00:02:46.620yeah i'm i'm sorry to say i think that there are as you know there are 342 million podcasts and uh
00:02:56.480i've i've i've done half of them and i'm absolutely certain not in this case that i'm speaking to
00:03:02.860myself and to the person i'm talking to at least now i know that there's at least a few other
00:03:07.980people listening god bless you man i uh yeah no i it's uh i imagine that's got to be the biggest
00:03:13.780change for you since you started this, right? 20 years ago had been, you know, the broadcast
00:03:18.360work or in person. Now it's, you know, ubiquity. Oh yeah. Well, we were still doing all of the
00:03:23.500old stuff. I mean, I've been doing it for, it's almost 50 years. And, you know, we started off
00:03:29.580in film and analog, you know, with razor blades, cutting film and taping them together and drawing
00:03:34.920grease pencils on the film and then, you know, digital editing and then, and videotape. And we
00:03:41.160we were always 10 years behind intentionally so that the technological tail didn't wag the dog
00:03:46.740and um and so we're just you know perpetually luddites catching up with everything but we're
00:03:53.680doing the old broadcast stuff too i went to 40 cities had 80 screenings you know uh but also did
00:04:00.84075 podcasts from joe rogan to you know the whatever the comparable is on the other side
00:04:06.840Mark 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, the New York Times to inner city kids and in Charleston and Detroit and suburban kids in Chicagoland and all the other places.
00:04:23.400and it it worked out okay because the story is so compelling that a lot of these divisions which we
00:04:30.480think are completely clogging our arteries fall away because if you tell if you tell a good story
00:04:37.520then you tell a good story and everybody's got a got an interest in a good story when you were
00:04:42.900talking to theo and joe and guys like that that may be you know perceived on a number of issues
00:04:47.240lean a little bit more to the right. Were they surprised by the fact that we are so surprised
00:04:54.100by this division that we have in this country? And you're able to contextualize that and say,
00:04:59.000you know, give me a break, you know, particularly with this film, which is as much about the civil
00:05:03.800war, not just the world war. Right. No, no, no. And I think one of the things about the revolution
00:05:08.980is that it is a civil war. It's a revolution. And we've sort of made it gallant and bloodless
00:05:15.100because I think, you know, accepting the violence of the Civil War and the 20th century wars,
00:05:20.720we don't want to have anything take away from the big ideas in Philadelphia in 76 and then in
00:05:25.9601787. But in fact, if you tell the correct story, those ideas aren't diminished in any way. They're
00:05:32.180actually made even more impressive that we were born in violence. So I think that the divisions
00:05:37.700that we experience now are part of the narcissism. It's always the best time or the worst time that
00:05:42.940we're living in. So I think everybody's less aware of the way in which they might contribute
00:05:47.000to those divisions than they want to just sort of repeat the same thing over and over again. And I'd
00:05:52.020suggest that, yeah, we're really divided, but not as bad as the revolution, not as bad as the Civil
00:05:56.580War, not as bad as the period of reconstruction right after the Civil War, which I'm working on
00:06:01.420a film on right now called Emancipation to Exodus, not during the Depression, like the second
00:06:06.960Vietnam, you remember Vietnam, 69 to 75, hundreds of bombings, hundreds of bombings. And so I think
00:06:16.240the good thing about the study of history is it gives you a little bit of perspective and a little
00:06:20.740bit of even optimism. You know, if you accept a priori that optimism is not a pejorative or a
00:06:28.880naive position, but in fact, a legitimate stake, which is, you know, we'll get through this.
00:06:34.320I 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.
00:06:49.480But I'm curious, you know, just going back to how we began casually the conversation.
00:06:53.780It's interesting. You talked about I love this notion of a razor blade editing back in the day, et cetera.
00:06:59.520And 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.
00:07:08.080But 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?
00:07:14.300Was it primarily through the platform at PBS or, you know, finding your way onto Oprah as a sort of monumental moment and achievement?
00:07:24.120Yeah, so that's exactly right. And it still remains the same.
00:07:27.420And still PBS is the broadcast platform is great.
00:07:30.400Only this time, the American Revolution, you know, six parts, 12 hours comes out in mid-November last year.
00:07:38.740And by the end of the year, we've accumulated 18 million viewers in traditional broadcast, which is pretty damn good.
00:07:46.600But we've hit, for the first time in PBS's history, the top 10 of streaming.
00:07:51.580And for me, this Luddite, they've got a metric, which is at that moment, at the end of November, 565 million minutes of streaming.
00:07:59.940You 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.
00:08:23.940and that, you know, liberals only like this. And it's not true. The novelist Richard Powers said
00:08:30.200something that I've been quoting for years now. He said, the best arguments in the world,
00:08:35.560and that's all we do is argue, won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing
00:08:39.900that can do that is a good story. Because in a computer world where everything's a one or a zero,
00:08:45.320in a media culture where everything's red state or blue state, young or old, black or white,
00:08:48.920gay or straight, rich or poor, north or south, east or west, all the dialectics that we are
00:08:53.300preoccupied with, which don't actually exist, there's no room for the complexity that we extend
00:09:00.240to the people we love, to the friends that we have, to the colleagues that we work with, to the
00:09:04.540understanding that the struggles are within us, that, you know, we say there are no, we lament
00:09:10.220that there are no heroes today, Governor, you know, and if you go back and say, well, where does
00:09:16.280the notion of heroism come from? It comes from the Greeks, and they endowed their gods with these
00:09:21.320examples for us mortals to study. And are those gods perfect? No. Achilles has his heel and his
00:09:28.080hubris to go along with his great strengths. So heroism is really a negotiation, sometimes a war
00:09:33.500within a person over their great strengths. So if you leave George Washington out on his marble
00:09:39.520statue collecting pigeon shit, he seems perfect. You know, never tells a lie, cut down a cherry
00:09:44.820tree coin across the Potomac. But if you examine him and understand that he's a very human character,
00:09:51.480he owns 577 human beings in his lifetime. As the writer Rick Atkinson said, you can't square that
00:09:58.580circle. He's right. He's rash on the battlefield, risking the entire cause by rushing out into the
00:10:03.900field. If he's killed or captured, it's all over. He makes some tactical mistakes that are in some
00:10:10.880he's inexcusable. And yet he's able to convince people to fight him the dead of night. He defers
00:10:16.160to Congress. He has great humility. He picks subordinate talent, generals that are better
00:10:20.700than him, like Benedict Arnold and Nathaniel Green. And he twice gives up power, military at
00:10:29.180the height of his military power and the presidency at the height of his political power. And that
00:10:34.220has set us in motion. So you can have in a story that we tell, which is as much bottom up as it is
00:10:39.740top down. You can have the almost exhilarating, you know, off brand thing that we don't have a
00:10:46.800country without him. And yet, in order to tell the story correctly, you know, you have to do
00:10:52.520all the other things. We live in a highlight world, right? Babe Ruth comes up, he hits a home
00:10:57.920run, right? But Babe Ruth struck out many more times than he hit home runs. And Babe Ruth only
00:11:03.380comes up once every nine times at bat so sometimes as any uh inhabitant of of los angeles can tell
00:11:10.900you sometimes it's the middle infielder sometimes it's the second baseman that is the deciding factor
00:11:17.540in any given moment so we're obligated to tell a complicated history there's no other word it's
00:11:24.020almost redundant complicated history or complicated human being and that any attempt to simplify it
00:11:31.060is really just the work of an authoritarian. That is to say, we're going to make this simple.
00:11:35.420We're going to keep you uninformed. We're going to keep you subscribing to superstitions and
00:11:40.420conspiracy theories that distract you from the fact that I have my boot on the back of your neck.
00:11:46.680Did, was that, I mean, was that omnipresent, you know, 200 years ago, this, this notion of
00:11:51.920censoring historic facts, rewriting history was, you know, was, was that constantly present?
00:11:57.780in our history. Yeah, I think that, you know, disinformation has always been, I'm sure the
00:12:02.400first conversation between two human beings ever was a lie, you know, or at least a lie was part
00:12:07.740of that. And I think that we do a disservice and say, oh, our time is worse. You know, the chicken
00:12:12.600littles, the sky's falling. I remember when, you know, when new technologies come along, like,
00:12:16.720oh, say the telegraph in the 1850s, people are wringing their hands. This is the end of letter
00:12:22.300writing. It's the end of this. And so I think, yeah, there's a lot. In fact, Sam Adams, who we
00:12:27.500think of as a beer. He was a failure as a brewer and a tax collector, but he was really good
00:12:33.980propagandist. And he said something that reminded me of our current media landscape. He said,
00:12:38.840there were times when the British would acquiesce. Okay, the Stamp Act, we're done with it. We're
00:12:43.320not going to impose it. And so everybody, the Sons of Liberty disband and it's all over. And
00:12:48.200Sam Adams is going, no, they're just going to do something bad. And he said, my job was to keep my
00:12:52.860fellow countrymen alive to their grievances, right? Sound familiar? In which you only have
00:12:59.720a politics that has to do with them and us. And my whole thing is that I've been making films about
00:13:06.560the US, but I've also been making films about us, that is to say the lowercase two-letter plural
00:13:12.800pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our, and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction,
00:14:18.620It just means that heretofore in the history of human beings, people have been subjects.
00:14:26.040And we're creating something new called citizens.
00:14:28.760And it's going to take an extra amount of energy to do that.
00:14:31.460And human beings will naturally devolve to the camps, to the tribal stuff.
00:14:35.840But we're actually going to experiment.
00:14:37.400We'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.
00:14:50.400It'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.
00:15:15.200We're all bound together by that web of mutuality.
00:15:18.020And, and, but I think about this and I think about it in the context of what you're, you
00:15:21.340know, so much of the work you're doing and so much of the notion of myth and this sort
00:15:26.580of chiseled notion of a monument, et cetera, and, and, and how we sanitize so much of that.
00:15:32.000But 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.
00:15:41.860I 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.
00:15:54.020It was his first state of the state speech.
00:15:55.740But I use that language and people are immediately offended and find it shameful.
00:16:01.080and I'm not providing context. He was in the vast majority. He was truly representative
00:16:05.960of the time. And so what's that, you know, this notion of myth and the importance of myth,
00:16:11.020the importance of things that we can unite around. How do you find that tension? Or you just try to
00:16:16.460go straight to the facts? Well, you know, we were interested, Governor, in calling balls and strikes.
00:16:21.240So I'm interested in the facts, however messy. I have in my editing room a neon sign that's been
00:16:25.920there for years and years and years, the main editing room. And it says it's complicated
00:16:58.840And at the beginning of the revolution, two and a half to three million Americans, 500,000 of whom are free or enslaved black people.
00:17:05.840There are within those 13 colonies becoming states, native peoples whose land has already been acquired and they have either assimilated or they're trying to figure out how to coexist.
00:17:16.600And on the Western border, there are dozens of nations that are as individual and as important on a global stage economically, diplomatically, militarily as, say, France and Prussia are.
00:17:36.940And we also remember, we don't call ourselves the Eastern Seaboard Congress who appoints George Washington, the head of the Eastern Seaboard Army. They know what's out there. They've heard of California. They know what's there. And they are a continental army and they're planning to get it.
00:17:53.920So all of a sudden, you have really interesting dynamics of black Americans deciding to side with the British or fight with the patriots or Native Americans doing the same things that are sometimes dividing their old alliances and confederacies and destroying them.
00:18:11.100There's one woman, a Mohegan woman from, I assume, Connecticut, north central Connecticut, named Rebecca Tanner, who loses five sons, five sons fighting for the patriot cause.
00:18:22.000And so we have a much more interesting, it's a very, of an enormous variety of people. People in my state of New Hampshire, where I've lived for the last 47 years, and Georgia feel like they're from different countries. They're like, totally different.
00:18:37.620The idea that someone like Washington or Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or others that we don't know that much about. Mercy Otis Warren is the first historian of the American Revolution, a friend of Abigail Adams. It's nice when you have Meryl Streep reading off camera and bringing Mercy Otis Warren alive.
00:18:56.880But they're talking about how it might be that we could not be an individual thing, but a one thing.
00:19:04.260And that, you know, it's the first idea that Washington's really great as he's trying to inspire men to fight in the dead of night.
00:19:12.040And often they're teenagers, children.
00:19:15.340They're going back to plant their crops or to reap their crops.
00:19:19.500And what happens is the Continental Army becomes filled with nerdy wells and teenagers and recent immigrants.
00:19:25.400And so democracy becomes not the intention of the revolution. It becomes a byproduct. Because all of a sudden, you can't just win against the greatest power on earth without foreign help, the French. But you also can't win unless you say, we're going to give you something for the sacrifices that you've made.
00:19:44.100And so what happens is that you emerge with a kind of fledgling democracy out of what was going to be a republic, a kind of aristocracy.
00:19:52.580The right would say the elites who control everything.
00:19:55.400But those elites are the guys that we're supposed to all agree that we like are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and Patrick Henry and James Mason and James Monroe and all of the so-called founding fathers.
00:24:28.640No one was talking semi-quincentennial. No one was talking 250th. About halfway through, I thought, man, if we accelerate, we could be at the 250th of Lexington and Concord. And my co-director, Sarah Bottsine, correctly corrected me and said, we'll still be mixing it online and you'll be out on the road promoting it. It'll be in the fall.
00:24:47.820I said, okay. And then I realized, oh, well, there's going to be a celebration. At least
00:24:52.780we might be offering something a little bit more substantive than what I worried would be kind of
00:24:59.040fife and drum treacle, you know, that you would just devolve to the lowest common denominator
00:25:03.480of an unexamined patriotism. And then of course, we're in the circumstances that we're in where
00:25:09.800we really have an opportunity in crisis to look back at our founding, just as an individual would
00:25:15.400do. You'd go to a pastor or a professional, and the first thing they'd ask you is, where'd you
00:25:19.860come from? Who are your parents? What are your early life like? So if you go back to your origin
00:25:24.420story as a way to reset, recommit to those ideals that were brand new on July 4th, 1776,
00:25:32.920we are, there's some folks called citizens, and there's the only place is the Eastern Seaboard
00:25:37.800of the United States. White men of property, mostly, but it's going to grow. And the second
00:25:42.860you break out this argument between Englishmen into natural rights saying, oh no, we hold these
00:25:50.140truths to be self-evident. Jefferson wrote it, Governor, he wrote, we hold these truths to be
00:25:55.220sacred and undeniable, which would be a really good enlightenment. I want to make an argument
00:25:59.260to you. This is what we believe, right? Franklin gets it and says, you know, no, no, no, self-evident.
00:26:06.900There's nothing self-evident about these ideas. But as someone said in a film we made about
00:26:11.760Franklin a few years ago, that it's the old lawyer's dodge. You just say it's self-evident
00:26:17.120and then you make it. So these are people on the outer edge of human thought saying, oh yeah,
00:26:23.800isn't this obvious? And once you break that out, as hypocritical as the tolerance of slavery by
00:26:29.540many of the founders is, slavery's done. It may take too long, obviously, because one minute more
00:26:36.680and slavery is bad. Women will get the vote, even though it's a shameful 144 years from that day
00:26:43.540before they will have it. Gay marriage is going to happen. I mean, all of these things get unlocked
00:26:48.700when you take, no pun intended, John Locke's life, liberty, property, we change it to pursuit
00:26:54.420of happiness, not objects, but lifelong learning to be more virtuous. When you unlock that human
00:26:59.960energy, look what we created, the greatest country on earth for all the flaws. And I'm
00:27:05.020More than happy to spend the rest of our time together enumerating those things or to understand that they come together and they're not mutually exclusive.
00:27:16.120They are actually kind of lawfully bound to each other just as we make advances.
00:27:21.400In the mid-18th century, Franklin was disturbed by German immigration to Pennsylvania.
00:27:28.700and he said i like the lovely white and red meaning the white english settlers and the
00:27:37.380native americans and he thought the germans and this will come as a shock to everybody
00:27:41.820were thwarty and they were you know they were not befitting the character then all of a sudden
00:27:47.620we're letting everybody in german immigrants irish immigrants whatever then the doors are
00:27:52.120completely in in the early 19th century people are trying to shut it down no no catholics can
00:27:57.320No, keep the Irish out. Let's let's not do that. And then from 1870 till 1920, it's wide open, except for, as you know, the Chinese Exclusion Act attempting to regulate the inflow of Asian peoples to the United States.
00:28:15.000And then in the 1920s, the door slammed shut.
00:28:18.880The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in 24 sets quotas, so it's going to make it impossible
00:28:23.320for us to respond to the Holocaust, even though we let in more people than any other sovereign
00:28:40.140And then you'd be making a dent in the 6 million number that we throw out without thinking. There are 9 million Jews in Europe in 1933. And by 1945, two out of three are dead. That's another way of saying 6 million.
00:28:54.000But if we'd knocked that down by a million or two million or three million, which we could have easily done, think where we'd be in terms of our own greatness and our own thing.
00:29:05.720But we that those impulses towards anti-Semitism, the impulses to make a them of somebody who's Catholic or black or female or different are always going to be part of the complexion.
00:29:19.100And as difficult as it is to and I don't need to tell you to manage a modern democracy, there's no other, you know, and the temptation is to regulate it, you know, and say, oh, it's got to be this one way.
00:29:32.880we can only have this superficial history, there's no better form of government, as chaotic as it is,
00:29:38.880as uncertain. The great jurist, learned hand, I mean, Governor, could there ever be a better name
00:29:45.060for a judge than learned hand, said liberty is never being too sure you're right. And there's
00:29:52.060a sort of sense now as we try to impose our will on chaotic events that the opposite of faith must
00:29:59.440be doubt. No, doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. That kills
00:30:05.760faith. And yet we see the damage that is done in the name of faith, that my faith is the only faith.
00:30:13.660That's why many of the founders sort of gravitated toward what's called deism,
00:30:19.200particularly Thomas Jefferson. And that is this idea that there is a supreme being,
00:30:23.720a supreme architect, divine providence, however you do it, but disinterested in the affairs of
00:30:28.700man. And obviously making no distinction between faiths. So Jefferson has this wonderful line,
00:30:37.900if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no God at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my
00:30:44.880leg. I mean, just think about how much we're governed by the intolerance of the people who
00:30:52.880want to make distinctions between their correct right set of facts and and someone else's does
00:31:00.040it i mean in contemporary terms we're talking uh on a day where the supreme court is hearing
00:31:05.780arguments on sort of a core construct when you talk about the chinese exclusion act its origin
00:31:11.040stories in the san francisco bay area oakland the original forgive me donald trump i think was
00:31:16.060dennis kearney who began and ended every speech the working men's party with the chinese must go
00:31:21.520And I go down to Chinatown and the museums there, and you'll see the virtual walls being built to keep the Chinese out, led to the Chinese Exclusion Act.
00:31:30.100And obviously part of the oral arguments today in the Supreme Court were around the Wong decision in the late 1880s.
00:31:36.720What do you make of, I mean, it just, it sounds like, I mean, none of this, again, nothing is surprising.
00:31:41.740It's very consistent with that thread of history.
00:31:43.880Well, you know, everybody likes to say in a kind of lazy fashion that history repeats itself.
00:31:49.960No event has ever happened twice. Ecclesiastes, which governors the Old Testament, says what has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. It means that human nature doesn't change and it superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events. And we see echoes, patterns, themes, motifs, or as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, rhymes. You know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
00:32:16.660So all these things are there, and there are lazy ways to approach this subject. America at its best has always been pluralistic and like an alloy, benefiting from all the ingredients that went into it.
00:32:35.280When 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.
00:32:44.220And this attempt at, I mean, look, one of my favorite amendments is the 14th, and the first really trumps it.
00:32:53.600But people say, oh, First Amendment, free speech, or freedom to assemble.
00:32:59.260The first is Congress will make no establishment of a religion.
00:33:02.640We're the first country on earth that didn't have an official religion, and it made all the difference.
00:33:07.700The 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.
00:33:20.380And 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.
00:33:50.380Medicare, Medicaid, I've said Social Security, up to the Affordable Care Act, so many things
00:33:58.660that we have done, which have been transforming not only for our own people, but for the world.
00:34:05.900And then you find, inevitably, the retrenchment that takes place, the people, the oligarchs,
00:34:13.460the former slave owners who are still unhappy
00:34:29.680When you speak of, you know, patriotism,
00:34:33.180we talk of nationalism, but what does patriotism mean to you?
00:34:36.380How do you, what's the sort of core essence of patriotism?
00:34:39.280Well, if you deal with American patriotism first,
00:34:42.500because i'm i'm i'm not that you know there's complicated relationships to british patriotism
00:34:48.100we call ourselves patriots the and and and the british call us rebels never once said patriot
00:34:54.700because patriot meant something um you know something different uh in britain and and they
00:35:00.480weren't going to ascribe us any other motives even when they were surrendering the british
00:35:04.620soldiers and the german soldiers were forbidden to look at the americans only the french were
00:35:09.060worthy of their attention, right? We were still just a rabble. And they were so humiliated at
00:35:14.700having the greatest military power on earth in the most far-flung empire on earth had to admit
00:35:20.980that they had just lost to this ragtag. But who would have thought, a German Hessian, Johann
00:35:26.860Ewald said, who would have thought a hundred years ago that out of this multitude of rabble
00:35:30.880would arise a people who could defy kings? So if you accept an American form of patriotism,
00:35:36.700just as a way for us to have a conversation for a few seconds, then embedded in his sense of our
00:35:43.800own exceptionalism, which is reasonable. Lincoln says in his address to Congress in what we'd call
00:35:48.840the State of the Union in 62, in the middle of the Civil War, just given the Emancipation
00:35:54.720Proclamation, it won't go into effect for a few weeks, but he said, we're the last best hope of
00:35:59.280earth, right? He saw that. And I think Americans imbibe that and have a feeling in the list of
00:36:04.580accomplishments that I made across time and missing half of them are spectacular. But if you
00:36:11.920are the best, if you are the goat of countries, do you think Tom Brady said after he won the first,
00:36:18.480well, now I can just rest on my lawns. There is a kind of almost furious self-involvement,
00:36:27.540that is to say, self-reflection, Socratic, know yourself. There's an incredible criticism,
00:36:32.640even more discipline is applied. And I think what happens is that patriotism sort of splits off down
00:36:38.980the road. And one way is a kind of lazy thing fills up slogans and is basically used to exclude
00:36:44.800people. And the other patriotism, which I think you subscribe to, is one which is energetic. It
00:36:50.640is engaged in process. It is in pursuit of happiness. It is after a more perfect union,
00:36:57.000and it involves self-reflection. This is what our founders, when they said pursuit of happiness,
00:37:02.640was lifelong learning. If you learned all your life, you were then could earn this extraordinary
00:37:09.160gift and responsibility of citizenship. You wanted to become more virtuous. This is reaching back
00:37:14.340over the dark ages into antiquity and pulling out these virtues. The most important is to be
00:37:21.140virtuous. And that if you did that, this constant self-awareness and improvement, then you'd be
00:37:28.600okay? I mean, in the middle of the deliberations about the articles of convention, while Washington's
00:37:34.620fighting in New York City against the British and about to lose because of a bad decision,
00:37:41.260strategic tactical decision, John Adams is going, is there enough? There's so much ambition
00:37:47.080and avarice, so much lust for profit. Is there enough virtue enough to create a republic?
00:37:52.640Those are the questions we should be asking ourselves, not, is this group bad? Is it blood and soil? I mean, if you're making a blood and soil argument, to me, you're going to say, this is the Native American story, right?
00:38:07.420Because if anybody has six or 700 generations of experience to our nine or 10, it's native peoples. And California, as you correctly pointed out, has an unbelievably shameful period where you have essentially state sponsored genocide and people were given a bounty.
00:38:25.820Um, but, you know, we have this, um, this responsibility to be self-critical, to be
00:38:35.300self-improving, to, to, if we're going to say we're the greatest, then we have to live up to
00:38:39.620that. And that requires an incredible amount of self-examination, which you find, um, autocrats
00:38:46.560do not want to participate in. To do that would be to admit a mistake. To do that would be to say
00:38:52.220there's room for me to improve. To do that is to apologize. To do that is to be sympathetic. To do
00:38:57.460that is to walk a mile in someone else's shoes. And that's what people are doing, you know, as
00:39:05.380they are now. There's a kind of muscular patriotism that I'm beginning to sense coming. And it's not
00:39:11.880a Democrat or Republican thing. It's go, wait a second. I did not sign up for this. I signed up
00:39:18.100for something. Yes, yes, I don't agree with you about this, taxes, or that, or whatever it might
00:39:24.560be. But I do believe in these founding documents. I do not think that somebody should enrich
00:39:33.080themselves in office. I do not think, I mean, the founders, if they came, as the scholar Yuval Levin
00:39:40.040told me back in November, he said, they wouldn't be surprised that someone was seeking monarchical
00:39:44.660power but they'd be so surprised and so disappointed in that their first article of the
00:39:50.440constitution after the beautiful poetic preamble written by governor morris of new york the rest
00:39:56.500of it is code it's just sort of the operating manual it's like ikea well how the hell am i
00:40:01.220gonna put this in together and the first article is the legislative co-equal and he would be they
00:40:07.740would be so shocked that the legislated had yielded so much out of fear of some kind of
00:40:13.840retribution, that they'd ceded the ability to tax tariffs. That's the province of Congress.
00:40:19.700The idea that you could change what the White House looked like or build a ballroom or slap
00:40:23.880your name on it, that's the province of Congress. The second article, the executive, would be the
00:40:28.940managers to carry out what Congress had said. And oh no, we're in too modern an age. Things
00:40:34.300happen too fast. So you can have wars of choice. And inevitably, the chaos that's created,
00:40:39.700If you get back to where you were before, somehow that's an overwhelming victory.
00:40:44.400You know, you go, OK, what Orwellian world are you living in?
00:40:50.880Ken, when you so much to unpack there, I mean, that was and he was a conservative historian that you were just referencing.
00:40:58.140Oh, you've 11, a conservative scholar of the Constitution. But this is where I'm saying we're all, if you look at Judd Ludwig, you know,
00:41:04.900these are people who are stunned at the kind of liberties that have been taken in the presumption
00:41:12.280that this is you know that that the original founders intended a christian nation they they
00:41:18.200wanted a god-fearing nation but they were saying no look what's happened in the whole history of
00:41:24.080of humanity when a when a government you know a kingdom has said that we have one way my way or
00:41:31.880the highway you know protestant henry the eighth or a catholic louis the 14th you know and if you
00:41:38.640you know presume that it's it's one thing you've violated the entire spirit of the united states
00:41:45.360did you i mean talk about presumption when you went through this project i mean was it
00:41:50.120how revelatory was all of this to you over the last 10 years i mean for someone that knows his
00:41:55.580stuff you must have come in with all kind you were like i got this yes right exactly you know
00:42:01.640Well, I actually, Governor, I learned years ago to drop that arrogance because, you know, when I got my seventh or eighth film, it was a big history on baseball.
00:42:12.500And I go, well, I have no baseball now.
00:42:14.480And each day was a daily humiliation of what I didn't know.
00:42:19.120And so now I just presume that I've got a kind of working man's person.
00:42:29.080And 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.
00:42:40.800It's very much a we over the course of the last 10 years.
00:42:44.640And we've got two dozen scholars and writers, and we're not we're taking what they've learned, not what their political and not what their particular philosophy, not political, but their their philosophy, what the historians call historiography.
00:42:58.060We don't have to buy into that. And so you can be strengthened like the spokes on a wheel that give the great dynamic strength to a wheel because you've got lots of different perspectives. It isn't just one. You're not seeing it through one lens. You're able to, and this is where story, narrative, which was understandably out of fashion by the middle of the 20th century, is actually still the only way to tell a story.
00:43:24.740Honey, how was your day? Does not begin back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb, unless somebody T-bones you and that's exactly the way you do it. What you do is you edit human experience. And to do that, you're going to have to know what that was.
00:43:40.380And so we studied scholars who knew the Native American countries, knew the difference between the Delaware and the Shawnee, who were actually partners, or the Creek, the Muskogee Creeks, or the Cheyenne, or, you know, whatever the, I mean, the Cherokee, or the Anishinaabe, or the Haudenosaunee, the Cayuga, Seneca, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Mohawk, that made up the Iroquois Confederacy.
00:44:07.200this democracy in a way, this union, this confederacy that Franklin, 20 years before
00:44:13.200the revolution said, whoa, this is pretty good. We should try it ourselves. And everybody said,
00:44:17.880really good idea. And every colony said, nope, we don't want to give up one ounce of authority
00:44:23.080to anything bigger than ourselves. And so 20 years later, this will come to a head and we'll
00:44:30.520be able to figure out on our own that. But it just tells you how much we're bound to each other,
00:44:36.580how much we're dependent on each other. We know what the social compact is. And unfortunately,
00:44:42.500we live in a world today in computers where it's one and zero, or the media culture where it's one
00:44:48.980thing or the other. And we forget to select for the things that we hold in common. I mean, I say
00:44:54.000this to my daughter, I have four daughters, 43 to 15. And I just say social media isn't, right?
00:45:00.740Right? It's not social. You've been in a room where people are all in their stuff.
00:45:04.360um you know how is that connecting it's not i live in a little village in new hampshire we get
00:45:09.880together we have a town meeting we decide whether we're going to buy a new bumper it's a big deal
00:45:14.020you know for the for the fire department and that's what civics has gone out of our lives and
00:45:18.820and so too i think that artificial intelligence isn't as long as we always i mean is artificial
00:45:26.140intelligence is artificial so as long as you keep that in mind that the glory is what our founders
00:45:32.200understood was the primacy of the individual, right? This holds primacy. It's at the heart.
00:45:38.960The value of each human life is at the heart of all religious practices, all of them, and
00:45:44.700particularly the children of Abraham, which would include Christians and Jews and Muslims,
00:45:51.460where that is there. But it's not to slight any other religion, which all has this sense
00:45:57.240of the primacy of the individual. And when we get away with it, we say, well,
00:46:01.360you know in animal farm orwell's animal farm which is why we have invoked the word orwellian
00:46:08.500the adjective orwellian so much lately is that well some animals are more equal than others
00:46:14.940right and then that's the slippery slope in which you just go back and you suddenly wake up to do
00:46:21.080that you know i i think our our next chapter which i think is already begun to being written
00:46:27.420written is repair and restoration like yeah look we'll go back to our let's let's go back
00:46:33.800to arguing about the things that matter without demonizing us you know you just wondered you know
00:46:40.720for a long time the republican party admirably and nobly held to this notion of the threat
00:46:45.880of communism sometimes to great expense if you think about the the mccarthyism of the 50s but
00:46:52.440also just the the sort of the willingness to say no that that's what it is but when that system
00:46:58.380collapsed unfortunately they there was an absence a surface of ideas and so what did you do you made
00:47:04.880bill clinton and then by extension all democrats the enemies and then all of a sudden we have
00:47:09.380people that i meet in the course of my life who believe we're pedophiles i mean the actually the
00:47:14.960the the stuff is coming out that it may not be limited to democrats or even any political party
00:47:21.340but just bad actors and we need to get to the bottom of it and figure out that we don't need to
00:47:27.840you know keep wagging the the dog here by you know capturing you know south american leaders
00:47:35.660or threatening greenland or starting another war uh just to to to distract from information that
00:47:44.040i believe was supposed to come out in december mid-december by law by congressional law and not
00:47:49.860all of the information has come out and i just want to know who's who's being protected uh god
00:47:56.760bless uh too much there to unpack i want to go back i'm sorry no i i no i appreciate all of in
00:48:03.020this notion of you know being repairs of the breach i i love that i want to and i need we all i think
00:48:07.460all of us need to get back a little bit to that canadian women are looking for more more to
00:48:12.220themselves their businesses their elected leaders and the world are up and that's why we're thrilled
00:51:37.420How did the secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever?
00:51:41.500And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids?
00:51:46.060The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote.
00:51:49.560Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:51:54.580But I'm curious, as you went back over the course, and I appreciate how you sort of unpacked this journey that you went on with your team, trying to understand our origin story.
00:52:06.580um what were there what were they i mean begs the question what what was most revelatory to you
00:52:12.820what did you come in and just stop you sort of stopped in your tracks like how did i miss this
00:52:19.120how did i not understand more fully that well one of it is the centrality of washington i mean i just
00:52:26.340was like not willing to accept that notion that he's the father of our country but there's a
00:52:31.580German language newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the spring after the first, the Valley Forge,
00:52:38.840the horrible Valley Forge, who calls him Das Landis Vater, the country's father.
00:52:43.120And you begin to realize that invested in this person is the future of this place.
00:52:49.380It had been captured, it had been all over.
00:52:51.460But I think it's more the grassroots of this, how much it meant to people.
00:52:55.440remember if you were we this is a civil war and that means it's not just the british 3 000 miles
00:53:02.040away we're just trying to throw them off it's our neighbors this is a civil war we're born in
00:53:06.740violence at least 20 overall but in any given place it might be a hotbed of loyalism they're
00:53:13.300against it they're they believe and we don't make them enemies um we they believe quite correctly
00:53:19.300that the british constitutional monarchy is a hell of a good form of government and it is their
00:53:24.000prosperity, the land they have, their literacy, their life expectancy, their good fortune
00:53:28.820is based on, and you're asking me to give this all up to support an idea that has never
00:53:38.160The thing that blows my mind, governor, is that how many people said yes to this completely
00:53:46.040new idea and that it was not just the declaration and the list of injuries and usurpations,
00:53:53.62018 of them that the king not parliament was now guilty of it wasn't just common sense it wasn't
00:53:59.740just later on the american crisis these are the times that dry men sold the summer soldier and
00:54:05.260the sunshine patriot already then they know there's a distinction between the people who
00:54:10.200love to wave the flag and then aren't there and at the end of the declaration we mutually pledge
00:54:16.460to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. It means something. George Washington
00:54:24.220may have been the richest person in the country. He certainly was for a time. He risked his life
00:54:30.440and his fortune and his sacred honor in support of this thing. And that's unbelievable. And so did
00:54:37.340a 14-year-old kid named John Greenwood from Boston. So did a 15-year-old named Joseph Plum
00:54:42.940martin from connecticut so did a lot of people that we don't know their stories who just said
00:54:48.800yeah i'm throwing in with this lot um it behooved most native americans to side with the british
00:54:56.380because they think at least they could forestall the onslaught into their into their territory at
00:55:01.980the ohio valley it was a short-term arrangement and then many times the british whose empire
00:55:08.180depended entirely on the wealth that was generated from slavery, particularly in the Caribbean.
00:55:14.240They had 13 colonies there that were huge profit centers. Only South Carolina and Virginia,
00:55:19.280for the reasons you can assume, are profit centers. The rest of the colonies aren't.
00:55:24.360But we're populated and we make things. So we're good trading partners. And they want to keep us
00:55:31.100from taking Indian land because they can't afford to protect us. And we want to take Indian land.
00:55:35.420So it's not just taxes and representation.
00:55:37.540So 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 Lexington Green, April 19, 1775, the chances of success are zero.
00:55:53.740And six and a half years later, on the 17th of October at Yorktown, they're 100%.
00:56:01.180Don't you want to know how that happened?
00:56:03.620And does Washington win every battle? No, he loses most of his battles. The big victory at Saratoga is away from him. He sent Daniel Morgan and most importantly, Benedict Arnold, who becomes the hero of Saratoga for the Patriots. We can get into Benedict Arnold later.
00:56:20.580It's so interesting that for us, it means one thing. And it's actually a much more dynamic, complicated thing that teaches an essential lesson about humanity and the conflicts, not only between people, but within them, just as George Washington is wrestling. Thomas Jefferson is wrestling. They know slavery is wrong. They know it's wrong.
00:56:41.020And the great Harvard scholar Annette Gordon-Reed says, how can you do something if you know it's wrong? And she comes on camera and says, well, that's the human question for all of us. Meaning she's not taking Thomas Jefferson off the hook and forgiving him.
00:56:56.160She's leaving him on the hook and putting the rest of us for our sanctimonious idea of our ability to judge another when we ourselves are walking contradictions and flaws.
00:57:10.860So the fact that we had a success, that something was born out of here that turned out to be the greatest country ever, right, is just spectacular to me and is a wonderful one.
00:57:24.400if you just think that it's only spectacular, then you missed a point. We had some compromises
00:57:31.740in the Constitution that were incredibly genius and some that were unbelievably tragic that
00:57:39.020perpetuated the institution of slavery, even when they knew. I mean, they were saying,
00:57:44.000George Washington said, you know, they're treating us like slaves. They're treating us
00:57:47.420in the same way that we treat the Negroes over which we have arbitrary sway. So they know they're
00:57:53.700using the language of slavery and they're going, you know, wait a second. And you have find the
00:57:58.860British going, how is it that this driver of Negroes, George Washington, is having success
00:58:04.180against us? I mean, not that they're opposed to slavery, they're for it. But every once in a while
00:58:08.840they'll offer freedom to those enslaved people of rebels. As a scholar pointed out in the film,
00:58:16.140not sure how you tell if you're an enslaved person of a loyalist and you hear there's freedom,
00:58:23.120promised i would say oh yeah my master's uh this and you know and and so people would just
00:58:29.880we think of it as big ideas and they are they're really important and they're and we're going to
00:58:35.300sponsor revolutions for the next 200 plus years when ho chi min declares vietnamese independence
00:58:39.540in 1945 he's quoting thomas jefferson but the decisions that people make are incredibly local
00:58:46.540where is the daylight that i can get to for me not only me but my children and my children's
00:58:54.080children's children like that's the important thing if you're enslaved this is the last thing
00:59:00.060anybody on earth wants to be and and you're going to make the decision which you think is a fest
00:59:05.380sometimes that's going to the british there's painful painful moments uh in new york city
00:59:10.740which doesn't evacuate the british don't leave there until two years and a month after yorktown
00:59:16.440And what they're doing in those last months is they're adjudicating which of the black people that have been with the British get to go and who have to stay.
00:59:25.740So a mother gets to go because she can prove employment with an officer or a loyalist, but the daughter can't.
00:59:32.640It's the reverse of the birthright citizenship, right?
00:59:37.120So the daughter goes back to Virginia and is enslaved, and the mother goes to Nova Scotia going, what happened?
00:59:43.860And there's two lists. They're called lists of Negroes. And every week or so, they meet at Fonce's Tavern in Lower Manhattan, still there, table still there. And four Brits and three Americans determine who gets to go and who doesn't get to go. And they're horse trading with human lives in a country that had just proclaimed to the world less than 10 years before that all human beings, all men are created equal. Pretty good story.
01:00:10.280so so much i mean i and i and i love your language about you know this notion of a finished monument
01:00:16.240versus you know this notion of unfinished responsibility and i you keep coming back
01:00:21.160this notion of citizenship active not inert citizenship that we have agency we can shape
01:00:25.680the future we're not by standards i think it was brandeis who said in a democracy the most
01:00:30.460important office is office of citizen so this is what washington knew right when he resigns
01:00:37.000I think he was tacitly saying, even when he resigned the military commission, I am a citizen.
01:00:43.540And then at the presidency, I'm a citizen. Adams wanted him to take a kind of royal or princely
01:00:49.980title. He goes, no, president, it's okay for me. And so I'm sorry, I interrupted you. But I think
01:00:55.040that's really at the heart of it, that this building block is not the top, it's the bottom,
01:01:00.900Or the bottom is the top, the individual agency of each human being.
01:01:06.780And the story of us has been the expansion of what was a very limited phrase, all men
01:01:12.260are created equal, all white men of property, free of debt.
01:02:21.940I think the existential threats are unprecedented. In those first three crises, there 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.
01:02:36.220And 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.
01:02:56.180And 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.
01:03:16.900that leads to the last best hope of earth.
01:03:20.140It means that you've got to just sort of say,
01:07:58.780I mean, obviously, you've got the saccharine version, as you describe it, that, you know, is likely to be portrayed top down.
01:08:06.220And, you know, we can anticipate, I mean, you know, everything dyed in purple and, you know, pictures on the side of walls and, you know, arches and coins, that version.
01:08:15.120but what you know what's what's uh give me uh write that story what's what's what should we
01:08:21.340be doing what can i be doing in the next few months what should we be doing in many of our
01:08:26.480religious traditions we have there's a phrase as above so below and you could say if you want to
01:08:32.800translate to something more rational that there is a startling and profound similarity between
01:08:38.280the architecture of an atom and the architecture of the solar system, right? So just hold that
01:08:45.320and say, I need to be two things. I need to be individual. I read at the lake on the porch,
01:08:54.560the Declaration of Independence every single 4th of July, you know? And my poor kids and
01:09:00.880now grandkids can't start eating the hamburgers and hot dogs until granddaddy gets through with
01:09:06.540this reading. And whatever you do that makes you happy, my favorite holiday, without a doubt,
01:09:12.540before this film, before any conversation, has always been the 4th of July, followed by
01:09:18.200Thanksgiving, because of the way we come together. So let's have what we always do, that individual
01:09:24.880thing, but then let's try to imagine it as a larger thing. So if there's an atomic moment
01:09:32.900on that porch at the lake, what's the, what's the solar system of this? And it has to be a kind of
01:09:40.240righteous re-engagement with the principles of our founding. Let's go back and say,
01:09:46.560this is what we meant. And, you know, I, I had screenings of the film before it was done. We're
01:09:51.240working on it. We're trying to get better. And, and I go, geez, there's a lot of red meat for
01:09:55.560MAGA. And then I went and said, great, great. You know, this is it. You know, there's these
01:10:01.440over mountain men in the Carolinas that are, have defied the British proclamation that you can't
01:10:06.820cross the Appalachians. And they just said, F you and went over there and started it. And then when
01:10:11.020the British said, unless you do this, this, and this, we will come over and make your lives
01:10:14.780unpleasant. They go, oh yeah, we're coming over and making your life unpleasant. So, you know,
01:10:20.080where you did not want to be in the revolution was New Jersey because it's guerrilla warfare
01:10:25.100and it's patriots killing loyalists and loyalists killing patriots or South Carolina, particularly
01:10:30.680where it's just un, just fettered slaughter.
01:10:34.860But there's some battles in which, big battles,
01:10:38.420Kings Mountain over the border in North Carolina,
01:10:41.380in which there's only one British officer.
01:11:33.380And I think that there's a way to do it at an individual level.
01:11:36.480I mean, obviously, our biggest responsibility is how we raise our kids and who we are to our neighbors, you know, the content of our character, Dr. King would say.
01:11:47.520But then there's a kind of civic responsibility that we have that says, however small the orbit of the solar system is,
01:11:56.800We have to be engaged in something bigger than ourselves.
01:12:20.480And just very briefly, I'm curious, just sort of reflecting on, you know, you've said some
01:12:25.600very, very generous things about Steve Jobs, though. You weren't generous enough to give in
01:12:31.180to his request that you commercialize or support. Well, you know, it was the opposite thing. He
01:12:36.900called me up in November of 2002 and said, will you come and see me? First of all, I didn't believe
01:12:42.800it was Steve Jobs. So I went out there and I met him and he led me into this room with a couple of
01:12:48.040engineers and he showed me this thing. And I'm still a Luddite. And it was how you could download
01:12:52.220your photographs or upload your photographs and and pan and zoom kind of like that and i said oh
01:12:57.120great and he said and next month january of 2003 all mac computers will have this on it and i said
01:13:03.720wow that's great basically going i have no idea really what he's talking about and he says and
01:13:09.400so we'd like to keep the working title and i said oh okay what's that and he goes the ken burns
01:13:13.380effect and i go i don't do commercial endorsements and he goes what go back to his office we spent
01:13:19.380about an hour in which we became friends. And whenever I was in Silicon Valley, I would stay
01:13:24.680at his house and sleep in his guest bedroom. And we eventually took his famous daughter, Lisa,
01:13:29.540as an intern and got to know his wife and his smaller kids. And, you know, it was wonderful
01:13:35.660endlessly walking to dinner, even when he was sick, into Palo Alto from his home.
01:13:43.540But I walked out of the room an hour later, not just with that friendship, but with a commitment
01:13:47.740that apple continued to honor of giving software and hardware to non-profits um which was the only
01:13:56.140way i could sort of handle it and he just couldn't conceive of it and it's so funny that when i tell
01:14:00.900this story people said oh you should have asked him for like you know a tenth of a penny every
01:14:05.180time we use i said you don't know steve jobs he would have said um uh we'll call it the pan and
01:14:10.720zoom effect goodbye right and i but but what he respected was somebody who was just outside
01:14:17.440him saying at one point he came to me and he says he calls me up and he goes you don't you're not
01:14:23.020you're not doing this right you're you're being taken advantage of and he said i want your lawyer
01:14:27.880to talk to my lawyer about your your pbs deals because i'm in pbs and and they're outside the
01:14:33.940marketplace right and and then he came back he said oh it looks like you're doing like you've
01:14:38.800got the right thing. And I said, look, all I want is to be independent. I want to be able to talk to
01:14:42.740you or the governor of California and say, all of these films are director's cuts. There's not a
01:14:48.940layer of suits above me. They're saying longer, shorter, sexier, less sexier, you're more violent,
01:14:54.420less violent. But that another way, let me just put it this way. If you don't like any of those
01:14:59.140films, it's all my fault. And that's what I want it to be. You know, I love it. Hey, Ken, just,
01:15:06.080just very briefly, just previewing, you mentioned a couple of the films you're working on. I mean,
01:15:10.360I think there's an LBJ film as well. I mean, yeah, we're, we're doing LBJ in the great society.
01:15:14.960You know, we'd done the Vietnam thing and LBJ is like Nixon, one of these great tragic figures,
01:15:19.740but his domestic agenda, he was trying to be the next coming of FDR. In fact, he chooses the
01:15:25.380initials because the first person who ever had initials in a big way to the population was FDR.
01:15:31.520And so here's LBJ. And that was an interesting thing. And we take care of his domestic agenda
01:15:40.020in one sentence in an 18-hour film, 10 episodes on Vietnam. So we wanted to reverse engineer it,
01:15:45.880to pull the sweater inside out and be inside the White House, watch the guns of Vietnam get louder
01:15:51.700and louder, but see this extraordinary domestic achievement. He's able to pass a civil rights
01:15:57.100bill that John F. Kennedy, who's very late to civil rights, probably couldn't get passed and
01:16:01.680voting rights. And he knew as a Southerner what the cost would be. And I think to be able to shed
01:16:07.300from waking up, you know, on, on, on election day and knowing you had every former state of
01:16:12.880the Confederacy on your pocket is not necessarily the best thing you want to be in because you're
01:16:18.100dealing with people who are continued to perpetuate the lost cause. And then he does all
01:16:24.240this other stuff, Medicare and Medicaid, public broadcasting, all these things that are sort of
01:16:28.500under assault, but it's an amazing story. So we're just doing that. We're also doing a history of
01:16:32.400reconstruction called Emancipation to Exodus. I've had the privilege of interviewing Barack Obama
01:16:37.780eight times, eight, two hour, hour and a half, two hour interviews. No rush. We want to wait
01:16:44.340until there's scholarship and whatever. And we also are saving a couple of interviews to sort
01:16:49.340think about what happened after his presidency and until the dust settles a bit it's going to
01:16:54.660be hard to talk about it we've also been filming people who knew dr king in the service of a big
01:16:59.140biography on king so those are very much active and we've just begun work on a big history we
01:17:04.900originally thought for years we'd do something on the cold war and i just switched it about a year
01:17:10.240ago or six months ago in my mind to doing a history of the cia and um it just it's just
01:17:17.800think about it you'll get the cold war but you'll get all the intimacies of the stories and you'll
01:17:22.820you'll be in every president's oval office and you'll be you know in in exotic places all around
01:17:29.020the world with people who are putting their life on their lines and big mistakes huge mistakes and
01:17:36.080heroic unsung successes and you know that's the essence of a good story right uh and an essence
01:17:43.680of a hell of a life, Ken. Look at you. I mean, decades of, I mean, so you are hardly slowing
01:17:50.700down. No, no, no. So I'm 72 and I'm like an idiot. I've got more on my plate than I've ever
01:17:56.280had because, you know, if I were given a thousand years to live, which I will not be given, I would
01:18:01.340not run out of topics in American history. So there's this kind of sense of urgency of like
01:18:06.800having to get it done. There's so many great stories still to be told.
01:18:12.000Well, thank you for being such a great storyteller. Thank you for reminding me. It's not just arguments that win the day. It is storytelling.
01:18:21.160Well, 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.
01:18:31.000it comes out and it has the possibility of offering people not the binary that doesn't
01:18:36.860exist in the real world only in computers a one and a zero and only in a media thing red state
01:18:42.500or blue state right that so if you've got a complicated story then you have to begin to
01:18:49.160understand like oh i have these two and i can't be i can't be convinced that it's only black or
01:18:56.040white from what the TV tells me. It's not one thing or the other. I have inside me these
01:19:02.300contradictions, these flaws and these weaknesses. And it makes me a better citizen, makes me a
01:19:07.080better parent, makes me a better husband or wife. It makes me a better politician. It makes me
01:19:11.760a better American. And that's all we want. I love it. Ken, thanks for joining us. Thank you.