The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2336 - Ken Burns

00:00:11.000 All right, we're up.

00:00:13.000 Mr. Burns, pleasure to meet you.

00:00:14.000 It's my pleasure, thank you.

00:00:16.000 I'm a huge fan, dude.

00:00:17.000 I've been watching your work for so long, and I've always had so many questions about how a person like you becomes a person like you.

00:00:25.000 How you become the preeminent documentarian.

00:00:28.000 Of our time.

00:00:29.000 I mean, you have so much work out there.

00:00:32.000 It's really extraordinary.

00:00:33.000 And all of it on PBS, right?

00:00:35.000 Right.

00:00:35.000 All of it.

00:00:36.000 All of it.

00:00:36.000 Which is also extraordinary.

00:00:38.000 You know, it's the Public Broadcasting Service.

00:00:40.000 It's the Declaration of Independence applied to communication.

00:00:53.000 It may not seem obvious to us, but it seemed obvious to me that that's where I should go.

00:00:57.000 So I had lots of, you know.

00:00:59.000 I headed for the hills out of New York, you know, 46 years ago because I thought I was taking a vow of anonymity and poverty to do this stuff.

00:01:07.000 And I've lived in the same house that I've lived in since then, in the same bedroom for 46 years in this tiny little village in New Hampshire.

00:01:14.000 And when the first film was nominated for an Academy Award, that was a film called Brooklyn Bridge.

00:01:20.000 Everybody said, oh, you're coming back to New York.

00:01:22.000 You're going to L.A. And I said, you know, I'm staying here.

00:01:24.000 It's so labor-intensive.

00:01:25.000 And I can sit here in front of you and tell you that every single one of my films is a director's cut.

00:01:32.000 I'm not going to sit here and give you an excuse.

00:01:34.000 Well, that one, they wouldn't let me do this or they didn't give me this amount of time.

00:01:38.000 And so I could, with the reputation I have, go into a streaming service or a premium cable and say, I need $30 million to do a history of the Vietnam War.

00:01:47.000 And they'd give it to me.

00:01:48.000 But they wouldn't give me the ten and a half years it took me to take.

00:01:52.000 You see what I mean?

00:01:53.000 It's the time.

00:01:54.000 It's the time and the ability to marinate the ideas, to do the deep dive into the scholarship, to triangulate the various scholarships, as you know better than anybody.

00:02:03.000 There's lots of different viewpoints and perspectives and you want to find a way in which you can kind of, if not average, them out.

00:02:10.000 You can find a way in which you can understand them and you can have a conversation, a sort of a campfire around which you can discuss the complexity and the undertow of any subject.

00:02:22.000 You pick it, the Brooklyn Bridge, the American Revolution most recently.

00:02:26.000 How early on did you realize that the only way to get this like full autonomy was to do with PBS?

00:02:35.000 I'd like to attribute some consciousness to it, and I honestly can't do it.

00:02:39.000 I realized that I was striking out trying to raise funds from folks, and the people who were interested in helping me, like the National Endowment for the Humanities or this, all required me to give it for free, as I still do, to PBS.

00:02:54.000 And we had foundations and that, and so suddenly that dream of being a filmmaker, which I'd had since 12, I wanted to be a filmmaker at 12. Of the communion of strangers in dark rooms, the cinematic experience.

00:03:07.000 Suddenly I had to go, you know what, it's okay.

00:03:09.000 I'm trading hundreds or maybe thousands of viewers for millions of viewers on a smaller screen and they're not watching it together but they're having an experience and I can do something over time.

00:03:21.000 I can do a Civil War series and it can be 11 and a half, 12 hours and get deep, deep into that experience.

00:03:28.000 Or Vietnam, which is 18 hours, 10 episodes.

00:03:31.000 Country music, the national parks, jazz, baseball.

00:03:34.000 I mean, there are like 40 different things.

00:03:36.000 American Buffalo.

00:03:37.000 American Buffalo, most recently, and Leonardo da Vinci, the first non-American topic.

00:03:42.000 We're just finishing the American Revolution.

00:03:44.000 It's just—it was right for me.

00:03:46.000 It was right for me.

00:03:48.000 And I like the fact that they have—BBS has one foot in the marketplace and the other out.

00:03:55.000 You know, that foot is tentatively there.

00:03:58.000 And so it also reaches— All parts of the country.

00:04:01.000 It's the largest network in the country.

00:04:04.000 It's 330 stations.

00:04:05.000 And they really serve rural stations mostly.

00:04:08.000 It's not this Upper West Side, Knob Hill, snobby kind of thing.

00:04:13.000 It's Homeland Security and crop reports and weather and continuing education and classroom of the air as well as children's programming and what I think is a pretty damn good prime time schedule.

00:04:25.000 You know, so it works.

00:04:27.000 In the context of all of America, not just some of America.

00:04:31.000 So this is sort of a fortuitous sort of a thing that you came to be cooperative with them?

00:04:37.000 I think so.

00:04:37.000 The filmmaking thing was born in tragedy.

00:04:40.000 My mom got cancer when I was two years old.

00:04:42.000 There was never a moment when she wasn't dying that I was aware.

00:04:45.000 She died when I was 11, a few months short of my 12th birthday.

00:04:50.000 And my dad had a pretty tough relationship.

00:05:01.000 Or he'd take me out to the cinnamon sea like Old Silence or French New Wave that was happening in the mid-60s.

00:05:09.000 And I saw my dad cry for the first time.

00:05:12.000 didn't cry when she was dying, didn't cry when she died, didn't cry at this impossibly sad funeral.

00:05:17.000 But we were watching this movie called James Mason, you know, very tragic.

00:05:28.000 And I saw him cry and I got it immediately.

00:05:31.000 That provided him with this safe haven to express himself in a way nothing in his life for whatever reasons, for his own psychology, his own history, his own traumas, his own whatever it is.

00:05:45.000 And I said, that's what I want to do.

00:05:46.000 And it wasn't about sentimentality or nostalgia.

00:05:50.000 It was about authentic emotional stuff, higher emotional stuff.

00:05:56.000 The way our founders would talk about we'd be able to create a republic where you'd have higher emotions.

00:06:01.000 Nothing sentimental about it.

00:06:02.000 It's that you would just get closer, be more virtuous.

00:06:06.000 And so I said, and that meant, you know, I was going to be Albert Hitchcock or John Ford or Howard Hawks, you know, big.

00:06:14.000 I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which was a brand new experimental school.

00:06:20.000 Came in its second year in 1971, and all of the teachers there were social documentaries, still photographers and filmmakers, and they reminded me, correctly, that there is as much drama in what is and what was as anything the human imagination makes up, Right?

00:06:36.000 And so, fiction, I'm no longer just a filmmaker going to hopefully go to Hollywood.

00:06:43.000 I'm now a documentary filmmaker, and all of that merged with this latent, Joe, I don't know how to describe it, love of my country and its history.

00:06:52.000 I mean, where everybody else growing up was reading novels and stuff like that.

00:06:57.000 I was reading encyclopedias and reading histories and trying to get at some aspect of who we are.

00:07:03.000 And I think every single film that I've made has asked the same question: Who are we?

00:07:09.000 Who are those strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans?

00:07:13.000 And what does an investigation of the past tell us about not only where we've been, but where we are and where we may be going, which is the great gift of history.

00:07:22.000 It's the best teacher we have, as you know.

00:07:26.000 One of the more fascinating things about documentary work, and particularly your work, is it provides Yes.

00:07:52.000 It makes it exciting where instead of the stale, boring classrooms a lot of children face.

00:07:59.000 If they could be exposed to something like your piece on Vietnam, was it 18 hours?

00:08:04.000 18 hours, 10 episodes.

00:08:06.000 That piece on Vietnam is so fascinating.

00:08:09.000 It's so incredible.

00:08:11.000 And to see the people that survived it express, there's this one moment where one of the guys is realizing that they're about, and it's just a very simple statement.

00:08:22.000 He goes, okay, here we go.

00:08:25.000 We're going to war. 0.85

00:08:26.000 And you could see it in his face, him recalling that.

00:08:30.000 And you're like, you don't get that from the written word, seeing that man's face, him recounting it.

00:08:36.000 And you don't get it from churning it out either.

00:08:39.000 So I spent five and a half years working on the Civil War, and I really was, like, daunted by it.

00:08:44.000 But the first—all of the first five or six films that I've made, The Brooklyn Bridge, wouldn't have been built without this new metal called steel, which the— The second film on the celibate religious sect, The Shakers, wouldn't have declined so precipitously, not because they were celibate.

00:09:04.000 Celibacy exists in lots of religious traditions, but because a country that had just murdered 650,000 of its own people was not interested after the Civil War in the questions of the soul survival in the intensity that it had before the Civil War. 0.51

00:09:18.000 The next film I made was on the Statue of Liberty.

00:09:21.000 And it was originally a gift from the French to Mrs. Lincoln to commemorate the survival of the Union despite her husband's ultimate sacrifice.

00:09:28.000 The next film was on Huey Long, the turbulent Southern demagogue.

00:09:31.000 He came from a North Louisiana parish that refused to secede from the Confederacy.

00:09:37.000 I mean, refused to secede from the Union.

00:09:39.000 They saw the Confederacy, the ownership of slaves.

00:09:42.000 As a rich man's cause.

00:09:44.000 And so they became a hotbed of kind of radicalism and populism and later would spawn this swamp thing called Huey Long.

00:09:51.000 You know, we made a film in the history of the Congress.

00:09:53.000 Obviously, the most important time in the Congress was when, you know, there were two Congresses, one in Washington, obviously, one in Montgomery and then later Richmond.

00:10:03.000 And so I began to see the centrality, and after the Civil War was done, We didn't want to do another film on war.

00:10:16.000 The guys, both North and South, who'd been in it, who said, here we go, were, they said they'd seen the elephant.

00:10:25.000 That's how they described it.

00:10:26.000 They said they'd seen the elephant.

00:10:27.000 I assume it was the most exotic thing they could think of.

00:10:31.000 That's what combat was, something that no one else experiences, seeing the elephant.

00:10:41.000 And we just sort of said, we're not going to do any more war films.

00:10:44.000 And then at the end of the 90s, the Civil War came out in 1990, the end of the 90s, people were working on lots of things, baseball and jazz and biographies on Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis and Clark and Mark Twain and all sorts of stuff, Jack Johnson later on.

00:10:57.000 I heard that...

00:11:03.000 I think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War.

00:11:07.000 And that a thousand veterans, American veterans of the Second World War were dying each day in America.

00:11:15.000 And I was like, fuck.

00:11:16.000 You know, we're losing them.

00:11:19.000 And by the way, that figure today is so small.

00:11:23.000 It's just actuarially.

00:11:25.000 It's true that it's not a thousand anymore.

00:11:27.000 It's maybe five or six today, and pretty soon it will be nobody.

00:11:31.000 And there will be no memory.

00:11:33.000 And so I wanted to make a film about that.

00:11:35.000 Before the ink was dry on the World War II film, I said, we're doing Vietnam. 0.95

00:11:39.000 And before the ink was dry, meaning we're locking it and we're mixing it and doing all the stuff we have to do, ten and a half years on Vietnam.

00:11:50.000 It came out in September of 17. In December of 15, Barack Obama still has 13 months left in his presidency.

00:11:58.000 I said, we're doing the revolution.

00:12:00.000 And I am now speaking to you where we are almost done with it.

00:12:05.000 We're still mixing.

00:12:06.000 We're still mastering.

00:12:07.000 We're still onlining some stuff.

00:12:09.000 But what it allowed us to do in all of the cases of all the war is get exactly at that thing that you're talking about.

00:12:16.000 What is everything?

00:12:20.000 What is this thing?

00:12:23.000 Life is vivified to an extent that we can't describe.

00:12:28.000 Our imminent death right now as we speak is not a possibility.

00:12:32.000 But if we're on the front lines, it is at any moment.

00:12:35.000 And life is vivified.

00:12:36.000 We understand why people come home and can't compartmentalize it.

00:12:39.000 We understand why people have problems.

00:12:41.000 We're amazed at the people who don't.

00:12:44.000 It obviously brings out the worst.

00:12:46.000 We're the most dangerous species on this planet, clearly.

00:12:50.000 But it brings out the best.

00:12:52.000 And it's worth pursuing.

00:12:56.000 And I think particularly when you take, most recently, we spent so many years studying the American Revolution.

00:13:03.000 We kind of accept the violence of the Civil War.

00:13:07.000 We accept the violence of the 20th century wars.

00:13:10.000 American Revolution, you know, they're in breeches and they're in stockings and they have wigs and the ideas are too important.

00:13:18.000 We don't want to admit that this was as bloody per capita as our civil war, that it was in fact a civil war in ways that even our civil war wasn't.

00:13:27.000 Civil War was a sectional war, North and South, and that...

00:13:35.000 Those ideas, those big ideas that we seemingly want to protect by, like, putting in a bug in Amber or, you know, guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, it doesn't in any way get diminished.

00:13:46.000 In fact, it enlarges, it makes it more inspiring and more exhilarating, the understanding that what happened when our country was formed is one of the most important events in the entire history of humankind.

00:14:00.000 I mean, you and I were talking about some of the punctuated equilibriums of comets or meteors or striking this, you know, ice ages.

00:14:07.000 I mean, Ecclesiastes, the Old Testament says there's nothing new under the sun.

00:14:12.000 And I agree with that.

00:14:13.000 Human nature doesn't change.

00:14:14.000 But for a few minutes, right here.

00:14:17.000 We started something that was brand new.

00:14:19.000 Thomas Paine said, like, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to do this.

00:14:24.000 And so we've just plowed ourselves into hearing not just those top-down voices, the bold-faced names that we all know, the Washingtons and the Thomas Paines and the Jeffersons and the John Adams, but also the people you've never heard of, right?

00:14:40.000 0.01% of people have a painting made of them or a drawing.

00:14:44.000 Everybody else is visually anonymous.

00:14:47.000 But somewhere they wrote their name down.

00:14:49.000 Somewhere they're in a church record.

00:14:50.000 Somewhere they're here.

00:14:51.000 Somewhere they wrote a memoir and got handed down.

00:14:55.000 And so we could bring to life a 14-year-old kid who joins the militia surrounding the British in Cambridge after Lexington conquered.

00:15:03.000 A 15-year-old who's from Connecticut who fights during the war.

00:15:07.000 A 10-year-old girl who's, you know, from 10 to 16. From Yorktown, who's a refugee for most of the time as her family's well-to-do circumstances are diminished and she has to be on the road because Yorktown is so vulnerable to attack from British.

00:15:23.000 Who are the native players?

00:15:25.000 Who are the black players?

00:15:26.000 Who are the Germans, the hired soldiers? 0.92

00:15:30.000 You know, they're real people.

00:15:32.000 Who are the Irish and Scottish and Welsh grunts of the British Army?

00:15:37.000 Who are the diplomats?

00:15:37.000 Who are the generals?

00:15:40.000 Who are the French? 0.99

00:15:41.000 And then if you charge yourself with that, you can't turn that out in a year and a half.

00:15:48.000 You have to spend a decade.

00:15:50.000 Marinating that stuff, finding out what's too much.

00:15:54.000 You know, you don't want to make an encyclopedia.

00:15:56.000 I mean, you started off by talking about entertainment, that you could make something that is, you know, technically educational, entertaining.

00:16:05.000 This is a good story.

00:16:06.000 I mean, the word history is mostly made up of the word story plus high, which is a really good way to begin a story, right?

00:16:14.000 High.

00:16:14.000 Yeah.

00:16:15.000 And then we begin.

00:16:16.000 And so I've tried to treat it as that way.

00:16:18.000 I understand, and PBS is really good, and one of the reasons to stay with them is that they can reach every classroom in the country.

00:16:24.000 So today's the school day in America, and hundreds of classrooms are showing a little bit of the Civil War, a little bit of baseball, a little bit of jazz, Lewis and Clark, the Roosevelt's, country music.

00:16:34.000 You name it.

00:16:34.000 And I love that idea that it isn't like broadcast television or even just the release of anything like skywriting.

00:16:40.000 The first breeze and then all of a sudden you can't see the words anymore.

00:16:44.000 I like the fact that a film I made 35 years ago in the Civil War is like as durable now as it was then.

00:16:50.000 That's all PBS.

00:16:52.000 That's amazing.

00:16:53.000 It really is.

00:16:54.000 And it is so cool that they do show these in classrooms because I think that...

00:17:09.000 This will give children a way to be educated, but also entertained, and it will spark this sort of, it gives them a pathway to maybe children that are very bored with school and just can't wait to get out.

00:17:24.000 All of a sudden, you have this spark of excitement.

00:17:28.000 And a pathway to, like, maybe education is cool.

00:17:31.000 Like, maybe there's something about this that's actually fun.

00:17:34.000 Exactly.

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00:18:56.000 Exactly.

00:18:56.000 And we have let a lot of what is fun about it.

00:19:00.000 We've sort of taken history out.

00:19:02.000 We've taken civics out.

00:19:03.000 We don't know about ethics.

00:19:05.000 We don't know about values.

00:19:06.000 We've placed everything over into one sort of set of educational prerogatives, forgetting that you want to build, as our founders said, these well-rounded citizens.

00:19:16.000 Remember, we invented that.

00:19:17.000 Everybody up until the point.

00:19:20.000 Of our revolution, we're subjects, right?

00:19:24.000 And Jefferson says a few phrases beyond the famous second sentence.

00:19:29.000 He goes, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

00:19:35.000 Meaning, the whole history of human beings is like, okay, I'm going to be under the boot of an authoritarian.

00:19:40.000 I just, you know, that's my lot.

00:19:42.000 I'm just going to accept it.

00:19:43.000 And he's going, no.

00:19:44.000 central to the success of this new thing you were creating, citizens, was the responsibility to educate and to be educated and to do that your lifelong.

00:19:54.000 In fact, he could have said, Jefferson could have said life, liberty, and property.

00:20:00.000 He didn't.

00:20:01.000 He said the pursuit of happiness.

00:20:02.000 That was not the chasing of objects, things in a marketplace of objects, but it was lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.

00:20:12.000 It was making the story of They imported it from the classical.

00:20:21.000 They went over the Dark Ages, over the Middle Ages, over the medieval period, and pulled back from classical times this idea of virtue, of temperance, of tolerance, and all of that.

00:20:31.000 There's a wonderful moment when John Adams, who's the big worrier of the revolution, he's always worrying.

00:20:36.000 He's saying, I just don't know if there's enough virtue to have a republic.

00:20:41.000 Everybody is so ambitious.

00:20:44.000 So greedy and so out to do this.

00:20:47.000 And so for him, if you were going to create this new thing, something new under the sun, you know, the world started over again, as Thomas Paine is suggesting, an asylum for mankind, he called it, then maybe you had to figure out how to educate your stuff.

00:21:05.000 And so when you go back and say, What have we lost?

00:21:09.000 We're now just repeating, are we trying to get to the test, or are we trying to make a well-rounded human being?

00:21:14.000 So if I tell you, in 1838, there is this lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, who is just a few days short of his 29th birthday, who is addressing the Young Men's Lyceum on an afternoon, and the topic is foreign policy.

00:21:32.000 And he says, whence shall we expect the approach of danger?

00:21:35.000 Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us with a blow? 0.84

00:21:40.000 Then he answered his own question.

00:21:42.000 Never.

00:21:43.000 All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track in the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.

00:21:52.000 If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

00:21:58.000 As a nation of free men, we shall live through all time.

00:22:02.000 Or die by suicide.

00:22:04.000 Whoa.

00:22:05.000 You know who said that?

00:22:06.000 That's Abraham Lincoln.

00:22:07.000 He would come the closest to overseeing our near-national suicide in the Civil War. 0.57

00:22:12.000 But he understood.

00:22:13.000 Here you've got these two magnificent oceans, big, relatively benign neighbors, north and south.

00:22:19.000 And so what we've been able to do is incubate so many extraordinary things, but we've also been able to incubate And he was saying it's those less than extraordinary things are going to trip us up or we'll live forever.

00:22:36.000 Because if you think about it, the greatest naval invasion in history, you know, June 6, 1944, D-Day, Normandy, nobody can do that for us.

00:22:47.000 Nobody's going to land at Montauk.

00:22:49.000 Nobody's going to land at, you know, St. Augustine.

00:22:52.000 Nobody's going to land at Galveston and help us, right?

00:22:56.000 We'll sink or swim by the extent to which we are knowledgeable of and adhered to the blessings that we've received from that founding generation, the sacrifice made not by those boldface names, but by the people that you've never heard of, that we are trying to tell you about.

00:23:17.000 John Greenwood, the 14-year-old Pfeiffer.

00:23:19.000 Joseph Plum Martin, the 15-year-old kid from Connecticut.

00:23:22.000 Betsy Ambler.

00:23:23.000 You know, loyalists, too.

00:23:24.000 I mean, we're umpires.

00:23:26.000 We call balls and strikes.

00:23:28.000 You know what?

00:23:28.000 Being a loyalist in the revolution is what it would be like saying, well, you're conservative, right?

00:23:33.000 Well, you think I live under the greatest political system, the British constitutional monarchy.

00:23:39.000 Why would I want to change this great life, this great prosperity I have for this idea that, A, Sounds foolhardy and radical, but also B, has zero chance of working out.

00:23:51.000 Zero chance of working out, right?

00:23:53.000 At Lexington, 250 years ago on April 19th, the chances of the Patriots prevailing are zero.

00:24:02.000 And to tell the story of how it went from zero to 100% is scary, violent, complicated.

00:24:14.000 Lots of undertow and as exhilarating as you could possibly imagine.

00:24:19.000 There's a great line in the trailer for this piece on the Revolutionary War.

00:24:26.000 We say it's the first war that was fought in history for the unalienable rights.

00:24:31.000 Proclaiming the unalienable rights of all people.

00:24:34.000 Now, let's be honest.

00:24:35.000 Thomas Jefferson meant all white men of property free of debt.

00:24:39.000 But the words are beautiful.

00:24:40.000 The words are vague.

00:24:41.000 And the door got opened a crack.

00:24:44.000 Everybody else put their foot in it.

00:24:45.000 Women put their foot in it. 1.00

00:24:47.000 The poor, the not landed people, the folks, the craftsmen who just had a regular job, black people. 1.00

00:24:53.000 And it has sponsored revolutions all around the world, democratic revolutions, that the greatest thing that we invented was the idea that we could govern ourselves, that we would no longer be under the boot of an authoritarian master who had just set himself up like King George.

00:25:14.000 Because of hereditary privilege, you know, his grandfather and his grandfather and his father and his uncle and going back.

00:25:22.000 And on what basis?

00:25:24.000 Is it talent?

00:25:25.000 Is it showing the things?

00:25:30.000 And so all of these people that we consider the bold-faced names of our revolution, the Washingtons and the Jeffersons and the Patrick Henrys and the John Adams, they didn't know they were those people.

00:25:42.000 Right?

00:25:43.000 Right.

00:25:43.000 They didn't know they were a planter and they were a businessman and they were a lawyer and they were this guy and a planter or a scientist.

00:25:49.000 And they were just risking their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for something much bigger than anything else.

00:25:58.000 And it's also the incredibly complex system of checks and balances that they divide to prevent tyranny.

00:26:05.000 Oh, it's so unbelievably beautiful.

00:26:06.000 I can't believe you brought that up.

00:26:08.000 So, we have a technical problem, which I'll share with you, or I thought it was a technical problem, which is the climax – if you're making a film called The American Revolution, the climax is the Battle of Yorktown.

00:26:20.000 It happens in October of 1781.

00:26:22.000 The British don't leave New York for two more years until 1783.

00:26:27.000 They're occupying New York, which they took over in the summer of 76. And our articles of convention are doing nothing.

00:26:36.000 Articles of Confederation are doing nothing.

00:26:38.000 They're toothless.

00:26:39.000 They can't be a government.

00:26:40.000 And so in 1787, we have this constitutional convention that happens in Philadelphia, four months.

00:26:46.000 They hammer together the shortest constitution in the world, and it is exactly that.

00:26:51.000 Jefferson's writing in from Paris, representing our interests, going, but what about this?

00:26:57.000 They're trying to check the possibility of somebody being...

00:26:57.000 What about...

00:27:08.000 And so all of those elaborately beautiful checks and balances, Article I is the legislative.

00:27:14.000 Article II is the executive.

00:27:17.000 It delineates Article III, the judicial.

00:27:19.000 It delineates what the responsibilities are and the way in which the system has worked and fits and starts with lots of problems.

00:27:26.000 And, you know, there's something.

00:27:29.000 Encouraging about seeing how divided Americans were back then, because we're always wringing our hands, oh, we're so divided.

00:27:36.000 Okay, human beings are divided.

00:27:38.000 And my feeling is that if you succumb to argument, right, which is what we do, the novelist Richard Powers said, the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do is argue, the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view.

00:27:54.000 The only thing that can do that?

00:28:01.000 Because a good story allows contradiction and undertow.

00:28:05.000 You can have a George Washington who is complex, flawed, rash, makes terrible tactical decisions on the battlefield, and yet, without him, historian after historian after historian says, without him, we don't have a country.

00:28:19.000 And you can take that and put that in the bank.

00:28:21.000 And at the same time, understand the dimensions of, we all have feet of clay.

00:28:26.000 We're all flawed in some way.

00:28:28.000 And to try to design a narrative that isn't, you know, filled with that kind of morning-and-again, sanitized, Madison Avenue kind of view of American history, nor is it that unforgiving revisionism that wants to throw out anybody who did something bad back then, you then permit—

00:28:52.000 Like, you can argue with other people and see that you get nowhere, but you also know if you're married or you have kids or you have friends or you're in business that you actually are more engaged in story and tolerance and understanding and listening.

00:29:08.000 And so part of our job as filmmakers, strangely enough, is not to impose ourselves on the material.

00:29:16.000 As I said before, we're umpires calling balls and strikes.

00:29:20.000 It's to listen to the material.

00:29:22.000 What is it telling us?

00:29:24.000 What is it saying about this circumstances of, say, the resistance in Boston in the early days leading up to the revolution?

00:29:32.000 To try to understand nuance.

00:29:34.000 Every school kid knows that when the 60 or 70 people, all white males, both rich and poor in Boston, dumped 40 tons of tea, 40 tons of tea, In the harbor, they were dressed crudely as Native Americans. 0.99

00:29:50.000 And if you ask a kid, why were they dressed that way?

00:29:53.000 Well, you know, just to disguise, to put the blame on somebody else.

00:29:57.000 It was to say, we're not part of the mother country anymore.

00:30:01.000 Really?

00:30:02.000 We're here.

00:30:03.000 We're aboriginal.

00:30:04.000 We are Americans.

00:30:05.000 We are distinct.

00:30:07.000 We've been having complaints about British citizenship.

00:30:10.000 We're arguing British law.

00:30:12.000 But all of a sudden, those laws have been broken out into natural laws.

00:30:16.000 We're telling you that we're not trying to blame it on anyone else.

00:30:19.000 Nobody would for a second have thought that the Native Americans would have dumped the tea. 0.83

00:30:23.000 They weren't burdened by the tea tax.

00:30:25.000 What they were doing was saying, and it's so ironic given the history of our relationship to the dispossession of Native lands.

00:30:34.000 They are saying we are aboriginal.

00:30:37.000 This is what the scar for Deloria says.

00:30:39.000 Oh, yeah.

00:30:40.000 Wow.

00:30:42.000 Right.

00:30:43.000 We're saying we're not of the mother country.

00:30:45.000 We're in essence kind of filing divorce papers by dressing as the people who originally inhabited this country dressed. 0.88

00:30:55.000 Nobody's fooled.

00:30:56.000 Nobody's trying to blame.

00:30:57.000 How did you figure that out?

00:30:58.000 It's listening to scholarship.

00:31:00.000 It's thinking, of course, that you're not going to have, no one in their right mind is going to say, oh, the Native Americans did it because they're protesting the T-Tex.

00:31:10.000 They're not paying the T-Tex, right?

00:31:12.000 Right.

00:31:13.000 So it's like, you then go and then you talk to a scholar, in this case Phil DeLore, who's been studying Native stuff, and he goes, just think about it.

00:31:21.000 You're dressed crudely as this.

00:31:23.000 You're making a statement.

00:31:25.000 to Britain, that we are no longer, we're severing ties.

00:31:29.000 Now this is well before, this is December of 1773.

00:31:34.000 The guns are going to fire in about 18 months at Lexington, a little bit less than 18 months at Lexington and Concord on April 19th.

00:31:42.000 But it is all of these little moments that lead up to boycott of British goods.

00:31:49.000 Women take a huge part of the role of the resistance. 0.97

00:31:52.000 You've got people like Samuel Adams who is A failure as a brewer and a tax collector.

00:31:58.000 It's sort of interesting.

00:31:59.000 You can't make this shit up.

00:32:01.000 His whole job is to keep his fellow colonists alive to their grievances.

00:32:06.000 When things calm down, the Brits sort of retreat.

00:32:08.000 He goes, oh, no, no, no.

00:32:09.000 It's just going to get worse.

00:32:10.000 It's going to get worse.

00:32:12.000 And so you meet these characters.

00:32:14.000 That sounded an awful lot like characters that occupy our large media space.

00:32:20.000 And it was occupying the large media space of the colonists from New Hampshire.

00:32:24.000 I live in a tiny village.

00:32:26.000 The Walpole Gazette was read all the way in Georgia.

00:32:29.000 People exchanged ideas and thought about things and were trying to figure out.

00:32:33.000 Even as late as the—even after— independency as they called it.

00:32:53.000 And then Thomas Paine comes in and writes this pamphlet, Common Sense.

00:32:58.000 And all of a sudden people are going, Oh, yeah.

00:33:01.000 And by June, there's a committee of the Second Continental Congress, and Franklin's in charge of it, and there's John Adams who's on the committee, and there's a 32-year-old lawyer from Virginia named Thomas Jefferson who's given the first crack at doing this thing.

00:33:15.000 And what does he write?

00:33:16.000 He writes, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.

00:33:21.000 And Franklin, who's the old man, the chairman, if you will, of this little committee, goes, uh-uh.

00:33:27.000 We hold these truths to be self-evident.

00:33:29.000 Joe, there is nothing in the world less self-evident than the idea that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

00:33:42.000 But as someone pointed out, it's the old lawyer's dodge.

00:33:45.000 You know, you just tell them that it's self-evident.

00:33:49.000 Not just sacred and undeniable, lovely phrasing on Jefferson's part, but if you say self-evident, then we're not arguing about this thing.

00:33:57.000 We're saying that everything that you're about to hear is without argument, which is a really in-your-face bold move.

00:34:05.000 And the intimacy, the human intimacy that gets communicated when you spend even a little amount of time trying to parse this, trying to get at the heart of the dynamics of dumping tea and dressed as Indians or writing these words, you know, that mankind are disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

00:34:30.000 We're not going to take it anymore.

00:34:31.000 When they first devised this system of government, what were they basing it on?

00:34:38.000 I know part of it was on the Greeks, but how did they make it to the point where even today we marvel at it? 0.73

00:34:47.000 250 years later, people go back and are like, look what they did.

00:34:50.000 This is extraordinary.

00:34:51.000 It's extraordinary.

00:34:52.000 So lots of factors.

00:34:54.000 First of all, it was true what I said.

00:34:55.000 They have experienced at a reserve and at sort of, as somebody said, salutary neglect.

00:35:03.000 People didn't pay attention to the colonists.

00:35:05.000 And they had learned suddenly they were more literate than their British compatriots.

00:35:11.000 They paid less taxes and they paid it to local stuff and they had land.

00:35:18.000 And most folks in England and Wales and Scotland and Ireland were living dependent lives.

00:35:23.000 They'd worked the land of somebody else for a thousand years.

00:35:25.000 So they've got this British constitutional monarchy, which is a really strong thing.

00:35:29.000 And King George is not a bad guy.

00:35:31.000 He really does believe that parliament has this role to play in the House of Lords and the House of Carmons.

00:35:35.000 They're kind of the checks and balances that we'd think of.

00:35:39.000 But they're also in the middle of the Enlightenment where they're beginning to say that there are certain rights that are natural.

00:35:49.000 That's the word that I think Jefferson would use.

00:35:52.000 That is to say, they are not bestowed by a monarch.

00:35:55.000 They're natural, that all men are created equal.

00:35:58.000 This is big stuff.

00:35:59.000 And this is distilling, in Jefferson's words in the Declaration, a century of Enlightenment thinking.

00:36:05.000 And the Enlightenment has been a kind of philosophical and human and kind of governmental dynamic that's coming out of the Renaissance, right?

00:36:14.000 We know what the Renaissance is in art.

00:36:16.000 Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, you know, all of this stuff, some music.

00:36:20.000 But what it's doing on a social scene and a philosophical scene is doing that.

00:36:25.000 And they're reaching back to antiquity, as you say, and they're pulling back some of the best ideas of self-discipline, of temperance, of virtue, all of these sorts of things.

00:36:35.000 But then because they've experienced all these years of this misogyny.

00:36:48.000 The Britain wins, with our help, what we call the French and Indian War, which was a global war called the Seven Years'War.

00:36:55.000 And they've got now the biggest, most far-flung empire on earth.

00:37:00.000 But they can't protect its own colonists who are trying to pour over the Appalachians to take Native American land. 0.71

00:37:06.000 And it's causing uproar.

00:37:11.000 1763.

00:37:12.000 You can't go over that.

00:37:13.000 And, oh, by the way, we're broke, so we need you to help us pay for this stuff.

00:37:18.000 But we don't have any representation there.

00:37:20.000 So Native lands, taxation, representation become this thing.

00:37:24.000 And it goes on for so long.

00:37:26.000 They've watched the ineffectiveness of their government while they're prosecuting the revolution and the ineffectiveness of the Articles of Confederation that emerges from fighting the war and is trying to figure out how to make it work that they go into that constitutional convention and they are determined to figure out every possible angle to forestall authoritarianism, to balance the relationships between the states, to have the checks and balances between the states.

00:37:54.000 Three forms of government, the judicial, the legislative and the executive.

00:37:59.000 It is...

00:38:02.000 And what was so incredible is that it fostered one of the greatest public debates ever in human history because they had emerged from this bloody, bloody, costly civil war.

00:38:14.000 Civil war means lots of deaths of civilians.

00:38:16.000 That didn't happen in our civil war except in Missouri and a little bit of Kansas.

00:38:21.000 You know, six people died at the Siege of Vicksburg, less than 20 at Atlanta, two in Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America.

00:38:30.000 But the American Revolution, lots of their battles in the South in which you might have one British officer leading Loyalist troops.

00:38:38.000 Every person on each side is an American and they're killing each other. 1.00

00:38:41.000 And they're doing it not just in set battles, but in little guerrilla actions, almost like the Viet Cong attacking patrols in South Vietnam.

00:38:49.000 I mean, it is really bad stuff.

00:38:52.000 And so they say, we're going to ratify this, but we want a Bill of Rights too.

00:38:57.000 We want to enshrine these things that we fought for.

00:39:01.000 And so you have no establishment of religion.

00:39:05.000 Freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to assemble and redress grievances, right to bear arms, free and fair trial, end of cruel and unusual punishment.

00:39:17.000 All these things become the set pieces of justice.

00:39:30.000 And I was at some event and somebody raised their hand and said, Is the Holocaust the most important event since the birth of Jesus Christ in world history?

00:39:40.000 And I just immediately said, no, it's the American Revolution.

00:39:42.000 It's the American Revolution.

00:39:44.000 I mean, this is a sea change in the course of human events.

00:39:49.000 And man, we don't know enough about it.

00:39:52.000 We don't know enough of the interiors of it that are complicated.

00:39:55.000 I have in my editing room a neon sign.

00:39:58.000 I've had it for a decade and a half in cursive, lowercase cursive.

00:40:01.000 It says, it's complicated.

00:40:03.000 You know, because there's not a filmmaker on earth that if, you know, if the scene's working, you don't touch it.

00:40:10.000 But we have spent the last 50 years touching those scenes, right?

00:40:15.000 You know what I mean?

00:40:16.000 Going in, maybe it's lesser, but it's truer.

00:40:18.000 And it's got more dynamism.

00:40:20.000 It's got more contours.

00:40:22.000 It feels like it's accurate to what actually happened, which is more complicated than our sort of simple binary discussions of what history is.

00:40:33.000 It's just – I think most people think it was the United States colonists against the British.

00:40:44.000 But the separatists and the loyalists battling it out together, I think most people are completely unaware of that.

00:40:51.000 We wrote a...

00:41:09.000 but a bloody struggle that involved more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American, that somehow came still to represent some of the highest aspirations of humankind.

00:41:22.000 So ours is like the fourth global war over the prize of North America.

00:41:27.000 And we're treating Native nations not as them, but as distinct entities.

00:41:34.000 The Shawnee, for example, in the middle of the 18th century, 1750, are as important an entity on the world trading stage with French or British or others as, say, the state of Virginia or the colony of Virginia is at that time.

00:41:50.000 And that they're different from the Delawares, their allies. 0.85

00:41:54.000 And they're different from the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, the six, five, and then it was six tribes, the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Tuscarora, the Oneida, and the Mohawk.

00:42:07.000 And I've just walked from western New York State all the way into New England, right, and up into Canada.

00:42:13.000 And they had formed a union of their own.

00:42:17.000 That had operated, a democracy that had operated for centuries, that had allowed the independence of each of these separate nations, states, and yet yielded to the larger thing when their interests were threatened.

00:42:32.000 So essentially with regard to foreign policy.

00:42:35.000 And Franklin looks at this and goes, 1754, he goes, Wow, this is a great idea.

00:42:41.000 We should be doing this.

00:42:42.000 He's been the postmaster.

00:42:43.000 He's the only person who's been to New Hampshire and he's been to Georgia and all the places in between.

00:42:49.000 He said, we should do this.

00:42:50.000 And he calls a conference in Albany.

00:42:53.000 And he's got a picture of a cut-up snake above the dire warning, join or die.

00:42:58.000 And they pass, seven of the 13 colonies attend, and they pass this thing called the Albany Plan of Union in 1754.

00:43:05.000 And then they go home to try to sell it.

00:43:08.000 And none of the states take it because no one wants to, none of the colonies take it because no one wants to give up their autonomy.

00:43:14.000 So the plan dies, but 20 years later, join or die is the war cry in the most consequential revolution in history.

00:43:22.000 Isn't that great?

00:43:23.000 It's amazing.

00:43:24.000 So you're taking the Native American riffing on that, and then as you're forming this, you're bringing in what you've had 0.70

00:43:45.000 All of these just utterly American but also been out there forever and we end up with what we have, which is this, you know, glorious, wonderful but also dysfunctional republic.

00:43:59.000 Yeah, it's terrible, but it's the best one out there.

00:44:01.000 It is the best one out there, yeah.

00:44:02.000 That's exactly right.

00:44:04.000 When you started this project, so you have this idea to start this project, what was your understanding of the Revolutionary War?

00:44:14.000 Versus what is it like when you really delve into the material and you start to formulate a plan for this documentary series?

00:44:22.000 Like, how much did you know about it when you first started?

00:44:25.000 I'm pretty well versed in American history, but nothing.

00:44:27.000 I mean, like, I've worked on two films where I made the mistake of thinking, ah, I know about this subject, baseball and Vietnam.

00:44:35.000 Because I grew up in the 60s, and I went through it.

00:44:39.000 I lived on a college campus.

00:44:40.000 I knew all the stuff, I thought.

00:44:43.000 I was at college as the war was winding down, and I loved baseball.

00:44:47.000 Every day of both those productions were daily humiliations of what I didn't know.

00:44:52.000 And so what happens is you come in with a humility that I wish to know, and rather than tell you what I know, the last time I checked, that's called homework, we would rather share with you our process of discovery.

00:45:06.000 Joe, you cannot believe what we just found out.

00:45:09.000 Can I use these mugs to tell you how Daniel Morgan won the Battle of Calpens against Bannister Tarleton in South Carolina, just below the North Carolina border?

00:45:21.000 And he trusts to his militia who are unreliable.

00:45:24.000 Please just fire twice the first line of militia.

00:45:27.000 And then you can retreat.

00:45:28.000 Then you can run.

00:45:28.000 But please promise me you're fired twice.

00:45:30.000 And the second line of militia, my more inexperienced, please just fire twice.

00:45:35.000 And then run behind the third line, which are these scraggly kids, teenagers, felons, ne 'er-do-wells, second and third sons without the chance of an inheritance, recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany, and they stop the British. 1.00

00:45:54.000 So Tarleton goes, oh, they're doing what all the militias do.

00:45:57.000 They're retreating, they're retreating, they're retreating.

00:45:58.000 And then the third line comes up and...

00:46:10.000 Tarleton gets away, but a huge part of Cornwallis' army has been diminished and they're uttering this war cry that they have adapted from the Cherokee, from Native American tribes, which is a yell that will reverberate in southern battlefields for decades.

00:46:26.000 Wow.

00:46:27.000 Wow is right.

00:46:30.000 I can take I mean There's Lexington and Concord, and then maybe somebody says Bunker Hill, which really breeds Hill, Bunker Hill too, and then maybe Trenton, he takes over, he surprises them on Christmas night, and then maybe some people know that Saratoga is the surrender of an entire British army that gives the French the confidence to come in on our side and give us the equivalent of $30 billion plus Navy and soldiers.

00:46:57.000 uh...

00:46:58.000 and the new yorktown but there are Like Germantown is a wonderful thing.

00:47:04.000 battle of brandywine.

00:47:06.000 What's the largest battle in the entire George Washington makes a terrible blunder.

00:47:14.000 A tactical blunder.

00:47:15.000 He leaves his left flank exposed and the British see it and they completely surround him.

00:47:20.000 And then a year later at Brandywine, he leaves his right flank exposed and they go around.

00:47:25.000 He's not the greatest tactician, but he is...

00:47:31.000 This leadership, this ability to understand subordinate talent, this reserve, this kind of confidence.

00:47:37.000 I mean, you cannot come away from this without extraordinary admiration for this person, without whom we don't have a country.

00:47:45.000 We just literally don't have a country.

00:47:47.000 Which is so crazy when you think of, like, pivotal figures in human history, this one person.

00:47:52.000 Were they not born?

00:47:53.000 Were they not in that position at that time?

00:47:56.000 Extraordinary circumstances, unusual character.

00:47:59.000 We have a historian, the only time, really, in the film that any of our talking heads break the fourth wall.

00:48:05.000 You know, we don't have first-person voices.

00:48:07.000 I mean, we don't have witnesses.

00:48:09.000 We have hundreds of first-person voices, but we have some scholars and writers who are on the thing.

00:48:14.000 And there's one Christopher Brown who just shakes his head and he goes, like, I'm not a big fan of the great man theory of history or interpretation of history, but – I don't see how the United States survives without Washington's leadership.

00:48:30.000 And it's this wonderful moment in which you go, right, we don't have to throw out the heroes in order to do that.

00:48:37.000 More often than not, we sort of elevated these people to a supernatural position that they don't really necessarily deserve.

00:48:44.000 He deserves it, and yet he's also deeply flawed, feats of clay, as I said.

00:48:50.000 And that's, to me, what makes a good story.

00:48:53.000 How is it that he can be tactically so wrong in two extraordinary places?

00:48:58.000 He's also very rash, Joe.

00:49:00.000 He runs out at Kipps Bay, which is halfway up Manhattan.

00:49:03.000 After he's lost the Battle of Long Island, he's now abandoning New York.

00:49:07.000 Or he's taking a good number of his men up to Harlem.

00:49:10.000 And at Kips Bay, which is sort of midtown on the East River, there's a battle and we're just being rolled up.

00:49:17.000 And he comes charging onto the battlefield and his aides are going crazy and they're grabbing the reins of his horse.

00:49:22.000 He's going to be killed.

00:49:23.000 If he's killed, that's it.

00:49:24.000 Right?

00:49:25.000 And then later on at the Battle of Princeton, he does the same thing, and one aide puts his hands over his face thinking, I cannot watch my commander-in-chief be killed.

00:49:34.000 And in the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse in New Jersey, he rides out and just is very present, turns what is a retreat of continental soldiers and militiamen into steading their lines and basically holding their own against the prime, the elite of the British Army.

00:49:54.000 Who does that?

00:49:56.000 How did we do—and from the very beginning, everybody knew you needed a Virginian.

00:50:01.000 The New Englanders, where the war started—the war is a symphony in three movements, right?

00:50:07.000 New England is the first movement, central states, and then the southern states.

00:50:12.000 And there is a sense early on when, after Lexington and Concord, where we've driven the British back into Boston, and they've got— Ways to get in, but they can't get out, besides by ship, that we need A real army. 0.72

00:50:27.000 And the army is formed, and it is very obvious from the very start that there can be no other person than George Washington.

00:50:34.000 The New Englanders want a Virginian. 0.80

00:50:36.000 It's the most populous.

00:50:37.000 It's the richest state.

00:50:39.000 And they know this person has been around since.

00:50:43.000 He's a 22-year-old militia officer who probably fires the first shot in the French and Indian War.

00:50:49.000 That starts.

00:50:51.000 The global conflict that everyone else on Earth calls the Seven Years' War that will set the stage for the American Revolution.

00:50:57.000 And then he acts bravely in many other situations, and he is denied a commission in the British Army, and he's like, F you, you know?

00:51:07.000 And then he's a speculator in Native American land that he doesn't own.

00:51:12.000 He wants to sell to new colonists.

00:51:14.000 And when the British put the line of demarcation in 1763 that separates, says you can't go over because we can't afford to protect you, he's now pissed again.

00:51:23.000 And then he's still this voice of reason that arrives in Philadelphia.

00:51:29.000 And people look to him for leadership.

00:51:31.000 He's very good at picking out, you know, that guy has got great, he's got great executive function and great ability to pick subordinates without fear of being overshadowed.

00:51:42.000 One of his great generals, Nathaniel Green, another great general, Benedict Arnold.

00:51:47.000 And we introduced Benedict Arnold in the opening seconds of our first, our second episode.

00:51:51.000 And it isn't until you're a third of the way through the sixth and last episode that you go, uh-oh.

00:51:58.000 But he's a hero at Quebec City.

00:52:00.000 He's a hero at the Battle of Saratoga.

00:52:03.000 He's been painted out of most of the paintings because he became Benedict Arnold.

00:52:07.000 But isn't it nice to know that he's that great a general before he becomes Benedict Arnold?

00:52:12.000 That term, when I was a child, when I was in school, a Benedict Arnold was a traitor.

00:52:17.000 A traitor.

00:52:18.000 I think that's gone now.

00:52:20.000 I think if I brought that up to my children, I said, do you know what a Benedict Arnold is?

00:52:23.000 Oh God, they say it was a mixture of It's like an Arnold Palmer.

00:52:28.000 It's a mixture of iced tea and lemonade.

00:52:30.000 You know what?

00:52:30.000 That's so terrifying to me.

00:52:32.000 Weird, right?

00:52:33.000 No, it's what happens when you atrophy this interest in American history, or you think that it can be so simplified that you don't have to do anything.

00:52:42.000 That's my job.

00:52:43.000 I mean, I love it, and I love the fact that we can bring back these things for people, and they can experience, and there isn't a person in the country.

00:52:52.000 That's listening to me now or that we're going, you know, 35 different cities all around the country talking about this.

00:52:59.000 We made it for everybody.

00:53:00.000 This is not made for the 8th grader taking American history, the 11th grader making this.

00:53:05.000 It's for you.

00:53:06.000 It's for anybody who cares about where their country came from and is willing to say, Probably don't know the full dimensions of this.

00:53:17.000 It's probably impossible to teach it in the way that you can in a documentary.

00:53:21.000 I think it's the most effective form of expressing these things.

00:53:25.000 I mean, obviously there's some things that can be documented in books, numbers, dates, history, that would be kind of cumbersome to certain documentaries because it would interfere with the flow of the entertainment aspect of it.

00:53:38.000 But in terms of absorption...

00:53:52.000 That's exactly right.

00:53:56.000 It's so interesting because we understand, as you're referencing the power of a book, still the greatest mechanical invention there is, that it can go into some depths, a documentary do.

00:54:07.000 But a documentary can hold lots of different opposing points of view, not make them arguments, but allow people to have different points of view and sort of collect, almost like spokes in the wheel.

00:54:17.000 You want to get to the hub.

00:54:18.000 That's whatever it is that you're after.

00:54:21.000 But the wheel is much stronger by all those spokes.

00:54:23.000 And unfortunately, too often, In history or in teaching, we subscribe to one particular theory of history, right?

00:54:32.000 That it's got to be this or it's got to be that.

00:54:35.000 And what we've done is we've found the documentary and the storytelling aspects of it hugely, hugely valuable in communicating the complexity of the subject without putting your thumb on the scale and making a political point.

00:54:49.000 We're just, you know, look, I will be totally honest.

00:54:53.000 History doesn't repeat itself.

00:54:55.000 No event has ever happened twice.

00:54:57.000 But Mark Twain is supposed to have said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

00:55:02.000 If he did say that, he's exactly right, because human nature doesn't change.

00:55:06.000 And so you watch these events, and when we finish working on it, I told you, we began this when Barack Obama had a year and a half to go in his presidency, or a year and a month to go in his presidency.

00:55:18.000 It's a totally different world, and we know that it rhymes, but we never once have concentrated in saying, oh, we're going to put our thumb on the scale here.

00:55:26.000 We want everybody to watch.

00:55:28.000 We have no axe to grind.

00:55:30.000 We're just, as I'm saying, calling balls and strikes.

00:55:33.000 And when I mean that, it would be like saying, let me tell you about Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson.

00:55:38.000 They struck out a lot.

00:55:40.000 Thanks so much.

00:55:43.000 I mean, and I'm true.

00:55:44.000 I have not told you anything that is not true, correct?

00:55:46.000 Right, sure.

00:55:48.000 A hell of a lot of home runs.

00:55:50.000 And so calling balls and strikes is saying that what happens is the way we teach history is the way ESPN does sports highlights.

00:55:58.000 It's always the home run.

00:56:01.000 It's never the guy turned the double play or he doubled some guy off or there was some other thing.

00:56:08.000 It's always the home run.

00:56:10.000 And so nobody takes a strike in these highlights.

00:56:13.000 And what we're trying to say is, And even Babe Ruth fails seven times out of ten.

00:56:29.000 He's a 300 hitter.

00:56:30.000 A little bit more than 300 hitter.

00:56:32.000 That's the great beauty of it.

00:56:34.000 And so I think that we don't ever now think that he is a failure.

00:56:38.000 We understand that the dynamics of life, the dynamics of this particular game, mean that the people who fail seven times out of ten and do it significantly, I mean, and that's the beauty of these storytellings.

00:56:55.000 I'm not taking anything away from George Washington by making it complex.

00:56:59.000 We're making him human.

00:57:01.000 He's not a statue out in the park collecting birdshed.

00:57:05.000 He's a real, breathing human being.

00:57:07.000 He's one of the richest people in America.

00:57:08.000 He marries one of the richest people in America, a widow.

00:57:14.000 And like he's away.

00:57:15.000 He makes one visit home, I think, to Monticello during the whole...

00:57:22.000 He's dedicated to this thing.

00:57:23.000 I mean, he doesn't have to do this, right?

00:57:26.000 He's committed to this project of us.

00:57:30.000 And that's the ultimate point I want to make about not just this film or Vietnam or all the things we've been talking about, is that I've had the great privilege of making films about the U.S. for nearly 50 years, Joe.

00:57:44.000 But I've also made films about us.

00:57:47.000 That is to say, All of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and even the controversy of the U.S. And that is a privileged space to be operating in, to be having been given the permission to do this for nearly 50 years.

00:58:10.000 Is just great.

00:58:11.000 I think I have the best job in the country.

00:58:13.000 And I'm always happy to meet somebody who's willing to contradict me.

00:58:16.000 But it's only because you have a chance to work hard at telling the story.

00:58:21.000 I mean, we lock the picture back in January.

00:58:24.000 That means you're not going to do any more work on it.

00:58:26.000 We've unlocked it hundreds of times just to make it better.

00:58:29.000 Some historian said, I'm not sure if you can be that categorical.

00:58:33.000 And then we put in a perhaps.

00:58:36.000 Or you find out that image isn't as as stunning as we thought it could be.

00:58:36.000 Right.

00:58:40.000 Could we swap that out?

00:58:42.000 Oh, yeah, that works better than before, even after we were done done.

00:58:45.000 And I like the ability that by the time we're letting it go, it's like your kids are still licking the smudge off their face and, you know, making sure that their their hair is tied up in a nice bow.

00:58:57.000 And, you know, have a good day, sweetie.

00:58:58.000 You know.

00:58:59.000 Well, I think that gratitude that you have towards your work and this dedication to truth, because One of the problems with problematic historical figures is we tend to use modern ideological perspectives when we describe these people.

00:59:20.000 And, you know, we try to show that we have a disdain for the way they live their lives and the choices they made in perspective with how we do today.

00:59:32.000 You know, and the problem with that is it comes off political or ideological or.

00:59:38.000 And you lose the real understanding of the complexities of history.

00:59:43.000 And of these human beings that lived in a very different time.

00:59:43.000 That's right.

00:59:47.000 1776, even though it's only three people ago, it was a very, you know, people lived to be 100, three people ago.

00:59:53.000 So it's a very different time.

00:59:55.000 It's a very different time.

00:59:56.000 and you make a really, really good point.

00:59:58.000 When you take the judgments of what we know now, But let me just tell you, they all knew slavery was wrong.

01:00:16.000 They all knew it was wrong.

01:00:17.000 And they still did it.

01:00:18.000 And there's a historian in it, Annette Gordon-Reed, who just says, you know, slavery's foundational to Thomas Jefferson.

01:00:24.000 And he knew all his life it was wrong and said it and wrote about it and tried to put in something to end the slave trade and end the Declaration of Independence, which no one would have.

01:00:33.000 And she goes, well, how could somebody do something they knew was wrong?

01:00:38.000 She goes, well, that's a question for all of us.

01:00:40.000 And so Jefferson's neighbor freed all his slaves and urged him to do it, and he didn't.

01:00:47.000 And his cousin freed all his slaves.

01:00:49.000 So there's already that.

01:00:51.000 The question is, if you...

01:00:53.000 you are just taking the judgments of today to cancel somebody, you've just missed the possibility of getting to know George Washington or getting to know Thomas Jefferson.

01:01:02.000 And if you only do people who are perfect, you're either lying about them or you're...

01:01:12.000 You've got very few characters, you know?

01:01:15.000 Because I don't know about you.

01:01:16.000 I'm not.

01:01:17.000 I presume you're not.

01:01:19.000 I don't think you know anybody who's perfect.

01:01:22.000 I don't know anybody who's perfect.

01:01:24.000 And so then it's like history becomes, honey, how was your day?

01:01:30.000 It doesn't begin.

01:01:31.000 I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb, you know?

01:01:38.000 Unless you get T-boned, in case that's exactly the way to do it. 0.98

01:01:41.000 You edit human experience and you tolerate the vast experiences that human beings are so complex.

01:01:50.000 And it's the interest.

01:01:52.000 It was very interesting.

01:01:53.000 We did an update of our baseball series called The Tenth Inning.

01:01:56.000 And being from New England and being a Red Sox fan, the whole thing was just a disguise to be able to do the Red Sox comeback in 2004.

01:02:03.000 But we were dealing with the great Atlanta team in the 90s and the great Joe Torre led Yankees and then Sosa and McGuire and then Bonds and then steroids and whatever.

01:02:14.000 At the end of it, we're really trying to come to something about steroids and try to figure out how to deal with it.

01:02:21.000 And Thomas Boswell, now retired as a great sports writer for the Washington Post, said, I think it's Keats, writing about William Shakespeare, who's a pretty good playwright, said, That Shakespeare had negative capability.

01:02:37.000 That means he could hold in tension the positive and negative aspects of a character for as long as you possibly could without making that quick and facile and easy judgment that we make all the time in our lives.

01:02:50.000 When the guy cuts us off, we give him the finger, you know, we yell, F you, whatever that is, we make judgments about it.

01:02:56.000 And Shakespeare had that ability.

01:02:57.000 Even with the darkest characters, you know, the Iegos and the Richard III, you know, people who are deep and dark, he had negative capability.

01:03:08.000 He said that's what we need to grow in order to understand the steroid era, in order to understand how to deal with all of that.

01:03:16.000 And I think that in a way all of us have to kind of grow that negative capability, that ability to distinguish that nobody's perfect.

01:03:26.000 And that if you superimpose this kind of abstract sets of judgment, nobody passes the test.

01:03:32.000 No one passes that sort of performative purity test to I think it's a real problem with our current culture where I think Because we could all agree that society is far more just today than it was in 1776.

01:03:54.000 and we know we're on this path, but it's a very bumbling, stumbling, Certainly.

01:04:01.000 Fail, figure out why you failed, kind of succeed, but then also Yeah, it's consistent.

01:04:07.000 And I think in this process of this, unfortunately...

01:04:16.000 That's correct.

01:04:17.000 And this is a lot of people that want to tear down statues and throw paint on paintings and do things where they're trying to show that I am better than the people who came before me.

01:04:27.000 And the problem with doing that in regards to history is we don't learn anything if you're not truthful.

01:04:33.000 If we don't give this sort of like a really objective analysis of all the factors that were taking place with these extraordinary human beings who were experiencing this thing that was wholly unique on this new continent and with this new idea of forming this experiment in self-government that hadn't existed before.

01:04:52.000 And that you're going to – you have to say it.

01:04:57.000 It's really the only way.

01:04:59.000 I think is the only way, and it takes time.

01:05:01.000 And I am very...

01:05:10.000 Where I have the time to do it.

01:05:12.000 It's sort of like an NIH grant.

01:05:14.000 Like, here, we'd like you to explore the possible cure to this disease.

01:05:17.000 Can you have it next Thursday?

01:05:19.000 Well, no, you can have it next Thursday.

01:05:21.000 That's what Hollywood says.

01:05:22.000 I need it out because the other Marvel thing is coming out at the same time.

01:05:26.000 What you need is we want to set you up with a certain set of circumstances that are going to permit you to have the best possibility of doing this.

01:05:35.000 And so we've always hit our marks.

01:05:37.000 We've always come...

01:05:44.000 So no one else was responsible for the fact that we decided Vietnam is not going to be seven episodes.

01:05:49.000 It's going to be eight.

01:05:50.000 And oh, you know what?

01:05:51.000 it's going to be 10 and that's 18 hours and that's, you know, as well as the range of Americans.

01:06:12.000 And so one of my favorite scenes is a North Vietnamese soldier and a Viet Cong soldier and an American all saying exactly the same thing about the same moment in a battle, early battle, before there were...

01:06:26.000 This was an advisor, an American advisor.

01:06:28.000 But they're all talking about a helicopter flying over this one hedge.

01:06:32.000 And the Viet Cong guy is behind the hedge. 0.99

01:06:35.000 The South Vietnamese officer is, you know, next to the American guy.

01:06:40.000 And they all have an experience of war that is exactly the same.

01:06:45.000 And I love that.

01:06:47.000 I love that.

01:06:50.000 What was your first piece?

01:06:52.000 Brooklyn Bridge.

01:06:54.000 What year was this?

01:06:55.000 So it came out, it was first broadcast in 88. And people were, you know, telling me, oh, this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge.

01:07:11.000 No.

01:07:12.000 And I used to keep these two big, thick three-wing binders on my desk, all filled with rejections for that one film.

01:07:18.000 I mean, literally hundreds of rejections.

01:07:20.000 But I had read David McCullough's The Great Bridge, the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and I went out to my partners.

01:07:27.000 We just founded our company called Florentine Films.

01:07:30.000 We were starving.

01:07:31.000 We'd, like, maybe get a day's work or two days' work a month as cinematographers and sound men and grips, and we were paying the rent, and that was that.

01:07:39.000 I said, we're going to do this, and I'll raise all the money.

01:07:42.000 And I did, and I moved up to New Hampshire so I could live on nothing in 79 and 80, and both those years I made less than $2,500.

01:07:52.000 Wow.

01:07:53.000 And chopped all the wood for my stove, split it, carried it, kept the stoves going.

01:07:59.000 You wake up in the middle of the night at 4 a.m. in February, and you go, I just heard the heater kick on.

01:08:06.000 I've got to go down and feed the stove.

01:08:09.000 But it came out, I got nominated for an Academy Award.

01:08:11.000 And that was the sign to me that I needed to...

01:08:17.000 I'd hit a fork in the road, and like Yogi Berra said, you take it, was to not go back to New York, to not go back to L.A., but to say, I'm going to be...

01:08:29.000 We're going to have to raise grants to do this stuff.

01:08:32.000 I'm not looking for investors.

01:08:33.000 We're looking for underwriting so that we are liberated from the suits that would come in and give the notes and say, oh, you need to be less sexy or more sexy or longer or shorter or more violent or less violent.

01:08:44.000 I can sit here and tell you with respect.

01:09:05.000 And they're, the way the country has responded to them, like the Civil War series, still 35 years old, it's still the highest rated program in the history of public television.

01:09:13.000 That's incredible.

01:09:15.000 How did you have that clarity of vision as a young man to recognize that working in isolation in a small town was the best option?

01:09:24.000 Because I would imagine if you had aspirations to being a filmmaker when you were younger, the call of Hollywood, just the call of being a part of an enormous organization, like being respected by your peers in this enormous – that had to be at least somewhat attractive.

01:09:44.000 But how did you have the clarity to realize that that was not the correct path for you?

01:09:48.000 I can't take credit for it.

01:09:50.000 You know, I went to Hampshire College.

01:09:51.000 My teachers were social documentary still photographers.

01:09:54.000 I had a mentor named Jerome Liebling.

01:09:59.000 And he was so firmly rooted in a kind of, you know, another word.

01:10:04.000 We've been talking about virtue.

01:10:05.000 Another word is honor or honorable.

01:10:08.000 That is not engaged and people don't really use it in ordinary conversation.

01:10:13.000 He just instilled in all of us, I believe, all of his students, a sense of honor.

01:10:18.000 So there was this responsibility to follow it through, to work really hard.

01:10:22.000 I mean, I don't know anybody that works harder than us.

01:10:25.000 You know, we really work seven days a week.

01:10:27.000 We love it.

01:10:28.000 I put my head on the pillow.

01:10:29.000 I want to know that my girls are okay, my daughters, and I want to know that I've made a film better.

01:10:34.000 You know, in some way, shape or form.

01:10:35.000 Seven days a week.

01:10:36.000 Seven days a week.

01:10:37.000 And it's not that you can't take a day off and you can't do something, but you're always thinking about this stuff and you want to make them better.

01:10:43.000 And it's very funny.

01:10:44.000 We're out on the road and we're showing the clips and, you know, we've seen these clips a gazillion times.

01:10:48.000 And I'm talking to Sarah Botstein, the co-director, and we just...

01:10:55.000 We have to change that shot.

01:10:56.000 And so suddenly we're working with an editor who happens to be in Paris this semester and the editor that's in New York and we're changing things and I love the fact that we did that.

01:11:07.000 I'm actually embarrassed that I'm telling you about it because I feel like in some ways I'm advertising the fact that that's what we do.

01:11:14.000 I'm just trying to say that somewhere along the line I've made the opposite of decision of what was – In fact, Robert Penn Warren, the poet and novelist, told me that he looked at me once and he just said, careerism is death.

01:11:34.000 And I've never used the word career.

01:11:36.000 I've always said my professional life.

01:11:38.000 Because careerism suggests that you're following some sort of rut, and that's not what I wanted to do.

01:11:48.000 A path?

01:11:49.000 A carved path?

01:11:50.000 A carved path that's already well-worn.

01:11:52.000 I mean, look, if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, you've got to follow some well-worn paths, just by virtue of that.

01:12:01.000 Everybody that I know that's working in documentary, that has been working at it for a long time and makes their living from it, have come from completely unique paths.

01:12:10.000 It's been their own way.

01:12:12.000 And I like the fact that I made this, no, I'm not going to go back to New York.

01:12:15.000 No, why would I move to L.A.?

01:12:17.000 I'm going to be here in this little town in New Hampshire where any number of Oscar nominations and Grammys and Emmys means zero.

01:12:28.000 To the people that I live with.

01:12:30.000 It's like, did you shovel the walk of the lady next door who's not doing so well?

01:12:36.000 Did you do this?

01:12:38.000 Are you a good neighbor?

01:12:39.000 That's the stuff that matters, and it's a good place to raise kids as well.

01:12:43.000 And then the splendid isolation.

01:12:46.000 There's a great tradition, as you know in American history, of the way in which wildness, nature, becomes...

01:13:04.000 This is the American catechism of being out in nature, and it manifests itself in different people who are aware of the power of nature.

01:13:13.000 Nature reminds you of your insignificance, and that is inspiriting.

01:13:19.000 This is paradoxical, right?

01:13:20.000 That's inspiriting.

01:13:21.000 Even though you're feeling insignificant, It's inspiriting, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard, right?

01:13:32.000 Right.

01:13:33.000 So anybody who says, oh, I'm this, it's actually diminished.

01:13:36.000 The person who is humble is humiliated by their atomic insignificance, as one person said about Mount Denali in Alaska in the 1910s, a reporter.

01:13:48.000 Is actually inspirited by that.

01:13:50.000 And I wish to be inspirited.

01:13:52.000 Because I think that's the only condition in which we're then able to make the kinds of decisions.

01:13:58.000 The creative decisions, the personnel decisions, the thoughtfulness, or to have that regard for not necessarily following the well-worn path.

01:14:09.000 It's just amazing.

01:14:10.000 Does that make sense?

01:14:11.000 It does make sense.

01:14:11.000 It does.

01:14:12.000 It resonates.

01:14:13.000 It resonates completely.

01:14:16.000 The natural art of nature.

01:14:18.000 The true majesty of experiencing the vastness of the mountains and of the woods.

01:14:28.000 It humbles you in a way that nothing else does, and it grounds you in a way of recognizing—I don't want to say your insignificance, your relative insignificance, but it puts— This whole thing.

01:14:46.000 It's massive.

01:14:47.000 You're so fortunate to experience it.

01:14:49.000 Oh, you know, I feel so grateful, Joe.

01:14:52.000 You know, my best friend once said to me, when we were much, much younger, we'd been friends for more than 50 years, he said, There's only one center of the universe and you're not it.

01:15:06.000 It was a great gift.

01:15:08.000 It was a really great gift.

01:15:09.000 And I don't know what I was doing or whether I was even doing anything that was inviting it, but he just wanted me to remember that there's no center of the universe.

01:15:19.000 Well, you also get to see the stars, too.

01:15:21.000 Yeah, out there.

01:15:22.000 And that's another thing.

01:15:23.000 I was thinking, you know, there is that beauty Emily Dickinson called sunsets and sunrises the far theatricals of day.

01:15:31.000 It's like a perfect description of it.

01:15:33.000 But when you go out and it's ten below zero in my town, and I'm up a mile and a half out of town, which has five or six streetlights, so there's no glare, and you see the Milky Way, and you just, you are just, what can you do but just be humbled by the vastness of the universe and how relatively insignificant our lives are?

01:16:00.000 But that in itself compels you, drives you to try to do something that would have not significance but just would add something.

01:16:11.000 So I live in a state.

01:16:14.000 Politics comes through all the time.

01:16:15.000 Everybody's got a lawn sign, right?

01:16:17.000 Left, right, center.

01:16:19.000 My lawn sign says love multiplies.

01:16:23.000 It's the only functioning theory of the entire universe.

01:16:30.000 What it's all about, right?

01:16:31.000 It doesn't matter what religion, what philosophy you might subscribe to or not.

01:16:35.000 Thomas Jefferson says in our film, if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no god at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

01:16:44.000 Right?

01:16:44.000 Like, we are so religiously intolerant today.

01:16:47.000 Oh, well, I know that if I had been born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, I'd still be a born-again Christian.

01:16:53.000 No, you wouldn't.

01:16:53.000 You'd be a Shiite.

01:16:55.000 I mean, a Sunni.

01:16:56.000 And you'd be at war with the Shiites across the border in Iran. 0.51

01:17:01.000 You know, I'm sorry to break the news to you.

01:17:04.000 And that all of them, all the great religions, have the same thing in mind.

01:17:09.000 It's also that problem that people have with this rigid perspective that they would be so arrogant as to believe that they would be unique in that environment.

01:17:17.000 Right.

01:17:18.000 That, no, I would get it.

01:17:19.000 I would understand it.

01:17:20.000 No, you wouldn't.

01:17:21.000 That's crazy.

01:17:22.000 And who's to say, I mean, what was essential about the founders, particularly Jefferson, is that they were deists.

01:17:29.000 And while they all had their own particular, mostly Protestant denominations that they were, had come to.

01:17:48.000 Who was disinterested in the affairs of man and did not distinguish between faiths.

01:17:53.000 So that, you know, you see the baseball player who hits the home run and crosses home base and looks up and thanks.

01:17:58.000 They never do that when they hit into a game-ending double play in the ninth inning, right?

01:18:05.000 They don't say, oh, thank you, God, for giving me that.

01:18:08.000 I've only seen that once.

01:18:09.000 Pedro Marcina had given up a fairly significant lead, not the entire lead, to the Yankees in one of those great playoffs.

01:18:16.000 And as he walked off, But this idea that all of our affairs are governed in that way is not what many of the founders believed in, that it is our obligation to lead that virtuous life.

01:18:34.000 We need to keep bringing you back there.

01:18:36.000 Moves you closer up the stairway to heaven, up the ray of creation to God.

01:18:42.000 And that it's your movement, not that supreme being's movement towards you.

01:18:48.000 Oh, let's make sure that's a ground root double. 0.99

01:18:52.000 Oh, that's not happening.

01:18:54.000 It is the ongoing chaos.

01:18:58.000 of the sequence of events and human nature, and we've got to be aware of the sort of incredible current, the force of the current of that human nature, but also the way in which my individuality, my will, the discipline, the virtue that I might be able to have could in some ways be singular and do something significant.

01:19:23.000 Not because of that, but in order to be closer to that higher thing.

01:19:28.000 And that's where they're all talking about it, that they want the founders' higher emotions.

01:19:33.000 As I said, not sentimentality, not nostalgia.

01:19:36.000 Those are the enemies of anything.

01:19:38.000 But the higher emotions.

01:19:39.000 Sometimes we say that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

01:19:44.000 What is the difference between that?

01:19:46.000 If you've added up all the sum of the parts and it comes here, what's that?

01:19:51.000 And what it means is that As much as to build a table, to build a bridge or a highway, one and one always has to equal two.

01:19:59.000 The things that matter in our lives are where one and one equals three, where we are able to see something that's bigger, that something is produced by the collision of two musical notes, by two images in a documentary, by the conversation between two human beings, whatever in which something is possible.

01:20:22.000 Interested in whatever energy that creates and with whom?

01:20:27.000 I mean, you just don't know that that person at the convenience store that you just kind of like don't even look and don't even think about has a life as important as yours.

01:20:37.000 You're driving on the highway.

01:20:38.000 We're coming down from Dallas this morning on 35, you know, thousands, thousands of cars going in the direction.

01:20:44.000 The person in that car is looking and their life is as full as what I'm seeing out of my eyes.

01:20:49.000 And I know sitting here that you are seeing something totally different than what I'm seeing.

01:20:55.000 And that life is as full.

01:20:57.000 And I think good history, good friendship, good storytelling, good conversation all have...

01:21:14.000 And in our country, we've actually got lots of blueprints for it.

01:21:18.000 We've got lots of plans.

01:21:19.000 They're out there.

01:21:20.000 It's in the Declaration.

01:21:21.000 It's in the Constitution.

01:21:22.000 It's in the Bill of Rights.

01:21:23.000 It's here.

01:21:24.000 It's in that speech.

01:21:25.000 It's in the Lincoln speech, you know?

01:21:27.000 We're going to live forever or die by suicide, all right?

01:21:30.000 Or then he's got two speeches, Lincoln does.

01:21:34.000 One's a message to Congress in 1962, what we'd call the State of the Union address, and he says, fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.

01:21:43.000 The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. 1.00

01:21:48.000 And then a few seconds later, he goes, the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

01:21:54.000 As our case is new, let us think anew.

01:21:57.000 He's both those things, right?

01:21:59.000 We cannot escape history and guess what?

01:22:01.000 The dogmas of the past.

01:22:02.000 He's in his second inaugural, one of the most famous addresses of all time.

01:22:06.000 He's got Old Testament righteousness.

01:22:08.000 You know, if we have to spend another 500 years drawing with the sword, the blood that is drawn with the lash, meaning fighting to end slavery, we'll do it.

01:22:20.000 And then he stops, very Old Testament, he stops on a dime and turns to this new...

01:22:46.000 whatever drawn by the lash.

01:22:48.000 Drawn by the sword, we will do.

01:22:50.000 It's just an amazing ability to understand us.

01:22:53.000 And he took, he's the one who reached back over the Constitution and plucked Jefferson back into significance.

01:22:59.000 And so when he gives the Gettysburg Address, four score and 87 years after the signing of the Declaration, he's creating the 2.0 operating system that we have now.

01:23:15.000 We really do mean it, that all men are created equal.

01:23:18.000 And that now, because of the sacrifice, there's not a proper word in that entire address.

01:23:23.000 You know, the guy before him, Edward Everett, noted orator, spoke for more.

01:23:26.000 than two hours and he spoke for two minutes.

01:23:30.000 And Everett wrote him and he said, "Mr.

01:23:31.000 President, I should flatter myself if I thought I came to the heart of the matter in two hours as you did in two minutes." It is.

01:23:38.000 There's so many wows in the work that we have.

01:23:42.000 And people say, well, what did you learn differently?

01:23:44.000 And you go, oh my God, are you kidding?

01:23:46.000 Every day is this revelation, this sort of tsunami that breaks over you of new information.

01:23:52.000 And then it's just, what is it that I can save?

01:23:55.000 You'd assume, you'd presume completely understandably that making a documentary film on the American Revolution is additive, right?

01:24:04.000 You're building this thing.

01:24:06.000 It's not.

01:24:07.000 I live in New Hampshire, we make maple syrup.

01:24:10.000 It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.

01:24:17.000 It's all reductive.

01:24:18.000 We have 12 hours in this six-part series, and we've got more than 500 hours of material filming reenactors for years, some of them dressed in French uniforms, some of them dressed in militia, some of them in British, some of them in, you know, Continental, some of them German, Hessian, some of them Native, all of that stuff.

01:24:41.000 And then we're using it to help.

01:24:42.000 The building blocks of doing it.

01:24:44.000 At the same time we've collected more than 12,000 paintings and drawings.

01:24:49.000 We've taken maps.

01:24:51.000 We've got more maps in this than in all the other films we've made combined.

01:24:54.000 Sometimes we're just taking an old archival map and leaving it alone.

01:24:57.000 Sometimes we're taking an old archival map and just putting red and blue lines showing the movement of British and continental soldiers.

01:25:04.000 Sometimes we're taking maps and sort of making our own hybrid map that gives us a little bit more control.

01:25:11.000 All of these things were just practicing.

01:25:13.000 I mean, I looked at something earlier today, which was just...

01:25:28.000 And the last one is Machias, which is up near the Canadian border, and we weren't seeing it.

01:25:34.000 So we were trying to figure out how to light up Marblehead and Cape Ann and Gloucester and Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Saco, Maine was then the Maine Department of Massachusetts, and then Falmouth, which is now Portland, Maine, and Machias.

01:25:48.000 And so we'll spend months trying to just get that one thing right.

01:25:53.000 No one, if we hadn't done it, no one would care, except for us.

01:25:57.000 Right.

01:25:58.000 Except for us, right?

01:26:00.000 Yeah.

01:26:00.000 It's that little thing, you know, I have friends who are woodworkers, and they'd never hide a mistake.

01:26:07.000 Right?

01:26:08.000 Right.

01:26:08.000 They'd never hide a mistake.

01:26:10.000 It always, there's a kind of craftsmanship to all of that.

01:26:14.000 Out in the woods by yourself, just how you relate to nature, a kind of purity, a kind of intention that you have in relationship to it.

01:26:23.000 I know you know all of that.

01:26:25.000 Yeah.

01:26:26.000 I think one of the things that's fascinating is that the isolation in which you work and the environment in which you live, which does highlight the majesty of nature and the humility of it all,

01:26:46.000 In the expression of your work, you're giving this vision to people that a lot of them are living in this world that creates uniquely anxious and disconnected people.

01:26:58.000 Because we're living in these urban environments, without nature, because we're of light pollution, we see no stars.

01:27:04.000 I think it's one of the reasons why we're one of the most confused societies ever.

01:27:14.000 Documentary film work is clearly art, especially art in providing an understanding of the true events of history.

01:27:25.000 It gives people a sense of what it really means to be a human being in a different way.

01:27:31.000 It illuminates these aspects of humanity in a different way that allows people just this kind of glimpse into like what are we made out of?

01:27:38.000 Like what what is it about us that makes us who we are and why do we do what we do?

01:27:49.000 I think that's exactly right.

01:27:50.000 This disconnection that we feel has come from the fact that we have become transactional beings.

01:27:57.000 Nothing is transformational.

01:28:01.000 We yearn nonetheless for that kind of transformation that takes place in our lives.

01:28:07.000 And as Americans, those of us fortunate enough to be Americans, with all the problems that are attendant to that statement, we have this glorious past that has the ability to take us out of that stupor, that take us out of that rut, to be able to say, And with the exception of a film on Leonardo, the 40 or so films that I've done, some of them are hour long, some of them are 20 hours long, are all about us, right?

01:28:36.000 All about us.

01:28:37.000 And the thing that I was describing about the U.S. and us is that I realize there's only us.

01:28:43.000 There's no them.

01:28:45.000 All of our world is about them, of creating a them, the artificiality that despots or autocrats always have to make of that.

01:28:56.000 There's got to be an enemy out there in order to do that.

01:28:59.000 There's only us.

01:29:00.000 And the important obligation that we have is to tell our stories to everybody.

01:29:10.000 That is to say, I do not wish to preach to the congregation, whatever my congregation is.

01:29:16.000 I do not wish to preach to the choir.

01:29:19.000 I wish to say...

01:29:25.000 I mean, I'm interested in its voices, I realize.

01:29:28.000 I'm interested in its complicated voices, the true, honest, complicated voices of American history that's unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit, and particularly the remarkable role this republic.

01:29:48.000 Plays in the positive progress of mankind.

01:29:51.000 That's my play.

01:29:54.000 That's my sandbox.

01:29:55.000 Wow.

01:29:56.000 That's a great sandbox.

01:29:57.000 It's a great sandbox.

01:29:58.000 You know, it's really, it's great.

01:30:01.000 And, you know, there's implied discipline in that.

01:30:04.000 work with people for decades and decades, and we work really hard, and we work And because, as I said, it's PBS with one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out, you can make decisions that don't have to do whether it's going to enrich your bank account.

01:30:23.000 I mean, there are so many ways to measure richness that don't have to do with the bottom line.

01:30:29.000 And, you know, one of the things that Americans have done, we've incubated lots of great ideas because of those two oceans and those two relatively benign names.

01:30:38.000 And de Tocqueville noticed this when he came through in the 1830s.

01:30:41.000 We're so into money.

01:30:43.000 And the almighty dollar, he called it.

01:30:45.000 That was the religion of America.

01:30:47.000 And that has its cost.

01:30:49.000 It obviously has some nice attributes.

01:30:53.000 It has a spiritual cost.

01:30:55.000 It has a spiritual cost that is profound.

01:30:59.000 You know, the Old Testament again said it is...

01:31:09.000 And that's tough for Americans to hear.

01:31:14.000 It is so tough for Americans to hear, particularly since we have so many preachers who are certain that it's okay to be both, you know?

01:31:23.000 And at some point you have to realize, you know...

01:31:31.000 There's richness in children.

01:31:33.000 There's richness in art and associations in knowledge.

01:31:39.000 Your curiosity is so palpable.

01:31:43.000 You know, I was listening to you speaking to my friend Elliot West, who's written about the Buffalo and Native peoples and the sort of prehistory of the American West.

01:31:53.000 And you can just hear there is this preternatural sort of interest in curiosity and like, how does it work?

01:32:01.000 all given a really short period of time and the bad news is Maybe it's also the good news.

01:32:10.000 None of us are getting out of here alive.

01:32:13.000 None of us.

01:32:14.000 And then it comes back to us.

01:32:16.000 What are we going to do?

01:32:20.000 And it doesn't matter.

01:32:21.000 You don't have to make documentary films.

01:32:22.000 You don't have to have radio shows.

01:32:25.000 You can raise a child.

01:32:27.000 You can tend a garden.

01:32:28.000 You can build a bridge.

01:32:29.000 All of these things are legitimate.

01:32:31.000 It just requires your full attention and willingness.

01:32:37.000 To engage in that.

01:32:38.000 Whatever it might be.

01:32:40.000 Whatever it is.

01:32:40.000 I've got a friend in my little town.

01:32:42.000 I've known him for 40 years.

01:32:44.000 I think we probably have opposite political views.

01:32:48.000 I don't know.

01:32:49.000 But I adore this man.

01:32:51.000 He built stone walls.

01:32:52.000 He's like, if you come to my house and you see the walls that he's built, it's like, you know.

01:33:00.000 You don't need to go to Chartres or Notre Dame.

01:33:02.000 You just say, whoa, Dougie did this really great job here.

01:33:06.000 And you just love him for that dedication to saying, I can just do this in this moment to the best of my ability.

01:33:16.000 People always say, do you ever go back to your earlier films and want to change it?

01:33:19.000 And I go, no.

01:33:20.000 Right?

01:33:21.000 It's like a photo album where you go back and you're wearing a paisley shirt with a big collar and you go, who the hell thought that was a good look?

01:33:29.000 But you don't tear that picture out of the album and say, that's who I was.

01:33:34.000 That's the time.

01:33:35.000 That's the time.

01:33:36.000 That's who I was.

01:33:37.000 What an extraordinary hypocrisy to have a rich preacher.

01:33:41.000 I was thinking that while you were saying that, you know, based upon that biblical quote, what a bizarre...

01:33:56.000 Jesus Christ did not intend to start a religion.

01:34:01.000 Other people who liked what he said started a religion long after he was crucified.

01:34:08.000 So religions themselves, it's so interesting that all of them that have at the root of their philosophy the exact same thing.

01:34:18.000 Exact same thing.

01:34:19.000 All of them.

01:34:19.000 You know, about do unto others.

01:34:21.000 It's essentially about love.

01:34:23.000 And yet, religions seem to be sometimes the cause of most of the pain in there. 1.00

01:34:30.000 It means that somewhere along the line, from the original message to the expression, stuff gets corrupted.

01:34:37.000 And you can convince yourself that having, as a guru in Oregon...

01:34:44.000 Or a giant arena that you have your congregation meet you at every Sunday.

01:34:50.000 It's just such a uniquely American thing, the megachurch pastor.

01:34:54.000 And uniquely sort of adapted to this bizarre society.

01:35:01.000 Where the bottom line is numbers.

01:35:04.000 It's ones and zeros on a ledger.

01:35:06.000 It's important.

01:35:07.000 You know, let's not downplay it.

01:35:08.000 Oh, yeah.

01:35:09.000 It's better than not having any money.

01:35:10.000 It's better than not having any money.

01:35:12.000 But it shouldn't be a job.

01:35:13.000 Shelby Foote, who was our talking head in the Civil War, said that money, the only thing it could buy you is privacy and service.

01:35:19.000 Meaning, you know, you can get somebody to mow your lawn if you need that to happen.

01:35:23.000 And you can be a little bit private.

01:35:25.000 But if you think it's going to be doing a lot, lot more than that, you've already begun to atrophy those.

01:35:32.000 That awareness of being alive, that I think everybody wants to feel that sense of vivifying oneness.

01:35:41.000 It's also a foolish pursuit to try to be better than people by just having more numbers.

01:35:47.000 It's a really crazy thing that people do.

01:35:50.000 Do you know the poor in the United States?

01:35:52.000 the studies have shown give away well more of their disposable income.

01:35:57.000 You know, if you've got a hundred bucks and your friend You give me a hundred bucks.

01:36:04.000 If you got a thousand bucks and somebody goes up and says, "Hey, I want a hundred bucks," you go, "Well, then I will not have a thousand.

01:36:09.000 I will have only 900." And this works all the way up to a hundred billion.

01:36:15.000 I know that is.

01:36:15.000 You're right.

01:36:17.000 It's so interesting that somehow this is what we think is, or even the folks who are Dedicated to spending, prolonging their lives with these other things.

01:36:31.000 It really is the quality of life is the much more important thing.

01:36:37.000 How generous you are.

01:36:39.000 I always tell my girls when they're in trouble, I say the three things.

01:36:43.000 And one is, this won't last.

01:36:46.000 Get help from others.

01:36:48.000 And be kind to yourself.

01:36:52.000 There's no yes-buts to those.

01:36:54.000 I mean, which is where when you're a teenager or anxious, there's always, or an adult, there's always a kind of a yes-but.

01:37:02.000 But, you know, just things will change.

01:37:05.000 It always does.

01:37:06.000 There's always change.

01:37:06.000 Maybe it gets worse.

01:37:07.000 Maybe it gets better.

01:37:08.000 Probably gets better.

01:37:10.000 And it's no harm in reaching out to other people.

01:37:12.000 And the hardest thing of all is to be kind to yourself.

01:37:15.000 Yes, I say the same things and I also say That's right.

01:37:23.000 Find the thing that you, whatever it is, that you're uniquely drawn to, and let that change over time.

01:37:29.000 If you don't love that anymore and there's a new thing that you love, pursue that.

01:37:33.000 But find the thing that really calls to you.

01:37:37.000 This is what Robert Penn Warren meant when he said to me, careerism is death.

01:37:41.000 He just was saying, you've got to find that thing.

01:37:44.000 And people, when I talk to students, they want to know, You know, what the secret is.

01:37:49.000 And I go, there's only two secrets.

01:37:51.000 One is to know yourself.

01:37:52.000 And that may be understanding that I thought I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I don't have anything to say.

01:37:57.000 And it's perfectly legitimate to do something else, to change that thing if you do it.

01:38:02.000 And the other is to persevere, because there's, in every single situation, many more people wanting to be in front of a mic every day than there are the possibility.

01:38:15.000 Of being in front of the mic every day.

01:38:17.000 And so you have to work at it really hard.

01:38:20.000 You can't make assumptions about it.

01:38:22.000 Sometimes you have to do, you know, I sort of felt like moving to New Hampshire was in The Godfather going to the mattresses.

01:38:28.000 You know, it's like, okay, I got handed a job.

01:38:30.000 I needed a job.

01:38:31.000 And I was just so worried, Joe, that I was going to put the film that I had shot for this first film on the Brooklyn Bridge on top of my refrigerator, and I would just wake up and I'd be 45 years old.

01:38:40.000 And I would have, you know, not...

01:38:45.000 And so I got offered a job which was like, you know, being offered $800,000 a year today.

01:38:50.000 And I said, no.

01:38:52.000 And I moved to New Hampshire where I could live for nothing and finished the film.

01:38:55.000 How did you choose New Hampshire?

01:38:57.000 I had a lot of friends.

01:38:58.000 I had gone to school in western Massachusetts and had a lot of friends, sort of hippies and others, that sort of after, sort of alternative stuff, that after they had not, some had gone to New York and pursued sort of traditional professional lives, but others had become book salesmen or opened a natural food store or were a weaver or whatever it might be.

01:39:17.000 And so a lot of them gravitated in southern Vermont and southern New Hampshire.

01:39:22.000 A little kind of nice.

01:39:24.000 And so I ended up going to this town and literally, I mean, I walked in, I rented the house for the first few years and bought it after my daughters were born.

01:39:36.000 And I've been in the same bedroom for 46 years.

01:39:40.000 And I don't feel cut off or starved.

01:39:43.000 I know.

01:39:44.000 Every part of the country.

01:39:45.000 My films have covered every part of the country and part of the shoe leather that we have to do with PBS, you know, because they don't have the big budgets to smather the American Revolution coming November 16th over every bus and subway and billboard.

01:40:00.000 As you go out, you talk to people.

01:40:02.000 And that puts you in touch.

01:40:04.000 And at the same time, you have this place to retreat and restore.

01:40:10.000 And every morning, I take a three-mile walk with my dog into what looks like 18th century America.

01:40:18.000 Wow.

01:40:20.000 Talk about rich.

01:40:22.000 That's pretty rich, right?

01:40:23.000 You can't buy that.

01:40:23.000 Right.

01:40:24.000 You cannot buy that.

01:40:25.000 That's really so important.

01:40:25.000 Yeah.

01:40:28.000 Because it's the greatest perspective enhancer ever.

01:40:31.000 It is.

01:40:32.000 I always say that about going to the mountains.

01:40:34.000 There's there's nothing different There's nothing You have to go to the actual source of nature, the true source of nature, to really appreciate that.

01:40:52.000 I think it's like a vitamin.

01:40:55.000 I think just like you get vitamin D from the sun, I think you get something from actual pure nature.

01:41:03.000 I agree.

01:41:03.000 Capital N. Yeah.

01:41:04.000 I agree completely.

01:41:05.000 Real nature.

01:41:08.000 Manifesticity basically says, see that river?

01:41:13.000 Let's dam it.

01:41:14.000 See that forest?

01:41:15.000 Let's calculate the board feet.

01:41:17.000 See that canyon?

01:41:18.000 What minerals can be extracted?

01:41:20.000 That's okay.

01:41:20.000 And we've done that with 98% of the continental United States.

01:41:25.000 But we also, in the midst of all of that, set aside these places that were so spectacularly beautiful, like Yosemite or Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon or Zion or Bryce or Canyonance or the Everglades or Acadia or Smokies, and just said...

01:41:46.000 That's one of the most extraordinary things about this country is what Teddy Roosevelt did with national lands.

01:41:51.000 That's why I said it's the declaration applied to the land.

01:41:55.000 No other countries.

01:41:55.000 We invented national parks.

01:41:57.000 Every other country has.

01:41:59.000 Every other country has followed suit because we were saying land does not belong to a monarch or to the nobleman or to the very rich.

01:42:09.000 Just reverse engineer that for a second and say, okay, we don't have national parks.

01:42:13.000 So Yosemite and Zion are gated communities.

01:42:17.000 You can't, you maybe have one little observational place along the Grand Canyon to look.

01:42:23.000 The Everglades was long ago drained in his golf courses and strip malls and apartments.

01:42:28.000 It's one of the most diverse ecological environments on Earth, as flat as it is.

01:42:33.000 It's just spectacularly diverse.

01:42:34.000 It's kind of a mess now.

01:42:38.000 Yellowstone would be a down-on-its-luck heyday in the 1950s amusement place called Geyser World.

01:42:47.000 But it's not that.

01:42:49.000 You and I, and everyone within the sound of my voice, own the most beautiful spots on the continent, and I would argue in many cases the most beautiful spots on the earth.

01:43:02.000 is pretty great.

01:43:04.000 And it gives us...

01:43:21.000 You know, the Colorado River.

01:43:23.000 Yeah, you stand, and you know, the thing I like about the parks is that it isn't just what you see, it's who you see it with.

01:43:30.000 Like, you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

01:43:32.000 And the Colorado River exposes Precambrian Vishnu Schist that is 1.7 billion years old. 0.54

01:43:40.000 That's almost half the age of the planet itself.

01:43:44.000 But the Grand Canyon works if you also are holding somebody's hand, right?

01:43:51.000 It's like who you see it with becomes central to the experience of it.

01:43:59.000 Muir called it a grand geological library, all of the strata.

01:44:02.000 It was like a library of telling stories of what was going on.

01:44:07.000 It's why I love American sports.

01:44:09.000 I really love them.

01:44:10.000 But I focus on baseball because in football, the description is, oh, you know, Joe Montana threw to Jerry Rice with a few seconds left and we scored a touchdown and we won.

01:44:20.000 Or Michael Jordan hit the three-pointer at the buzzer, tongue-wagging, and we won.

01:44:25.000 But the baseball story always begins, It's all gauged with who you see it with as well as what the thing is.

01:44:46.000 Wow.

01:44:47.000 Yeah.

01:44:49.000 Baseball is a unique American pastime because it's boring.

01:44:55.000 You know, it's exciting.

01:44:56.000 It's not for those of us who love it.

01:45:00.000 And it was always the national pastime.

01:45:02.000 It's had competition.

01:45:03.000 I think one of the reasons why we sort of relegate it to this thing is that most of the other forms of entertainment, particularly in sports, are a little bit more fast-moving.

01:45:13.000 George Will said to me, though, who's a big football fan, he says, football has two of the worst features of American life.

01:45:20.000 Violence.

01:45:21.000 Punctuated by frequent committee meetings.

01:45:27.000 What a great quote!

01:45:30.000 But baseball has this thing.

01:45:32.000 It's the only sport in which the defense has the ball.

01:45:36.000 The person scores, not the ball.

01:45:39.000 And where do you go?

01:45:40.000 Home.

01:45:42.000 And statistics matter.

01:45:45.000 Maybe you know how many yards Tom Brady has, the greatest of all time.

01:45:49.000 Probably you don't.

01:45:50.000 But you know how many home runs Babe Ruth hit and how many home runs Hank Aaron hit.

01:45:54.000 And you know these are things that matter.

01:45:56.000 And if you look up the 1919 World Series, it says that the Cincinnati Red Stockings won the 1919 World Series.

01:46:05.000 There's no asterisk.

01:46:06.000 But then those numbers require you to tell a story about the Chicago White Sox, known to us forever as the Black Sox, who took money from Arnold Rothstein and other gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series and give it to the much lesser team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings.

01:46:26.000 It is great that the statistics matter.

01:46:29.000 A 300 hitter means the same thing to my dad as it does to my grandfather and my great-great-grandfather and my great-great-great-great-grandfather.

01:46:37.000 But you still have to tell stories.

01:46:40.000 Mmm.

01:46:40.000 Yeah, it's...

01:46:47.000 I mean, it's something that is a part of their life that they tune into to give their life more meaning.

01:46:57.000 That's the something that I never understood about team sports when I was younger because I never liked them because I was always in I always felt like I Like, I don't want to be a loser because somebody else fucked up.

01:47:12.000 I want it to be entirely dependent upon me.

01:47:14.000 Then, after a while, I started realizing, like, no, there's a richness to being a fan.

01:47:21.000 There's a quality of life that comes, there's an experience that comes from everyone being united in this thing, like, wanting the team to win.

01:47:32.000 That doesn't exist.

01:47:33.000 In individual sports.

01:47:35.000 It doesn't.

01:47:35.000 I agree with you completely.

01:47:37.000 There's something wonderful.

01:47:38.000 I was just talking to my best friend about this the other day.

01:47:40.000 That my daughter was at school and she was the co-captain, my oldest daughter, of her softball game.

01:47:49.000 And 25, 30 years ago we went to some misty Saturday morning.

01:47:54.000 And it was like they were winning 3-2 in the bottom of whatever the last inning was.

01:47:59.000 And the other team had the bases loaded and no outs.

01:48:02.000 And we got three force outs.

01:48:04.000 And it was like the girls just immediately burst into tears.

01:48:08.000 But it was just an amazing thing.

01:48:10.000 You're driving in a suburban or a city area and there's a ball game going on.

01:48:17.000 And you're kind of slow.

01:48:18.000 You lift your foot off the accelerator as the pitch.

01:48:22.000 As it goes, there's something suspended as the pitch is heading from the pitcher to the bat or something.

01:48:27.000 Everything stops and possibility is suddenly there in front of you.

01:48:31.000 That's why I love the game so much.

01:48:33.000 It's just a game that if you try to introduce it today, it would be very difficult to sell.

01:48:38.000 You know, it's so funny.

01:48:39.000 I get to more often than not and haven't been in a while because I'm such a dull boy and working so much to Fenway Park.

01:48:47.000 And it's always just filled with people, and it's always got lots of kids, and they're always there because they want to be.

01:48:52.000 My screensaver of my phone are my two daughters at a Red Sox, my two youngest daughters at a Red Sox game, you know, 10 or 15 years ago.

01:49:02.000 I haven't been taking it off the thing.

01:49:04.000 You know, this one's now a sophomore at Georgetown University, and this one is going into ninth grade.

01:49:09.000 But they were like eight and 13 then.

01:49:15.000 Wow.

01:49:16.000 Look at the expressions on their face.

01:49:19.000 It's just pure joy.

01:49:20.000 Yeah.

01:49:22.000 I mean, it really is uniquely American.

01:49:25.000 And it's accompanied nearly every decade of our national narrative.

01:49:30.000 Even into the 17th century, there are bits of pieces in which there seems to be some stick-and-ball game.

01:49:37.000 And then before the Civil War, in the decades before the Civil War, they begin to combine rounders, sort of a British schoolyard game with cricket.

01:49:46.000 And do something that's a lot better than both, called baseball.

01:49:52.000 And you know what?

01:49:53.000 There was a guy in 1858 named Pete O 'Brien who said, you know, they don't play baseball the way they used to when I was a kid.

01:50:01.000 This is 1858.

01:50:02.000 I don't mean they don't play it with the same rules or the same...

01:50:06.000 of it, they just lost the spirit of it.

01:50:08.000 So we've always been saying, something's wrong, something's gone out of the game, it's not quite right, and there's always...

01:50:17.000 And just, it continues on.

01:50:19.000 The steroid era to me was really fascinating because one of the things about baseball being so uniquely American is that the idea of someone cheating at this uniquely American thing was particularly offensive.

01:50:35.000 Whereas at the same time...

01:50:42.000 Oh, yeah.

01:50:42.000 Bill Romanowski was, you know, there was bottom of the fold of the New York Times.

01:50:46.000 But as soon as the baseball player was implicated, it was the top of the fold.

01:50:50.000 And that told you, even though the NFL had long overtaken baseball as kind of the national pastime, or football had done that.

01:50:58.000 And I think it has to do with the sense that it, I mean, it does allow stealing of bases, but you're absolutely right.

01:51:05.000 Well, that's a strategy.

01:51:07.000 There is that wonderful thing about baseball that it seems kind of pure.

01:51:13.000 It seems American.

01:51:14.000 And to cheat at that is offensive.

01:51:16.000 And as cheat as that, and that's why, you know, I used to say, out of some, I don't know, I used to say, well, they should let Pete Rose in to the Hall of Fame after he dies.

01:51:29.000 Now he's died.

01:51:30.000 And I'm still, I sort of feel like, who am I to say that?

01:51:36.000 Certainly the Hall of Fame isn't like a list of angels.

01:51:40.000 But I also still am not sure he should go in.

01:51:44.000 Or Shoeless Joe Jackson, as much as you want to resurrect the great story of the most promising of the Chicago White Stockings in 1919 that threw the World Series, the Black Stockings.

01:51:57.000 I don't know.

01:51:58.000 I mean, it's very complicated.

01:51:59.000 Will Roger Clemens?

01:52:02.000 Will some of these other people that we know were juicing?

01:52:04.000 Barry Bonds?

01:52:05.000 You know, we, he was, Barry Bonds, doing interviews is clearly...

01:52:15.000 And you could even say to the moment he looks at McGuire and says that he knows he's got tons more talent than them and they're getting all the attention and he says, I can do this.

01:52:27.000 He's still got – he's right then.

01:52:30.000 He's a first ballot Hall of Famer and would arguably – if he just stopped right then and just quit and said whatever.

01:52:36.000 But decisions are made and then it becomes back to – Shakespeare, negative capability.

01:52:42.000 And can you hold in tension the great prodigious gifts and, in this case, the sort of shortcut of the way in which these gifts were corrupted?

01:52:55.000 Well, it was so uniquely American that there was congressional hearings on steroid use in a sport.

01:53:00.000 Yeah.

01:53:01.000 Which was very strange.

01:53:02.000 And again, while simultaneously, it's ubiquitously used in football.

01:53:08.000 And you also live in a society in which you take a pill to deal with erections.

01:53:14.000 You take a pill for this.

01:53:15.000 You go to sleep.

01:53:16.000 You take a pill to sleep, to wake up.

01:53:18.000 We're all drugged.

01:53:21.000 The person made in our 10th inning, the update to the series on baseball that came out in 94, 10th inning came out in 2010.

01:53:29.000 They said, look, what if you're scraping middle infield or second baseman, shortstop, and everybody's taking steroids in the clubhouse.

01:53:39.000 Everybody knows about it.

01:53:39.000 Baseball has no rules against it right now.

01:53:46.000 million dollar contract that in which your family is set for life you're from the Dominican Republic you're from you know wherever you're from and maybe ending up in AAA and that's it yeah and then you you realize and and you're being told by every signal of society take something to be better yeah this then complicates the entire dynamic of our Of our judgments, of the facility of saying, oh, I'm really absolutist.

01:54:14.000 I know this.

01:54:15.000 And I realize the more I go, the more disappointed I am in the arrogance of my certainty before.

01:54:25.000 I think one of the big things is we think that the opposite of faith is doubt.

01:54:31.000 Doubt is central to faith.

01:54:34.000 The opposite of faith is certainty, which destroys the mystery of the unknown.

01:54:40.000 And so I'm always taken aback, sometimes more often in retrospect than in the moment when I could possibly do something about it, that I have been more certain about something.

01:54:52.000 And less trying to see it from another person's point of view or from the other side of the coin or whatever it might be.

01:55:00.000 or maybe there's many different facets to these things.

01:55:04.000 As we were talking about with regard to the revolution and slavery and how we How much did that previous moment already understand the morality of it?

01:55:16.000 Which they did.

01:55:19.000 What's the right answer?

01:55:20.000 And I think staying open to the questions I know in filmmaking has made us better.

01:55:27.000 And it's not a royal.

01:55:28.000 I don't do this alone.

01:55:29.000 There are a lot of people that I work with.

01:55:32.000 It's a small little nucleus of people, but they deserve credits to writers and co-directors and co-producers.

01:55:32.000 They're handmaids.

01:55:40.000 And people who are digging in the archives, cinematographer I've worked with for 52 years.

01:55:44.000 I think this is so important for people to hear because I think this very unique and noble perspective that you have is why your work resonates so much with people.

01:55:56.000 I agree.

01:55:56.000 I think what it is, is that whatever, I don't want to say sacrifices, but whatever discipline has been imposed on the process of whatever it is we do.

01:56:11.000 And they know that they can see something.

01:56:16.000 They may not like all the aspects of it because it is complicated.

01:56:20.000 and you do see not just the intimacy of the us, but you also see the complexity and the contradiction and the controversy along with the majesty of the U.S. It's all there.

01:56:31.000 But I do think that they know that...

01:56:40.000 That's the biggest thing we have.

01:56:42.000 Like, you know this.

01:56:43.000 You're asking an extraordinary amount of people right this second.

01:56:46.000 You're asking them to devote their attention.

01:56:49.000 I mean, the longest episode I've ever done is like two hours and 20 minutes, two hours and 30 minutes.

01:56:56.000 That required every skill I had to be able to make that over 10 years, an episode, the fourth episode of World War II, a film called The War.

01:57:06.000 But mostly it's two hours and it is a supreme compliment if somebody will give me their attention for that amount of time and then maybe for ten episodes or nine episodes or in the case of the American Revolution just six for a total of 12 hours.

01:57:20.000 That is a huge, huge responsibility of trying to keep – trying to earn someone's attention.

01:57:28.000 And that's our job is really just making sure that that person who does not know, who's ignorant.

01:57:34.000 But curious, which is, of course, perfectly fine.

01:57:37.000 If you're willfully ignorant, I really can't help you.

01:57:41.000 But if you're curious and ignorant, then we want to make sure that if you've given us your attention for this two hours of the first episode of the revolution and then stay for all 12 hours, that we want to make sure that we've earned it in the simplest way, that the equation is not at all applicable.

01:58:07.000 Like if I look up or down, already I've dislocated the possibility.

01:58:12.000 And the only communication is among equals.

01:58:15.000 And that's, you treat your audience like they know something.

01:58:20.000 Not that they're familiar with the subject, but they're not stupid, and they don't have to be added some sort of passion.

01:58:30.000 It can be complex.

01:58:31.000 Because if it is, they'll recognize either themselves or they'll recognize somebody that they know that's very close to them.

01:58:38.000 And that's the essence of good story, is it's human beings telling stories about other human beings and what they do that has a resonance, that accrues like the layers of a pearl imperceptibly.

01:58:50.000 You can't identify, but you know.

01:58:53.000 And of course a pearl is based on an irritant, a grain of sand that's bothering the hell out of that.

01:58:58.000 You know, oyster, right?

01:59:00.000 You've created this gem out of the friction and irritation and resistance and perseverance of having to do something.

01:59:10.000 I think one of the most uniquely American stories that you've told is the story of Jack Johnson.

01:59:15.000 Yeah.

01:59:16.000 It's, you know, it's interesting because we, I mean, it's obvious because we were founded on the ideal that all men are created equal, and the guy who wrote that sentence owned hundreds of human beings and didn't see fit in his lifetime to free them.

01:59:33.000 But you also have individuality.

01:59:36.000 And what is, with Jack Johnson, like a good boxing match, you have a black man who also just wants to be a man, wants to be fully himself.

01:59:46.000 Now, the society doesn't really want him to do that, and they're going to put lots of constraints, and he's going to overcome those constraints, and then when he does, they're going to find another way to box him in.

01:59:56.000 But James Earl Jones was really great on this.

01:59:58.000 He was almost saying, do not just be constantly distracted by the question of race.

02:00:03.000 This is somebody who wanted to be a man, his own person, and that a great deal of Jack Johnson and all the travails and all the things that he went through Great skill.

02:00:18.000 I mean, Muhammad Ali, we made a film on Ali too, which I'm really, really proud of, but he's clearly studied Jack Johnson.

02:00:27.000 He knew they would watch those films.

02:00:29.000 Rope-a-dope is Jack Johnson.

02:00:31.000 A lot of that making, wearing your opponent out is Jack Johnson from, you know, an earlier century.

02:00:37.000 And this is a time, I mean, his heyday.

02:00:39.000 Is between 1905 and 1915 when more African Americans were lynched for looking sideways at somebody.

02:00:46.000 And he's openly defeating every great white hope that came at him. 0.78

02:00:52.000 And dating white women. 0.99

02:00:53.000 Dating white women and marrying white women.

02:00:55.000 And so, you know, we call the film, you know, mostly we like to have kind of boring things like the American Revolution, Brooklyn Bridge, the Vietnam War.

02:01:07.000 But we call that film Unforgivable Blackness, The Rise and Fall.

02:01:16.000 Du Bois at the turn of the 20th century said, boxing is in great disfavor.

02:01:23.000 Jack Johnson seems to be the cause.

02:01:25.000 But Jack Dunson did nothing that no other boxer or sportsman or even senator has done.

02:01:32.000 Why then has it come?

02:01:34.000 As it come to him, it all comes down then to his unforgivable blackness. 1.00

02:01:39.000 That by taking the crown, by defeating all comers, it was an unacceptable situation.

02:01:45.000 When in those days, being the heavyweight champion, there was a sense of this was the supreme masculinity of the world.

02:01:53.000 Everyone went out of their way, from John Sullivan to others, to avoid fighting a black man. 1.00

02:01:59.000 And finally, somebody paid Tommy Burns, guaranteed $30,000, to fight Jack Johnson on Boxing Day.

02:02:06.000 What was that worth today?

02:02:09.000 Oh, my God.

02:02:11.000 Millions and millions of dollars.

02:02:12.000 Jack only got $5,000, but he's happy to do it.

02:02:15.000 He's been going after Tommy Burns.

02:02:17.000 No relation.

02:02:18.000 And Tommy Burns was a pseudonym.

02:02:20.000 I can't remember his name.

02:02:21.000 I'm Canadian.

02:02:21.000 Anyway, in Australia, they fight on the day after Christmas, 1908, and Jack Johnson just told him he probably could have taken care of him in the first inning, and he just keeps it going.

02:02:32.000 They finally cut the newsreels off.

02:02:34.000 They actually stop the fight because they do not want the public to see this.

02:02:39.000 And when, after having digested, I think is a good word, all of the white hopes that were thrown at him in the intervening, Intervening a year and a half, they finally convinced Jim Jeffries, the guy who'd retired undefeated, the previous champion before Tommy Burns, to come out, and in Reno on July 4th, 1910, the fight of the century, Jack Johnson defeated at...

02:03:06.000 no one thought it would happen Jim Jeffries and there were riots all across the country white on black riots the Los Angeles Times wrote their lead editorial was a word to the black man do not lift your chest up too high do not put your face up to the sun you are still the same lowly person you were yesterday just because Jack Johnson and I mean the idea that

02:03:36.000 That, you know, it goes back to this issue.

02:03:39.000 Washington knew it was wrong.

02:03:42.000 Jefferson knew it was wrong.

02:03:44.000 They made so much money.

02:03:45.000 It was really hard to do this.

02:03:47.000 I mean, Jefferson himself said slavery is like holding a wolf by the ears.

02:03:54.000 You don't like it, but you don't dare let it go.

02:03:58.000 And so what happens is that somebody like an Abraham Lincoln is born anti-slavery.

02:04:05.000 But they're also a developing abolitionist movement.

02:04:09.000 So now they want to abolish slavery.

02:04:11.000 They're not just against it and understand that it's immoral.

02:04:15.000 Nowhere does God say that black people are inferior to white people.

02:04:21.000 But what happens is, even though most of the slavers know that it's wrong, but there's so many good prophets to make, what happens when the abolitionists come along?

02:04:32.000 That they begin to make arguments that slavery is actually good and that black people are, in fact, inferior. 0.79

02:04:39.000 And so one of the reasons why the Civil War happens is this sense of threat to their economic power, which are the 4 million people in the 9 million populated South that are owned by other human beings.

02:04:52.000 And it's an extraordinary dynamic.

02:04:54.000 We face it.

02:04:56.000 The reverberations.

02:04:57.000 And Jack Johnson, I think, is one of those magnificent cases where he defies your ability to put it in a neat cubbyhole.

02:05:06.000 It defies your ability to make it binary.

02:05:08.000 We live in this media culture, right?

02:05:10.000 We live in a computer world.

02:05:11.000 Everything's a one or a zero.

02:05:12.000 Everything's a red state or a blue state.

02:05:14.000 Everything's young or old, gay or sweet.

02:05:15.000 It's not that way.

02:05:17.000 And so to tell a complex story of history, particularly like of Jack Johnson, is just to You know, it really is exhilarating.

02:05:30.000 I probably said that word too many times, but it's exhilarating.

02:05:34.000 I think he's also one of the rare cultural figures where a sports figure defines a time, much like Muhammad Ali defined the Vietnam era.

02:05:46.000 Like, Muhammad Ali, when I was a child, my parents were hippies.

02:05:51.000 And they never cared about sports at all except when Muhammad Ali lost to Leon Spinks and then had the rematch.

02:05:58.000 We all watched.

02:06:00.000 I remember this, being a child, thinking how strange it was that my parents were so invested in Muhammad Ali.

02:06:08.000 But what they were invested in is this man that risked his entire career and livelihood.

02:06:14.000 They took his livelihood for three years for protesting the Vietnam War and refusing to go fight.

02:06:19.000 And it was a big thing because he was a cultural hero.

02:06:22.000 That's right.

02:06:23.000 It wasn't just that he was the best boxer ever.

02:06:26.000 He was also this guy that said, I'm not doing this.

02:06:29.000 The Vietnamese people didn't do anything to me.

02:06:32.000 I'm not participating in this.

02:06:34.000 I'm not going to go kill anybody.

02:06:35.000 I'm not doing this.

02:06:36.000 And we were all like, yes!

02:06:38.000 And then they took his livelihood away and he became a martyr.

02:06:41.000 He became a hero.

02:06:42.000 And, you know, spoke out against the war.

02:06:44.000 And then it was three solid years in his prime.

02:06:49.000 Yeah, it's an amazing story.

02:06:51.000 And we told it just a few years ago in a four-part, eight-hour series.

02:06:55.000 I agree with you 100%.

02:06:58.000 I'm a little bit older.

02:07:00.000 I remember when Sonny Liston and then Cassius Clay fought in Miami.

02:07:07.000 And he was such a new commodity.

02:07:10.000 He was rocking the boat with this verbal onslaught that we were, for a nanosecond, Sorry that Sonny Liston lost because he was the person that we were familiar with.

02:07:25.000 We knew this kind of black man.

02:07:28.000 And we did not know this other scarier verbal person.

02:07:32.000 And almost instantly, and my dad was an anthropologist.

02:07:35.000 I mean, this was boxing.

02:07:36.000 He was not doing this thing.

02:07:37.000 But from then on, we became just loyal.

02:07:40.000 We watched all the stuff through the 60s and then saw his opposition into the war.

02:07:44.000 And then he said, you know, you could come and mow me down with a machine gun.

02:07:49.000 I'm not.

02:07:51.000 And ABC did some interviews with black soldiers in Vietnam, and they all, to a person, said, this is why I'm fighting. 0.99

02:07:58.000 This is why I'm here.

02:07:59.000 I'm fighting for him to say I don't want to be here.

02:08:02.000 And I just thought it was great.

02:08:04.000 And I also wanted to do this because people had done certain fights.

02:08:09.000 People had done his fight with the government.

02:08:12.000 I wanted to do Soup to the Nuts.

02:08:13.000 We wanted to do Soup to the Nuts.

02:08:15.000 My oldest daughter, Sarah, and my son-in-law, David McMahon, we made the film.

02:08:19.000 From birth to the death.

02:08:21.000 This guy is, in the late 60s, the most hated man in America for that stance that you were describing about the drug.

02:08:27.000 And he dies the most beloved person on the planet.

02:08:30.000 And I really love the idea.

02:08:33.000 I love the opportunity of being able to show how that happened in the midst of, you know, they call it the sweet science, but there are some fights.

02:08:42.000 The three fights with Frasier are like as brutal as anything you could ever possibly imagine.

02:08:50.000 And what they went through and what he ultimately clearly, in retrospect, lost as a result of winning two of the three.

02:08:57.000 three of the fights, is one of those miraculous stories.

02:09:02.000 And I agree.

02:09:03.000 Like Jack Johnson is defining an age and so interesting that it's in a marginalized activity.

02:09:12.000 Like even back then, like heavyweight boxing.

02:09:14.000 Well, marginalized but still elevated.

02:09:32.000 You learned it in the dangerous gyms.

02:09:35.000 It's not something that you learn on a college campus with educated professors and analysts that have reviewed proper technique.

02:09:45.000 Which is how they teach in Russia.

02:09:46.000 You know, Russia has a very, like, technical version of it.

02:09:51.000 Well, they do in America as well, too, now.

02:09:54.000 Back then it was dark, dingy gyms, mob-run businesses.

02:09:54.000 But not back then.

02:09:59.000 The sporting world, and you were there.

02:10:01.000 There were gamblers.

02:10:02.000 There were women of the night.

02:10:04.000 It was, you know, money was being exchanged.

02:10:06.000 A lot of mob stuff.

02:10:06.000 Lots of throne fights, and it was in the interest.

02:10:12.000 It was so interesting that emerged this person who was so resolutely himself, just as Muhammad Ali would be decades later.

02:10:20.000 It's why I'm drawn to it.

02:10:21.000 I'm not a big fan of boxing, but it's irresistible.

02:10:24.000 You can't take your eyes away from these two men when they're fighting.

02:10:27.000 They're, first of all, spectacular specimens, and they are amazing fighters.

02:10:33.000 They change the whole dynamic.

02:10:34.000 And as you said, there's no greater boxer than Muhammad Ali.

02:10:38.000 Well, the really terrible thing is Muhammad Ali's years were taken from him yeah because if you go to 1967 I've talked about this numerous times on the podcast when he fought Cleveland Big Cat Williams yeah that fight was one of the most extraordinary performances of any heavyweight ever it was Cleveland was a dangerous guy like vicious knockout puncher.

02:11:00.000 He was a real specimen himself.

02:11:02.000 Yes, he was and Ali toyed with him.

02:11:05.000 I mean toyed with him just boxed his face off knocked him out moving backwards Just picked him apart, popped him, and showed movement and speed and agility and technique that we had never seen from a heavyweight ever.

02:11:19.000 He was the greatest.

02:11:21.000 The greatest.

02:11:22.000 And then three solid years of inactivity.

02:11:26.000 Yeah, I think this is what makes him so great.

02:11:29.000 This is like Ted Williams, only much bigger.

02:11:32.000 Because Ted Williams loses a lot of time to World War II and to Korea.

02:11:36.000 And comes back and, you know, still hits.

02:11:38.000 You know, 350 or whatever it is he hits for the Red Sox, having lost what you'd consider the prime of his career in his early days in World War II.

02:11:48.000 And as a fighter, this is not like the goodwill ambassador.

02:11:51.000 He's flying fighter bombing runs.

02:11:54.000 He's like, really, it's every time he can not come back.

02:11:54.000 You know what I mean?

02:11:57.000 And he's magnificent stuff.

02:12:00.000 But it's not denying it, as they did in both Jack Johnson.

02:12:03.000 took away his title.

02:12:05.000 And he was fallow from 19. They're going to go 40 rounds after the 26. This guy who's got 10 years on Jess Willard, he's 37. Willard's 27. You know, Willard finally gets in a thing and it's like, oh, thank God.

02:12:29.000 And they would not let another black man fight for a heavyweight champion until he was not Jack Johnson.

02:12:35.000 That is to say, until he was Joe Louis, light-skinned.

02:12:39.000 Couldn't be seen with a white woman.

02:12:42.000 Couldn't smile at his victories.

02:12:43.000 And Lewis agreed to all of this.

02:12:45.000 It was the unspoken, unwritten rule that you couldn't be an in-your-face black man.

02:12:51.000 And that sort of obtained for a couple of decades.

02:12:53.000 And then Ali came and he said— And essentially, they used to say when he was training, Ali was training, there'd be ghost in the house.

02:13:06.000 Ghost in the house.

02:13:07.000 And that meant that Jack Johnson was there.

02:13:09.000 Oh, wow.

02:13:10.000 And that Ali had to be that much better. 0.92

02:13:12.000 Wow.

02:13:13.000 Ghost in the house.

02:13:13.000 Wow.

02:13:15.000 The Ali of three years later was a completely different fighter, unfortunately.

02:13:19.000 Physically, he didn't look the same because he didn't train for three years.

02:13:22.000 He didn't do anything, and he lost everything.

02:13:25.000 I mean, he still was one of the greatest.

02:13:27.000 I mean, still was able to beat Joe Lewis, still was able to beat George Foreman.

02:13:33.000 He didn't move the same way.

02:13:34.000 He didn't have the same physical build.

02:13:36.000 He didn't look as good.

02:13:37.000 He lost three solid years in his prime of training.

02:13:42.000 And it makes those post-Vietnam years even more spectacular, the fact that he could prevail over Frazier and over.

02:13:51.000 I mean, the rumble in the jungle is just crazy.

02:13:58.000 Crazy.

02:13:58.000 What he did.

02:13:59.000 What he did.

02:13:59.000 Yeah.

02:14:00.000 Well, nobody thought he was going to win.

02:14:01.000 No one thought he was going to win.

02:14:02.000 Including Hunter S. Thompson, who famously sabotaged his career by not covering the fight.

02:14:07.000 He was sent over there to cover the fight and instead decided to just swim in the pool and drink.

02:14:11.000 Yeah.

02:14:12.000 Because he didn't want to watch Ali get destroyed.

02:14:14.000 Yeah.

02:14:15.000 Meanwhile, he missed.

02:14:16.000 One of the greatest fights of all.

02:14:17.000 I remember, I was in college still, and we got Soundless.

02:14:24.000 Black and white footage of the fight, some of it in slow motion.

02:14:29.000 And my film teacher showed it to us, and none of us were interested.

02:14:34.000 I was like, whoa, this is stuff I did with my dad 10 years before.

02:14:38.000 And it was him delivering a blow to Foreman and seeing in slow motion this halo of sweat coming off the afro. 0.94

02:14:52.000 I mean, I will never forget almost the beauty of this incredibly brutal sport.

02:15:02.000 Yeah, incredibly brutal, but in those moments, it elevated everybody who watched it.

02:15:10.000 That's the crazy irony of it all.

02:15:12.000 It's like in this brutality, this beatdown of another man, everybody who watched it was elevated.

02:15:18.000 Because someone did something that we thought was impossible.

02:15:20.000 Exactly.

02:15:21.000 And it was that person who did it, this guy who stood up against the Vietnam War.

02:15:26.000 And, you know, at the time, we didn't realize how bad the Vietnam War would look retrospectively.

02:15:33.000 Yeah, no, he did not enjoy any benefit of the doubt.

02:15:37.000 No.

02:15:38.000 It was really another time of division and people exploiting division and making them.

02:15:45.000 He was the worst them that there possibly could be.

02:15:49.000 The fact that he was able to stick to his guns.

02:15:53.000 I mean, he could have said, okay, I will go and do goodwill stuff.

02:15:57.000 And it would have been all over.

02:15:58.000 He said, no, I'm not going to.

02:16:01.000 Famously, no Vietnamese ever called me the N-word.

02:16:03.000 Yeah, and just the fact that at the time, we didn't understand.

02:16:08.000 We were still locked into this perception of military conflict being like World War II, where it was imperative to save the world from communism.

02:16:18.000 And that there was a real problem, there's a real threat to the American way of life and America as a whole that was going on in Vietnam, which now seems absurd. 0.88

02:16:27.000 It seems absurd.

02:16:28.000 There's a wonderful parallel.

02:16:30.000 I mean, when I said that Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

02:16:35.000 We have a failed invasion of Canada in the American Revolution.

02:16:39.000 There's a big debate over inoculation.

02:16:41.000 There's an eclipse that takes place.

02:16:43.000 You know, all of this sort of stuff.

02:16:44.000 And there's always an interesting thing is that, particularly in New Jersey and South Carolina, the British are always talking about, we have now pacified New Jersey.

02:16:53.000 The province of New Jersey.

02:16:55.000 We have now pacified the province of South Carolina.

02:16:58.000 And then all of a sudden they have to admit that it's un-pacified because the patriots have taken over and done all this guerrilla warfare that has made it un-pacified.

02:17:06.000 And at one point, George III and many others within the British government are worried about what we would call the domino theory.

02:17:13.000 If we lose them, then we're going to lose Ireland. 0.92

02:17:14.000 And if we lose Ireland, we're going to lose Gibraltar.

02:17:16.000 And we're going to lose the subcontinent of India. 0.99

02:17:19.000 And so you go, there's nothing new under the sun.

02:17:19.000 And we're going to lose.

02:17:26.000 The Vietnam War and your 18-hour piece on the Vietnam War is one of the more confusing aspects of the United States history because looking at it today, it doesn't make any sense how we sold this.

02:17:43.000 And every president from Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, even Ford.

02:17:43.000 No.

02:17:50.000 never told us the complete truth about it and did stuff that got Americans killed and lots of other people killed over what would have been If you left it at that, we'd be talking about 3 million people still walking the earth at least.

02:18:16.000 Crazy.

02:18:17.000 Crazy.

02:18:18.000 And the communists, Chinese and the Soviets, were very suspicious of Ho Chi Minh.

02:18:24.000 They thought he's not a communist.

02:18:25.000 He's just a nationalist.

02:18:27.000 And he knew...

02:18:39.000 That same day, in Badin Square, in Hanoi.

02:18:47.000 Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence, and he quoted Thomas Jefferson.

02:18:52.000 Whoa.

02:18:53.000 And standing next to him were OSS guys.

02:18:55.000 By the end of September, the State Department, having realized, oh, this World War II is over, but we're going to be in a new—they didn't call it Cold War yet, but we're going to be in an epic struggle all around the world with communism, and this guy has been to Moscow and whatever, so he must be a communist.

02:19:15.000 And so all of a sudden, the State Department, the OSS, had saved his life.

02:19:19.000 They'd parachuted into northern Vietnam looking for people that could mobilize in their help against the Japanese and found a sick and dying Ho Chi Minh, we don't know what it was, malaria, whatever, treated him and brought him back.

02:19:32.000 And he didn't see us as the enemy, and yet, We, in those two years, in 1956, when they should have held an election, we had already decided to place our bets with Ngo Ding Ziem, who was a corrupt South Vietnamese politician who would eventually be assassinated by, you know, a general who would be a one in a series of generals until we got Chu and Ki.

02:19:56.000 And those were the people who took us out of it or were on their watch when the North Vietnamese, you know, finally— It's just, and the lying, you know, that we have the tapes of Johnson and of Nixon, and it just, you know.

02:20:17.000 There's an arrogance to record yourself for posterity, you know, and you be careful what you say.

02:20:23.000 Some of the things that not all of them have been listened to, they haven't all been transcribed, and we were fortunate to spend a lot of time just listening and listening and finding just some stuff that, you know, if Nixon and Kissinger had walked into the peace talks that were already started in January of 69 and taken the terms that the North Vietnamese were offering.

02:20:42.000 They would have had better terms than what they had in 73, and there would be fewer Americans, a lot more Americans alive, 25,000 more Americans alive, something like that, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.

02:20:54.000 But they didn't want to be the first president to lose a war.

02:20:58.000 In fact, they'd already soured the South Vietnamese, they said, as Humphrey was coming up in the polls.

02:21:05.000 He only lost by 0.7 points of a percentage in the election.

02:21:11.000 He'd been way behind and was making a lot of speed.

02:21:14.000 A lot of it had to do with what people perceived as progress in Paris.

02:21:17.000 And the Nixon administration, or not administration, the Republican Party, the Nixon's election campaign, reached out through an intermediary to the South Vietnamese government and said, boycott the talks in Paris.

02:21:30.000 And if you'd had another week or two to the election...

02:21:40.000 And Johnson got it on tape.

02:21:43.000 They were taping the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington and the palace in Saigon.

02:21:48.000 And he knew it.

02:21:49.000 And he called up Nixon.

02:21:50.000 and there's a tape and he goes, And Johnson, either pissed off at Humphrey because he's not as much as a hawk as Johnson had become, or more than likely unwilling to admit to your allies that you had been taping them in their own embassy in Washington and their own palace in Saigon,

02:22:11.000 did not tell the truth of what he knew, that Richard Nixon had essentially reached out to a foreign power at the time of a national election to try to influence that election.

02:22:22.000 Yeah, I mean, it's just endless.

02:22:24.000 And the reverberations, like, the one thing that it did that I think is, like, so pivotal is it destroyed the faith that the United States citizens had.

02:22:34.000 In its government, telling them the truth.

02:22:36.000 And in engaging in military activities.

02:22:39.000 Because we had always thought we were a just government.

02:22:41.000 We were a just society.

02:22:43.000 And that if we got into World War II, it was to save the world.

02:22:46.000 If we got into Vietnam, it was to save the world.

02:22:49.000 Oh, no, it wasn't.

02:22:50.000 Not only that, we got in on a lie.

02:22:52.000 We literally got into the war on a false flag.

02:22:55.000 So it was entirely engineered.

02:22:57.000 And then there was also the heroin production, which was a big part of the whole thing.

02:23:01.000 The heroin trade, there was money that was being allocated to various individuals through the heroin trade that was facilitating a lot of it.

02:23:11.000 It's very confusing stuff when you look at it over time and you look back at it, you're What would we look like today?

02:23:24.000 The counterfactual?

02:23:25.000 Well, I think we'd be less divided.

02:23:27.000 I think a good deal of the divisions now were sort of born in there, the entrenched positions that people take now.

02:23:33.000 I think there's also a sense, you know, the Pentagon Papers were McNamara going to a gentleman that we interviewed, Robert Gard, and saying, I need to find out all the decisions.

02:23:45.000 And he learned, not only was he lying at times, you know, going and getting battlefield reports and then coming back and saying it's all rosy, but everybody had been lying back to the Truman administration about what was going on.

02:23:58.000 And it was just a series of lies.

02:24:01.000 And that's what, when they asked the Rand Corporation to sort of analyze some of the data, that's when Daniel Ellsberg, who worked for the Rand Corporation, surreptitiously, illegally copied them and then released them.

02:24:15.000 to various newspapers and they became, you know, what we call the Pentagon Papers, but they were always the Pentagon Papers.

02:24:22.000 And they detail exactly what you just described, just a complete presence of both parties, a military industrial company.

02:24:38.000 He's not saying this is something that happened last Thursday.

02:24:41.000 Right.

02:24:42.000 He's saying this happened the second World War II was over.

02:24:46.000 Well, even before that, Smedley Butler talked about it in 33. People, there was so much money to be made that nobody wanted to ramp down the armaments.

02:24:57.000 And so you end up having these proxy wars.

02:24:59.000 You end up having these places where you're going to not have a hot war because that means the end of the world. 0.64

02:25:07.000 In a world of nuclear weapons, but you're going to fight these proxy wars in different places.

02:25:13.000 And in Kennedy, it's a doctrine that Eisenhower and Kennedy, and they all sort of embrace and figure out that they can do it.

02:25:21.000 And then, of course, Johnson, who, you know, Kennedy inherits 700 advisers from Eisenhower.

02:25:26.000 Johnson inherits 17,000 advisers now, in quotes, when he comes in.

02:25:32.000 And he still has to wait until he wins re-election overwhelmingly a year later.

02:25:38.000 And it's only into the following March of 1965 that he commits ground forces, First Army and First Marines and then Army, to Vietnam.

02:25:47.000 And then we have the...

02:25:57.000 And then it just escalates.

02:25:58.000 At the peak, it's well over 550,000 American soldiers in the country.

02:26:04.000 Insane.

02:26:05.000 Insane.

02:26:06.000 It's also the coming to fruition of Eisenhower's warnings, and then this inspires this counterculture of the 1960s.

02:26:17.000 That sort of reshapes art, reshapes culture, reshapes rock and roll.

02:26:22.000 Politics.

02:26:23.000 Everything.

02:26:24.000 Everything changes.

02:26:24.000 And then, you know, Nixon comes along to stop the anti-war movement, to stop the civil rights movement, puts these sweeping Schedule I drug acts on all these different...

02:26:49.000 And it's effective.

02:26:50.000 It is so interesting to look.

02:26:53.000 And I've got in my office this wonderful two-framed maps, if you will.

02:26:57.000 And they're the intertwining of the various two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, over time.

02:27:04.000 So the Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party of emancipation, of whatever, and the party that invented progressivism in the first part of the 20th century.

02:27:14.000 Democrats had been not that place.

02:27:17.000 But in the 60s, it began to change thanks to Lyndon Johnson of Austin, Texas, who understood.

02:27:25.000 That it was the right thing to do to put in those civil rights and voting rights acts and other things that we call part of his Great Society, a film, by the way, that we're working on now.

02:27:35.000 We'll be out in a few years.

02:27:36.000 But he knew that the bargain would be to give up the solid South.

02:27:43.000 I mean, you woke up on Election Day, if you're a Democrat, and you had every one of the states of the former Confederacy, all of them, all of them, in your tally.

02:27:52.000 And that's flipped.

02:27:53.000 And now you wake up.

02:27:54.000 On Election Day, you more or less have had all the states of the former Confederacy on the Republican side who abandoned what they were about.

02:28:04.000 And it's interesting to see in which for self-interest, for whatever, I mean, Nixon begins it.

02:28:10.000 Jackie Robinson is a Lincoln Republican, didn't go over as many black people did to FDR during the New Deal.

02:28:17.000 He was supporting Nixon for president, but Nixon wouldn't come to Harlem in campaign.

02:28:22.000 So he ended up voting for Kennedy and Goldwater fully understood that we're just going to now switch the Republican Party and go after just white voters who are disaffected with changes in civil rights.

02:28:38.000 And so it's an interesting story of the way in which parties can change places and be the very opposite of the thing they were just a few years before.

02:28:50.000 Yeah, because they're all gross.

02:28:53.000 Well, I just find the thing is, you know, the bad word is progressive today.

02:28:58.000 And this is, you know, the Republican Party invented progressivism.

02:29:03.000 And they joined forces with some more liberal Democrats in the big cities, right?

02:29:09.000 But the opposition to the civil rights bill is coming from Southern Democrats.

02:29:15.000 And it's Lyndon Johnson knowing that he will have to use every bit of his powers of persuasion to get it over and he will require lots of Republican votes.

02:29:25.000 And he does.

02:29:26.000 So you do have something positive happening in American history where the two parties are coming together and not just lockstep where every single Republican votes for something and every single Democrat votes against it.

02:29:38.000 And you just feel like somebody's they're from two different planets.

02:29:43.000 The other thing about the Vietnam War that's so crazy is like.

02:29:43.000 Yeah.

02:29:54.000 Because after that war, it sort of set the stage for Afghanistan, Iraq, especially Afghanistan, like this prolonged 20-year complete failure, especially in how we withdrew from it. 0.94

02:30:12.000 It's like we've lost a lot of faith in the decisions that are made.

02:30:17.000 I actually think you have young officers like Colin Powell who are learning the lessons of Vietnam.

02:30:24.000 And so what you find is extraordinary reticence in the late 70s and the 80s and the early 90s.

02:30:31.000 So the first Gulf War is very much a reflection of Vietnam. 0.71

02:30:37.000 Chastened by the excesses of Vietnam. 1.00

02:30:39.000 We're going to do it with a coalition.

02:30:41.000 You know, we're going to do it with one arm tied behind our back.

02:30:44.000 We're going to stop a little bit sooner.

02:30:46.000 We're not going to have the full destruction of this.

02:30:48.000 All these sorts of things are Vietnam inherited. 0.96

02:30:51.000 But then real politique comes in.

02:30:54.000 And then all of a sudden you realize we're in Afghanistan because of 9-11.

02:30:59.000 We're pursuing this person.

02:31:01.000 It's not – we had a chance to get him.

02:31:04.000 We missed him.

02:31:05.000 It was not our fault.

02:31:06.000 And we then switched the focus to Iraq and then ended up in both places in a kind of, you know, terrific stalemate that, as you say, just was, I think, back to being Vietnam.

02:31:19.000 I mean, I always say this, that if we, you know, we made our film on Vietnam, it came out in 2017.

02:31:25.000 If I had done the film 10 years, and this is why history requires perspective, if I had done it 10 years after the fall of Saigon in, There's a recession going on in the United States, not big, but we talk about the Pacific Rim.

02:31:43.000 Japan has ascended.

02:31:44.000 We think Japan is going to be the best thing.

02:31:47.000 Vietnam would be this ball and chain that we'd be dragging around us forever. 0.85

02:31:52.000 If I'd waited 20 years to 1995, we're the sole superpower.

02:31:56.000 We're in the middle of the largest, to that point, largest peacetime economic expansion in the history of our country.

02:32:04.000 And Vietnam would always be important, but it wouldn't be this symbol of our decline, right?

02:32:11.000 If I'd waited 30 years to 2005, when we are bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people are beginning to use the language of the Vietnam and getting stuck in these unwanted, perpetual, never-ending wars, you'd have another view.

02:32:29.000 To do good history is to actually get some distance and perspective.

02:32:32.000 So you can look at the Vietnam War from the mountaintop of 85 and 95 and 2005 and then realize I've still got other experiences.

02:32:41.000 New scholarship has come.

02:32:43.000 Classified material has been released.

02:32:45.000 More of those tapes have been listened to.

02:32:47.000 There's been a mellowing among the veterans and a willingness to speak.

02:32:52.000 Gold star mothers realize they can't hide their grief.

02:32:56.000 We have one in the film.

02:32:58.000 She knows that by telling her story, she will help thousands of other people who've lost their children.

02:33:05.000 You can interview soldiers from other cities.

02:33:20.000 So that was bad.

02:33:21.000 We did that badly.

02:33:22.000 that we did this poorly, you can see it for this hugely, hugely complex machine that it was that just ate up human beings and ate up credibility, as you're saying, that the More 60 million people's lives were extinguished in World War II.

02:33:50.000 But as we said it in our film about World War II, called the war, one of our pilots said it was a necessary war.

02:33:58.000 And that's what we should be thinking about, fighting necessary ones, not the ones that are going to, you know.

02:34:05.000 To have all these ulterior things that you described.

02:34:07.000 And it's also like unwinding all that bad and sort of reshaping America's perspective and the way the world perceives us takes so much time.

02:34:18.000 And I think we lost so much of that post 9-11.

02:34:21.000 I think 9-11 had the entire world in our sympathies.

02:34:25.000 I agree.

02:34:26.000 We had been attacked.

02:34:28.000 The whole world thought of us as being like this shining light, like, wow, we have to stand against this.

02:34:34.000 Then we go and invade Iraq, and everyone's like, what are you doing?

02:34:37.000 What is this?

02:34:38.000 There's really no weapons of mass destruction.

02:34:40.000 It's all a lie.

02:34:42.000 The thing that the Depression did is it got used to Americans doing without.

02:34:50.000 And it made it very easy for Americans to segue into the Second World War.

02:34:56.000 Because it was about shared sacrifice, something they'd learned on a domestic level, they could now learn it on an international level.

02:35:04.000 And they did that.

02:35:06.000 We had an opportunity at 9-11, it seems to me, and I haven't made a film about it, and I imagine once we get enough years out, it might be interesting to sort of look at that.

02:35:16.000 We had an opportunity to collectively turn the energy that we had, the grief and the sense of purpose, even anger of that moment, as well as the world's unabashed sympathy for what we'd done and turn it into something powerful.

02:35:36.000 productive, and yet we didn't.

02:35:38.000 We then, as you were saying, we moved into sort of rationales and justifications for Iraq that were, as we know in retrospect, completely fraudulent.

02:35:48.000 Yeah.

02:35:49.000 From the outside, like me looking at your work...

02:35:59.000 And I know you have 10 years for some of them to like really ruminate and really figure it out.

02:36:04.000 But what is your process like?

02:36:07.000 How do you begin?

02:36:08.000 Like you said, you're going to do something on Lyndon Johnson or if you're going to do something in Vietnam.

02:36:12.000 How do you—what does day one look like?

02:36:15.000 Day one is making sure that you're looking yourself in the mirror and you're going to commit to that because I'm now off like a congressman trying to raise money from foundations and corporations and individuals of wealth and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and things like that.

02:36:29.000 But you're immediately reading, you're immediately talking to scholars who spent their life maybe on this aspect or that aspect of Vietnam.

02:36:37.000 We had, I think it was 23 scholars, all who knew one aspect.

02:36:41.000 And I knew we were onto something when we'd have these screenings.

02:36:44.000 And a scholar would comment and all the other 22 would like whip over like they hadn't heard that.

02:36:50.000 And so the film would do that.

02:36:52.000 It's daunting.

02:36:53.000 I asked Shelby Foote about U.S. Grant, and he said, Grant had what they call four o 'clock in the morning courage.

02:36:59.000 That meant you could wake him at four o 'clock in the morning and tell him the enemy had turned his left flank and he'd be as cool as a cucumber.

02:37:06.000 And so what you develop is four o 'clock in the morning courage.

02:37:10.000 You wake up and go, and we're still doing it.

02:37:12.000 I'm still waking up.

02:37:12.000 I didn't like the way that sounded.

02:37:14.000 Why didn't we trail that?

02:37:15.000 So you just put one foot in the other.

02:37:17.000 You trust a process.

02:37:19.000 Process is a really, Just like comparison is the thief of joy, if you're impatient, then process kills process.

02:37:33.000 Is squandered.

02:37:33.000 And process teaches you really important things of how to relate to a subject, how to collect the material, and then how to figure out how to digest that material into something that's a cohesive story that I can give to you, who may be ignorant of that story.

02:37:47.000 But it's daunting, it's terrifying, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

02:37:52.000 You know?

02:37:54.000 And I think I'm speaking for the people who work with me because there's something – everything Everybody says, yeah, what do we do that?

02:38:04.000 We can fix this.

02:38:05.000 We'll find an alternative to that to make it better.

02:38:08.000 And sometimes it's the niggling tiny things, or sometimes it's really big to have the courage to take out an entire scene that really is working really well, but destabilizes the film a half an hour later.

02:38:19.000 And I did that in our Mark Twain film.

02:38:21.000 I took out this beautiful prose thing from Life on the Mississippi called White Town Drowsing about Hannibal.

02:38:27.000 This disguised Hannibal sort of waking up from its slumbers as it sees the puff of smoke north as the steamboat's coming down.

02:38:35.000 And the whole town is industry and activity and loading and unloading and whatever.

02:38:39.000 And then by the time the puff of smoke is around the bend south, everybody's back asleep again.

02:38:45.000 It was just fantastic and written so beautifully.

02:38:49.000 Mark Twain never wrote a bad word.

02:38:53.000 And I just realized we weren't getting out of the early biographical stuff soon enough.

02:38:58.000 And I said to my partner on the film, the co-producer and the writer, who'd found that quote from Life on the Mississippi, I said, we're taking it out.

02:39:08.000 And he looked so hurt and so pained.

02:39:10.000 I said, look, I'll put it back in if you want it.

02:39:12.000 So we left it out, and I thought it worked, Brian.

02:39:15.000 He came to me, looked sad.

02:39:16.000 I said, I'll put it back in.

02:39:17.000 And for about six months we went back and forth, and then finally he came to me and he said, you were right.

02:39:23.000 And I said, you can put it in the book.

02:39:25.000 We'll put it in the DVD extras.

02:39:26.000 We'll do all the things that you need to do.

02:39:29.000 But that's the kind of 4 o 'clock in the morning courage you need to do is take out something that, like, it, Joe, it worked so well.

02:39:38.000 And yet, you remember the movie Amadeus?

02:39:41.000 Too many notes.

02:39:43.000 And you just go, you gotta do that.

02:39:45.000 I'd rather, the reason why we have the, it's complicated is because There's not a filmmaker on earth that doesn't want to change a scene that's working.

02:39:53.000 But we have spent our entire professional lives changing scenes that were working when we found out new compromising sort of controversial.

02:40:03.000 And maybe it made the scene less.

02:40:05.000 Maybe the scene disappeared.

02:40:06.000 But it actually serves the honor and the virtue of whatever that story requires.

02:40:14.000 And this is true so many things in the American Revolution that are close to me because we're just coming off the months and months of these.

02:40:22.000 Unbelievable sacrifices of having to take out one phrase of a sentence or changing one little thing just to help fine-tune it.

02:40:28.000 Nobody would notice.

02:40:29.000 If I left it in and you looked at it twice and then I took it out the second time, I don't think you'd notice it.

02:40:35.000 but I'd notice it so I'd wanted to to be It might be the only platform that would allow you to do it that way.

02:40:46.000 I don't think there is another platform.

02:40:48.000 I assume that A-list directors in Hollywood who have the final say enjoy that.

02:40:55.000 Steven Spielberg, who is one of the great directors of all times, I'm sure.

02:41:00.000 But there's still suits that are coming in.

02:41:02.000 There's still people who are giving him notes.

02:41:04.000 We get notes from scholars.

02:41:06.000 We get notes that are sort of like this.

02:41:09.000 You've got lots of voices of loyalists in there, and that's really good because people tend to ignore the loyalists.

02:41:16.000 They're just de facto bad people, and you don't make them bad people.

02:41:20.000 But you don't have a loyalist who goes through several episodes that you follow throughout the film.

02:41:25.000 So we had this loyalist quote.

02:41:28.000 In our fourth episode, in the Battle of Bennington, where this guy named John Peters, who's been in Vermont, been driven out by the patriots, he's gone to Canada, he's formed a revolution.

02:41:38.000 The family, his wife and small infant kids are driven out.

02:41:41.000 They find a British patrol boat somehow on Lake Champlain.

02:41:44.000 They reunite.

02:41:45.000 He starts a regiment, a loyalist regiment, his 15-year-old son.

02:41:49.000 They find themselves with Burgoyne's army around Bennington, where they've been told there's...

02:41:58.000 There's no loyalist sympathies or none that anybody is speaking up for and there are lots of patriots and they're defeated.

02:41:58.000 It's the opposite.

02:42:04.000 But at one moment, this man, John Peters, is on a parapet of a quickly made redoubt, a fort that they've put up to try to repel the attacking Americans.

02:42:14.000 And he hears the voice of a man named Jeremiah Post who is saying, Peters, you damn Tory, which is the other insult that you would give to a loyalist.

02:42:25.000 And he recognizes the voice of his best friend growing up and cousin of his sister.

02:42:33.000 And at that moment, Jeremiah Post, the rebel, the patriot, stabs him with the bayonet into his bone, but it's deflected by the bone of the ribcage.

02:42:46.000 At that moment, as Peter said, "I was obliged to destroy him." and he kills him with his pistol.

02:42:52.000 That's the American Revolution.

02:42:54.000 So we had that quote, and it was like, but why don't we go and put John Peters in episode one, in episode two, in episode three, in episode four, and then episode six when he's leaving and moving to Nova Scotia permanently and not going to be a part of this new deal.

02:43:12.000 You want to know what's the American Revolution about it?

02:43:14.000 Killing your best friend on a hill west of Bennington, Vermont.

02:43:21.000 Right?

02:43:24.000 You know what I mean?

02:43:25.000 I mean, we say kind of without thinking about the Civil War, brother against brother, you know?

02:43:30.000 And I guess it's true a few times.

02:43:32.000 But the revolution is like that.

02:43:34.000 Henry Knox, who's this sort of big, amiable bookseller who Washington somehow figures out, picks out of a crowd, and he said, oh, go to – I got to drive the British out of Boston. 0.89

02:43:49.000 And Knox does.

02:43:50.000 Sleds, impossible, hundreds of miles over land and over Lake George and, you know, terrible weather.

02:43:56.000 And he gets it there.

02:43:58.000 But he's married to this young woman named Lucy whose parents are loyalists.

02:44:03.000 And so she loses in the revolution her father, her mother, her brother, and her sisters.

02:44:10.000 That's the choice she made by marrying Henry Knox, this sweetheart of a bookseller who learned most of his stuff about artillery and gun emplacements from the books in his bookstore and from serving as, you know, in the local militia.

02:44:24.000 And he puts the guns, he gets the guns up top, and the British wake up and go, uh-oh, we're out of here, and they go to...

02:44:34.000 Massachusetts thinks the war's over.

02:44:35.000 They thank General Washington for his service and enjoy his retirement.

02:44:39.000 He goes, are you kidding me?

02:44:40.000 I'm going to New York, which is exactly right, because that's where the British will attack next. 1.00

02:44:45.000 And the largest battle of the American Revolution is the Battle of Long Island.

02:44:49.000 And I won't spoil it for you.

02:44:51.000 What happens?

02:44:52.000 Please don't.

02:44:53.000 Ken Burns, your national treasure.

02:44:56.000 Thank you so much.

02:44:57.000 Thank you, Joe.

02:44:58.000 I really appreciate you being here.

02:44:59.000 I really enjoyed it.

02:45:00.000 And like I said, I've been a giant fan of your work for a long time, so this is a huge treat for me.

02:45:05.000 Thank you.

02:45:06.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 11, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2336 - Ken Burns

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