This is Gavin Newsom - And, This Is How To Preserve Our Democracy With Filmmaker Ken Burns

00:00:00.000 We live in a place right now where it actually pays to promote division.

00:00:05.240 I do not think somebody should enrich themselves in office.

00:00:09.360 Let's go back to arguing about the things that matter without demonizing.

00:00:14.860 This is Gavin Newsom.

00:00:17.460 And this is Ken Burns.

00:00:21.720 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:00:24.620 Guaranteed human.

00:00:25.600 I'm Lori Siegel and on my new podcast, Mostly Human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world.

00:00:34.140 I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion at a real world cafe right here in New York City.

00:00:40.700 There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you.

00:00:47.040 Mostly Human is your playbook for how tech can work for you.

00:00:50.340 Anyone can now be an entrepreneur. Anyone can build an app. And it's very empowering.

00:00:53.920 Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

00:01:02.600 In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.

00:01:10.180 You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?

00:01:13.700 I doctored the test once.

00:01:15.500 It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.

00:01:20.060 Two more men who'd been through the same thing. 0.55

00:01:22.480 Greg, a lesbian. 0.69

00:01:23.280 My mind was blown.

00:01:26.320 I'm Stephanie Young.

00:01:27.720 This is Love Trapped.

00:01:29.060 Laura, Scottsdale Police.

00:01:30.920 As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. 1.00

00:01:35.600 Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:01:42.100 You know Roald Dahl.

00:01:43.720 He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.

00:01:46.220 But did you know he was a spy?

00:01:48.460 In the new podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl,

00:01:51.480 I'll tell you that story and much, much more.

00:01:54.360 What?

00:01:55.200 You probably won't believe it either.

00:01:56.920 Was this before he wrote his stories?

00:01:58.640 It must have been.

00:02:00.020 Okay, I don't think that's true.

00:02:02.060 I'm telling you.

00:02:03.400 The guy was a spy.

00:02:04.760 Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl

00:02:06.900 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

00:02:09.540 or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:02:12.760 If you're trying to keep up with everything happening

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00:02:42.220 Hi, Governor.

00:02:42.940 Hey, Ken.

00:02:43.600 How are you?

00:02:43.920 Nice to meet you.

00:02:44.900 I know that background well.

00:02:46.620 yeah i'm i'm sorry to say i think that there are as you know there are 342 million podcasts and uh

00:02:56.480 i've i've i've done half of them and i'm absolutely certain not in this case that i'm speaking to

00:03:02.860 myself and to the person i'm talking to at least now i know that there's at least a few other

00:03:07.980 people listening god bless you man i uh yeah no i it's uh i imagine that's got to be the biggest

00:03:13.780 change for you since you started this, right? 20 years ago had been, you know, the broadcast

00:03:18.360 work or in person. Now it's, you know, ubiquity. Oh yeah. Well, we were still doing all of the

00:03:23.500 old stuff. I mean, I've been doing it for, it's almost 50 years. And, you know, we started off

00:03:29.580 in film and analog, you know, with razor blades, cutting film and taping them together and drawing

00:03:34.920 grease pencils on the film and then, you know, digital editing and then, and videotape. And we

00:03:41.160 we were always 10 years behind intentionally so that the technological tail didn't wag the dog

00:03:46.740 and um and so we're just you know perpetually luddites catching up with everything but we're

00:03:53.680 doing the old broadcast stuff too i went to 40 cities had 80 screenings you know uh but also did

00:04:00.840 75 podcasts from joe rogan to you know the whatever the comparable is on the other side

00:04:06.840 Mark 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.

00:04:23.400 and it it worked out okay because the story is so compelling that a lot of these divisions which we

00:04:30.480 think are completely clogging our arteries fall away because if you tell if you tell a good story

00:04:37.520 then you tell a good story and everybody's got a got an interest in a good story when you were

00:04:42.900 talking to theo and joe and guys like that that may be you know perceived on a number of issues

00:04:47.240 lean a little bit more to the right. Were they surprised by the fact that we are so surprised

00:04:54.100 by this division that we have in this country? And you're able to contextualize that and say,

00:04:59.000 you know, give me a break, you know, particularly with this film, which is as much about the civil

00:05:03.800 war, not just the world war. Right. No, no, no. And I think one of the things about the revolution

00:05:08.980 is that it is a civil war. It's a revolution. And we've sort of made it gallant and bloodless

00:05:15.100 because I think, you know, accepting the violence of the Civil War and the 20th century wars,

00:05:20.720 we don't want to have anything take away from the big ideas in Philadelphia in 76 and then in

00:05:25.960 1787. But in fact, if you tell the correct story, those ideas aren't diminished in any way. They're

00:05:32.180 actually made even more impressive that we were born in violence. So I think that the divisions

00:05:37.700 that we experience now are part of the narcissism. It's always the best time or the worst time that

00:05:42.940 we're living in. So I think everybody's less aware of the way in which they might contribute

00:05:47.000 to those divisions than they want to just sort of repeat the same thing over and over again. And I'd

00:05:52.020 suggest that, yeah, we're really divided, but not as bad as the revolution, not as bad as the Civil

00:05:56.580 War, not as bad as the period of reconstruction right after the Civil War, which I'm working on

00:06:01.420 a film on right now called Emancipation to Exodus, not during the Depression, like the second

00:06:06.960 Vietnam, you remember Vietnam, 69 to 75, hundreds of bombings, hundreds of bombings. And so I think

00:06:16.240 the good thing about the study of history is it gives you a little bit of perspective and a little

00:06:20.740 bit of even optimism. You know, if you accept a priori that optimism is not a pejorative or a

00:06:28.880 naive position, but in fact, a legitimate stake, which is, you know, we'll get through this.

00:06:34.320 I 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.

00:06:49.480 But I'm curious, you know, just going back to how we began casually the conversation.

00:06:53.780 It's interesting. You talked about I love this notion of a razor blade editing back in the day, et cetera.

00:06:59.520 And 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.

00:07:08.080 But 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?

00:07:14.300 Was it primarily through the platform at PBS or, you know, finding your way onto Oprah as a sort of monumental moment and achievement?

00:07:24.120 Yeah, so that's exactly right. And it still remains the same.

00:07:27.420 And still PBS is the broadcast platform is great.

00:07:30.400 Only this time, the American Revolution, you know, six parts, 12 hours comes out in mid-November last year.

00:07:38.740 And by the end of the year, we've accumulated 18 million viewers in traditional broadcast, which is pretty damn good.

00:07:46.600 But we've hit, for the first time in PBS's history, the top 10 of streaming.

00:07:51.580 And for me, this Luddite, they've got a metric, which is at that moment, at the end of November, 565 million minutes of streaming.

00:07:59.940 You 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.

00:08:23.940 and that, you know, liberals only like this. And it's not true. The novelist Richard Powers said

00:08:30.200 something that I've been quoting for years now. He said, the best arguments in the world,

00:08:35.560 and that's all we do is argue, won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing

00:08:39.900 that can do that is a good story. Because in a computer world where everything's a one or a zero,

00:08:45.320 in a media culture where everything's red state or blue state, young or old, black or white,

00:08:48.920 gay or straight, rich or poor, north or south, east or west, all the dialectics that we are

00:08:53.300 preoccupied with, which don't actually exist, there's no room for the complexity that we extend

00:09:00.240 to the people we love, to the friends that we have, to the colleagues that we work with, to the

00:09:04.540 understanding that the struggles are within us, that, you know, we say there are no, we lament

00:09:10.220 that there are no heroes today, Governor, you know, and if you go back and say, well, where does

00:09:16.280 the notion of heroism come from? It comes from the Greeks, and they endowed their gods with these

00:09:21.320 examples for us mortals to study. And are those gods perfect? No. Achilles has his heel and his

00:09:28.080 hubris to go along with his great strengths. So heroism is really a negotiation, sometimes a war

00:09:33.500 within a person over their great strengths. So if you leave George Washington out on his marble

00:09:39.520 statue collecting pigeon shit, he seems perfect. You know, never tells a lie, cut down a cherry 0.99

00:09:44.820 tree coin across the Potomac. But if you examine him and understand that he's a very human character,

00:09:51.480 he owns 577 human beings in his lifetime. As the writer Rick Atkinson said, you can't square that

00:09:58.580 circle. He's right. He's rash on the battlefield, risking the entire cause by rushing out into the

00:10:03.900 field. If he's killed or captured, it's all over. He makes some tactical mistakes that are in some

00:10:10.880 he's inexcusable. And yet he's able to convince people to fight him the dead of night. He defers

00:10:16.160 to Congress. He has great humility. He picks subordinate talent, generals that are better

00:10:20.700 than him, like Benedict Arnold and Nathaniel Green. And he twice gives up power, military at

00:10:29.180 the height of his military power and the presidency at the height of his political power. And that

00:10:34.220 has set us in motion. So you can have in a story that we tell, which is as much bottom up as it is

00:10:39.740 top down. You can have the almost exhilarating, you know, off brand thing that we don't have a

00:10:46.800 country without him. And yet, in order to tell the story correctly, you know, you have to do

00:10:52.520 all the other things. We live in a highlight world, right? Babe Ruth comes up, he hits a home

00:10:57.920 run, right? But Babe Ruth struck out many more times than he hit home runs. And Babe Ruth only 0.52

00:11:03.380 comes up once every nine times at bat so sometimes as any uh inhabitant of of los angeles can tell

00:11:10.900 you sometimes it's the middle infielder sometimes it's the second baseman that is the deciding factor

00:11:17.540 in any given moment so we're obligated to tell a complicated history there's no other word it's

00:11:24.020 almost redundant complicated history or complicated human being and that any attempt to simplify it

00:11:31.060 is really just the work of an authoritarian. That is to say, we're going to make this simple.

00:11:35.420 We're going to keep you uninformed. We're going to keep you subscribing to superstitions and

00:11:40.420 conspiracy theories that distract you from the fact that I have my boot on the back of your neck.

00:11:46.680 Did, was that, I mean, was that omnipresent, you know, 200 years ago, this, this notion of

00:11:51.920 censoring historic facts, rewriting history was, you know, was, was that constantly present?

00:11:57.780 in our history. Yeah, I think that, you know, disinformation has always been, I'm sure the

00:12:02.400 first conversation between two human beings ever was a lie, you know, or at least a lie was part

00:12:07.740 of that. And I think that we do a disservice and say, oh, our time is worse. You know, the chicken

00:12:12.600 littles, the sky's falling. I remember when, you know, when new technologies come along, like,

00:12:16.720 oh, say the telegraph in the 1850s, people are wringing their hands. This is the end of letter

00:12:22.300 writing. It's the end of this. And so I think, yeah, there's a lot. In fact, Sam Adams, who we

00:12:27.500 think of as a beer. He was a failure as a brewer and a tax collector, but he was really good

00:12:33.980 propagandist. And he said something that reminded me of our current media landscape. He said,

00:12:38.840 there were times when the British would acquiesce. Okay, the Stamp Act, we're done with it. We're

00:12:43.320 not going to impose it. And so everybody, the Sons of Liberty disband and it's all over. And

00:12:48.200 Sam Adams is going, no, they're just going to do something bad. And he said, my job was to keep my

00:12:52.860 fellow countrymen alive to their grievances, right? Sound familiar? In which you only have

00:12:59.720 a politics that has to do with them and us. And my whole thing is that I've been making films about

00:13:06.560 the US, but I've also been making films about us, that is to say the lowercase two-letter plural

00:13:12.800 pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our, and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction,

00:13:20.660 and even controversy of the U.S.

00:13:23.260 But the one thing I've learned, if I've learned anything,

00:13:26.200 is that there's no them.

00:13:27.800 There's no them.

00:13:29.160 There's only us.

00:13:30.360 And that whenever anyone creates a them,

00:13:33.440 it is for an agenda that is not one that is in sync

00:13:40.000 with what a pluralistic democracy is.

00:13:43.200 I mean, we now have been, over the last 50 years,

00:13:46.820 I've watched the word liberal fall, shot dead, you know, at a firing squad.

00:13:51.140 I've watched all these sorts of things.

00:13:53.460 And we just witnessed the end of DEI.

00:13:56.180 But, you know, isn't e pluribus unum DEI?

00:14:01.240 You know, that's our Latin motto, that we're going to figure out how to come together.

00:14:06.020 Jefferson says a couple sentences after the second one, the great one.

00:14:11.280 He says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are

00:14:16.820 sufferable.

00:14:17.640 It's not hard to parse.

00:14:18.620 It just means that heretofore in the history of human beings, people have been subjects.

00:14:26.040 And we're creating something new called citizens.

00:14:28.760 And it's going to take an extra amount of energy to do that.

00:14:31.460 And human beings will naturally devolve to the camps, to the tribal stuff. 0.84

00:14:35.840 But we're actually going to experiment.

00:14:37.400 We'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.

00:14:50.400 It'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.

00:15:00.620 Pays to promote division.

00:15:01.960 I couldn't agree more with that.

00:15:02.960 This interest, you know, it's interesting, but this notion, you know, in the Bible teaches

00:15:08.820 us many parts, one body, one part suffers, we all suffer this, this, you know, Dr. King

00:15:13.780 talked so evocatively about that.

00:15:15.200 We're all bound together by that web of mutuality.

00:15:18.020 And, and, but I think about this and I think about it in the context of what you're, you

00:15:21.340 know, so much of the work you're doing and so much of the notion of myth and this sort

00:15:26.580 of chiseled notion of a monument, et cetera, and, and, and how we sanitize so much of that.

00:15:32.000 But 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.

00:15:41.860 I 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.

00:15:54.020 It was his first state of the state speech.

00:15:55.740 But I use that language and people are immediately offended and find it shameful.

00:16:01.080 and I'm not providing context. He was in the vast majority. He was truly representative

00:16:05.960 of the time. And so what's that, you know, this notion of myth and the importance of myth,

00:16:11.020 the importance of things that we can unite around. How do you find that tension? Or you just try to

00:16:16.460 go straight to the facts? Well, you know, we were interested, Governor, in calling balls and strikes.

00:16:21.240 So I'm interested in the facts, however messy. I have in my editing room a neon sign that's been

00:16:25.920 there for years and years and years, the main editing room. And it says it's complicated

00:16:29.400 in lowercase cursive neon.

00:16:32.120 And that's what you want to do.

00:16:33.160 The mythologies grow up around a desire

00:16:35.580 to simplify and control that history.

00:16:38.380 So say with the revolution,

00:16:40.260 you inherit something that is really just about white men 0.73

00:16:42.640 when half the population of women are deeply involved. 0.87

00:16:45.740 The revolution doesn't happen without the resistance

00:16:48.040 that leads up to it in the nearly decade of resistance.

00:16:51.400 And women are at the heart of that. 1.00

00:16:52.580 They're the buyers in each homestead.

00:16:54.520 There are among the two and a half to three million Americans

00:16:57.660 in the time of resistance

00:16:58.840 And at the beginning of the revolution, two and a half to three million Americans, 500,000 of whom are free or enslaved black people.

00:17:05.840 There 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.

00:17:16.600 And 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.

00:17:34.460 And we don't extend to them.

00:17:36.200 We just say them.

00:17:36.940 And 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.

00:17:53.920 So 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. 0.58

00:18:11.100 There'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.

00:18:22.000 And 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.

00:18:37.620 The 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.

00:18:56.880 But they're talking about how it might be that we could not be an individual thing, but a one thing.

00:19:04.260 And 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.

00:19:12.040 And often they're teenagers, children.

00:19:13.920 It's not all the militia men.

00:19:15.340 They're going back to plant their crops or to reap their crops.

00:19:19.500 And what happens is the Continental Army becomes filled with nerdy wells and teenagers and recent immigrants. 1.00

00:19:25.400 And 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. 0.56

00:19:44.100 And 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.

00:19:52.580 The right would say the elites who control everything.

00:19:55.400 But 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.

00:20:10.200 And they are.

00:20:11.860 They're a remarkable group of people.

00:20:14.100 But you can't tell a complete story without the balls and strikes and everybody else who

00:20:18.580 gets to come to bat.

00:20:20.420 Canadian women are looking for more, more out of themselves, their businesses, their 1.00

00:20:24.740 elected leaders, and the world around them.

00:20:26.800 And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.

00:20:30.540 I'm Jennifer Stewart.

00:20:31.700 And I'm Catherine Clark.

00:20:32.940 And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists,

00:20:38.060 athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.

00:20:42.120 So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.

00:20:45.660 Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

00:20:51.860 I'm Laurie Siegel, a longtime tech journalist.

00:20:54.720 And consider my new podcast, Mostly Human, your bridge to the future.

00:20:59.000 Anyone can now be an entrepreneur.

00:21:00.200 Anyone can build an app.

00:21:01.420 And it's very empowering.

00:21:03.040 Each week, I'll speak to the people building that future.

00:21:05.920 And we're going to break down what all of this innovation actually means for you.

00:21:10.680 What I come to realize is that when people think that they're dating this AI companion,

00:21:15.060 they're actually dating the companies that create this.

00:21:18.220 We're experiencing one of the greatest tech accelerations in human history.

00:21:22.380 And let's be honest, that can be messy.

00:21:25.720 There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you.

00:21:31.520 But it's my belief that we should all benefit from this moment.

00:21:35.380 Mostly Human will show you how.

00:21:37.080 My goal is to give you the playbook.

00:21:39.560 so you can benefit.

00:21:41.400 The reason I say agency is because, like,

00:21:43.100 if we can give power back to people,

00:21:45.780 then I think that's probably the best thing

00:21:47.560 we can do for your mental health.

00:21:49.580 Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app,

00:21:51.960 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen

00:21:53.680 to your favorite shows.

00:21:58.900 In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd

00:22:02.660 found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.

00:22:05.640 The family court hearings that followed

00:22:07.480 revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.

00:22:10.960 This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.

00:22:14.280 You doctored this particular test twice in so-and-so, correct?

00:22:17.800 I doctored the test once.

00:22:19.360 It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.

00:22:22.640 I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.

00:22:26.640 Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.

00:22:28.940 They would uncover a disturbing pattern.

00:22:31.460 Two more men who'd been through the same thing.

00:22:33.560 Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.

00:22:35.240 My mind was blown.

00:22:37.480 I'm Stephanie Young.

00:22:39.100 This is Love Trap.

00:22:41.080 Laura, Scottsdale Police.

00:22:42.940 As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. 1.00

00:22:47.380 Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County

00:22:50.200 as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.

00:22:53.660 This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.

00:22:58.600 Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app,

00:23:01.720 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:23:05.160 You know Roald Dahl,

00:23:06.800 the writer who thought up Willy Wonka,

00:23:08.480 Matilda, and the BFG.

00:23:10.460 But did you know he was also a spy?

00:23:12.700 Was this before he wrote his stories?

00:23:14.420 It must have been.

00:23:15.580 Our new podcast series,

00:23:16.840 The Secret World of Roald Dahl,

00:23:18.480 is a wild journey through the hidden chapters

00:23:20.400 of his extraordinary, controversial life.

00:23:23.180 His job was literally to seduce the wives 0.99

00:23:25.600 of powerful Americans.

00:23:26.880 What?

00:23:27.100 And he was really good at it.

00:23:28.540 You probably won't believe it either.

00:23:30.080 Okay, I don't think that's true.

00:23:32.000 I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.

00:23:33.800 Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long

00:23:39.720 affair with a congresswoman? And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside

00:23:43.660 Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent

00:23:49.340 wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past

00:23:54.360 seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote.

00:23:59.940 Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:24:05.280 And when you endeavored, I mean, you said it was a 10-year process from the idea and storyboarding.

00:24:11.160 Yeah, so I released a film a year.

00:24:13.320 Yeah, I looked up from a map that we were doing, well, we were finishing our Vietnam series in December of 2015.

00:24:20.940 Barack Obama, remember him?

00:24:22.920 He had 13 months to go in his presidency, and I said, we're doing the American Revolution.

00:24:27.280 And I knew it would take that.

00:24:28.640 No 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.

00:24:47.820 I said, okay. And then I realized, oh, well, there's going to be a celebration. At least

00:24:52.780 we might be offering something a little bit more substantive than what I worried would be kind of

00:24:59.040 fife and drum treacle, you know, that you would just devolve to the lowest common denominator

00:25:03.480 of an unexamined patriotism. And then of course, we're in the circumstances that we're in where

00:25:09.800 we really have an opportunity in crisis to look back at our founding, just as an individual would

00:25:15.400 do. You'd go to a pastor or a professional, and the first thing they'd ask you is, where'd you

00:25:19.860 come from? Who are your parents? What are your early life like? So if you go back to your origin

00:25:24.420 story as a way to reset, recommit to those ideals that were brand new on July 4th, 1776,

00:25:32.920 we are, there's some folks called citizens, and there's the only place is the Eastern Seaboard

00:25:37.800 of the United States. White men of property, mostly, but it's going to grow. And the second 0.99

00:25:42.860 you break out this argument between Englishmen into natural rights saying, oh no, we hold these

00:25:50.140 truths to be self-evident. Jefferson wrote it, Governor, he wrote, we hold these truths to be

00:25:55.220 sacred and undeniable, which would be a really good enlightenment. I want to make an argument

00:25:59.260 to you. This is what we believe, right? Franklin gets it and says, you know, no, no, no, self-evident.

00:26:06.900 There's nothing self-evident about these ideas. But as someone said in a film we made about

00:26:11.760 Franklin a few years ago, that it's the old lawyer's dodge. You just say it's self-evident

00:26:17.120 and then you make it. So these are people on the outer edge of human thought saying, oh yeah,

00:26:23.800 isn't this obvious? And once you break that out, as hypocritical as the tolerance of slavery by 0.95

00:26:29.540 many of the founders is, slavery's done. It may take too long, obviously, because one minute more

00:26:36.680 and slavery is bad. Women will get the vote, even though it's a shameful 144 years from that day 0.99

00:26:43.540 before they will have it. Gay marriage is going to happen. I mean, all of these things get unlocked 1.00

00:26:48.700 when you take, no pun intended, John Locke's life, liberty, property, we change it to pursuit

00:26:54.420 of happiness, not objects, but lifelong learning to be more virtuous. When you unlock that human

00:26:59.960 energy, look what we created, the greatest country on earth for all the flaws. And I'm

00:27:05.020 More 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.

00:27:16.120 They are actually kind of lawfully bound to each other just as we make advances.

00:27:21.400 In the mid-18th century, Franklin was disturbed by German immigration to Pennsylvania.

00:27:28.700 and he said i like the lovely white and red meaning the white english settlers and the

00:27:37.380 native americans and he thought the germans and this will come as a shock to everybody

00:27:41.820 were thwarty and they were you know they were not befitting the character then all of a sudden

00:27:47.620 we're letting everybody in german immigrants irish immigrants whatever then the doors are

00:27:52.120 completely in in the early 19th century people are trying to shut it down no no catholics can 0.98

00:27:57.320 No, 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. 0.95

00:28:15.000 And then in the 1920s, the door slammed shut.

00:28:18.880 The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in 24 sets quotas, so it's going to make it impossible

00:28:23.320 for us to respond to the Holocaust, even though we let in more people than any other sovereign

00:28:28.980 nation.

00:28:29.340 I have to say sovereign because of the number of people who immigrated to Palestine.

00:28:33.100 But we could have saved so many more human beings if we weren't imprisoned, locked into

00:28:37.940 this straitjacket of Johnson-Reed.

00:28:40.140 And 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.

00:28:54.000 But 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.

00:29:05.720 But 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.

00:29:19.100 And 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.

00:29:32.880 we can only have this superficial history, there's no better form of government, as chaotic as it is,

00:29:38.880 as uncertain. The great jurist, learned hand, I mean, Governor, could there ever be a better name

00:29:45.060 for a judge than learned hand, said liberty is never being too sure you're right. And there's

00:29:52.060 a sort of sense now as we try to impose our will on chaotic events that the opposite of faith must 0.96

00:29:59.440 be doubt. No, doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. That kills

00:30:05.760 faith. And yet we see the damage that is done in the name of faith, that my faith is the only faith.

00:30:13.660 That's why many of the founders sort of gravitated toward what's called deism,

00:30:19.200 particularly Thomas Jefferson. And that is this idea that there is a supreme being,

00:30:23.720 a supreme architect, divine providence, however you do it, but disinterested in the affairs of

00:30:28.700 man. And obviously making no distinction between faiths. So Jefferson has this wonderful line,

00:30:37.900 if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no God at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my

00:30:44.880 leg. I mean, just think about how much we're governed by the intolerance of the people who

00:30:52.880 want to make distinctions between their correct right set of facts and and someone else's does

00:31:00.040 it i mean in contemporary terms we're talking uh on a day where the supreme court is hearing

00:31:05.780 arguments on sort of a core construct when you talk about the chinese exclusion act its origin

00:31:11.040 stories in the san francisco bay area oakland the original forgive me donald trump i think was

00:31:16.060 dennis kearney who began and ended every speech the working men's party with the chinese must go

00:31:21.520 And 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.

00:31:30.100 And obviously part of the oral arguments today in the Supreme Court were around the Wong decision in the late 1880s.

00:31:36.720 What do you make of, I mean, it just, it sounds like, I mean, none of this, again, nothing is surprising.

00:31:41.740 It's very consistent with that thread of history.

00:31:43.880 Well, you know, everybody likes to say in a kind of lazy fashion that history repeats itself.

00:31:49.080 It doesn't.

00:31:49.860 Right.

00:31:49.960 No 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.

00:32:16.660 So 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.

00:32:35.280 When 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.

00:32:44.220 And this attempt at, I mean, look, one of my favorite amendments is the 14th, and the first really trumps it.

00:32:53.600 But people say, oh, First Amendment, free speech, or freedom to assemble.

00:32:57.580 Those are number two and three.

00:32:59.260 The first is Congress will make no establishment of a religion.

00:33:02.640 We're the first country on earth that didn't have an official religion, and it made all the difference. 1.00

00:33:07.700 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.

00:33:20.380 And 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.

00:33:50.380 Medicare, Medicaid, I've said Social Security, up to the Affordable Care Act, so many things

00:33:58.660 that we have done, which have been transforming not only for our own people, but for the world.

00:34:05.900 And then you find, inevitably, the retrenchment that takes place, the people, the oligarchs,

00:34:13.460 the former slave owners who are still unhappy

00:34:17.180 of the way the Civil War took out

00:34:19.480 and want to just, you know, get back what they had before.

00:34:24.600 And you can't go back.

00:34:26.840 You have to go forward.

00:34:28.080 You got to go forward.

00:34:29.680 When you speak of, you know, patriotism,

00:34:33.180 we talk of nationalism, but what does patriotism mean to you?

00:34:36.380 How do you, what's the sort of core essence of patriotism?

00:34:39.280 Well, if you deal with American patriotism first,

00:34:42.500 because i'm i'm i'm not that you know there's complicated relationships to british patriotism

00:34:48.100 we call ourselves patriots the and and and the british call us rebels never once said patriot

00:34:54.700 because patriot meant something um you know something different uh in britain and and they

00:35:00.480 weren't going to ascribe us any other motives even when they were surrendering the british

00:35:04.620 soldiers and the german soldiers were forbidden to look at the americans only the french were

00:35:09.060 worthy of their attention, right? We were still just a rabble. And they were so humiliated at

00:35:14.700 having the greatest military power on earth in the most far-flung empire on earth had to admit

00:35:20.980 that they had just lost to this ragtag. But who would have thought, a German Hessian, Johann 1.00

00:35:26.860 Ewald said, who would have thought a hundred years ago that out of this multitude of rabble 1.00

00:35:30.880 would arise a people who could defy kings? So if you accept an American form of patriotism,

00:35:36.700 just as a way for us to have a conversation for a few seconds, then embedded in his sense of our

00:35:43.800 own exceptionalism, which is reasonable. Lincoln says in his address to Congress in what we'd call

00:35:48.840 the State of the Union in 62, in the middle of the Civil War, just given the Emancipation

00:35:54.720 Proclamation, it won't go into effect for a few weeks, but he said, we're the last best hope of

00:35:59.280 earth, right? He saw that. And I think Americans imbibe that and have a feeling in the list of

00:36:04.580 accomplishments that I made across time and missing half of them are spectacular. But if you

00:36:11.920 are the best, if you are the goat of countries, do you think Tom Brady said after he won the first,

00:36:18.480 well, now I can just rest on my lawns. There is a kind of almost furious self-involvement,

00:36:27.540 that is to say, self-reflection, Socratic, know yourself. There's an incredible criticism,

00:36:32.640 even more discipline is applied. And I think what happens is that patriotism sort of splits off down

00:36:38.980 the road. And one way is a kind of lazy thing fills up slogans and is basically used to exclude

00:36:44.800 people. And the other patriotism, which I think you subscribe to, is one which is energetic. It

00:36:50.640 is engaged in process. It is in pursuit of happiness. It is after a more perfect union,

00:36:57.000 and it involves self-reflection. This is what our founders, when they said pursuit of happiness,

00:37:02.640 was lifelong learning. If you learned all your life, you were then could earn this extraordinary

00:37:09.160 gift and responsibility of citizenship. You wanted to become more virtuous. This is reaching back

00:37:14.340 over the dark ages into antiquity and pulling out these virtues. The most important is to be

00:37:21.140 virtuous. And that if you did that, this constant self-awareness and improvement, then you'd be

00:37:28.600 okay? I mean, in the middle of the deliberations about the articles of convention, while Washington's

00:37:34.620 fighting in New York City against the British and about to lose because of a bad decision,

00:37:41.260 strategic tactical decision, John Adams is going, is there enough? There's so much ambition

00:37:47.080 and avarice, so much lust for profit. Is there enough virtue enough to create a republic?

00:37:52.640 Those 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?

00:38:07.420 Because 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.

00:38:25.820 Um, but, you know, we have this, um, this responsibility to be self-critical, to be

00:38:35.300 self-improving, to, to, if we're going to say we're the greatest, then we have to live up to

00:38:39.620 that. And that requires an incredible amount of self-examination, which you find, um, autocrats

00:38:46.560 do not want to participate in. To do that would be to admit a mistake. To do that would be to say

00:38:52.220 there's room for me to improve. To do that is to apologize. To do that is to be sympathetic. To do

00:38:57.460 that is to walk a mile in someone else's shoes. And that's what people are doing, you know, as

00:39:05.380 they are now. There's a kind of muscular patriotism that I'm beginning to sense coming. And it's not

00:39:11.880 a Democrat or Republican thing. It's go, wait a second. I did not sign up for this. I signed up

00:39:18.100 for something. Yes, yes, I don't agree with you about this, taxes, or that, or whatever it might

00:39:24.560 be. But I do believe in these founding documents. I do not think that somebody should enrich

00:39:33.080 themselves in office. I do not think, I mean, the founders, if they came, as the scholar Yuval Levin

00:39:40.040 told me back in November, he said, they wouldn't be surprised that someone was seeking monarchical

00:39:44.660 power but they'd be so surprised and so disappointed in that their first article of the

00:39:50.440 constitution after the beautiful poetic preamble written by governor morris of new york the rest

00:39:56.500 of it is code it's just sort of the operating manual it's like ikea well how the hell am i

00:40:01.220 gonna put this in together and the first article is the legislative co-equal and he would be they

00:40:07.740 would be so shocked that the legislated had yielded so much out of fear of some kind of

00:40:13.840 retribution, that they'd ceded the ability to tax tariffs. That's the province of Congress.

00:40:19.700 The idea that you could change what the White House looked like or build a ballroom or slap

00:40:23.880 your name on it, that's the province of Congress. The second article, the executive, would be the

00:40:28.940 managers to carry out what Congress had said. And oh no, we're in too modern an age. Things

00:40:34.300 happen too fast. So you can have wars of choice. And inevitably, the chaos that's created,

00:40:39.700 If you get back to where you were before, somehow that's an overwhelming victory.

00:40:44.400 You know, you go, OK, what Orwellian world are you living in?

00:40:50.880 Ken, when you so much to unpack there, I mean, that was and he was a conservative historian that you were just referencing.

00:40:58.140 Oh, 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,

00:41:04.900 these are people who are stunned at the kind of liberties that have been taken in the presumption

00:41:12.280 that this is you know that that the original founders intended a christian nation they they

00:41:18.200 wanted a god-fearing nation but they were saying no look what's happened in the whole history of

00:41:24.080 of humanity when a when a government you know a kingdom has said that we have one way my way or

00:41:31.880 the highway you know protestant henry the eighth or a catholic louis the 14th you know and if you

00:41:38.640 you know presume that it's it's one thing you've violated the entire spirit of the united states

00:41:45.360 did you i mean talk about presumption when you went through this project i mean was it

00:41:50.120 how revelatory was all of this to you over the last 10 years i mean for someone that knows his

00:41:55.580 stuff you must have come in with all kind you were like i got this yes right exactly you know

00:42:01.640 Well, 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.

00:42:12.500 And I go, well, I have no baseball now.

00:42:14.480 And each day was a daily humiliation of what I didn't know.

00:42:19.120 And so now I just presume that I've got a kind of working man's person.

00:42:22.380 I'll do all right on Jeopardy.

00:42:24.360 I'm the guy you want at Trivial Pursuits at your party.

00:42:27.820 But I know nothing.

00:42:29.080 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.

00:42:40.800 It's very much a we over the course of the last 10 years.

00:42:44.640 And 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.

00:42:58.060 We 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.

00:43:24.740 Honey, 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.

00:43:40.380 And 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.

00:44:07.200 this democracy in a way, this union, this confederacy that Franklin, 20 years before

00:44:13.200 the revolution said, whoa, this is pretty good. We should try it ourselves. And everybody said,

00:44:17.880 really good idea. And every colony said, nope, we don't want to give up one ounce of authority

00:44:23.080 to anything bigger than ourselves. And so 20 years later, this will come to a head and we'll

00:44:30.520 be able to figure out on our own that. But it just tells you how much we're bound to each other,

00:44:36.580 how much we're dependent on each other. We know what the social compact is. And unfortunately,

00:44:42.500 we live in a world today in computers where it's one and zero, or the media culture where it's one

00:44:48.980 thing or the other. And we forget to select for the things that we hold in common. I mean, I say

00:44:54.000 this to my daughter, I have four daughters, 43 to 15. And I just say social media isn't, right?

00:45:00.740 Right? It's not social. You've been in a room where people are all in their stuff.

00:45:04.360 um you know how is that connecting it's not i live in a little village in new hampshire we get

00:45:09.880 together we have a town meeting we decide whether we're going to buy a new bumper it's a big deal

00:45:14.020 you know for the for the fire department and that's what civics has gone out of our lives and

00:45:18.820 and so too i think that artificial intelligence isn't as long as we always i mean is artificial

00:45:26.140 intelligence is artificial so as long as you keep that in mind that the glory is what our founders

00:45:32.200 understood was the primacy of the individual, right? This holds primacy. It's at the heart.

00:45:38.960 The value of each human life is at the heart of all religious practices, all of them, and

00:45:44.700 particularly the children of Abraham, which would include Christians and Jews and Muslims,

00:45:51.460 where that is there. But it's not to slight any other religion, which all has this sense

00:45:57.240 of the primacy of the individual. And when we get away with it, we say, well,

00:46:01.360 you know in animal farm orwell's animal farm which is why we have invoked the word orwellian

00:46:08.500 the adjective orwellian so much lately is that well some animals are more equal than others

00:46:14.940 right and then that's the slippery slope in which you just go back and you suddenly wake up to do

00:46:21.080 that you know i i think our our next chapter which i think is already begun to being written

00:46:27.420 written is repair and restoration like yeah look we'll go back to our let's let's go back

00:46:33.800 to arguing about the things that matter without demonizing us you know you just wondered you know

00:46:40.720 for a long time the republican party admirably and nobly held to this notion of the threat

00:46:45.880 of communism sometimes to great expense if you think about the the mccarthyism of the 50s but 0.70

00:46:52.440 also just the the sort of the willingness to say no that that's what it is but when that system

00:46:58.380 collapsed unfortunately they there was an absence a surface of ideas and so what did you do you made

00:47:04.880 bill clinton and then by extension all democrats the enemies and then all of a sudden we have

00:47:09.380 people that i meet in the course of my life who believe we're pedophiles i mean the actually the

00:47:14.960 the the stuff is coming out that it may not be limited to democrats or even any political party

00:47:21.340 but just bad actors and we need to get to the bottom of it and figure out that we don't need to

00:47:27.840 you know keep wagging the the dog here by you know capturing you know south american leaders

00:47:35.660 or threatening greenland or starting another war uh just to to to distract from information that

00:47:44.040 i believe was supposed to come out in december mid-december by law by congressional law and not

00:47:49.860 all of the information has come out and i just want to know who's who's being protected uh god

00:47:56.760 bless uh too much there to unpack i want to go back i'm sorry no i i no i appreciate all of in

00:48:03.020 this notion of you know being repairs of the breach i i love that i want to and i need we all i think

00:48:07.460 all of us need to get back a little bit to that canadian women are looking for more more to 1.00

00:48:12.220 themselves their businesses their elected leaders and the world are up and that's why we're thrilled

00:48:17.060 to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.

00:48:19.860 I'm Jennifer Stewart.

00:48:21.020 And I'm Catherine Clark.

00:48:22.260 And in this podcast,

00:48:23.360 we interview Canada's most inspiring women.

00:48:25.920 Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians,

00:48:28.620 and newsmakers,

00:48:29.540 all at different stages of their journey.

00:48:31.740 So if you're looking to connect,

00:48:33.540 then we hope you'll join us.

00:48:34.980 Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio

00:48:37.340 or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

00:48:41.100 I'm Laurie Siegel, a longtime tech journalist.

00:48:44.000 And consider my new podcast, Mostly Human,

00:48:46.140 your bridge to the future.

00:48:48.240 Anyone can now be an entrepreneur.

00:48:49.520 Anyone can build an app.

00:48:50.820 And it's very empowering.

00:48:52.340 Each week, I'll speak to the people building that future.

00:48:55.320 And we're going to break down what all of this innovation actually means for you.

00:49:00.080 What I come to realize is that when people think that they're dating this AI companion,

00:49:04.480 they're actually dating the companies that create this.

00:49:07.460 We're experiencing one of the greatest tech accelerations in human history.

00:49:11.680 And let's be honest, that can be messy.

00:49:15.040 There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you.

00:49:20.840 But it's my belief that we should all benefit from this moment.

00:49:24.720 Mostly Human will show you how.

00:49:26.780 My goal is to give you the playbook so you can benefit.

00:49:30.700 The reason I say agency is because, like, if we can give power back to people,

00:49:35.160 then I think that's probably the best thing we can do for your mental health.

00:49:38.660 Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

00:49:44.680 In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.

00:49:54.700 The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.

00:50:00.260 This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.

00:50:03.620 You doctored this particular test twice, yourselves, correct?

00:50:07.100 I doctored the test once.

00:50:08.660 It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.

00:50:11.700 I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.

00:50:16.000 Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.

00:50:18.560 They would uncover a disturbing pattern.

00:50:20.780 Two more men who'd been through the same thing.

00:50:22.880 Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.

00:50:24.980 My mind was blown.

00:50:27.000 I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap.

00:50:30.400 Laura, Scottsdale Police.

00:50:32.260 As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. 1.00

00:50:36.660 Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County

00:50:39.500 as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.

00:50:43.260 This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.

00:50:47.920 Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app,

00:50:51.020 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:50:54.480 You know Roald Dahl,

00:50:56.120 the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG.

00:50:59.760 But did you know he was also a spy?

00:51:02.000 Was this before he wrote his stories?

00:51:03.720 It must have been.

00:51:04.880 Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl,

00:51:07.560 is a wild journey through the hidden chapters

00:51:09.700 of his extraordinary, controversial life.

00:51:12.720 His job was literally to seduce the wives 0.99

00:51:14.900 of powerful Americans.

00:51:16.160 What?

00:51:16.400 And he was really good at it.

00:51:17.840 You probably won't believe it either.

00:51:19.380 Okay, I don't think that's true.

00:51:21.260 I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.

00:51:23.980 Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's, 0.82

00:51:26.680 played poker with Harry Truman,

00:51:28.400 and had a long affair with a congresswoman?

00:51:30.300 And then he took his talents to Hollywood,

00:51:32.120 where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock

00:51:34.620 before writing a hit James Bond film,

00:51:37.420 How did the secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever?

00:51:41.500 And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids?

00:51:46.060 The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote.

00:51:49.560 Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:51:54.580 But 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.

00:52:06.580 um what were there what were they i mean begs the question what what was most revelatory to you

00:52:12.820 what did you come in and just stop you sort of stopped in your tracks like how did i miss this

00:52:19.120 how did i not understand more fully that well one of it is the centrality of washington i mean i just

00:52:26.340 was like not willing to accept that notion that he's the father of our country but there's a

00:52:31.580 German language newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the spring after the first, the Valley Forge,

00:52:38.840 the horrible Valley Forge, who calls him Das Landis Vater, the country's father.

00:52:43.120 And you begin to realize that invested in this person is the future of this place.

00:52:49.380 It had been captured, it had been all over.

00:52:51.460 But I think it's more the grassroots of this, how much it meant to people.

00:52:55.440 remember if you were we this is a civil war and that means it's not just the british 3 000 miles

00:53:02.040 away we're just trying to throw them off it's our neighbors this is a civil war we're born in

00:53:06.740 violence at least 20 overall but in any given place it might be a hotbed of loyalism they're

00:53:13.300 against it they're they believe and we don't make them enemies um we they believe quite correctly

00:53:19.300 that the british constitutional monarchy is a hell of a good form of government and it is their

00:53:24.000 prosperity, the land they have, their literacy, their life expectancy, their good fortune

00:53:28.820 is based on, and you're asking me to give this all up to support an idea that has never

00:53:35.860 been tried before.

00:53:36.960 Are you out of your mind?

00:53:38.160 The thing that blows my mind, governor, is that how many people said yes to this completely

00:53:46.040 new idea and that it was not just the declaration and the list of injuries and usurpations,

00:53:53.620 18 of them that the king not parliament was now guilty of it wasn't just common sense it wasn't

00:53:59.740 just later on the american crisis these are the times that dry men sold the summer soldier and

00:54:05.260 the sunshine patriot already then they know there's a distinction between the people who

00:54:10.200 love to wave the flag and then aren't there and at the end of the declaration we mutually pledge

00:54:16.460 to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. It means something. George Washington

00:54:24.220 may have been the richest person in the country. He certainly was for a time. He risked his life

00:54:30.440 and his fortune and his sacred honor in support of this thing. And that's unbelievable. And so did

00:54:37.340 a 14-year-old kid named John Greenwood from Boston. So did a 15-year-old named Joseph Plum

00:54:42.940 martin from connecticut so did a lot of people that we don't know their stories who just said

00:54:48.800 yeah i'm throwing in with this lot um it behooved most native americans to side with the british

00:54:56.380 because they think at least they could forestall the onslaught into their into their territory at

00:55:01.980 the ohio valley it was a short-term arrangement and then many times the british whose empire

00:55:08.180 depended entirely on the wealth that was generated from slavery, particularly in the Caribbean.

00:55:14.240 They had 13 colonies there that were huge profit centers. Only South Carolina and Virginia,

00:55:19.280 for the reasons you can assume, are profit centers. The rest of the colonies aren't.

00:55:24.360 But we're populated and we make things. So we're good trading partners. And they want to keep us

00:55:31.100 from taking Indian land because they can't afford to protect us. And we want to take Indian land. 1.00

00:55:35.420 So it's not just taxes and representation.

00:55:37.540 So 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.

00:55:53.740 And six and a half years later, on the 17th of October at Yorktown, they're 100%.

00:56:01.180 Don't you want to know how that happened?

00:56:03.620 And 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.

00:56:20.580 It'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.

00:56:41.020 And 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.

00:56:56.160 She'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.

00:57:10.860 So 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.

00:57:24.400 if you just think that it's only spectacular, then you missed a point. We had some compromises

00:57:31.740 in the Constitution that were incredibly genius and some that were unbelievably tragic that

00:57:39.020 perpetuated the institution of slavery, even when they knew. I mean, they were saying,

00:57:44.000 George Washington said, you know, they're treating us like slaves. They're treating us

00:57:47.420 in the same way that we treat the Negroes over which we have arbitrary sway. So they know they're 0.97

00:57:53.700 using the language of slavery and they're going, you know, wait a second. And you have find the

00:57:58.860 British going, how is it that this driver of Negroes, George Washington, is having success 1.00

00:58:04.180 against us? I mean, not that they're opposed to slavery, they're for it. But every once in a while

00:58:08.840 they'll offer freedom to those enslaved people of rebels. As a scholar pointed out in the film,

00:58:16.140 not sure how you tell if you're an enslaved person of a loyalist and you hear there's freedom,

00:58:23.120 promised i would say oh yeah my master's uh this and you know and and so people would just

00:58:29.880 we think of it as big ideas and they are they're really important and they're and we're going to

00:58:35.300 sponsor revolutions for the next 200 plus years when ho chi min declares vietnamese independence 0.98

00:58:39.540 in 1945 he's quoting thomas jefferson but the decisions that people make are incredibly local

00:58:46.540 where is the daylight that i can get to for me not only me but my children and my children's

00:58:54.080 children's children like that's the important thing if you're enslaved this is the last thing

00:59:00.060 anybody on earth wants to be and and you're going to make the decision which you think is a fest

00:59:05.380 sometimes that's going to the british there's painful painful moments uh in new york city

00:59:10.740 which doesn't evacuate the british don't leave there until two years and a month after yorktown

00:59:16.440 And 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.

00:59:25.740 So a mother gets to go because she can prove employment with an officer or a loyalist, but the daughter can't. 0.99

00:59:32.640 It's the reverse of the birthright citizenship, right?

00:59:37.120 So the daughter goes back to Virginia and is enslaved, and the mother goes to Nova Scotia going, what happened?

00:59:43.860 And 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. 0.93

01:00:10.280 so so much i mean i and i and i love your language about you know this notion of a finished monument

01:00:16.240 versus you know this notion of unfinished responsibility and i you keep coming back

01:00:21.160 this notion of citizenship active not inert citizenship that we have agency we can shape

01:00:25.680 the future we're not by standards i think it was brandeis who said in a democracy the most

01:00:30.460 important office is office of citizen so this is what washington knew right when he resigns

01:00:37.000 I think he was tacitly saying, even when he resigned the military commission, I am a citizen.

01:00:43.540 And then at the presidency, I'm a citizen. Adams wanted him to take a kind of royal or princely

01:00:49.980 title. He goes, no, president, it's okay for me. And so I'm sorry, I interrupted you. But I think

01:00:55.040 that's really at the heart of it, that this building block is not the top, it's the bottom,

01:01:00.900 Or the bottom is the top, the individual agency of each human being.

01:01:06.780 And the story of us has been the expansion of what was a very limited phrase, all men

01:01:12.260 are created equal, all white men of property, free of debt. 0.88

01:01:15.300 We don't mean that anymore.

01:01:17.080 And the more we grow and the more we expand it, the richer we become.

01:01:22.040 And that's the story of us.

01:01:25.060 No them involved, but of us.

01:01:27.800 The no kings rallies, the sense, I mean, I'm starting to feel more optimistic listening

01:01:35.260 to you about this moment, this sort of this energy, this percolation, this notion that

01:01:40.080 the top is the bottom, this notion that the foundational principles that have allowed

01:01:47.340 us to endure and endure these moments and the fact that these moments are hardly unique

01:01:50.980 in our history and the fact that we've been able to persevere.

01:01:54.840 I mean, are you feeling more or less optimistic in that context?

01:01:58.860 I know it's the rote question you get every interview, but in the context of this moment

01:02:04.160 in particular, and I mean, quite literally, perhaps this moment.

01:02:07.860 Yes, Governor, I believe in that.

01:02:10.540 I do think that the three great crises that we could identify after our founding, the

01:02:16.640 Civil War, the Depression, and World War II, were the great crises.

01:02:20.740 I think we're in a fourth.

01:02:21.940 I 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.

01:02:36.220 And 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.

01:02:56.180 And 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.

01:03:16.900 that leads to the last best hope of earth.

01:03:20.140 It means that you've got to just sort of say,

01:03:24.000 yes, it's unprecedented,

01:03:25.280 but also have faith in the American people,

01:03:28.000 which is something that autocrats don't have. 1.00

01:03:31.140 They can use them.

01:03:32.640 They can play groups off one another,

01:03:34.440 but they have zero faith in the actual stuff

01:03:39.440 of what it is to struggle to be human

01:03:42.040 and to just, you know, in economies and families,

01:03:45.520 get by you know with with opioid addictions with hard work with illness unexpected illnesses

01:03:52.520 all of the things not you know the the disparity of wages i mean i made a film on baseball and in

01:03:58.900 the 70s um you know it was the same thing with with corporate ceos that you know the ceo of a

01:04:06.220 company made at best like eight nine times what the line guy made and now we're talking about 800

01:04:13.420 times as much. And so the proportionality of things, and it permits, you know, we have great

01:04:19.500 articulators of that disparity. And we sort of think as politics as a line, it's a circle,

01:04:25.460 you know, like a third of Bernie's supporters voted for Hillary, a third stayed home and a

01:04:31.220 third voted for Trump. So you know that somewhere in this, you have to just be able to articulate

01:04:38.320 that you understand what is the stuff of life.

01:04:42.360 How do you get through?

01:04:43.180 How do you put food on the table for your families?

01:04:45.900 How do you do that?

01:04:47.300 But incumbent in an American dynamic

01:04:49.880 is that you have to exercise citizenship.

01:04:52.620 It is no longer convenient to stay home

01:04:55.900 or to say it doesn't count

01:04:58.000 because it does count and it does matter

01:05:01.020 and you can't stay home.

01:05:02.140 And it doesn't mean you have to be involved.

01:05:04.700 You don't have to go to marches.

01:05:05.960 You don't have to do this,

01:05:06.820 but you can vote. You can be engaged in civics taken out of our curriculum. It's been a dirty

01:05:13.240 word for three or four decades. They don't teach history anymore either. They just want

01:05:18.800 the automatons of STEM to just go forward. There's something missing. I remember an executive,

01:05:25.480 when I was working on my first film on the Brooklyn Bridge, executive at AT&T, very senior,

01:05:29.860 he was just lamenting. He said, I just wish you would come to work for me. I can teach you

01:05:34.120 what i know i have all these newly minted mbas but they can't write a letter they don't know

01:05:39.160 about ethics they don't know about history they don't know about comparative religion and so

01:05:43.920 they're absent something and i can't teach them that you have that and i can teach you whatever

01:05:49.380 things and you don't want to do this i said no i do not i want to go off and make documentary films

01:05:54.980 and thank you very much for introducing me to people who would help us do it but it really

01:06:00.340 stuck with me. It was a lament that somehow in our rush for the bottom line, we've forgotten to serve

01:06:07.380 the basic instincts of a democracy, which is a mechanical question. How does it work? Who are

01:06:15.060 we? What's the ingredients? You know, people talk about Machiavelli, the prince says this Machiavellian

01:06:21.160 is a pejorative adjective, but it really is the study of how you get things done, how you get

01:06:26.060 along with your neighbors how how do you make something how do you compromise how do you say

01:06:30.200 okay you want this i remember in my film about thomas jefferson 20 plus years ago george will

01:06:37.700 said democracy is the politics of the half loaf you don't get everything half loaf half loaf you

01:06:44.620 don't get everything you know be so suspicious of the 99 to 1 vote and be rejoice at the 51 to 49

01:06:52.060 vote. You know, that's okay. That's okay. And what's your, you know, people argue, oh, we're

01:06:58.120 just trying to address this, you know, those two percentage points of independence or soccer moms 1.00

01:07:04.240 or whatever the new thing is. No, it's not about that. You're trying to engage everybody in this

01:07:09.200 process. And that's where I think you can have a sense of optimism. You can have a sense of

01:07:14.900 purpose. You can say, no, this doesn't sit right. I don't like it. Somebody celebrating the death

01:07:20.140 of somebody else that I, that I, that they didn't agree with or demonizing somebody else that they

01:07:28.280 disagree with. Disagreement is human, right? You know, even within ourselves, Whitman said,

01:07:35.200 do I contradict myself? I contradict myself. And it's, it's about as American a catechism as I know.

01:07:42.440 So as we march forward, Ken, to July 4th, and you know, here we are just a few months out. I mean,

01:07:49.300 So, you know, look, if you could, you can write the next, the chapters of the next few months.

01:07:55.000 What, I mean, at our best, what would you expect?

01:07:57.460 What do you expect of the states?

01:07:58.780 I mean, obviously, you've got the saccharine version, as you describe it, that, you know, is likely to be portrayed top down.

01:08:06.220 And, 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.

01:08:15.120 but what you know what's what's uh give me uh write that story what's what's what should we

01:08:21.340 be doing what can i be doing in the next few months what should we be doing in many of our

01:08:26.480 religious traditions we have there's a phrase as above so below and you could say if you want to

01:08:32.800 translate to something more rational that there is a startling and profound similarity between

01:08:38.280 the architecture of an atom and the architecture of the solar system, right? So just hold that

01:08:45.320 and say, I need to be two things. I need to be individual. I read at the lake on the porch,

01:08:54.560 the Declaration of Independence every single 4th of July, you know? And my poor kids and

01:09:00.880 now grandkids can't start eating the hamburgers and hot dogs until granddaddy gets through with 1.00

01:09:06.540 this reading. And whatever you do that makes you happy, my favorite holiday, without a doubt,

01:09:12.540 before this film, before any conversation, has always been the 4th of July, followed by

01:09:18.200 Thanksgiving, because of the way we come together. So let's have what we always do, that individual

01:09:24.880 thing, but then let's try to imagine it as a larger thing. So if there's an atomic moment

01:09:32.900 on that porch at the lake, what's the, what's the solar system of this? And it has to be a kind of

01:09:40.240 righteous re-engagement with the principles of our founding. Let's go back and say,

01:09:46.560 this is what we meant. And, you know, I, I had screenings of the film before it was done. We're

01:09:51.240 working on it. We're trying to get better. And, and I go, geez, there's a lot of red meat for

01:09:55.560 MAGA. And then I went and said, great, great. You know, this is it. You know, there's these

01:10:01.440 over mountain men in the Carolinas that are, have defied the British proclamation that you can't

01:10:06.820 cross the Appalachians. And they just said, F you and went over there and started it. And then when

01:10:11.020 the British said, unless you do this, this, and this, we will come over and make your lives 0.85

01:10:14.780 unpleasant. They go, oh yeah, we're coming over and making your life unpleasant. So, you know,

01:10:20.080 where you did not want to be in the revolution was New Jersey because it's guerrilla warfare

01:10:25.100 and it's patriots killing loyalists and loyalists killing patriots or South Carolina, particularly

01:10:30.680 where it's just un, just fettered slaughter.

01:10:34.860 But there's some battles in which, big battles,

01:10:38.420 Kings Mountain over the border in North Carolina,

01:10:41.380 in which there's only one British officer.

01:10:43.420 He's leading the loyalists 0.97

01:10:44.780 and everybody else is an American killing an American.

01:10:47.420 And so I think we have to just disenthrall ourselves,

01:10:51.660 as Lincoln said, of this obsession with the other

01:10:54.080 and understand how, if you want to get things done,

01:10:57.880 you know, you're not making America great again.

01:11:00.220 You're making America great going forward.

01:11:03.160 It's always been great.

01:11:04.700 It has not been diminished except by those moments when we have pretended that our future

01:11:10.920 is in our past.

01:11:12.280 Our future is up ahead.

01:11:17.820 You know, big headline, stop.

01:11:21.060 You know, documentary filmmaker says future is ahead of us.

01:11:25.680 It's also inside of us, decisions, not conditions.

01:11:28.560 We've got to manifest it.

01:11:31.940 You have to manifest it.

01:11:33.380 And I think that there's a way to do it at an individual level.

01:11:36.480 I 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.

01:11:47.520 But then there's a kind of civic responsibility that we have that says, however small the orbit of the solar system is,

01:11:56.800 We have to be engaged in something bigger than ourselves.

01:12:01.240 I love that.

01:12:02.540 And Ken, before we leave, I'd be remiss.

01:12:06.240 A adjacent topic, though connected to all things Ken Burns and the Ken Burns effect.

01:12:11.960 Today is the 50th anniversary of the founding of Apple.

01:12:17.240 And I know you've talked in the past.

01:12:20.480 And just very briefly, I'm curious, just sort of reflecting on, you know, you've said some

01:12:25.600 very, very generous things about Steve Jobs, though. You weren't generous enough to give in

01:12:31.180 to his request that you commercialize or support. Well, you know, it was the opposite thing. He

01:12:36.900 called me up in November of 2002 and said, will you come and see me? First of all, I didn't believe

01:12:42.800 it was Steve Jobs. So I went out there and I met him and he led me into this room with a couple of

01:12:48.040 engineers and he showed me this thing. And I'm still a Luddite. And it was how you could download

01:12:52.220 your photographs or upload your photographs and and pan and zoom kind of like that and i said oh

01:12:57.120 great and he said and next month january of 2003 all mac computers will have this on it and i said

01:13:03.720 wow that's great basically going i have no idea really what he's talking about and he says and

01:13:09.400 so we'd like to keep the working title and i said oh okay what's that and he goes the ken burns

01:13:13.380 effect and i go i don't do commercial endorsements and he goes what go back to his office we spent

01:13:19.380 about an hour in which we became friends. And whenever I was in Silicon Valley, I would stay

01:13:24.680 at his house and sleep in his guest bedroom. And we eventually took his famous daughter, Lisa,

01:13:29.540 as an intern and got to know his wife and his smaller kids. And, you know, it was wonderful

01:13:35.660 endlessly walking to dinner, even when he was sick, into Palo Alto from his home.

01:13:43.540 But I walked out of the room an hour later, not just with that friendship, but with a commitment

01:13:47.740 that apple continued to honor of giving software and hardware to non-profits um which was the only

01:13:56.140 way i could sort of handle it and he just couldn't conceive of it and it's so funny that when i tell

01:14:00.900 this story people said oh you should have asked him for like you know a tenth of a penny every

01:14:05.180 time we use i said you don't know steve jobs he would have said um uh we'll call it the pan and

01:14:10.720 zoom effect goodbye right and i but but what he respected was somebody who was just outside

01:14:17.440 him saying at one point he came to me and he says he calls me up and he goes you don't you're not

01:14:23.020 you're not doing this right you're you're being taken advantage of and he said i want your lawyer

01:14:27.880 to talk to my lawyer about your your pbs deals because i'm in pbs and and they're outside the

01:14:33.940 marketplace right and and then he came back he said oh it looks like you're doing like you've

01:14:38.800 got the right thing. And I said, look, all I want is to be independent. I want to be able to talk to

01:14:42.740 you or the governor of California and say, all of these films are director's cuts. There's not a

01:14:48.940 layer of suits above me. They're saying longer, shorter, sexier, less sexier, you're more violent, 0.96

01:14:54.420 less violent. But that another way, let me just put it this way. If you don't like any of those

01:14:59.140 films, it's all my fault. And that's what I want it to be. You know, I love it. Hey, Ken, just,

01:15:06.080 just very briefly, just previewing, you mentioned a couple of the films you're working on. I mean,

01:15:10.360 I think there's an LBJ film as well. I mean, yeah, we're, we're doing LBJ in the great society.

01:15:14.960 You know, we'd done the Vietnam thing and LBJ is like Nixon, one of these great tragic figures,

01:15:19.740 but his domestic agenda, he was trying to be the next coming of FDR. In fact, he chooses the

01:15:25.380 initials because the first person who ever had initials in a big way to the population was FDR.

01:15:31.520 And so here's LBJ. And that was an interesting thing. And we take care of his domestic agenda

01:15:40.020 in one sentence in an 18-hour film, 10 episodes on Vietnam. So we wanted to reverse engineer it,

01:15:45.880 to pull the sweater inside out and be inside the White House, watch the guns of Vietnam get louder

01:15:51.700 and louder, but see this extraordinary domestic achievement. He's able to pass a civil rights

01:15:57.100 bill that John F. Kennedy, who's very late to civil rights, probably couldn't get passed and

01:16:01.680 voting rights. And he knew as a Southerner what the cost would be. And I think to be able to shed

01:16:07.300 from waking up, you know, on, on, on election day and knowing you had every former state of

01:16:12.880 the Confederacy on your pocket is not necessarily the best thing you want to be in because you're

01:16:18.100 dealing with people who are continued to perpetuate the lost cause. And then he does all

01:16:24.240 this other stuff, Medicare and Medicaid, public broadcasting, all these things that are sort of

01:16:28.500 under assault, but it's an amazing story. So we're just doing that. We're also doing a history of

01:16:32.400 reconstruction called Emancipation to Exodus. I've had the privilege of interviewing Barack Obama

01:16:37.780 eight times, eight, two hour, hour and a half, two hour interviews. No rush. We want to wait

01:16:44.340 until there's scholarship and whatever. And we also are saving a couple of interviews to sort

01:16:49.340 think about what happened after his presidency and until the dust settles a bit it's going to

01:16:54.660 be hard to talk about it we've also been filming people who knew dr king in the service of a big

01:16:59.140 biography on king so those are very much active and we've just begun work on a big history we

01:17:04.900 originally thought for years we'd do something on the cold war and i just switched it about a year

01:17:10.240 ago or six months ago in my mind to doing a history of the cia and um it just it's just

01:17:17.800 think about it you'll get the cold war but you'll get all the intimacies of the stories and you'll

01:17:22.820 you'll be in every president's oval office and you'll be you know in in exotic places all around

01:17:29.020 the world with people who are putting their life on their lines and big mistakes huge mistakes and

01:17:36.080 heroic unsung successes and you know that's the essence of a good story right uh and an essence

01:17:43.680 of a hell of a life, Ken. Look at you. I mean, decades of, I mean, so you are hardly slowing

01:17:50.700 down. No, no, no. So I'm 72 and I'm like an idiot. I've got more on my plate than I've ever

01:17:56.280 had because, you know, if I were given a thousand years to live, which I will not be given, I would

01:18:01.340 not run out of topics in American history. So there's this kind of sense of urgency of like

01:18:06.800 having to get it done. There's so many great stories still to be told.

01:18:12.000 Well, 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.

01:18:19.680 It can move people.

01:18:21.160 Well, 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.

01:18:31.000 it comes out and it has the possibility of offering people not the binary that doesn't 0.99

01:18:36.860 exist in the real world only in computers a one and a zero and only in a media thing red state

01:18:42.500 or blue state right that so if you've got a complicated story then you have to begin to

01:18:49.160 understand like oh i have these two and i can't be i can't be convinced that it's only black or

01:18:56.040 white from what the TV tells me. It's not one thing or the other. I have inside me these

01:19:02.300 contradictions, these flaws and these weaknesses. And it makes me a better citizen, makes me a

01:19:07.080 better parent, makes me a better husband or wife. It makes me a better politician. It makes me

01:19:11.760 a better American. And that's all we want. I love it. Ken, thanks for joining us. Thank you.

01:19:18.440 Thank you, sir.

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01:20:01.360 In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins,

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01:20:40.860 You know Roald Dahl.

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01:20:53.020 What?

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01:20:58.760 Okay, I don't think that's true.

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This is Gavin Newsom - April 02, 2026

And, This Is How To Preserve Our Democracy With Filmmaker Ken Burns

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