00:03:09.580Well, we're still doing all of the old stuff.
00:03:11.640I mean, I've been doing it for it's it's almost 50 years. And, you know, we started off in film and analog, you know, with razor blades, cutting film and taping them together and drawing grease pencils on the film and then, you know, digital editing and then and videotape.
00:03:28.120And we were always 10 years behind intentionally so that the technological tail didn't wag the dog.
00:03:35.600And so we're just, you know, perpetually Luddites catching up with everything.
00:03:40.840But we're doing the old broadcast stuff, too.
00:03:43.160I went to 40 cities, had 80 screenings, you know, but also did 75 podcasts from Joe Rogan to, you know, whatever the comparable is on the other side.
00:03:54.540Mark Twain said, if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. So I said the same thing to Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn, as I said to the New York Times, to inner city kids in Charleston and Detroit and suburban kids in Chicagoland and all the other places.
00:04:11.100and it it worked out okay because the story is so compelling that a lot of these divisions which
00:04:18.020we think are completely clogging our arteries fall away because if you tell if you tell a good story
00:04:25.240then you tell a good story and everybody's got a got an interest in a good story when you were
00:04:30.620talking to theo and joe and guys like that that may be you know perceived on a number of issues
00:04:34.960lean a little bit more to the right. Were they surprised by the fact that we are so surprised
00:04:41.800by this division that we have in this country? And you're able to contextualize that and say,
00:04:46.720you know, give me a break, you know, particularly with this film, which is as much about the civil
00:04:51.500war, not just the world war. Right. No, no, no. And I think one of the things about the revolution
00:04:56.660is that it is a civil war. It's a revolution. And we've sort of made it gallant and bloodless
00:05:02.820because I think, you know, accepting the violence of the Civil War and the 20th century wars,
00:05:08.440we don't want to have anything take away from the big ideas in Philadelphia in 76 and then in
00:05:13.6601787. But in fact, if you tell the correct story, those ideas aren't diminished in any way. They're
00:05:19.900actually made even more impressive that we were born in violence. So I think that the divisions
00:05:25.400that we experience now are part of the narcissism. It's always the best time or the worst time that
00:05:30.640we're living in. So I think everybody's less aware of the way in which they might contribute
00:05:34.720to those divisions than they want to just sort of repeat the same thing over and over again.
00:05:39.100And I'd suggest that, yeah, we're really divided, but not as bad as the revolution,
00:05:43.360not as bad as the Civil War, not as bad as the period of reconstruction right after the Civil
00:05:48.200War, which I'm working on a film on right now called Emancipation to Exodus, not during the
00:05:53.320Depression, like the second war, Vietnam. You remember Vietnam, 69 to 75, hundreds of bombings.
00:06:00.640Hundreds of bombings. And so I think the good thing about the study of history is it gives you a little bit of perspective and a little bit of even optimism.
00:06:10.720You know, if you accept a priori that optimism is not a pejorative or a naive position, but in fact, a legitimate stake, which is, you know, we'll get through this.
00:06:22.040I love it. And as we get through, I want to get back to more deeply that the current project and not just the ones you're working on, but the one we're here to really celebrate and at least reflect upon as we reflect on the 250th anniversary.
00:06:37.180But I'm curious, you know, just going back to how we began casually the conversation.
00:06:41.480It's interesting. You talked about, I love this, no sort of a razor blade editing back in the day, et cetera.
00:06:47.200And now as you're out on podcasts and you're sort of battling traditional media, people in person, and then, of course, online and so many different podcasts.
00:06:55.940But when you were doing those first films, what was, I mean, what did Ken Burns, what was, how did you go out there and promote these things?
00:07:02.000Was it primarily through the platform at PBS or, you know, what was it finding your way onto Oprah as a sort of monumental moment and achievement?
00:07:11.840Yeah, so that's exactly right. And it still remains the same.
00:07:15.100It's still PBS is the broadcast platform is great.
00:07:18.120Only this time, the American Revolution, you know, six parts, 12 hours comes out in mid-November last year.
00:07:26.440And by the end of the year, we've accumulated 18 million viewers in traditional broadcast, which is pretty damn good.
00:07:34.320But we've hit, for the first time in PBS's history, the top 10 of streaming.
00:07:39.300And for me, this Luddite, they've got a metric, which is at that moment, at the end of November, 565 million minutes of streaming.
00:07:47.640You know, my kids can do the divide by 720 minutes that 12 hours is. But now it's well over 4 billion. And that's a big deal. And it was a big deal that we broke the top 10. But it's an even bigger deal that we now have something in which we're told that, you know, conservatives only like Yellowstone, as if that's a simplistic story. And it's not. And that, you know, liberals only like this. And it's, it's not true.
00:08:15.400The novelist Richard Powers said something that I've been quoting for years now.
00:08:20.900He said, the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do is argue, won't change a single person's point of view.
00:08:27.080The only thing that can do that is a good story.
00:08:29.720Because in a computer world where everything's a one or a zero, in a media culture where everything's red state or blue state, young or old, black or white, gay or straight, rich or poor, north or south, east or west, all the dialectics that we are preoccupied with, which don't actually exist.
00:08:45.400There's no room for the complexity that we extend to the people we love, to the friends that we have, to the colleagues that we work with, to the understanding that the struggles are within us.
00:08:56.200We lament that there are no heroes today, Governor, and if you go back and say, well, where does the notion of heroism come from?
00:09:05.360It comes from the Greeks, and they endowed their gods with these examples for us mortals to study.
00:11:24.360We're going to keep you subscribing to superstitions and conspiracy theories that distract you from the fact that I have my boot on the back of your neck.
00:11:34.380Did was that I mean, was that omnipresent, you know, 200 years ago, this this notion of censoring historic facts, rewriting history was, you know, was was that constantly present?
00:11:46.140Yeah, I think that, you know, disinformation is always I'm sure the first conversation between two human beings ever was a lie.
00:11:53.440you know or at least a lie was part of that and i think that we do a disservice and say oh our time
00:11:59.060is worse you know the chicken littles the sky's falling i remember when you know when new
00:12:03.260technologies come along like oh say the telegraph in the 1850s people are are wringing their hands
00:12:08.920this is the end of letter writing it's the end of this and so i think yeah there's a lot in fact
00:12:13.500sam adams who we think of as a beer um he he was a failure as a brewer and a tax collector but he
00:12:20.860really good propagandists. And he said something that reminded me of our current media landscape.
00:12:25.700He said, there were times when the British would acquiesce. Okay, the Stamp Act, we're done with
00:12:30.560it. We're not going to impose it. And so everybody, the Sons of Liberty disband and it's all over.
00:12:35.860And Sam Adams is going, no, they're just going to do something bad. And he said, my job was to keep
00:12:40.360my fellow countrymen alive to their grievances. Right? Sound familiar? In which you only have a
00:12:47.580politics that has to do with them and us. And my whole thing is that I've been making films about
00:12:54.260the U.S., but I've also been making films about us, that is to say, the lowercase two-letter
00:13:00.140plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our, and all of the majesty, complexity,
00:13:07.940contradiction, and even controversy of the U.S. But the one thing I've learned, if I've learned
00:13:13.180to anything is that there's no them. There's no them. There's only us. And that whenever anyone
00:13:19.380creates a them, it is for an agenda that is not one that is in sync with what a pluralistic
00:13:29.320democracy is. I mean, we're now, we now have been, over the last 50 years, I've watched the word
00:13:35.240liberal fall, shot dead, you know, at a firing squad. I've watched all these sorts of things.
00:13:41.180And we just witnessed the end of DEI. But, you know, isn't e pluribus unum DEI? You know, that's our Latin motto, that we're going to figure out how to come together. Jefferson says a couple sentences after the second one, the great one.
00:13:59.000He says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are
00:14:06.340It just means that heretofore in the history of human beings, people have been subjects.
00:14:13.740And we're creating something new called citizens.
00:14:16.460And it's going to take an extra amount of energy to do that.
00:14:19.160And human beings will naturally devolve to the camps, to the tribal stuff.
00:14:23.560But we're actually going to experiment.
00:14:25.100We're going to put the Enlightenment into practice, and we're going to call it the United States of America, and we're going to be in pursuit of happiness, not things, but knowledge and virtue, and we're going to be after a more perfect union.
00:14:38.100It's going to require a lot of coming together, but we live in a place right now where it's so – it actually pays to promote division.
00:14:50.660This interest, you know, it's interesting, but this notion, you know, in the Bible teaches us many parts, one body, one part suffers, we all suffer.
00:14:59.440This, this, you know, Dr. King talked so evocatively about that.
00:15:02.900We're all bound together by that web of mutuality.
00:15:05.720And, and, but I think about this and I think about it in the context of what you're, you know, so much of the work you're doing and so much of the notion of myth and this sort of chiseled notion of a monument, et cetera, and, and, and how we sanitize so much of that.
00:15:19.720But the importance of myth at the same time, this notion of the things that bind us together, not just celebrating our interesting differences, but how we can be bound together.
00:15:29.560I mean, where's that tension between, you know, when I talk about California and was born into genocide, the first governor in California, 1851, Burnett literally talked about the war and extermination.
00:15:41.700It was his first state of the state speech.
00:15:43.440But I use that language and people are immediately offended and find it shameful.
00:15:48.780and I'm not providing context. He was in the vast majority. He was truly representative
00:15:53.660of the time. And so what's that, you know, this notion of myth and the importance of myth,
00:15:58.740the importance of things that we can unite around. How do you find that tension? Or you
00:16:03.560just try to go straight to the facts? Well, you know, we were interested,
00:16:07.780Governor, in calling balls and strikes. So I'm interested in the facts, however messy. I have
00:16:11.260in my editing room a neon sign that's been there for years and years and years, the main editing
00:16:15.660room. And it says it's complicated in lowercase cursive neon. And that's what you want to do.
00:16:20.880The mythologies grow up around a desire to simplify and control that history. So say with
00:16:27.260the revolution, you inherit something that is really just about white men when half the population
00:16:31.380women are deeply involved. The revolution doesn't happen without the resistance that leads up to it
00:16:37.100in the nearly decade of resistance. And women are at the heart of that. They're the buyers in each1.00
00:16:41.760homestead. There are among the two and a half to three million Americans in the time of resistance
00:16:46.540and at the beginning of the revolution, two and a half to three million Americans, 500,000 of whom
00:16:51.760are free or enslaved black people. There are within those 13 colonies becoming states,
00:16:57.900native peoples whose land has already been acquired and they have either assimilated
00:17:02.300or they're trying to figure out how to coexist. And on the Western border, there are dozens
00:17:06.900of nations um that are as um as as individual and as important on a global stage uh economically
00:17:17.680diplomatically militarily as say france and prussia are and we don't extend to them we just
00:17:24.180say them and we also remember we don't call ourselves the uh the the eastern seaboard
00:17:30.320congress who appoints george washington the head of the eastern seaboard army they know what's out
00:17:36.100there. They've heard of California. They know what's there. And they are a continental army
00:17:40.600and they're planning to get it. So all of a sudden, you have really interesting dynamics
00:17:44.520of black Americans deciding to side with the British or fight with the patriots or Native
00:17:50.280Americans doing the same things that are sometimes dividing their old alliances and confederacies
00:17:56.280and destroying them. There's one woman, a Mohegan woman from, I assume, Connecticut,
00:18:02.000north central connecticut named rebecca tanner who loses five sons five sons uh fighting for
00:18:08.780the patriot cause and so we have a much more interesting it's a very of an enormous variety
00:18:15.460people people in my state of new hampshire where i've lived for the last 47 years um and georgia
00:18:21.820feel like they're from different countries they're like totally different the idea that
00:18:26.120someone like Washington or Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or others that we don't know that much
00:18:33.420about. Mercy Otis Warren is the first historian of the American Revolution, a friend of Abigail
00:18:39.720Adams. It's nice when you have Meryl Streep reading off camera and bringing Mercy Otis Warren
00:18:44.260alive. But they're talking about how it might be that we could not be an individual thing,
00:18:50.140but a one thing. And that, you know, it's the first idea that then Washington's really great
00:18:56.400as he's trying to inspire men to fight in the dead of night. And often they're teenagers,
00:19:01.240children, it's not all the militia men, they're going back to plant their crops or to reap their
00:19:06.700crops. And what happens is the Continental Army becomes filled with narrative wells and teenagers
00:19:11.940and recent immigrants. And so democracy becomes not the intention of the revolution, it becomes0.97
00:19:17.580a byproduct. Because all of a sudden, you can't just win against the greatest power on earth
00:19:22.640without foreign help, the French. But you also can't win unless you say, we're going to give0.98
00:19:29.560you something for the sacrifices that you've made. And so what happens is that you emerge with a
00:19:34.680kind of fledgling democracy out of what was going to be a republic, a kind of aristocracy. The right
00:19:41.040would say the elites who control everything. But those elites are the guys that we're supposed to
00:19:45.800all agree that we like are are are george washington and thomas jefferson and benjamin
00:19:50.300franklin and and patrick henry and you know james mason and james monroe and all of the
00:19:56.040the so-called founding fathers and and they're they are they're a remarkable group of people but
00:20:02.080you can't tell a complete story without the balls and strikes and everybody else who gets
00:20:06.520to come to bat and when you uh and when you endeavored i mean what's this you said it was
00:20:11.22010 year process from the idea. So I released a film a year. Yeah. I looked up from a map that
00:20:17.420we were doing it while we were finishing our Vietnam series and in, um, in, in December of
00:20:22.7002015, Barack Obama, remember him used to had 13 months to go in his presidency. And I said,
00:20:28.380we're doing the American revolution. And I knew it would take that. No one was talking semi
00:20:32.420quintentennial. No one was talking to 50th about halfway through. I thought, man, if we accelerate,
00:20:38.680right. We could be at the 250th of Lexington and Concord. And my co-director, Sarah Botstein,
00:20:44.240correctly corrected me and said, we'll still be mixing it online and you'll be out on the road
00:20:48.520promoting it. It'll be in the fall. I said, okay. And then I realized, oh, well, there's going to
00:20:53.880be a celebration. At least we might be offering something a little bit more substantive than what
00:21:00.300I worried would be kind of fife and drum treacle, you know, that you would just devolve to the lowest
00:21:05.240common denominator of an unexamined patriotism. And then, of course, we're in the circumstances
00:21:11.700that we're in where we really have an opportunity in crisis to look back at our founding, just as
00:21:17.120an individual would do. You'd go to a pastor or a professional, and the first thing they'd ask you
00:21:21.680is, where'd you come from? Who are your parents? What are your early life like? So if you go back
00:21:26.280to your origin story as a way to reset, recommit to those ideals that were brand new on July 4th,
00:21:33.9801776 we are there's some folks called citizens and there's the only place is the eastern seaboard
00:21:40.380of the united states white men of property mostly but it's going to grow and the second you break
00:21:46.620out this argument between englishmen uh into natural rights saying oh no we hold these truths
00:21:52.880to be self-evident jefferson wrote it um governor he wrote we hold these truths to be sacred and
00:21:58.320undeniable which would be a really good enlightenment i want to make an argument to you
00:22:05.540Franklin gets it and says, you know, no, no, no, self-evident.
00:22:09.460There's nothing self-evident about these ideas.
00:22:12.460But as someone said in a film we made about Franklin a few years ago, that it's the old lawyer's dodge.
00:22:17.640You know, you just say it's self-evident and then you make it.
00:22:21.060So these are people on the outer edge of human thought saying, oh, yeah, isn't this obvious?
00:22:27.080And once you break that out, as hypocritical as the tolerance of slavery by many of the founders is, slavery is done. It may take too long, obviously, because one minute more in slavery is bad. Women will get the vote, even though it's a shameful 144 years from that day before they will have it.
00:22:47.260gay marriage is going to happen. All of these things get unlocked. When you take, no pun intended,
00:22:53.900John Locke's life, liberty, property, we change it to pursuit of happiness, not objects, but
00:22:58.820lifelong learning to be more virtuous. When you unlock that human energy, look what we created,
00:23:04.860the greatest country on earth for all the flaws. And I'm more than happy to spend the rest of our
00:23:10.080time together enumerating those things or to understand that they come together and they're
00:23:15.340they're um they're not mutually exclusive they are actually kind of lawfully bound to each other
00:23:21.500just as we make advances um in the mid 18th century franklin was disturbed by german immigration
00:23:30.400to pennsylvania and he said i like the lovely white and red meaning the white english settlers
00:23:39.380and the native americans and he thought the germans and this will come as a shock to everybody
00:23:44.360were thwarty and they were, you know, they were not befitting the character. Then all of a sudden
00:23:50.180we're letting everybody in, German immigrants, Irish immigrants, whatever. Then the doors are
00:23:54.680completely in, in the, in the early 19th century, people are trying to shut it down. No, no Catholics1.00
00:23:59.640can come. No, keep the Irish out. Let's, let's not do that. And then from 1870 till 1920, it's1.00
00:24:06.340wide open, except for, as you know, the Chinese Exclusion Act attempting to regulate the inflow of,
00:24:12.980of Asian peoples to the United States. And then in the 1920s, the door slammed shut. The Johnson
00:24:21.920Reed Immigration Act in 24 sets quotas. So it's going to make it impossible for us to respond to0.98
00:24:27.300the Holocaust, even though we let in more people than any other sovereign nation. I have to say0.96
00:24:32.340sovereign because of the number of people who immigrated to Palestine. But we could have saved0.88
00:24:36.720so many more human beings if we weren't imprisoned, locked into this straitjacket
00:24:41.480of Johnson Reed. And then you'd be making a dent in the 6 million number that we throw out without
00:24:47.020thinking. There are 9 million Jews in Europe in 1933. And by 1945, two out of three are dead.
00:24:54.380That's another way of saying 6 million. But if we'd knock that down by a million or 2 million
00:24:59.900or 3 million, which we could have easily done, think where we'd be in terms of our own greatness
00:25:06.220and our own thing, but those impulses towards anti-Semitism, the impulses to make of them
00:25:13.200somebody who's Catholic or black or female or different are always going to be part of
00:25:20.660the complexion. And as difficult as it is to, and I don't need to tell you, to manage a modern
00:25:26.960democracy, there's no other, you know, and the temptation is to regulate it, you know, and say,
00:25:33.700no, it's got to be this one way. We can only have this superficial history. There's no better
00:25:38.380form of government as chaotic as it is, as uncertain. The great jurist, learned hand,
00:25:45.140I mean, Governor, could there ever be a better name for a judge than learned hand,
00:25:49.520said liberty is never being too sure you're right. And there's a sort of sense now as we try to
00:25:57.320impose our will on chaotic events that the opposite of faith must be doubt. No, doubt is
00:26:03.500central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. That kills faith. And yet we see
00:26:10.820the damage that is done in the name of faith, that my faith is the only faith. That's why
00:26:16.900many of the founders sort of gravitated toward what's called deism, particularly Thomas Jefferson.
00:26:23.020And that is this idea that there is a supreme being, a supreme architect, divine providence, however you do it, but disinterested in the affairs of men and obviously making no distinction between faiths.
00:26:38.220So Jefferson has this wonderful line, if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no God at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
00:26:47.760I mean, just think about how much we're governed by the intolerance of the people who want
00:26:55.780to make distinctions between their correct right set of facts and someone else's.
00:27:02.460Does it, I mean, in contemporary terms, we're talking on a day where the Supreme Court is
00:27:07.880hearing arguments on sort of a core construct.
00:27:10.880When you talk about the Chinese Exclusion Act, its origin stories in the San Francisco
00:27:14.920Bay Area, Oakland. The original, forgive me, Donald Trump, I think, was Dennis Kearney,
00:27:19.400who began and ended every speech, the Working Men's Party, with the Chinese must go. And I go0.99
00:27:25.160down to Chinatown and the museums there, and you'll see the virtual walls being built to keep
00:27:30.340the Chinese out, led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. And obviously, part of the oral arguments
00:27:34.620today in the Supreme Court were around the Wong decision in the late 1880s. What do you make of,
00:27:39.980I mean, it just, it sounds like, I mean, none of this, again, nothing is surprising.
00:27:44.300It's very consistent with that thread of history.
00:27:46.440Well, you know, everybody likes to say in a kind of lazy fashion that history repeats itself.
00:28:03.820It means that human nature doesn't change and it superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events.
00:28:11.120And we see echoes, patterns, themes, motifs, or as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, rhymes.
00:28:17.600You know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
00:28:19.380So all these things are there and there are lazy ways to approach this subject.
00:28:23.380To be a, I mean, America at its best, you know, has always been pluralistic and like an alloy benefiting from all the ingredients that went into it.
00:28:37.920When it's at its worst is when it's nativist and saying, oh, there's really only one us and you're definitely not part of that.
00:28:46.780And this attempt at, I mean, look, one of my favorite amendments is the 14th. And the first really trumps it. But people say, oh, First Amendment, free speech or freedom to assemble. Those are number two and three.
00:29:01.420The first is Congress will make no establishment of a religion. We're the first country on earth that didn't have an official religion. And it made all the difference. The energy it gave us by being able to draw in from the people who don't believe in any God or believe in 20 gods has been a phenomenal achievement in the course of human history.
00:29:22.940And maybe we should just remember, starting with the Declaration and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and, you know, the Land Grant College Act and the Homestead Act and national parks and child labor and antitrust and, you know, the Social Security, labor's right to organize, the GI Bill, the interstate highway system, a man on the moon.
00:29:52.940Medicare, Medicaid, I've said Social Security, up to the Affordable Care Act, so many things
00:30:01.240that we have done, which have been transforming not only for our own people, but for the world.
00:30:08.460And then you find, inevitably, the retrenchment that takes place, the people, the oligarchs,
00:30:16.020the former slave owners who are still unhappy
00:34:04.540You speak of, you know, patriotism. We talk of nationalism. But what does patriotism mean to you? What how do you what's the sort of core essence of patriotism?
00:34:13.760Well, if you deal with American patriotism first, because I'm not that, you know, there's complicated relationships to British patriotism.
00:34:22.700We call ourselves patriots and the British call us rebels.
00:34:26.980Never once said patriot because patriot meant something, you know, something different in Britain.
00:34:34.260And they weren't going to ascribe us any other motives, even when they were surrendering, the British soldiers and the German soldiers were forbidden to look at the Americans.
00:34:42.580only the French were worthy of their attention, right? We were still just a rabble. And they were
00:34:47.960so humiliated at having, you know, the greatest military power on earth in the most far-flung1.00
00:34:53.180empire on earth had to admit that they had just lost to this ragtag. But who would have thought,1.00
00:34:59.840a German Hessian, Johann Ewald said, who would have thought a hundred years ago that out of this0.88
00:35:04.160multitude of rabble would arise a people who could defy kings. So if you accept an American form of0.85
00:35:10.720patriotism, just as a way for us to have a conversation for a few seconds, then embedded
00:35:16.100in his sense of our own exceptionalism, which is reasonable. Lincoln says in his address to
00:35:22.140Congress in what we'd call the State of the Union in 62, in the middle of the Civil War, just given
00:35:28.520the Emancipation Proclamation, it won't go into effect for a few weeks, but he said, we're the
00:35:32.940last best hope of Earth, right? He saw that. And I think Americans imbibe that and have a feeling
00:35:38.340and the list of accomplishments that I made across time
00:35:41.000and missing half of them are spectacular.0.69
00:35:46.080But if you are the best, if you are the goat of countries,
00:35:50.220do you think Tom Brady said after he won the first,
00:35:53.060well, now I can just rest on my lawns.
00:35:55.920There is a kind of almost furious self-involvement,
00:36:02.240that is to say self-reflection, Socratic, know yourself.
00:36:05.780there's an incredible criticism, even more discipline is applied. And I think what happens
00:36:10.480is that patriotism sort of splits off down the road. And one way is a kind of lazy thing,
00:36:16.160fills of slogans and is basically used to exclude people. And the other patriotism,
00:36:21.540which I think you subscribe to, is one which is energetic. It is engaged in process. It is
00:36:27.500in pursuit of happiness. It is after a more perfect union and it involves self-reflection.
00:36:33.920This is what our founders, when they said pursuit of happiness, was lifelong learning.
00:36:38.460If you learned all your life, you then could earn this extraordinary gift and responsibility of citizenship.
00:36:56.500And that if you did that, this constant self-awareness and improvement, then you'd be okay. I mean, in the middle of the deliberations about the articles of convention, while Washington's fighting in New York City against the British and about to lose because of a bad decision, strategic tactical decision, John Adams is going, is there enough?
00:37:20.240There's so much ambition and avarice, so much lust for profit. Is there enough virtue enough to create a republic? Those are the questions we should be asking ourselves, not is this group bad? Is it blood and soil?
00:37:34.420I mean, if you're making a blood and soil argument, to me, you're just, you're going to say, this is the Native American story, right? Because if anybody has six or 700 generations of experience to our nine or 10, it's Native peoples.
00:37:50.180And California, as you correctly pointed out, has an unbelievably shameful period where you have essentially state-sponsored genocide.
00:38:39.300You know, as they are now, there's a kind of muscular patriotism that I'm beginning to sense coming. And it's not a Democrat or Republican thing. It's go, wait a second, I did not sign up for this. I signed up for something else.
00:38:54.180yes, I don't agree with you about this, taxes, or that, or whatever it might be. But I do believe
00:39:01.300in these founding documents. I do not think that somebody should enrich themselves in office. I do
00:39:10.300not think, I mean, the founders, if they came, as the scholar Yuval Levin told me back in November,
00:39:15.920he said, they wouldn't be surprised that someone was seeking monarchical power. But they'd be so
00:39:21.120surprised and so disappointed in that their first article of the constitution after the beautiful
00:39:26.620poetic preamble written by governor morris of new york the rest of it is code it's just sort of the
00:39:32.860operating manual it's like ikea well how the hell am i going to put this in together and the first
00:39:38.080article is the legislative co-equal and he would be they would be so shocked that the legislated
00:39:45.240It had yielded so much out of fear of some kind of retribution that they'd ceded the ability to tax tariffs.
00:39:54.300The idea that you could change what the White House looked like or build a ballroom or slap your name on it, that's the province of Congress.
00:40:00.560The second article, the executive, would be the managers to carry out what Congress had said.
00:40:06.860And, oh, no, we're in too modern an age.
00:40:11.360And inevitably, the chaos that's created, if you get back to where you were before, somehow that's an overwhelming victory.
00:40:19.000You know, you go, OK, what Orwellian world are you living in?
00:40:25.240Ken, when you – there's so much to unpack there.
00:40:28.000I mean, that was – and he was a – he's a conservative historian that you were just referencing.
00:40:32.820Oh, Yuval Levin, a conservative scholar of the Constitution.
00:40:35.220But this is where I'm saying, we're all, if you look at Judd Ludwig, you know, these are people who are stunned at the kind of liberties that have been taken in the presumption that this is, you know, that the original founders intended a Christian nation.
00:40:52.200They wanted a God-fearing nation, but they were saying, no, look what's happened in the
00:40:57.600whole history of humanity when a government, you know, a kingdom has said that we have
00:41:04.260one way, my way or the highway, you know, Protestant Henry VIII or a Catholic Louis
00:41:19.940Did you, I mean, talk about presumption. When you went through this project, I mean, was it, how revelatory was all of this to you over the last 10 years? I mean, for someone that knows his stuff, you must have come in with all kinds, you were like, I got this.
00:41:33.880Yes, right, exactly. Well, I actually learned years ago to drop that arrogance because when I got my seventh or eighth film was a big history on baseball. And I go, well, I have no baseball now. And each day was a daily humiliation of what I didn't know.
00:41:53.420And so now I just presume that I've got a kind of working man's person. I'll do all right on Jeopardy. I'm the guy who wanted trivial pursuits at your party, but I know nothing. And so rather than think about it, rather than tell you what you should know about the revolution, why don't I share with you what I just discovered, what we just discovered.
00:42:15.320it's very much a we over the course of the last 10 years and we've got two dozen scholars and
00:42:20.960writers and we're not we're taking what they've learned not what their political uh not what
00:42:26.800their particular philosophy not political but their political uh their philosophy what the
00:42:31.260historians call historiography we don't have to buy into that and so you can be strengthened
00:42:35.720like the spokes on a wheel that give the the great dynamic strength to a wheel because you've
00:42:41.820got lots of different perspectives isn't just one you're not seeing it through one lens you're you're
00:42:47.280able to and this is where um story narrative which was understandably out of fashion uh by the middle
00:42:55.140of the of the 20th century is actually still the only way to tell a story honey how was your day
00:43:01.000does not begin i back slowly down the driveway avoiding the garbage can at the curb unless
00:43:07.180somebody t-bones you and that's exactly the way you do it what you do is you edit human experience
00:43:11.660and to do that you're going to have to know what that was and so we studied scholars who knew the
00:43:17.500native american countries knew the difference between the delaware and the shawnee who were
00:43:21.420actually partners or the creek the muskogee creeks or the cheyenne or you know whatever the the the
00:43:28.220i mean the cherokee or the anishinabe or the hoden and shone the the cayuga uh um seneca
00:43:36.220onondaga tuscarora oneida and mohawk that made up the the iroquois confederacy this this this
00:43:43.100democracy in a way this union this confederacy that franklin 20 years before the revolution said
00:43:48.940whoa this is pretty good we should try it ourselves and everybody said really good idea
00:43:53.340and every colony said nope we don't want to give up one ounce of authority to anything
00:43:58.780bigger than i'm than ourselves and so 20 years later this will will come to a head and we'll be
00:44:05.260able to figure out on our own um that but it just tells you how much we're bound to each other how
00:44:11.580much we're dependent on each other we know what the social compact is and unfortunately we live
00:44:17.820in a world today in computers where it's one and zero or the media culture where it's one thing or
00:44:23.820the other and we forget to select for the things that we hold in common i mean i say this to my
00:46:07.460Let's go back to arguing about the things that matter without demonizing us.
00:46:13.740You know, you just wondered, you know, for a long time, the Republican Party admirably and nobly held to this notion of the threat of communism, sometimes to great expense, if you think about the McCarthyism of the 50s, but also just the sort of the willingness to say, no, that's what it is.
00:46:31.460But when that system collapsed, unfortunately, there was an absence, a surface of ideas.
00:46:47.800I mean, actually, the stuff is coming out that it may not be limited to Democrats or
00:46:54.580even any political party, but just bad actors.
00:46:58.200And we need to get to the bottom of it and figure out that we don't need to, you know, keep wagging the dog here by, you know, capturing, you know, South American leaders or threatening Greenland or starting another war just to distract from information that I believe was supposed to come out in December, mid-December by law, by congressional law.
00:47:23.720and not all of the information has come out.
00:47:26.200And I just want to know who's being protected.
00:50:26.300And so did a 14-year-old kid named John Greenwood from Boston.
00:50:29.900So did a 15-year-old named Joseph Plum Martin from Connecticut.
00:50:33.920So did a lot of people that we don't know their stories who just said, yeah, I'm throwing in with this lot.
00:50:41.880It behooved most Native Americans to side with the British because they think at least they could forestall the onslaught into their territory of the Ohio Valley.0.68
00:50:54.680And then many times the British, whose empire depended entirely on the wealth that was generated from slavery, particularly in the Caribbean, they had 13 colonies there that were huge profit centers, only South Carolina and Virginia, for the reasons you can assume, are profit centers.
00:51:11.740The rest of the colonies aren't, but we're populated and we make things, so we're good trading partners and, you know, they want to keep us from taking Indian land because they can't afford to protect us and we want to take Indian land, so it's not just taxes and representation.
00:51:26.980So you begin to see this like dropping a stone in the water, and you follow the ripples out, and it becomes so amazing that we see.
00:51:35.840Lexington Green, April 19, 1775, the chances of success are zero.
00:51:43.380And six and a half years later, on the 17th of October at Yorktown, they're 100%.
00:51:50.640Don't you want to know how that happened?
00:52:08.000We can get into Benedict Arnold later.
00:52:10.340It's so interesting that for us, it means one thing.
00:52:13.320And it's actually a much more dynamic, complicated thing that teaches an essential lesson about
00:52:19.400humanity and the conflicts, not only between people, but within them.
00:52:24.140just as George Washington is wrestling, Thomas Jefferson is wrestling. They know slavery is
00:52:28.640wrong. They know it's wrong. And, and the, the great Harvard scholar, Annette Gordon-Reed says,
00:52:34.580how can you do something if you know it's wrong? And she comes on camera and says, well, that's
00:52:40.220the human question for all of us. Meaning she's not taking Thomas Jefferson off the hook and
00:52:45.020forgiving him. She's leaving him on the hook and putting the rest of us for our sanctimonious
00:52:51.820idea of our ability to judge another when we ourselves are walking contradictions and flaws.
00:53:00.080So the fact that we had a success, that something was born out of here that turned out to be the
00:53:05.740greatest country ever, right, is just spectacular to me and is a wonderful one. If you just think
00:53:15.460that it's only spectacular, then you're, you missed a point. We had some compromises in the
00:53:21.600constitution that were incredibly genius and some that were unbelievably tragic that perpetuated
00:53:29.560the institution of slavery, even when they knew, I mean, they were saying, George Washington said,
00:53:34.560you know, they're treating us like slaves. They're treating us in the same way that we treat the
00:53:38.680Negroes over which we have arbitrary sway. So they know they're using the language of slavery0.94
00:53:44.960And they're going, you know, wait a second. And you have find the British going, how is it that this driver of Negroes, George Washington, is having success against us? I mean, not that they're opposed to slavery. They're for it. But every once in a while, they'll offer freedom to those enslaved people of rebels.0.97
00:54:02.980as as a scholar pointed out in the film not sure how you tell if you're had a if you're an enslaved
00:54:09.200person of a of a loyalist and you hear there's freedom promised i would say oh yeah my master's
00:54:15.600a this and you know and and so people would just we think of it as big ideas and they are they're
00:54:22.000really important and they're and we're going to sponsor revolutions for the next 200 plus years
00:54:26.920when ho chi minh declares vietnamese independence in 1945 he's quoting thomas jefferson but the
00:54:32.880decisions that people make are incredibly local. Where is the daylight that I can get to? For me,
00:54:40.820not only me, but my children and my children's children's children. Like that's the important
00:54:45.960thing. If you're enslaved, this is the last thing anybody on earth wants to be. And you're going to
00:54:52.940make the decision which you think is the best. Sometimes that's going to the British. There's0.99
00:54:56.980painful, painful moments in New York City, which doesn't evacuate. The British don't leave there.1.00
00:55:02.880until two years and a month after Yorktown.
00:55:06.160And what they're doing in those last months
00:55:07.880is they're adjudicating which of the black people
00:59:33.200I mean, I love your language about this notion
00:59:36.440of a finished monument versus this notion of unfinished responsibility. And you keep coming
00:59:42.420back, this notion of citizenship, active, not inert citizenship, that we have agency, we can
00:59:46.960shape the future. We're not by standards. I think it was Brandeis who said, in a democracy, the most
00:59:51.940important office is office of citizen. So this is what Washington knew, right? When he resigns,
00:59:58.560I think he was tacitly saying, even when he resigned the military commission, I am a citizen.
01:00:04.620And then at the presidency, I'm a citizen. Adams wanted him to take a kind of royal or princely title. He goes, no, president, it's okay for me. And so I'm sorry I interrupted you. But I think that's really at the heart of it, that this building block is not the top, it's the bottom, or the bottom is the top, the individual agency of each human being.
01:00:28.180And the story of us has been the expansion of what was a very limited phrase, all men are created equal, all white men of property free of debt.
01:00:49.300The no kings rallies, the sense, I mean, I'm starting to feel more optimistic listening to you about.
01:00:57.660Well, this moment, this sort of this energy, this percolation, this notion that the top is the bottom, this notion that we the foundational principles that have allowed us to endure and endure these moments.
01:01:10.680And the fact that these moments are hardly unique in our history and the fact that we've been able to persevere.
01:01:16.540I mean, are you are you feeling more or less optimistic in that context?
01:01:20.300I know it's the rote question you get every interview.
01:01:23.400So in the context of this moment in particular, and I mean, quite literally, perhaps this moment.
01:01:29.340Yes, Governor, I believe in that. I do think that the three great crises that we could identify
01:01:36.100after our founding, the Civil War, the Depression, and World War II, were the great crises. I think
01:01:42.480we're in a fourth. I think the existential threats are unprecedented. In those first three crises,
01:01:48.700There were free and fair elections. There was a peaceful transfer of power. There was an independence of the judiciary, all of which seems in play.
01:01:57.700And yet I think part of the sort of arrogance of the present is you think that because you're alive that you must know more than those who came before us, that somehow because we've survived, our situation is so much more bad or worse or great.
01:02:17.660And I think that we have to, Lincoln says it in that same address to Congress, he says, the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, we must think anew, we must act anew, we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we can save our country.
01:02:38.380that leads to the last best hope of earth it means that you've got to just sort of
01:02:44.460say yes it's unprecedented but also have faith in the american people which is something that
01:02:50.720autocrats don't have they can use them they can play groups off one another but they have
01:02:56.340zero faith in in the actual um stuff of what it is to struggle to be human and to just
01:03:04.400you know in economies and families get by you know with with opioid addictions with hard work
01:03:11.960with illness unexpected illnesses all of the things not you know the the disparity of wages
01:03:18.080i mean i made a film on baseball and in the 70s um you know it was the same thing with with
01:03:24.260corporate ceos that you know the ceo of a company made at best like eight nine times what the line
01:03:32.120guy made and now we're talking about 800 times as much and so we we the proportionality of things
01:03:39.000and it permits you know we have great articulators of that um disparity and and we sort of think as
01:03:45.200politics as a line it's a circle you know like a third of bernie's supporters uh voted for hillary
01:03:51.600a third stayed home and a third voted for trump so you know that somewhere in this you have to just
01:03:58.260be able to articulate that you understand what is the stuff of life. How do you get through? How do
01:04:04.820you put food on the table for your families? How do you do that? But incumbent in an American
01:04:10.860dynamic is that you have to exercise citizenship. It is no longer convenient to stay home or to say
01:04:18.220it doesn't count because it does count and it does matter and you can't stay home. And it doesn't
01:04:24.700mean you have to be involved you don't have to go to marches you don't have to do this but you can
01:04:29.340vote you can be engaged in civics taken out of our curriculum it's been a dirty word for three or
01:04:36.000four decades um they don't teach history anymore either they just want the automatons of stem to
01:04:43.280just go forward there's something missing i remember an executive when i was working on my
01:04:47.720first film on the brooklyn bridge executive at at&t very senior he was just lamenting he said
01:04:52.540i just wish you would come to work for me i can teach you what i know i have all these newly
01:04:57.200minted mbas but they can't write a letter they don't know about ethics they don't know about
01:05:02.340history they don't know about comparative religion and so they're absent something and i can't teach
01:05:08.060them that you have that and i can teach you whatever things and you don't want to do this
01:05:13.120i said no i do not i want to go off and make documentary films and thank you very much for
01:05:17.960introducing me to people who would help us do it. But it really stuck with me. It was a lament
01:05:23.600that somehow in our rush for the bottom line, we've forgotten to serve the basic instincts of
01:05:30.780a democracy, which is a mechanical question. How does it work? Who are we? What's the ingredients?
01:05:38.600You know, people talk about Machiavelli, the prince says this Machiavellian is a pejorative
01:05:43.700adjective, but it really is the study of how you get things done, how you get along with your
01:05:48.020neighbors. How do you make something? How do you compromise? How do you say, okay, you want this?
01:05:52.720I remember in my film about Thomas Jefferson 20 plus years ago, George Will said, democracy is
01:06:00.640the politics of the half loaf. You don't get everything. Half loaf, half loaf. You don't get
01:06:06.380everything, you know, be so suspicious of the 99 to one vote and be rejoice at the 51 to 49 vote.
01:06:14.480You know, that's okay. That's okay. And what you're, you know, people argue, oh, we're just
01:06:19.780trying to address this, you know, those two percentage points of independence or soccer moms
01:06:25.720or whatever the new thing is. No, it's not about that. You're trying to engage everybody in this
01:06:30.680process. And that's where I think you can have a sense of optimism. You can have a sense of
01:06:36.380purpose. You can say, no, this doesn't sit white. I don't like it. Somebody celebrating the death0.51
01:06:41.620of somebody else that they didn't agree with or demonizing somebody else that they disagree with.
01:06:51.320Disagreement is human, right? Even within ourselves. Whitman said, do I contradict myself?
01:06:57.640i contradict myself and it's it's about as american a catechism as i know
01:07:02.320so as we march forward ken to july 4th and you know here we are uh just a few months out i mean
01:07:10.780what you know look if you could you can write the the next the chapters of the next few months what
01:07:16.500i mean at our best what would you expect what do you expect of the states and what do you i mean
01:07:21.140you obviously you've you've got the saccharine version as you describe it that you know is likely
01:07:25.760to be portrayed top down. And, you know, we can anticipate, I mean, you know, everything died in
01:07:30.960purple and, you know, pictures on the side of walls and, you know, arches and coins, that version.
01:07:37.380But what, you know, what's, what's, give me, write that story. What should we be doing? What can I
01:07:43.800be doing in the next few months? What should we be doing? In many of our religious traditions,
01:07:49.020we have, there's a phrase, as above, so below. And you could say, if you want to translate to
01:07:54.820something more rational, that there is a startling and profound similarity between the architecture
01:08:00.420of an atom and the architecture of the solar system, right? So just hold that and say,
01:08:07.700I need to be two things. I need to be individual. I read at the lake, on the porch,
01:08:16.040the Declaration of Independence every single 4th of July, you know? And my poor kids and
01:08:22.360Now, grandkids can't start eating hamburgers and hot dogs until granddaddy gets through with this reading.
01:08:28.780And whatever you do that makes you happy, my favorite holiday, without a doubt, before this film, before any conversation, has always been the Fourth of July, followed by Thanksgiving, because of the way we come together.
01:08:42.540So let's have what we always do, that individual thing, but then let's try to imagine it as a larger thing.
01:08:51.980So if there's an atomic moment on that porch at the lake, what's the what's the solar system of this? And it has to be a kind of righteous reengagement with the principles of our founding. Let's go back and say, this is what we meant. And, you know, I had screenings of the film before it was done. We're working on it. We're trying to get better. And I go, geez, there's a lot of red meat for MAGA.
01:09:17.340And then I went and said, great, great, you know, this is it.
01:09:22.320You know, there's these over mountain men in the Carolinas that are, have defied the
01:09:26.920British proclamation that you can't cross the Appalachians.
01:09:29.100And they just said, F you, and went over there and started it.
01:09:32.140And then when the British said, unless you do this, this, and this, we will come over
01:12:58.140Endlessly walking to dinner, even when he was sick, into Palo Alto from his home.
01:13:05.040But I walked out of the room an hour later, not just with that friendship, but with a commitment that Apple continued to honor of giving software and hardware to nonprofits.
01:13:15.040um which was the only way i could sort of handle it and he just couldn't conceive of it and it's
01:13:21.080so funny that when i tell this story people said oh you should have asked him for like
01:13:24.540you know a tenth of a penny every time we use i said you don't know steve jobs he would have said
01:13:29.620um uh we'll call it the pan and zoom effect goodbye right and i but but what he respected
01:13:36.780was somebody who was just outside him saying at one point he came to me and he says he calls me
01:13:43.120up. And he goes, you don't, you're not, you're not doing this right. You're, you're being taken
01:13:46.880advantage of. And he said, I want your lawyer to talk to my lawyer about your, your PBS deals.
01:13:52.260Cause I'm in PBS and, and they're outside the marketplace. Right. And, and then he came back,
01:13:58.220he said, Oh, it looks like you're doing like, you've got the right thing. And I said, look,
01:14:01.660all I want is to be independent. I want to be able to talk to you or the governor of California and
01:14:06.840say, all of these films are director's cuts. There's not a layer of suits above me that are
01:14:12.000saying longer, shorter, sexier, less sexier, you're more violent, less violent. But that
01:14:16.900another way, let me just put it this way. If you don't like any of those films,
01:14:21.660it's all my fault. And that's what I want it to be. You know, I love it. Hey, Ken, just,
01:14:27.660just very briefly, just previewing you, you mentioned a couple of the films you're working
01:14:31.380on. I mean, I think there's an LBJ film as well. I mean, yeah, we, yeah, we're, we're doing LBJ
01:14:35.520and the great society. You know, we'd done the Vietnam thing and LBJ is like Nixon, one of these
01:14:39.660great tragic figures but his domestic agenda he was trying to be the next coming of fdr in fact
01:14:45.920he chooses the initials because the first person who ever had initials in a big way to the population
01:14:52.120was fdr and so here's lbj and that that was um an interesting thing and i i it's we take care of his
01:15:00.800domestic agenda in one sentence in an 18-hour film 10 episodes in vietnam so we wanted to reverse
01:15:06.540engineer it, to pull the sweater inside out and be inside the White House, watch the guns
01:15:11.140of Vietnam get louder and louder, but see this extraordinary domestic achievement.
01:15:16.700He's able to pass a civil rights bill that John F. Kennedy, who's very late to civil
01:15:20.740rights, probably couldn't get passed, and a voting rights.
01:15:23.820And he knew as a Southerner what the cost would be.
01:15:26.380And I think to be able to shed from waking up on election day and knowing you had every
01:15:33.720former state of the Confederacy on your pocket is not necessarily the best thing you want to be in
01:15:39.020because you're dealing with people who are continued to perpetuate the lost cause. And then
01:15:45.200he does all this other stuff, Medicare and Medicaid, public broadcasting, all these things
01:15:49.420that are sort of under his belt, but it's an amazing story. So we're just doing that. We're
01:15:53.080also doing a history of reconstruction called Emancipation to Exodus. I've had the privilege
01:15:57.300of interviewing Barack Obama eight times, eight two hour, hour and a half, two hour interviews.
01:16:03.440No rush. We want to wait until there's scholarship and whatever. And we also are saving a couple of
01:16:09.900interviews to sort of think about what happened after his presidency. And until the dust
01:16:14.400settles a bit, it's going to be hard to talk about it. We've also been filming people who
01:16:18.940knew Dr. King in the service of a big biography on King. So those are very much active. And we've
01:16:24.360just begun work on a big history. We originally thought for years we'd do something on the Cold
01:16:29.280War. And I just switched it about a year ago or six months ago in my mind to doing a history of
01:16:34.840the CIA. And just think about it. You'll get the Cold War, but you'll get all the intimacies of
01:16:42.880the stories. And you'll be in every president's Oval Office. And you'll be in exotic places all
01:16:50.100around the world with people who are putting their life on their lines and big mistakes,
01:16:55.720huge mistakes and heroic unsung successes. And, you know, that's the essence of a good story,
01:17:03.340right? And an essence of a hell of a life, Ken, look at you. I mean, decades of, I mean,
01:17:10.340so you are hardly slowing down. No, no, no. So I'm 72 and I'm like an idiot. I've got more on
01:17:16.880my plate that I've ever had, because, you know, if I were given a thousand years to live, which I
01:17:21.300will not be given, I would not run out of topics in American history. So there's this kind of sense
01:17:26.900of urgency of like having to get it done. There's so many great stories still to be told.
01:17:34.080Well, thank you for being such a great storyteller. Thank you for reminding me. It's not just
01:17:38.040arguments that win the day. It is storytelling. It can move people.
01:17:42.640Well, you know, it's a benign Trojan horse. You let the story in, and it doesn't come out in the middle of the night and slay the populace and burn the city down. It comes out and it has the possibility of offering people, not the binary, that doesn't exist in the real world, only in computers, a one and a zero, and only in a media thing, red state or blue state, right?
01:18:04.720so if you've got a complicated story then you have to begin to understand like oh i have these two
01:18:12.940and i can't be i can't be convinced that it's only black or white from what the tv tells me it's one
01:18:20.460it's not one thing or the other i have inside me these contradictions these these flaws and
01:18:25.780these weaknesses then it makes me a better citizen makes me a better parent makes me a better
01:18:29.860husband or wife. It makes me a better politician. It makes me a better American. And that's all we
01:18:35.620want. I love it. Ken, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thank you, sir.
01:18:46.760Joy is essential and it's also elusive. But now there's a new and exciting way to start your
01:18:53.260journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotb.
01:19:00.120If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting,
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01:19:12.540Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb is presented by CVS. Hey everybody, it's the Jonas Brothers. This week,
01:19:19.020we're so excited to be hanging out with Mika Abdallah
01:19:48.080And on the Disgraceland podcast, I explore the wild lives of rock stars and unbelievable true crime stories from music history.
01:19:56.800These are the stories you haven't heard, the kind you'll end up telling someone else.
01:20:02.000Like the time Paul McCartney spent in a notorious prison, or the bizarre crime Lady Gaga has accused of, or that time Blondie's Debbie Harry escaped Ted Bundy.
01:20:12.920Listen to Disgraceland on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
01:20:20.340My first guest is Paris Hilton, Shakira, Luke, and Yerin.