the mystery of this thing that you and I have been talking about. Who wants to stop that? Unless it's a thou shal, 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. What's a real American? There are 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 the American Revolution took place. However, they do have a legitimate claim to saying, we're the real Americans. And so all of this 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 cultures as distinct, I said, as any other cultures. And we've also imported by force 500,000 enslaved African-Americans. Where are they going to go and what are they going to 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 got the bottom and they want more. And the Dutch who used to be in there, New York was a This was a Dutch city. Brooklyn is a Dutch name. Harlem is a Dutch name. So you've got this overlay of all of these cultures competing here. And so the revolution is the place where we co- We bring together the best ideas that had ever been thought in humankind about human organization amongst a huge variety of people. We've made it work for at least 249 years. I'm super proud to be an American. 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.

This episode is sponsored by I, Betterhelp. Did you know that October 10th is World Mental Health Day? And this year we're saying thank you, therapists. Betterhelp therapists have helped over 5 million people worldwide on their mental health journeys. That's millions of stories. And behind everyone is a therapist who showed up, listened, and helped someone take a step forward. I want you to know that the right therapist can help change everything. And Betterhelp has 12 plus years experience in matching people to the right therapist. Betterhelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US. This World Mental Health Day, we're celebrating the therapists who have helped millions of people take a step forward. If you're ready to find the right therapist for you, Betterhelp can help you start that journey. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp. Com/theo. That's betterhelp. Com com/theo. Thank you so much, man. This is so fun. It is fun. It is fun.

I'm having the best time.

It was great. Yeah, I appreciate that. Let's look at a little bit of the minutia. Just to add, just to get into a little bit of the storytelling to add some blush to the cheeks of this conversation. What about 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 rumors going on out there. Some of that's TikTok, but still.

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 are coming or the Redcoats 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, are coming out. And so he is a Patriot. He's a silversmith and an engraver. And he's made an engraving of the 1770 event in March called the Boston Massacre. 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 That's not what free people have, right? Is the army in your midst?

So the British army is in there in the colonies.

They're in Boston because there's so much- Only in Boston or in all the colonies? 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 against them. And that's what we have a lot going on right now, hypothetically.

I had a premiere of the film at the Telluride Film Festival, episode one.

Telluride, 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 peace time? This is horrible, like that. And the audience Telluride 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 they just raise the temperature on that pot I'm sitting in? Am I about to be boiled? What's going on? Anyway, he does an engraving. Paul Revere does an engraving of the massacre.

Before you move on, actually, do you mind, Ken? Yeah. I'm sorry. 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 the British, just being British. I'm not sure exactly what they were doing, but this is just incredible. Wow. Unite the Kingdom Rally in Britain. 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 a far-right thing. The news, I don't think, has done a good job. It feels like they want us to be at odds a lot of times.

I think that since- Do you think that's a Is that an understatement? Yeah, I think that in many ways, media, regardless of its orientation, depends on conflict, and that we spend a lot of time, that's the essence of a story, is we think conflict rather than... It's so funny. You get involved. Look at this.

This is incredible.

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 We were making our film in Vietnam, and we were introducing a Marine who just did some amazing thing, got a chest full of medals, just almost the Congressional Medal of Honor, just amazing stuff for his action. We kept pressing him, wanting to hear the stuff. 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. I'm guilty I'm not really a fan of focusing as I tell other things, but history of country music, history of jazz music, baseball, all of that stuff. 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. 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 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 you realize that it's like the Old Testament, an eye for an eye. And you realize you keep going with that and everybody's blind.

Yeah, everybody has a seeing eye dog or something. It's kidding. Go back to that rally. I just want to even read who was there. 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... What I liked about this is it's people showing up for something, right? It's people in the streets.

Well, they're expressing what they're allowed to do. And that's what in a democratic society, which Britain is, you get a chance to, as our First Amendment says, the government will establish no religion. You have freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. You have the ability to... These are the hallmarks, the number one thing. After the Constitution was done, everybody said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, That enshrines the things we just fought for, the things we just died for. There's one, the saving private Ryan story of sons are dying. It's based on a true story where a woman, I think from Iowa, his last name is Sullivan, lost four sons in a battleship that went down, and the Department of War said, we're now going to 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 women. So you realize that's the sacrifice that people have made in order for us to be able to hold a demonstration, express our point of view nonviolently, and to be able to tolerate lots of ideas. I mean, you can't say we're only going to tolerate our ideas, and everybody else who doesn't agree with us are therefore bad.

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 the head of the Communist Party?

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. You know what I'm saying? That idea, that's what I think is interesting about these... 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. The event attracted between 110,000 and every thousand people, making one of the largest protests in British history. The rally was built as a free speech festival, and the demonstration featured chants like, We want our country back. What I think is interesting about this It's people who have a set of beliefs and ideals of what British life is, and history is to them, and that they want to speak out for it. That's one thing that I thought was pretty cool.

This is the democratic right. I remember when I was growing up- It's people tweeting with their feet.

I said this the other day in a conversation, but it's not people sitting in the fucking background, yelling stuff or screaming, but it's people who are actually out. This, to me, is always inspiring because you're putting your face out there with your voice. And you're putting your feet out there with your voice. And that, to me, feels like a real tweet.

They could 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 people get an idea of what a culture is, right? Yeah. Especially, I mean, Britain was predominantly white, probably, I would guess, until they took in slaves and Native Americans and much.

Well, 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 European cultures. Their whole worldwide economy was dependent on slavery, mostly in the Caribbean, as the Spanish had it, mostly in South and Central America. Then we had it in the Southern States. Slavery was legal in the colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia. Then one by one, the Northern States realized it. George Washington freed his slaves. They all knew.

He kept a couple, somebody said.

I don't know if that's true. Thomas Jefferson understood. They understood that slavery was morally wrong, and yet it was an impossible, what's the right word? 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 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 opportunities. You try to provide as many opportunities for as many people. But the minute you transform this civic 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.

But But history does that. It's interesting because it's like, even whenever they were declaring America and deciding what it meant to be American, and they were in this It's purely that you investigate in the American Revolution Documentary. It's like they were saying, this is who we are. At the same time, they're also colonizing. It's interesting when colonization and human and being human started to... I don't know. Do you know what I'm saying? I know what you're talking. It's just such a weird dichotomy.

It's the difference between the ideal and the human possibility at any given And what the founders were saying is that in order to have a government that operates, not only all people have to be created equal, but you have to be pursuing this self-examination. We should be interested in improving removing 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. 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 continent. 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. One of the leading women of Philadelphia, Elizabeth Willing Powell, met Benjamin Franklin as he came out in mid-September in 1787 from Independence Hall, where they had been 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. 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 Continental, the regular army Army of the United States of America, the Continental Army, were teenagers, second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance, felons, ne'er-do-wells, recent immigrants from Germany and England, and they won the war. The dogs. The dogs won the war. As they're beginning, and we follow them, as you'll see in this story, 14-year-old kid from Boston named John Greener, 15-year-old kid, Joseph Plum Martin from Connecticut, a 10-year-old girl from Yorktown, who's a refugee all 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 on property or not.

And John Adams is like, wait, we're not going to... What about the aristocracy? Not the landing. So what happens 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. It's just so exciting. I mean, 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 next Tuesday. I'm sharing with you the process of discovery. Like, Betsey Ross It wasn't mentioned in here. We don't actually know who made the first flag. No one says, Don't fire till you hear the lights of our eyes. Paul Revere did not say, The red coats are coming, the red coats are coming. He said, The regulars are coming. The regulars are coming out. The regulars are coming out.

That meant the regular are coming out of their homes.

Out of Boston. To out to Lexington and to Concord. Concord was the place where they thought everything was hidden, and they were right, and they just never found it. Then we started fighting back. We didn't fight back so much on Lexington Green. It was a massacre on Lexington Green and then Concord at the North Bridge. 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 guy, Abner Hosmer, is one of the first Americans to be killed at the North Bridge. But then the fury of the Patriot Militia just overwhelms the British, and they start a retreat. And if there hadn't been some reinforcements that caught up with them when they were limping back, retreating back through Lexington, it would have been a route. It was still all the way, every spot of ground, all the way back to Boston was contested. Everybody sitting there going, like yesterday, these were our brothers. Yesterday, these were our fellow countrymen. Yesterday, we were arguing. Today, we're at war. There's a great sense of thing. Abigail, Adam says something, we're in the midst of a revolution, the most glorious and the fate of Millions Yet Unborn are being decided, meaning you and me.

Great. Then Abigail, his own wife, his greatest correspondence between anybody.

Oh, yes, she was a dime, dude.

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 meaning be careful what you wish for. She's something else. When people say, who's the best writer? Is it Thomas Payne? Is it Thomas Jefferson? Is it George Washington? Great writer. Is it John Adams? Great writer. Abigail holds her own. She's pretty good.

That's cool, man.

She's got a friend named, I bet you can call this up, too. Oh, yeah. Named Mercy Otis Warren.

Pull up with a friend, girly.

Mercy Otis Warren.

Look, Kiki.

Yeah, there she is. You got a book of her. She writes one of the first the histories of it. There she is. She's in her film. There. Oh, yeah. 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. So the longest day about D-Day had cast list. But we've got Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, who reads Mercy Otis-Warran, and Claire Daines, who reads Abigail Adams, and Paul Giamatti, and Josh Brolin, and Sir Kenneth Brownell, and Morgan Freeman, and Samuel L. Jackson, and Leev Schreiber, and Ed Norton.

That have all voiced in your docs?

In this doc.

In this doc in American Revolution alone, and Dom Nell Gleasing, and Jeff Daniels.

Jeff Daniels, he's the voice of Thomas Jefferson. I probably listed a fifth of the voices that are in that film.

Do you ask them or no? How does it happen?

Yeah, we ask A lot of people have read for us before. A lot of new people have read this time. But we ask them, Tom Hanks has read for us for almost 25 years.

He did the D-Day Museum in New Orleans. He's their whole D-Day guy. Have you been there?

Yeah. It's amazing. I took my little girl a year and a half ago, my then 13-year-old, and we just loved it. I've been there many, many times. Steven Ambrose, the late historian, really started it. But Tom and many other people made it possible, and he's just so phenomenal. He's so smart. Also, like Meryl Streep and Jeff Daniels and others, Josh Brolin, couldn't be nice. I recorded long distance a Morgan Freeman, who's in his mid to late '80s. Yeah, he's from Mississippi. He's getting up there, and he lives on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi. I'm just making an 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. It just made me feel really good. That's cool. I'll bump into someone and they go, Why haven't you called me? Because they're not making anything. We pay them SAG minimum. I always tease Tom. I always go, I'm giving you a check for $313. 22. Please don't spend it all in one place. Please save it. But they come and they work. Look at that list. Oh, it's remarkable.

Yeah. Josh Brolin is an exceptional man.

Oh, he's great. He's George Washington. 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. You somehow have to be somebody that is both unknowable, only as a historian, one of the historians in the film says, 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 mutining, 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 going to 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. What does he do after two terms? He leaves it.

He's the coach of the Bad News Bayers in a way.

George III, who's not the idiot that we try to make him out to be George W. Bush? No, George III.

I was going to say- The King George III.

He says when he hears that Washington- He even voted he was an idiot, I think.

He might have.

When Washington resigned his military commission and then resigned of presidency, he said, Then he is the most powerful character of the age. 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, didn't try to amass personal power. He just said, It is my service to this new idea. 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, that the feeble engines of despotism only work, he said, unless 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, the times that try men's soul. And then great title called Conquer by the Drawn Game.

It's what Washington understood. Britain, 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 misunderstand how big we are. Of course, nobody's got a weather report. That storm-Right.

He realized the battle is not... It's not right here in this moment. It is. But if you look at the different legs of it, there's There's more than a couple of ways to win this thing.

The historian Jane Kaminski says, he knows what every insurrectionary leader means, meaning guerrilla, that you eat at them there. 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. It is a down and dirty war. There are terrorist organizations of loyal- It's like Grand Theft America. It's pretty wild. Yet out of it comes an extraordinary order. 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 equal. Lincoln was that white Iverson. We're going to live through all or die by suicide. Nobody's coming to attack us and conquer us. If we dissolve, it's on us. And so that's the message for today. It is. It's what Washington's example of giving up power. It's of the non-authoritarian stuff of Thomas Paine and Jefferson and this sense of the power of the civic example. And then, of course, Lincoln Lincoln's warning that you have to stay together.

He presided over the closest we ever came to national suicide or civil war. Without him, like without Washington, who knows what happens.

Lincoln was the guy that kept the pilot light of what these other guys had lit going. I have one or two questions. Do you think there's been this thing in my lifetime where you felt like colonialism ended? You felt like that through articles that were written and just looking like, That's bad. This is wrong. But then you still have things that happen. You still have genocides happening. You still have ethnic cleansing in Gaza that some people believe is happening. You still have colonial... Is that just something the media tricked us to think? Is it safe for us to think that that thing has ended? Because you almost want to evolve as a species and think that that's not happening anymore because it seems so 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, these guys lit this pilot light a long time ago, being a citizen in reflection of yourself and how that's going to be. That's going to need to always be a part of what it means to be an American and for this to evolve and to stay alive.

And the only way it can die is by suicide, right? It really puts it immediately 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 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 other, totalitarianism. It's as my Marine, Tommy Vallalee, was his name, Corporal Tommy Vallalee. 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, 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, it's the end of colonialism. It's the end of partisan rancor, it's the end of this, it's the progress.

We're colorblind. We're like a black person Isn't it all- Or you solved it. Yeah. Well, I have friends would say, I've centered race in a lot of my films, and I've gotten some criticism for it, telling the story of that, our asterisk, our yes, but. Then when Obama was inaugurated, they said, Now, will you stop talking about that? I held up the Onion magazine and it said, Black men given worst job in nation. I just said, Just watch what happens. 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 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, not- I feel like 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. 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, suppressed.

No, we're not going to manifest that way. Kids behave. We've still got two hours before we get to the beach. And suddenly, by the time we get to the beach, we're at war again. 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... The essence of what we've talked about, it seemed to me, has been about this incredibly difficult thing, which is self-discipline. I need to actually do the work on myself. I 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 people. The people who have been doing the work and following the rules hypothetically and 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. And that may be 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 think a lot of it has to do with this device in our back pocket and all the atomized sources of information that we have. When I grew up, there were three channels in CBS, which I It works, all my films on CBS 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 this. People knew what it was. Now, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Senator from New York here, said, Everybody's entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. We do know that the Battle of Gettysburg happened on July first, second, and third, 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. Does 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 or whatever, it may be more imbalanced by the fact that they have been convinced of a lot of things that aren't necessarily true.

One in one has got to equal two, except in our faith, in that faith, where one in one has to equal three, that we say the The hole is greater than the sum of the parts. Here's the sum of the parts, and here's the sum of the parts, and here's the hole. 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. And that's not who I am. And we are all the same. Shakespeare has it when the Shylock in the merchant event, are we not human? Have we 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 fascist, you don't have a You're boiling gay people in your apartment or whatever.

Yes. But just shit like that. It's like, what is going?

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, and you just after a while, you have to go, Stop. 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 truth is lies and And knowledge is ignorance, and everything is the opposite of what it actually is. And what you have to get back is to what is verifiable. And as much as people say, Oh, the mainstream media, the lamestream media, whatever it is, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that 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 just they're actually really good at what they do. I think if Americans were to 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, the Governor's Association. 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 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, there's nothing social about it. There's nothing social about it. It's all an interior dialog with yourself. It's It's a phrenic. 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? Is the central question. I start with an easier question, very hard. Who are we? The United States of America. But then inevitably, all of those questions form a mirror. 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 tough. A lot of people would rather be completely occupied by other stuff all the time rather than say, what is it that I could do that could make me a better person?

Yeah, thank you. Some of these thoughts are so great. A group of friends of mine.

Oh, you've given me them. 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. I would disagree on the news outlets that you mentioned, right? I would disagree 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 you, Hey, I disagree with a news source. You might like... It just shows that what you're even saying is just us conversating about something is what really matters. That's all that matters. 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. Because when the cat's away, the mice will play. That's all we have now, are mice out there. 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 a purity test of 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 it's going to drive us crazy. Maybe the opposite will happen.

We're going to be data slaves. You and I are going to have pickaxes. We'll be in a bit mine somewhere and we'll literally be hammering out statistics from old NBA games so some guy can upload them for his DraftKings account.

That's right.

That's what's exactly how it's-That's where we're going to go. 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 last year, she will be doing a documentary on you and I working as miners in a bit mine somewhere.

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 signs out, but nobody says you're wrong. They just say, that's what you believe. I disagree with that. It's really good.

I think there's a lot of good places out there that do have a lot of peace in them. Since we're talking about information and stuff, where do you get your information? How do you do it? Do you have a team that helps you source? What do you guys do? Do you walk into the Library of Congress? They're like, Kenny boy. What happens?

They do know my face. In the American Revolution, we've got materials drawn from 340 sources, archives, libraries around 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, 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 very few in Massachusetts and maybe half in South Carolina. We just want to find out that. We want to check the date. We always have lots of different sources. We want a source thing from scholars who've been working in, and you find there's sometimes a little desperate stuff, a different stuff. We will say, 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. Then you read a fifth source, and it says, not sure.

We go somewhere in all this narration that Peter Coyote has read and found the word perhaps, cut it, duplicate it, and pull it and go, perhaps 16. We do not sleep at night until we know we're absolutely dead certain.

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. People manipulate the past. We know what it's like in a Soviet system where they cut somebody else out of the picture or they're on the presidium and the Polit Bureau in front of the Mayday parade and somebody's out of favor. So suddenly they edit it out of the pre- It's like the 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 live in 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, 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, and we just say, How do we get better? 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 braided 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 Bowl. He is phenomenally dedicated to self-criticism and where you can improve. If we extended that into our civic and our political world, we would not be in the 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.

I'm in the mud because of you, not because I stepped in it. If we brought that ethic of self-improvement, it's what we've been talking along all along. It's my response. My mom used to say that to me. If he's got a problem with you, it's your responsibility. If you've got a problem with him, it's your responsibility. Which means I don't need you to change. I need to figure out what It is what it is. If this is worth repairing, which I think our experiment is, then it always begins with myself. It's so rare to see people, particularly in politics, take a stand that says, a George Washington stand, I'm leaving, I'm giving up power, or you know what? My party is wrong in this. I am not going to do this.

More people would vote for that guy.

Of course.

I think it's one of the reasons why it's like I think we're getting down to people don't trust entities for information. I think it's one of the problems that you have with news and stuff. Because some of those are, they make money based on advertising, so 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 evolved. I think people now are trying to find a person that they believe because it's easier for them to analyze. I can figure out if I believe this person, so I'll get information from them. Whereas I think people don't trust entities anymore as much.

I have spent my entire professional life as an independent filmmaker, but all of my films are made for 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 perspectives and understandings and knowledge. And they also are not... They're free of that advertising thing, right? So that I am able to do it. I could tell you, let me just say, our Vietnam series took ten and a half years to make, cost 30 million bucks. I spent ten of the ten 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 the death of CPCPB is a big thing.

Can I ask you about that? Your funding, how's that been affected by- It's huge.

But more importantly, it's such a short-sighted decision because you know what's going to 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 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 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 CBS, not just for the children's programming, not just for the great primed time, but for their homeland security, their alerts. They may be the most important, the only 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 at the City Council.

You want a personal connection.

You want a personal person that you know. So I have worked with them. So go back to my Vietnam example. I spent 10 of the ten 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. 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. I am so proud of that. But I didn't take the money, do it in a year or a year and a half, and have it be a piece of shit.

Oh, you're not a tea bill. You're a bond, dude.

Yeah, I am long term. That's exactly it. 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. You know what PVS stands for? It's not system. The S is not. It's public. I like that part, meaning you and me. Broadcasting, obviously. Service. It's not the Columbia Broadcasting System.

It's not the public broadcasting self.

It's It's not a top-down. It's not a network saying, What part of 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 is exactly the Declaration of Independence applied to the communications world, just as the National Parks or 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. We know we're saving it for all time. That's beautiful stuff, because if we didn't have that, if we had a different system, 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.

The Everglades would be drained and be endless strip malls and golf courses and condominiums. Yellowstone would be a down on its luck amusement place called Geyser World. Just think about it.

There'd be a lot of hippies. There'll be a lot of EDM festivals out there.

Manifest Destiny says, We're going to take the whole continent, and you're going to have to get out of the way, whoever you are. That stand of trees I look at, I think board feet. That river, I think dam. 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. 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. You can go there and look at it and see exactly what Theodore Roosevelt saw. More importantly, you can see in the case of the native people who occupied Yosemite, what they saw 2,000 years ago. 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 has been called Denali, said, McKinley never saw the mountain. He said, It reminds me of my atomic insignificance, meaning the way nature dwarf you.

You just look up at a night sky in the nature when it's 10 below zero and you just see all those stars, and you go, I mean, I'm like, nothing. I need a drink or whatever. But the thing is about that, it's paradoxical nature, 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. You know that. You see somebody who's so full of shit, so full of themselves, and they just get smaller and smaller. But the person who goes, wow, I'm nothing in the scheme of things, and that's true, seems bigger. It seems like somebody I want to listen to.

Oh, yeah.

All the great gurus of the national parks like Emerson and particularly John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, they have distance in their eyes. That's what Stuart Udall, who's a former Secretary of the Interior 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 blustry guy that we love for all his belligerents, walks awfully, but carry a big stick. But what does he do? He sets up the Grand Canyon, the grandest Canyon on Earth, I assure you.

And had that longevity of thought to have the... I don't want other people to come here and see the same thing.

I want my great, great grandchildren to enjoy it. And guess You know 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 I know part of it was the Bill of Rights. We don't have an Internet Bill of Rights. We don't have a social media Bill of Rights. I think it's stuff like that that's killing us. It's like, you can have... If I'm a restaurant and you come there and I poison you, 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, feeding people, literally poisoning them. They know what they're feeding them. They have a log of it. They have a log of the recipe. If you go here, we're going to 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 stop them, it feels like.

I agree completely. I think that's beautifully said. One would hope that there There was a health department that might have noticed that that restaurant had ingredients or there was mice or rats around in the kitchen that might be poisoning. They're going to 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 lead a little C.

You'll lead a C now. I draw the line at B. I'm sorry, this is where you and I disagree But maybe there is some overarching sense of discipline, or maybe there's self-discipline. Maybe I realize that in Fantasia, in the Sorcer's Apprentice, where he's got the endless number of brooms carrying the buckets of water, it's just so proliferated. We're just so out of control and unable to make sense of anything that at some point you need someone, in this case, the Wizard, to come and recast It has to spell. So it goes back to being one broom that's carrying these things. And then we've got that possibility. And 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.

The algorithm is the fact that you can continue to poison. Just imagine a 15-year-old kid.

But it pays. If it bleeds, it leads. Then right now, that used to be the thing in the '70s when there were 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 know you're wrong. It's a 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, even as we said in the beginning, that this doesn't end, right? The idea to be free, to think free, to feel, all those things, you're going to constantly have to come in to bring those into the present day to keep America evolving. And I think it's no more evident than ever than right now with just a new front line war for information, for facts, for the ability for our children not to be contaminated. Maybe it used to be by dirty water, but now it's by bad information. It's by algorithms that aren't shackled by any facts. That they don't want to poison people.

I think one of the impulses 10 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 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's 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 serve? 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 of many different face and of many different perspectives, we're able to figure out how they could govern themselves. And it set an example for the world. And so maybe Maybe going back and collecting, 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 to.

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.

I'm so happy to meet you. Really, really happy to meet you.

You, too. Thank you for all your commitment and your undying desire. I bet your mother's very proud of- Can I tell you, my mother's name was Laila, L-Y-L-A.

That name forever was just draped in black creep. We didn't say it. We called her mommy. My eldest daughter, who's now 42, on January 18th, 2011, had her first child, my first grandchild, and named her after a grandmother she never met named Laila. Now we say Laila every day, and we smile, and flowers bloom, and birds chirp, and it's the music place. It's a wonderful nose dive.

The pilot light is relit.

The pilot light is relit.

Laila. We'll have to put a picture of her up there at the end if you'll send us a cute whenever.

L-y-l-a, we'll get it to you.

That'd be awesome. Thank you so much. Keep working. Stay alive. No, no, no, no, no. Get on peptides. We need more. We need more Ken Burns forever. We need the pilot light to keep burns. Thank you so much, brother. Thank you.

Now, I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must be cornerstone. Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones. But it's going to take.