This Past Weekend with Theo Von - #615 - Ken Burns

00:00:00.000 It was even bad in America.

00:00:03.120 You know, I'm not home a lot.

00:00:05.440 You know, I can't keep a plant alive at the moment.

00:00:08.460 But when I am home, my bedroom is like my sanctuary.

00:00:12.460 You know, it's a sacred spot for sleep.

00:00:15.220 Thankfully, I have a Helix Sleep Mattress.

00:00:19.320 God, I like it.

00:00:20.660 I mean, I get on that thing and, ooh, baby girl,

00:00:24.060 before I know it, it's morning and I'm feeling good.

00:00:27.800 In fact, I like mine so much I got two of them.

00:00:30.520 I put one of them in the guest room over there

00:00:32.500 in case mom wants to come

00:00:34.020 and just launch some of her dirty dreams into that thing. 1.00

00:00:37.820 Because honestly, sleep matters more to me than ever.

00:00:41.300 Especially when I'm on the go.

00:00:42.460 If I'm home, you know it.

00:00:43.980 Days are long.

00:00:44.800 When you shut it down, it's time to shut it down.

00:00:47.160 Getting real sleep on my Helix Sleep Mattress

00:00:49.900 makes all the difference.

00:00:51.080 If your old mattress has you just launched in,

00:00:53.420 locked in a trench over there,

00:00:55.180 you need a ladder to get out that thing. 0.81

00:00:57.120 It may be time for you to give Helix Sleep a try.

00:01:01.080 You can sleep great too.

00:01:02.760 Just go to helixsleep.com slash Theo

00:01:05.280 to get 25% off site-wide for our audience only.

00:01:09.640 That's helixsleep.com slash T-H-E-O.

00:01:14.780 Make sure you enter our show name after checkout

00:01:17.400 so they know that we sent you.

00:01:19.860 If you're running a business,

00:01:21.040 today's guest is a filmmaker.

00:01:23.580 He's a historian.

00:01:24.720 He's a writer.

00:01:26.120 He is a cartographer of time, if you will.

00:01:30.780 His name is ubiquitous with documentaries.

00:01:34.660 He's covered some of the biggest events in U.S. history

00:01:37.400 and his new film, The American Revolution,

00:01:40.600 premieres in November.

00:01:42.480 I had a great chat with the one and only

00:01:44.760 Mr. Ken Burns.

00:01:47.260 Yeah, and if you'd like to sit back,

00:02:06.080 whatever you feel like, Ken,

00:02:07.000 if you start to feel uncomfortable,

00:02:08.060 just let us know and we'll get you.

00:02:09.580 I'm kind of an edge of the seat guy.

00:02:11.800 You are?

00:02:12.280 Yeah.

00:02:13.420 Wow.

00:02:14.620 Excited.

00:02:14.980 That's an, I've never heard somebody say

00:02:16.480 like I'm an edge of the seat guy.

00:02:18.120 Yeah.

00:02:18.460 Like you're edging or whatever.

00:02:19.880 And I know that's like.

00:02:20.800 It's just, I'm excited.

00:02:21.940 Yeah.

00:02:22.340 Like, you know.

00:02:23.020 Oh yeah.

00:02:23.520 If I were an animal, I'd be a puppy.

00:02:25.800 Oh yeah.

00:02:26.200 You know, kind of.

00:02:27.060 By the door.

00:02:27.620 Yeah.

00:02:27.940 Come on, come on, come on. 0.97

00:02:28.720 Yeah.

00:02:29.360 What are we doing?

00:02:30.220 It must be horrible that an animal,

00:02:32.280 they don't even give it a key on its wrist or anything.

00:02:34.300 That's right.

00:02:34.700 For it to think it could have any,

00:02:36.320 it's just sitting by the door.

00:02:38.000 Yes, exactly.

00:02:39.080 Waiting.

00:02:39.640 Waiting.

00:02:39.720 Yeah.

00:02:40.160 Like if your wife or husband were like that

00:02:42.280 and they're just sitting by the door.

00:02:43.620 You'd get them help.

00:02:44.860 Yeah.

00:02:45.260 Or you'd at least give them like a.

00:02:47.360 Right.

00:02:47.960 A hug.

00:02:48.580 A hug.

00:02:49.140 Yeah.

00:02:49.720 Or a spare key so they could at least have a chance.

00:02:52.660 Right.

00:02:53.120 You'd give them a little button they could hit.

00:02:55.000 Yes.

00:02:55.260 Right.

00:02:55.560 Just to walk out.

00:02:56.740 Yeah.

00:02:56.920 That would help.

00:02:57.580 Yeah.

00:02:58.820 We good, Zach?

00:03:00.860 Ken Burns, thank you so much for hanging out, man.

00:03:02.920 My pleasure.

00:03:03.440 My pleasure.

00:03:04.020 Good to be with you.

00:03:04.640 And thank you for all your examination of humanity, I guess, through documentaries.

00:03:12.740 I was like, I know about you as most people did, you know,

00:03:16.040 kind of when you burst onto the scene with the Ken Burns effect.

00:03:18.980 I think that's when it kind of hit a lot of my culture, you know?

00:03:24.000 You're like, instead of hiring actors and everything, we're just going to slightly.

00:03:27.860 Want to hear the story of how that happened?

00:03:29.960 Yeah, I would love to.

00:03:30.560 It's really pretty cool.

00:03:31.260 So, you know, I've been trying to make films about American history since like the mid-70s.

00:03:37.600 And I'd had some success, a couple Academy Award nominations, but I'd hit the jackpot

00:03:43.060 when this big series in 1990 came out on the Civil War series, which, you know,

00:03:47.380 used the photographs and stuff like that.

00:03:49.260 And our idea was to energetically explore the landscape of a painting and treat an old

00:03:55.620 photograph like it was a feature filmmaker's master shot.

00:03:59.880 Having a wide, a medium, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, an insert of detail.

00:04:05.220 So we were just sort of very energetically exploring the landscape of each image.

00:04:11.000 And so I got a call in 2002, November, and it said it was Steve Jobs.

00:04:17.000 I went, really?

00:04:18.200 And he goes, yeah.

00:04:18.720 He said, will you come out and visit me?

00:04:19.860 And I said, yeah, that's me knocking at the door.

00:04:21.180 So a few weeks later, in December of 2002, I'm in a room with him.

00:04:26.700 We're talking.

00:04:27.520 And he brings in a couple of pretty nervous engineers.

00:04:32.180 And I'm a Luddite.

00:04:34.400 You're a Luddite?

00:04:35.460 Yeah, meaning I'm not a big computer person.

00:04:37.820 It represents a group in England in the 19th century who were opposed to technological changes.

00:04:45.000 Okay, so Mennonite, Luddite, Amish, similar.

00:04:48.180 Well, not quite.

00:04:48.740 It wasn't religious as much as a kind of a social.

00:04:51.140 Anyway.

00:04:51.580 Okay, so Amish without the dairy kind of.

00:04:53.420 That's right.

00:04:55.020 Exactly.

00:04:55.800 So it's basically folks who are opposed to it.

00:04:58.580 I'm not. 0.98

00:04:59.360 I'm just inept.

00:05:00.540 So my children and my grandchildren helped me with all of that.

00:05:02.780 Anyway, Steve is saying, look, we've been working on this thing.

00:05:05.500 And every Mac computer that comes out next month, January of 2003, is going to have this feature on it.

00:05:11.220 And he's showing me, and it's sort of like you can upload your photographs and pan and zoom on them.

00:05:15.560 Very, very simply.

00:05:16.340 A kind of crude, superficial version of what we do or try to do with our stuff to wake up the image, to wake the dead, you know.

00:05:25.420 So I'm looking at it, and I'm kind of going, cool, because I don't really know what's going on.

00:05:30.040 And he says, so we'd like to keep the working title.

00:05:33.620 And I said, what's that?

00:05:34.580 And he said, the Ken Burns effect.

00:05:36.380 I said, you know, I don't do commercial endorsements.

00:05:39.220 He goes, what?

00:05:40.100 And the engineers kind of blanch.

00:05:42.160 And I'd known a little bit that he had a temper.

00:05:44.620 He never showed it to me.

00:05:45.480 But we went back to his office.

00:05:47.360 And after an hour, I worked out agreement that he could use it.

00:05:51.120 But I'd.

00:05:51.980 Yeah, I already had a temper.

00:05:53.060 His iPhone always had a cracked screen.

00:05:56.120 Maybe.

00:05:56.820 But I know some folks who got yelled at.

00:05:58.800 He never, he said, what?

00:05:59.980 So at the end, I walked out.

00:06:01.620 And he basically agreed to give us what turned out to be over a million dollars of hardware and software.

00:06:06.920 Wow.

00:06:07.400 That we gave away to nonprofits, except for one or two computers that stayed in the office because we didn't have a good Mac computer in the office.

00:06:14.640 And then we became friends for the rest of his life.

00:06:17.720 And so whenever I visited Silicon Valley, I'd stay with him.

00:06:20.480 You know, his kids, his daughter became an intern for us for a couple of semesters.

00:06:26.980 So it was a really good relationship.

00:06:28.820 But it is really funny.

00:06:30.000 It's the technological tale that wags the dog of what I'm trying to do, which is take these old things where you don't have newsreels or you don't have living witnesses and try to wake up moments in the past and make them as dramatically compelling as you would if you could talk to some veteran, say, of the Iraq war who's still alive.

00:06:48.900 Well, you certainly mastered it, man.

00:06:51.280 You know, I mean, and the Ken Burns effect, it's like that was at the time where everybody was trying to be could suddenly everybody could suddenly be a filmmaker, right?

00:07:00.000 That's right.

00:07:00.460 Well, this is what Steve did.

00:07:01.780 I mean, by inventing this, he made us all filmmakers.

00:07:05.440 He made us it democratized it all.

00:07:07.380 And what you needed were the tools to be able to polish it.

00:07:10.000 I mean, my kids now and my grandkids can do stuff with this that I wouldn't have any idea how to do it.

00:07:15.720 And one of the cruder tools is the Ken Burns effect, which has saved lots of vacations, lots of birthdays, lots of memorial services, lots of bar mitzvahs, you know.

00:07:25.440 That's a great point.

00:07:26.640 You know what I mean?

00:07:27.360 Yeah.

00:07:27.680 And people say, oh, like, man, you didn't ask him for a cut?

00:07:31.700 And I said, no, I don't do commercial endorsements.

00:07:34.940 But if I'd said, like, I want one one hundredth of a penny every time it's used, he'd go, okay, we'll call it the pan and zoom effect.

00:07:42.940 You know what I mean?

00:07:43.760 It was like the great thing was to just sort of split the difference in the middle and not be so obstinate that I couldn't yield.

00:07:52.340 I don't do commercial endorsements.

00:07:53.860 So it was sort of awkward.

00:07:55.400 But at the same time, I wasn't endorsing a thing.

00:07:59.400 I was endorsing an idea of how you use and manipulate images, which is what I do for an image, for a living.

00:08:05.260 And also you manipulate the past, right?

00:08:07.580 Just in a way to bring it to life, right?

00:08:09.460 That's right.

00:08:09.780 It's almost like you're giving CPR to it in a way, you know?

00:08:12.840 I can't believe that you said that because my mom was sick from the time I was born, like a couple years in.

00:08:19.800 And you grew up here in New York City, which is where we are.

00:08:21.620 No, no, no.

00:08:22.040 I was born in Brooklyn.

00:08:23.480 I grew up in Delaware and Michigan and came east to Massachusetts for college.

00:08:28.700 But my mom had cancer from the very, very beginning.

00:08:32.700 And she died.

00:08:33.460 From when you were a child?

00:08:34.280 Yeah.

00:08:34.560 When I was 11.

00:08:35.440 And it was just a horrible, just the worst, shittiest growing up.

00:08:40.520 And my dad had some mental illness stuff.

00:08:42.840 So it was really hard.

00:08:43.840 I'm not alone in having a hard childhood.

00:08:45.700 Yeah, yeah.

00:08:46.640 It's not self-pity.

00:08:47.700 You're just sharing.

00:08:48.000 But I watched my dad cry at a movie after my mom died.

00:08:52.540 And I'd never seen him cry when she was sick or when she died or at the impossibly sad funeral.

00:08:58.320 And I realized, at 12 years old, I go, I'm going to be a filmmaker.

00:09:01.500 This is 1965.

00:09:03.280 This is, you know, a long time ago, 60 years ago.

00:09:07.440 A great time.

00:09:07.900 It's way too long to be without a mom.

00:09:09.940 But I said, that meant I'd be John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock, Hollywood directors, and stuff like that.

00:09:16.460 And then I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

00:09:19.140 And they were all documentary, still photographers and filmmakers.

00:09:22.260 That reminded me that there's as much drama in what is and what was as anything to human imagination.

00:09:29.120 So I'm a documentary filmmaker.

00:09:30.560 By 22, I'm making films in history.

00:09:32.820 And I've been doing that for 50 years.

00:09:34.660 So I had a crisis, going through a crisis.

00:09:38.560 My late father-in-law was an eminent psychologist.

00:09:41.400 And I said to him one night, I said, I seem to be keeping my mom alive.

00:09:46.620 And he goes, yeah, I bet you blew out your candles on your birthday wishing she'd come back.

00:09:51.540 And I go, how'd you know?

00:09:53.460 And then he named two or three other things that only I knew.

00:09:56.420 You know, really intimate stuff.

00:09:57.940 Because that's how children like that operate?

00:09:59.840 Yes.

00:10:00.140 And it's just, you know, what grief does and what the inability to express it.

00:10:04.660 When you're 11 years old or when you're two years old and realize there's never a moment when there's not a sword of Damocles hanging over your head that's going to ruin everything.

00:10:12.980 So I just, I said, what do you mean?

00:10:15.500 And he goes, well, look what you do for a living.

00:10:17.200 You wake the dead.

00:10:18.380 You make Jackie Robinson and Abraham Lincoln come alive.

00:10:21.700 Who do you think you're really trying to wake up?

00:10:23.660 And then all of a sudden, I knew that's what I do.

00:10:26.860 I'm waking the dead.

00:10:28.060 And everything is a conversation with this woman that has not been around, Theo, for 60 years.

00:10:35.680 60 years, which is way too long to be without a mom.

00:10:38.980 It's all a love story, isn't it, in a way?

00:10:40.740 It's all a love story.

00:10:41.480 Like, you know, there's a musician, Stephen Wilson Jr., who's really great.

00:10:45.520 He's a great poet.

00:10:46.360 And he says that grief is only love that's got no place to go.

00:10:51.440 Yeah, that's perfect.

00:10:53.240 And man, I just.

00:10:53.960 Well, just think about the energy, the propulsion of this loss, just for me, is, and also my father's sort of, he's the smartest guy I knew, but kind of a Maserati without a clutch, you know.

00:11:05.720 Looked really good, sounded voom, voom, really good, but couldn't get into first gear.

00:11:10.340 That made me, you know, such, you know, keep working.

00:11:14.160 I mean, I've got 40 films, you know.

00:11:15.780 So I'm not stopping.

00:11:16.980 All my friends are retiring, and I'm like, what?

00:11:19.440 What's retiring?

00:11:20.320 You know, I'm, you know.

00:11:21.240 Yeah, you're drinking plasma at the house and taking electrolytes.

00:11:24.480 I got stuff to do.

00:11:26.080 Right.

00:11:26.480 You know, if I were given 1,000 years to live, I would never run out of topics in American history.

00:11:31.080 Like, so this is sort of a, you know, I make films about the U.S., but I make films about us.

00:11:38.260 You know what I mean?

00:11:38.820 Got you, yeah.

00:11:39.280 Lowercase, two-letter, plural, pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the U.S.

00:11:50.120 And it is a magnificent space to operate in.

00:11:53.300 I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to be, have the responsibility.

00:11:58.040 It's a huge responsibility to dive into something like the Vietnam War, right now the American Revolution, which we just finished.

00:12:03.540 And, you know, or the Civil War or World War II or the biographies we did.

00:12:07.840 Huey Long, you know, we were talking about from your state of Louisiana, which is just like one of the great unknown stories.

00:12:14.900 It's such an amazing story.

00:12:16.940 Yeah.

00:12:17.300 There he is.

00:12:17.880 Good job.

00:12:18.400 Yeah, man.

00:12:18.900 Oh, he was like, he was definitely a big guy.

00:12:21.720 He had amassed more personal power than anyone else in the history of the United States in a state context.

00:12:26.840 He was both governor and United States senator, which is not legal.

00:12:31.180 And he was already running for president against Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 when he was assassinated in September of 1935 in the statehouse in Baton Rouge, in the big, magnificent Art Deco statehouse he built as a kind of monument to himself when he was governor.

00:12:48.980 Yeah, kind of wild to build a monument while you're alive.

00:12:51.260 And then it also immediately kind of turns into a mausoleum.

00:12:54.000 Yeah, exactly right.

00:12:55.000 Pretty wild how that works.

00:12:55.820 As children, we would go there.

00:12:57.820 And, yeah, it was like a big part of the field trips and stuff like that.

00:13:00.580 We're growing up in Louisiana.

00:13:02.400 But, yeah, there was something really amazing about him that he riled the poor, but he also was able to operate with the elite.

00:13:08.800 You know, you have like – but it was hard to know if he was just out for himself.

00:13:13.240 That's how I felt at the end of watching your documentary about it.

00:13:15.100 There's a kind of ultimate corruption of power, you know, and Jefferson said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

00:13:24.000 And so I think Huey has that.

00:13:25.720 But unlike all the other demagogues that we know, he actually did provide schools.

00:13:31.840 He did provide school books.

00:13:33.860 He did build bridges.

00:13:35.300 He did pave roads so that the poor of Louisiana could bring their products to market.

00:13:39.780 He did, you know, create hospitals.

00:13:43.000 He did do all the things that he said he was going to do, but he did it in a corrupt fashion and basically leveled, as the journalist, Eye of Stone said in our film, all the liberties of the republic.

00:13:55.420 You know, he was kind of like a Caesar who took charge and thought it was his right to destroy the democratic institutions.

00:14:01.900 That had more or less work.

00:14:04.020 And so we have this woman from the Garden District in Louisiana, beautiful woman, to the manner born.

00:14:12.300 And she says in the film, right in the first couple of minutes, there wasn't a Saturday night when we didn't talk about killing Huey Long.

00:14:18.900 It didn't mean you were going to do it.

00:14:20.620 You just wish there was some way to rid the state of this incubus, which is like an old, you know, evil thing.

00:14:28.200 Because he wasn't born into wealth.

00:14:30.160 No, no.

00:14:30.800 So that's another thing.

00:14:31.940 If you're not in that, if you're not part of that echelon, especially in a traditional area like New Orleans, like Louisiana, then you never really can get to those rungs of that ladder.

00:14:44.240 Well, you know, it's really many different states, but certainly there's New Orleans, there's the Catholic South, there's the Protestant North.

00:14:52.180 And he's from a wind parish in North Louisiana.

00:14:55.280 Oh, yeah.

00:14:55.960 There's nothing up there.

00:14:57.000 And was able to articulate the aspirations of people who then surrendered to him and then also had to then pay the price for the kind of dictatorial stuff.

00:15:08.280 I mean, he was surrounded by jackbooted state troopers.

00:15:12.120 He was, you know, had bodyguards.

00:15:13.780 He's eventually killed by the son-in-law of a judge that he fired, got out of his job.

00:15:20.700 And so – or so we think because with all, you know, things like that, there's an attached conspiracy theory that maybe he didn't even have a gun.

00:15:31.100 Carl Alston Weiss was his name.

00:15:32.920 Maybe he didn't do anything except confront Huey about this and that bodyguards shot him and the ricocheting bullet in the close quarters of the hallway of the statehouse ricocheted and killed him.

00:15:45.660 But, you know, we just don't know 100% what happened.

00:15:50.160 But it's one hell of an American story.

00:15:53.120 Yeah.

00:15:53.520 I love it, man.

00:15:54.380 Yeah.

00:15:54.560 I think one thing about documentaries is it makes people think that you feel cared about, you know?

00:16:00.240 Yes.

00:16:00.400 I think the past feels cared about.

00:16:02.080 And there's something that's very beautiful about that.

00:16:05.200 I want to – the American Revolution, it's a new series.

00:16:07.560 It comes out next month.

00:16:09.000 It comes out in November, November 16th.

00:16:11.560 And I've been working on it for – when it comes out, it'll be nine years and 11 months.

00:16:17.520 I started it.

00:16:18.940 I said yes to it when Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency.

00:16:23.840 And, you know, Mark Twain says history doesn't repeat itself.

00:16:26.100 He's absolutely right.

00:16:26.960 No event has happened twice.

00:16:28.780 But the Bible, Old Testament, says there's nothing new under the sun, meaning human nature doesn't change.

00:16:34.020 So Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

00:16:37.860 So I've never worked on a film in which it wasn't rhyming in the present moment.

00:16:42.400 And so the revolution is just another one of these extraordinary stories, our origin story, which we've lost touch with.

00:16:49.920 Oh, I think – there's no doubt about it.

00:16:51.480 It's at arm's length because there are no photographs.

00:16:53.260 There's no newsreels.

00:16:54.380 They're in buckled shoes.

00:16:55.560 They got hoes. 1.00

00:16:56.240 They got breeches.

00:16:57.240 They got waistcoats.

00:16:57.980 They got powdered wigs.

00:16:58.880 And somehow we don't want to fuss with the great ideas.

00:17:02.560 And the great ideas are the greatest ideas ever.

00:17:04.940 I actually think the American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ.

00:17:09.680 I heard you say that.

00:17:10.420 I really, really firmly believe that because if you think about it, up until that moment, everybody was under an authoritarian rule.

00:17:19.500 They were subjects.

00:17:20.740 They were superstitious peasants.

00:17:22.500 And we created citizens.

00:17:24.720 And that's a big deal.

00:17:26.120 When we say we hold these truths to be self-evident, there was nothing self-evident about what Jefferson was about to say, that all men are created equal.

00:17:34.140 No one on earth had made that proposition.

00:17:36.800 Really?

00:17:37.180 That they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

00:17:43.160 Let's go.

00:17:43.680 That is not stuff that the world had ever really heard.

00:17:48.040 He had distilled a century of Enlightenment thinking.

00:17:50.480 He'd been goaded on by what was happening in the breakdown of relationships with the British over stuff.

00:17:56.920 And what became a quarrel between Englishmen suddenly got broken out into natural rights.

00:18:02.540 Like this is what we all not only deserve, but the world needs to change.

00:18:08.640 And it did from that moment on.

00:18:10.840 And that was Jefferson?

00:18:11.640 And that's Jefferson distilling it, but it's the sensibility of everybody.

00:18:15.220 The other thing is that it's a process thing.

00:18:17.600 It's like democracy isn't something that you – it's a thing.

00:18:22.160 It's a process.

00:18:23.080 It's something you do.

00:18:24.300 So when it says pursuit of happiness, the key is – we can get to happiness in a second – but the key is pursuit.

00:18:30.720 It's like after a more perfect union, as the Constitution says.

00:18:35.540 The pursuit means it's a process.

00:18:37.260 You're never getting there.

00:18:38.040 And happiness did not mean the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning so that you would be virtuous enough – they borrowed from the classical traditions – to earn the right of citizenship.

00:18:50.680 And everybody talked to you here as we're working on that virtue, virtue, virtue.

00:18:55.020 It's all about character.

00:18:56.320 It's all about the idea that character is destiny.

00:18:59.480 John Adams is petrified that there's too much ambition and avarice, too much lust for profit, that we won't be virtuous enough to sustain this republic.

00:19:10.100 It's so interesting because they're all the ideas that we wrestle with today, you know?

00:19:14.960 So the Declaration is kind of like a love letter to the future in a way.

00:19:17.580 Oh, my God.

00:19:18.520 That's the best expression I've ever heard.

00:19:21.680 That's exactly what it is.

00:19:22.740 That's so interesting.

00:19:23.340 Tom Paine, Thomas Paine, an Englishman who came off the boat in Philadelphia, failure and everything, and he contracted dysentery or typhus on the way.

00:19:32.420 And he writes this pamphlet that's published in January, early January of 1776.

00:19:38.340 At that point, the war has already started at Lexington and Concord the previous April, but nobody's really sure what we're going to do with this rebellion.

00:19:46.820 And certainly, independency, as they called it, is not on the mind of everybody.

00:19:51.320 But he writes this thing called Common Sense. 0.99

00:19:53.340 It's this pamphlet, the most important pamphlet in American history, and just comes out and says the king is an ass. 0.98

00:19:58.500 And who is Thomas Paine? 0.99

00:19:59.280 Yeah, Thomas Paine, you know?

00:20:00.620 And he then says, not since the time of Noah, you know what happened with Noah, do we have a chance to remake the world.

00:20:09.100 And that's the American Revolution.

00:20:10.960 It's suddenly you're no longer quarreling over Native American land or taxes or representation.

00:20:17.500 You're actually into the biggest idea that human beings have suggested, that we could actually govern ourselves.

00:20:23.880 No, that had never happened before.

00:20:25.440 And that we could sustain.

00:20:27.700 And we then sponsor, these ideas sponsor revolutions for the next 200 plus years.

00:20:34.040 And, you know, we've been going along for 249 years pretty well.

00:20:38.880 Thank you.

00:20:39.240 And we're in it.

00:20:39.820 Thank you very much.

00:20:40.740 That's a great answer.

00:20:41.900 I love the love letter to the future, though, man.

00:20:43.640 I'm not going to forget that.

00:20:44.820 That's a great gift you gave me today.

00:20:46.500 Thank you.

00:20:46.840 Oh, man.

00:20:47.340 That's what it is.

00:20:48.420 Because it's all about possibility.

00:20:49.880 Well, you said it's the pursuit of happiness, right?

00:20:51.740 That's right.

00:20:52.820 Sometimes we even now you're challenging the way that I've thought about some of this because it's like and you're in your the documentary does this.

00:21:00.360 And I think it's eight parts.

00:21:01.400 I'm not sure.

00:21:01.820 Six, six parts, 12 hours.

00:21:03.480 I haven't watched all of it.

00:21:04.720 But but but it challenges you to think about that.

00:21:07.980 It's like you're not just here to just be here.

00:21:10.840 Right.

00:21:11.260 You're not just here like you got this Willy Wonka ticket like to be in a citizen or a part of a society.

00:21:19.660 It's something that is alive and that's evolving.

00:21:22.280 And you need to constantly put it under the microscope.

00:21:24.480 That's correct.

00:21:25.020 And you need to put you under the microscope.

00:21:26.740 Right.

00:21:27.200 Right.

00:21:27.500 We don't have a relationship with ourselves.

00:21:29.160 That's one thing.

00:21:29.640 I think a lot of people don't have a relationship with themselves anymore.

00:21:31.780 And so I think when you're not sitting there and thinking and contemplating where you're at and how the world's affecting you and how you can affect the world,

00:21:38.820 I think it starts to limit us to just looking at our at our Declaration of Independence almost just as like a receipt of times instead of as a living document, you know, or more like a living will and testament.

00:21:51.740 I don't know how it could be said any better than that.

00:21:54.280 I think we wear too many things instead of be too many things.

00:21:58.720 We wear our faith and use it as a cudgel.

00:22:01.780 You know, if there's one thing I learned about making films about the U.S. and us is that there's only us.

00:22:08.820 There's no them.

00:22:10.020 I mean, and people are always creating a them to make an enemy in order to postpone the active work that I have to do, that self-investigation.

00:22:20.000 And that's, interestingly enough, that self-reflective sense that I need to improve, you know.

00:22:26.820 Mark Twain once said, nothing so needs improving as other people's habits.

00:22:32.580 Like, we're always ready to say, man, you should do this differently.

00:22:36.800 You should do that differently.

00:22:38.020 But we're not willing to, you know, my, I have an ancestor, the Scottish poet Robert Burns, who said,

00:22:44.100 oh, would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us.

00:22:48.440 And I think that this whole work of not just wearing your ideas like a piece of clothing, a fashion, but absorbing them and living it is the big dynamic.

00:22:59.300 So everybody, it is in the interest of an authoritarian to have everybody be a kind of superstitious peasant, right? 0.57

00:23:07.320 Uneducated, not improving, not in pursuit of happiness and lifelong learning, which is what that, what they all meant.

00:23:15.260 Right, that's where they want us.

00:23:16.380 That's where the rulers want you there.

00:23:19.420 They want you in a place where you're passive, where you're distracted by your things and your whatever and this scandal and stuff like that.

00:23:26.960 Eleanor Roosevelt once said that great people discuss ideas, average people discuss events, and small minds discuss other people, you know?

00:23:40.320 And you realize the extent to which our old culture is based on kind of judgment, not of ourselves, not with the self-reflective scrutiny that all of our religious teachings,

00:23:52.520 all of our philosophy, and all of the common sense of negotiating this complicated thing that we call our lives suggest,

00:23:59.840 but abandoning that in favor of, I can tell you what you're doing and I can tell you what he's doing wrong,

00:24:06.560 but, oh no, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm fine here, you know, I believe this. 0.94

00:24:10.660 Well, it's nice, it's nice to reflect, because it's fucking painful to look at yourself. 0.97

00:24:13.740 That is. 0.94

00:24:14.180 And I think it's painful, or I don't know if it's painful, it was inventive of these guys at the time.

00:24:19.620 And the American Revolution, it also, it, it all, it often gets classified as like 1776, that's the year everybody, everybody has.

00:24:27.200 But your documentary, it kind of goes, I think, from 75 or to 83.

00:24:33.280 Well, we start at 55 and back up and show you, you know, the French and Indian War, what we call the French and Indian War,

00:24:39.400 it was really called the Seven Years' War, which is probably the third global war over the prize of North America.

00:24:44.740 And so, yeah.

00:24:44.980 And our revolution is the fourth global war.

00:24:47.700 We don't like to think of it as a global war, so it leads up to it.

00:24:51.080 But at the end of the first episode, Lexington-Concord happens in 1775.

00:24:55.940 By 1776, the land we're sitting on, by the way, is farmland.

00:24:59.760 The biggest battle of the revolution will take place in Long, on the Battle of Long Island, which we lose because of George Washington,

00:25:08.440 who's the most important person in the history of the United States.

00:25:11.600 Without him, we don't have a country because of his mistakes.

00:25:14.740 So nobody's perfect.

00:25:16.160 Everybody's pretty complicated.

00:25:18.260 Wait, we don't have a country because of his mistakes?

00:25:20.360 No, no, no.

00:25:21.040 We, if he didn't live, if he didn't survive or if he surrendered, we wouldn't have a country.

00:25:25.720 He's central to it.

00:25:26.600 And at the same time, he's flawed, he's rash, he rides out on the battlefield at Kips Bay, just over there.

00:25:32.320 And his aides grab the reins of the horse because he's going to get killed if he gets killed.

00:25:37.820 It's all over.

00:25:38.660 He rides out in Princeton in the next January in the middle of the battle.

00:25:43.520 And some aide, you know, covers his eyes.

00:25:45.840 He's going to get killed.

00:25:46.560 But he makes a classic mistake at the Battle of Long Island in Brooklyn, what is now Brooklyn.

00:25:51.080 And he doesn't protect his left flank and the British curl him up.

00:25:54.340 Makes the same mistake again the next year at the Battle of Brandywine.

00:25:58.080 And yet he keeps his army together and he suddenly realizes he doesn't have to win.

00:26:04.060 He just can't not completely lose.

00:26:06.740 The British have to win and they're 3,000 miles away from headquarters.

00:26:10.200 And nobody knows what weather is coming.

00:26:12.220 And it takes six weeks to get back, the news to get back to England.

00:26:15.480 It takes even longer because the Gulf Stream is not working in your favor.

00:26:18.600 Coming the other way and so what are you going to do?

00:26:21.740 So it's an amazing story.

00:26:23.540 So New York, 249 years ago, is in British hands. 0.72

00:26:29.540 And it stays in British hands through the rest of the war.

00:26:34.000 Ends in the fall of 1781 at Yorktown.

00:26:37.240 And another two years and two months before the Treaty of Paris and the British evacuate.

00:26:44.220 Evacuation day is November 25th.

00:26:46.520 So it's two months and 10 days.

00:26:48.000 That's when the Brits had to take a hike?

00:26:49.680 Eight years when they finally leave.

00:26:51.740 And it just drove Washington crazy.

00:26:53.720 And in fact, everybody's going saying, go to Virginia.

00:26:56.700 The French are going, go to Virginia. 1.00

00:26:58.080 Let's get them there, which they do.

00:26:59.780 And he's going, no, no, no.

00:27:00.720 What about New York?

00:27:01.440 Why don't we take back New York?

00:27:02.720 Because he's the humiliation of having lost this city.

00:27:06.220 And this is the big British stronghold and loyalist stronghold for the war.

00:27:10.520 And people don't remember that our revolution was a civil war.

00:27:14.700 More than our civil war was.

00:27:16.240 Our civil war was a sectional war.

00:27:18.180 One part of the country against the other.

00:27:20.260 But this is a civil war in which people in your own town, in your own family, might be loyalists.

00:27:25.200 And you might be a patriot.

00:27:26.240 Or you might be disaffected.

00:27:27.500 Please leave me alone.

00:27:28.380 I just want to keep my head down and not be bothered by it.

00:27:30.760 So there's a constant set of interesting struggles that we don't tend to do with.

00:27:36.940 I think we don't want to accept the violence of the revolution because we think it might diminish those big ideas we've been talking about.

00:27:44.220 They're not in any way diminished.

00:27:46.020 They're made even more inspirational and more impressive.

00:27:49.700 Right.

00:27:49.980 It's better when you look at it.

00:27:51.020 Because of how incredibly violent and bloody this revolution was.

00:27:56.500 Well, people were willing to die for something, you know.

00:27:58.680 I think you should know that Bitcoin just hit an all-time high, which is pretty wild considering that it was at about $60,000 last year.

00:28:09.440 When I need more Bitcoin, MoonPay is always the first app that I open because it doesn't force you to buy a whole coin.

00:28:18.800 And it's super easy to use.

00:28:20.880 MoonPay is one of the biggest partners on the show, which is why I'm excited to share that I've made my decision

00:28:26.060 to accept my compensation from them in Bitcoin instead of U.S. dollars.

00:28:32.240 I'm planning to hold and save that Bitcoin in my MoonPay account.

00:28:37.160 Yep.

00:28:37.780 That Bitcoin will sit in a digital wallet that no one can access except for me.

00:28:44.080 The U.S. dollar continues to fluctuate in value.

00:28:46.960 So by making this decision, I'm diversifying my portfolio.

00:28:50.540 And hopefully earning more from our partnership than I would have otherwise.

00:28:56.620 Remember, while MoonPay makes buying crypto straightforward, it's essential to do your own research and understand the risks involved.

00:29:04.080 Crypto trading can be volatile and you could lose your investment.

00:29:07.980 MoonPay is a tool to facilitate your transactions, not a source of financial advice.

00:29:13.140 Trade responsibly.

00:29:14.340 Take me into those 20 years before.

00:29:17.240 There's two groups, right?

00:29:18.020 The Patriots and the Loyalists.

00:29:19.620 We discovered America, right?

00:29:21.120 We developed these colonies along the eastern seaboard.

00:29:24.040 So there's 13 colonies.

00:29:25.100 But there's also the Native Americans.

00:29:27.140 I mean, there's so many things going on.

00:29:28.800 There's so many elements going on.

00:29:30.300 So what happens is, is everybody wants to bust out, cross over the Appalachians and take more Native American land.

00:29:38.240 And it isn't just them.

00:29:40.040 They are many, many nations that are lined up again.

00:29:42.900 But, and there is different-

00:29:44.180 What do you mean?

00:29:44.620 So is it many nations wanted to go over there?

00:29:46.740 No, no, no.

00:29:47.540 Many Native American nations are there.

00:29:50.160 So you might have the Delaware, the Shawnee.

00:29:52.300 You might have the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Seneca, Onondaga, Tuscarora.

00:29:58.060 The Oneida.

00:29:58.760 Oneida and Mohawk.

00:29:59.960 You've got, you know, all the Cherokees in the South. 1.00

00:30:02.820 You have all these different-

00:30:03.840 And they're as separate and as unique as, say, Virginia is or, say, France is or the Netherlands.

00:30:10.540 And so you need to treat them not as a monolithic them.

00:30:14.260 You need to treat them as themselves.

00:30:16.060 In fact, Franklin's whole idea, Benjamin Franklin has the idea of uniting the colonies because he reads about the Iroquois Confederacy.

00:30:24.220 And they said, we are a powerful Confederacy.

00:30:26.280 Never fall out one with the other.

00:30:28.140 So they had their individual interests, we call that states' rights, but they had the federal connection that protected them in their general rights.

00:30:35.900 So the great irony is the American Revolution destroys their Confederacy.

00:30:42.360 But what's going on here is people are wanting to move west.

00:30:45.820 The British win the French and Indian War.

00:30:47.800 Their treasury is bankrupt.

00:30:49.680 And they have no way to protect the settlers as they're pouring across the land trying to take land.

00:30:55.180 So the British are trying to control everything from over there. 0.94

00:30:58.020 Yes, but remember, they have no money to protect their own people.

00:31:01.080 They're all Brits from that. 1.00

00:31:02.880 They also have 13 other colonies in the Caribbean, which are much more profitable.

00:31:07.660 They're all based on slave labor.

00:31:09.140 Oh, yeah.

00:31:09.380 Only Virginia and South Carolina are profitable.

00:31:11.660 All the rest aren't.

00:31:12.580 But we're the most populist.

00:31:13.860 We're the most literate.

00:31:15.180 We make things.

00:31:16.100 We trade with them.

00:31:16.940 And we're also on the continent, which is what everybody wants.

00:31:21.440 The French want it.

00:31:22.420 The Spanish want it.

00:31:23.420 The Dutch want it.

00:31:24.700 Everybody wants this.

00:31:26.020 To be in the Americas? 0.88

00:31:26.820 To own what we call North America.

00:31:29.220 And, of course, the native peoples who've been there for 20,000 years want to keep it.

00:31:35.380 And so there's all these tensions.

00:31:38.000 And so they're big land speculators, too.

00:31:40.480 Like, normally, you and I, we'd be working our land for 1,000 years for somebody else in Wales or Scotland or Ireland or England.

00:31:48.140 But now we're over here, and we can get 125 acres of our own.

00:31:51.780 But there's big speculators like Franklin and Washington.

00:31:55.100 And they just decided that Native American land is mine. 0.84

00:31:58.660 Why don't I divide it up and sell it and be the middleman for land they didn't yet own?

00:32:02.480 The British are like, we can't protect you. 1.00

00:32:04.900 Our treasury is whatever.

00:32:06.120 So not only can you not cross the Appalachians, in 1763, they made a rule, you can't go over it.

00:32:12.480 That enraged the colonists.

00:32:14.880 And then they said, we need you to help pay.

00:32:18.840 The Stamp Act, is that it?

00:32:19.760 And various things that they were going to tax us.

00:32:22.760 T, Stamp Act, they proposed, and everybody went crazy.

00:32:25.160 That was amazing.

00:32:26.020 That was a good sign of how the people had a lot of control.

00:32:29.000 Well, this is what happened.

00:32:30.840 Those individual colonies that had no interest in connecting with one another.

00:32:34.580 Franklin had suggested back in the 1750s, let's get together and do a union like the Native peoples can't do. 0.93

00:32:40.780 And we all said, no, we're not giving up our autonomy.

00:32:43.880 Nobody came.

00:32:44.920 Nobody wanted to do it.

00:32:46.460 But then, as these taxes happened, as the decision to not allow colonists to go into Indian land was enforced, they just suddenly started coming together.

00:32:59.520 And there's committees of correspondence, the Sons of Liberty, there's resistance.

00:33:03.520 Women are hugely part of it. 1.00

00:33:04.880 You never hear about this.

00:33:06.040 They keep this thing going.

00:33:07.280 They said, we can do without these imported goods.

00:33:09.800 We'll make our own homespun cloth.

00:33:11.520 And so, people are in competition.

00:33:13.540 The ladies of this province are this.

00:33:15.620 And so, what happens is, eventually, as always happens, and this happens in history so much, is that I tell you, you know, you're acting radical.

00:33:25.860 You may not be acting radical, but then you start acting more radical.

00:33:28.740 You say me.

00:33:29.480 You're being tyrannical.

00:33:30.800 And I may not be tyrannical, but I start acting more tyrannical.

00:33:33.760 And you get to this point where somebody says, we think they're storing arms in Lexington and Concord.

00:33:40.040 Let's go and capture their leaders, this firebrand, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and let's collect this stuff.

00:33:48.840 So, it's the weapons of mass destruction.

00:33:50.400 Well, it's their rifles and muskets and flints and gunpowder.

00:33:54.300 And they go, and, you know, the patriots meet them on the green at Lexington.

00:33:58.940 And the British say, disperse.

00:34:00.800 And they start to, and a shot fires out.

00:34:03.220 Somebody say, it's a massacre.

00:34:05.200 The British kill eight or nine of us and wound others. 0.99

00:34:09.380 And then they march on to Concord.

00:34:10.880 And then finally at Concord, everybody said, F this.

00:34:13.600 You know, we're going.

00:34:14.600 And so, they fight back.

00:34:15.740 And the whole way, the retreat back to Boston is just a slaughter for the British. 0.77

00:34:20.220 And then they're hemmed in.

00:34:21.540 They're not, they can get out.

00:34:22.600 They've got their most powerful navy on earth.

00:34:24.880 But they can't, they can't move out because there's just thousands of patriots who've rushed from Rhode Island and Connecticut and New Hampshire.

00:34:33.080 As well as Massachusetts towns to the defense of Boston.

00:34:36.520 And they ring them and they've got them in.

00:34:39.060 And then it begins a war that is going to take six and a half years until Yorktown.

00:34:46.660 And any time you're in telling a story, you have to remember that everyone who's in it doesn't know how it's going to turn out.

00:34:55.760 And that if you're a good storyteller, you have people tune in, pay attention to the story, because you think it may not turn out the way you know it did.

00:35:05.600 That's the essence of it.

00:35:06.700 So, I have people telling me about my Civil War series.

00:35:09.400 They say, you know, I went into that Ford's Theater hoping the gun would jam this time.

00:35:13.600 And I went, yes, that's exactly what you want, right?

00:35:16.760 That's exactly what you want.

00:35:17.820 Oh, yeah.

00:35:18.420 Because even when the French decide to come in after the Battle of Saratoga, it's still not a given that we're going to win.

00:35:24.260 Washington isn't totally sure that we're going to win.

00:35:26.900 And when Charleston falls in the spring of 1780, it's like, I think the game is over.

00:35:34.660 I'm not sure how we can continue.

00:35:36.960 And he does.

00:35:37.900 And then the French, we have a few engagements.

00:35:41.320 The first couple of engagements with the French are disasters. 0.78

00:35:43.960 And we're thinking, maybe we don't, their help isn't going to be helpful.

00:35:48.540 And then their army comes.

00:35:50.820 And they march with Washington, not to New York to liberate it, but around and down.

00:35:54.880 And they trap Cornwallis and the French Navy defeats the British and allows the big guns to come in from New York.

00:36:01.720 I mean, it is as riveting a story as you could ever tell.

00:36:07.140 And it's our story and nobody knows it.

00:36:09.480 It's our origin story.

00:36:11.220 It's our origin mythology.

00:36:13.080 It's our Valhalla.

00:36:16.140 It's our Thor and Odin.

00:36:18.880 These are all the founding stuff.

00:36:22.260 And what could be more important, and particularly today when we feel like we're divided, so divided, well, you go, well, we're pretty divided back then.

00:36:29.920 And we were pretty divided during the Vietnam.

00:36:31.640 We were really divided during the Great Depression.

00:36:34.120 And we were really, you know, in America first.

00:36:35.940 And we were really divided during the Civil War.

00:36:38.580 So maybe we're always divided.

00:36:40.460 And maybe the essence is not to just keep pointing and escalating it, but say, what do we share in common?

00:36:48.160 Well, I'll tell you what we share in common.

00:36:49.760 We share an origin story.

00:36:51.520 That on July 4th in 1776, very few countries know exactly when they were born, where, Philadelphia, when, July 4th, 1776.

00:37:00.920 And what?

00:37:01.860 We hold these truths to be self-evident.

00:37:04.120 That's our story.

00:37:05.300 What's our zodiac sign?

00:37:06.440 Yeah, so we are Cancer.

00:37:09.140 That's our zodiac sign.

00:37:10.480 Yeah, July 4th.

00:37:11.980 Although I read an article the other day that suggests that actually these borders of the signs might be shifting.

00:37:19.000 So now I'm going to put an asterisk next.

00:37:21.940 Okay. 0.96

00:37:22.740 So America's a Cancer. 0.80

00:37:24.120 Cancer with an asterisk. 0.56

00:37:25.140 Okay.

00:37:25.580 I love that.

00:37:27.600 Take me, Cancer is characterized as highly emotional, imaginative, and loyal.

00:37:32.940 There you go.

00:37:33.540 That's pretty American.

00:37:34.220 So maybe we ought to work on those things.

00:37:37.860 Tenacious, sympathetic, creative, protective.

00:37:40.660 That's pretty good.

00:37:42.280 Weaknesses are moodiness, insecurity, pessimism, and being easily hurt.

00:37:47.480 So we're here, dude.

00:37:48.820 So this is us, right?

00:37:50.600 This is the U.S. 0.77

00:37:51.540 This is us, right?

00:37:52.140 This is us.

00:37:52.740 So this is, you know, there was a cartoonist named Walt Kelly, and he had a cartoon series called Pogo Strip.

00:38:00.600 And at one point, the main character, who's this odd animal figure, says, we have met the enemy, and he is us.

00:38:09.100 Right?

00:38:09.620 Because it's a variation on a military moment.

00:38:13.340 And it's really true.

00:38:16.340 Lincoln, as a young lawyer, not yet 29 years old, 28 years old, addresses the Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois.

00:38:26.680 And they're discussing foreign policy.

00:38:29.340 And he says, whence shall we expect the approach of danger?

00:38:32.880 Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow?

00:38:37.540 And then he answers his own question.

00:38:39.320 Never.

00:38:39.660 All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink in the Ohio River or make a track in the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

00:38:49.900 If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

00:38:55.300 We are a nation of free men who will live forever or die by suicide.

00:38:59.680 Wow.

00:39:00.200 So there's our challenge, right?

00:39:02.480 You want to get self-involved.

00:39:04.180 You want to make your neighbor your enemy.

00:39:06.260 You want to make lots of them.

00:39:07.700 Then you are headed towards that self-destruction that Lincoln's talking about.

00:39:12.820 You want to figure out what we share in common, this corny sort of civic virtue, civic energy that comes from the Declaration of Independence, like how you can work together to do it.

00:39:25.080 And, you know, a lot of people who are unbelievable citizens, it's like they go to the school board meeting.

00:39:31.340 They participate in, you know, I live in New England and we have a town meeting.

00:39:36.180 And, you know, sometimes the biggest decision is whether to buy a new pumper for the fire department.

00:39:40.820 That's a big deal.

00:39:41.580 That's civics.

00:39:42.640 That's dealing with the stuff.

00:39:44.400 And it's also saying I've got to vote and I have a responsibility as a citizenship to do it.

00:39:50.300 And then we'll save our country.

00:39:51.960 Then, you know, if you like the abstraction of disagreement and violence and all that sort of stuff where suddenly just because your feed tells you one thing that somebody's an enemy, then you're lost.

00:40:05.300 But if you look across the room and you say, you know, I don't share in common that much with somebody who comes from Louisiana and lives in Tennessee.

00:40:13.360 I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Delaware and Michigan and now I've lived in New England for the last, you know, 54 years.

00:40:22.980 What will we have in common?

00:40:24.620 We share a love of those ideas.

00:40:26.720 We share a love of that process, the pursuit of happiness.

00:40:30.780 God, yeah, it comes so much back to like your own integrity with yourself, you know, and I think it's interesting whenever like as I'm watching your documentary, it's like you learn that like even as you were saying earlier that this is like the first time that people thought of themselves as not under rule.

00:40:51.080 But like it's almost like we were away at summer camp or something and you kind of your imagination started to bloom.

00:40:59.680 That's right.

00:41:00.100 You know, like that's kind of the feeling that I get of those of the first colonists here.

00:41:05.420 It's so it's so exciting.

00:41:07.220 There's a moment.

00:41:08.380 I mean, it's blooming on somebody else's land as well.

00:41:10.920 It's definitely blooming on Native Americans. 1.00

00:41:12.320 So I don't want to not say that.

00:41:14.020 So here's here's the deal.

00:41:15.180 You ask any school kid, how's the how were the colonists who threw the tea in Boston Harbor dressed?

00:41:22.240 And they say as Native Americans, why were they dressed as Native Americans?

00:41:26.280 And they go to deflect the blame.

00:41:28.220 And you go, no, they were dressing.

00:41:30.860 And it's so ironic and poignant and sad and also ennobling that we were saying to Britain, we're no longer part of you.

00:41:42.000 The scholar Phil DeLoria says we're Aboriginal.

00:41:45.720 We choose to dress this way because we're severing our feelings and our affections with the motherland because of what you're doing to us.

00:41:54.420 And who do you choose?

00:41:56.460 Oh, the people that you've spent the last 150 years dispossessing of their land.

00:42:00.380 And oh, by the way, you're going to spend the next 150 years continuing to dispossess them of their land.

00:42:06.100 So there's a great irony.

00:42:07.200 But there was a point you made a second ago, a little bit later in the declaration after he says pursuit of happiness.

00:42:12.340 There's the phrase he says, Jefferson says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

00:42:22.600 It's not that difficult to figure out a little bit, but can you break that down?

00:42:25.920 For me a little bit so I can understand it.

00:42:27.300 So he says, basically, he says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

00:42:35.260 Meaning, heretofore, all human beings have been under the boot of an authoritarian.

00:42:40.320 And basically, it's the human lot to just put up with it.

00:42:44.280 And we are creating something new called a citizen.

00:42:48.320 It's going to take hard work.

00:42:49.820 It's going to take that self-examination.

00:42:51.700 It's going to take that self-criticism, which we're so unwilling to do.

00:42:55.180 It's rather criticize the other than ourselves rather than to assume the discipline necessary to have the virtue, getting better as a human being, to be a citizen.

00:43:06.980 But he's putting it right down there.

00:43:09.800 You will devolve back to that state where when somebody comes in who is acting as an authoritarian, you'll go, fine, take it over for me, Mussolini. 0.70

00:43:18.140 The trains are running on time.

00:43:19.580 That's all I need is for the trains to run on time.

00:43:21.820 You know, you think that's what it's about?

00:43:23.860 It's not about.

00:43:24.560 We know what the story of tyranny is, and we know what our story is, and our story is not the story of tyranny.

00:43:33.220 And it never happens with a light switch.

00:43:36.640 It happens incrementally.

00:43:38.580 You know, you don't—it's like two frogs sitting in the boiling pot of water, and somebody says—they're still saying to each other,

00:43:46.460 I really like a hot bath, you know, until they're cooked, right?

00:43:50.460 And so at some point, what Jefferson is saying is, do not be so disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable,

00:43:59.800 meaning do not put up with the yoke of authoritarianism.

00:44:05.240 You know, be more active as a citizen and understand that that person that you disagree with, we want them to disagree.

00:44:12.940 Remember, we're the first country on earth that didn't establish a religion.

00:44:16.720 Like, almost all of the wars that are fought are over some interpretations of religion or some other such thing that devolves from that.

00:44:26.020 And we were saying, make no notice of it.

00:44:28.320 Thomas Jefferson himself said, if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no god at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

00:44:36.800 And like, New York and Pennsylvania have got—worked into their state constitutions, just not paying attention to a particular religion means you are free from all the tyrannical thou shall rather than this is. 0.63

00:44:53.260 Like, the thing that you're talking about, that individual responsibility—

00:44:56.960 That's another them and me.

00:44:58.020 That's exactly—when it is, this is, and it is an acceptance, thou shall is telling somebody else how to be and how that's wrong.

00:45:07.420 So the whole story is trying to figure out—you could say that we're a nation in the process of becoming.

00:45:15.200 Like, and what do you want to be? Ever see the movie?

00:45:17.620 You should always be a nation in the process of becoming.

00:45:19.440 Of course. Otherwise, what are you?

00:45:20.980 You are static.

00:45:21.880 You're, you know, Putin's Russia.

00:45:24.500 You're Xi's China. 0.70

00:45:25.380 You've just got people telling you what to do.

00:45:27.780 And nobody wants that.

00:45:29.800 You want to develop ideas.

00:45:31.100 You want to pursue science.

00:45:32.620 You want to pursue arts.

00:45:33.660 You want to have a lot—you want to tolerate lots of different points of view.

00:45:37.700 And right now, we've gotten to the place where we don't even want to listen to another point of view.

00:45:42.040 We only want to hear the information that, you know, sat us.

00:45:45.540 Oh, yeah, that's what I agree with, you know?

00:45:47.200 And not sort of expand ourselves and say, I can listen to someone that I totally disagree with, and I don't have to then make that person the enemy.

00:45:57.780 That's the key to the American experiment.

00:46:00.340 Yeah.

00:46:01.200 Well, I think even just a conversation like this, man, it's so good for me.

00:46:04.820 Like, it's so good.

00:46:06.100 It takes me out of this, like—I don't get too caught up in the, like, us and them thing, but it puts me back in a place of, like, oh, yeah, well, I'm here with a purpose, right?

00:46:16.360 Like, it gives you a purpose of, like, being a citizen, of being a human, right?

00:46:20.560 Of, like, a Rubik's Cube that will never be solved, right?

00:46:25.140 It's like, I don't need to win, right?

00:46:27.480 Like, but I do need to keep playing and also be a good competitor and an earnest competitor.

00:46:35.720 And, yeah, it just—it puts it more back on you, right?

00:46:39.440 It makes the mirror a little bit stronger.

00:46:41.320 I think it gets nice.

00:46:42.100 That is a beautiful thing, and it goes along with your dream of the—I mean, Jefferson wrote that to Adams.

00:46:47.060 You know, they were friends, and they were enemies, and then they were friends again at the end of their life.

00:46:51.380 They both died on July 4th, 1826, 50 years to the moment of the signing of the Declaration.

00:46:58.200 And they both thought the other was alive.

00:47:00.420 Jefferson had died first.

00:47:01.780 Adams survived him by a couple of hours.

00:47:03.740 But just before he died, he said, you know, I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

00:47:09.920 And so we shall go on—so we will go on and shall go on—puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of mankind.

00:47:20.420 And I love that idea that's puzzled and prospering.

00:47:22.720 I gave a commencement address last year at Brandeis University, and I was talking about how we're so preoccupied with these binaries, you know, red state, blue state, Democrat, Republican, young, old, black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, east, west, north, south.

00:47:39.980 We always have these divisions.

00:47:41.200 They don't exist in nature.

00:47:42.860 They're just arbitrary divisions that we've imposed on things.

00:47:45.960 And so I said, when you look at things and you see how it's going, the opposite of faith is not doubt.

00:47:55.120 Doubt is central to faith.

00:47:57.380 The opposite of faith is certainty.

00:48:00.640 I was going to say certainty.

00:48:01.820 Certainty destroys the mystery of this thing that you and I have been talking about.

00:48:06.840 Who wants to stop that unless it's a thou shall? 1.00

00:48:11.000 You can't dance.

00:48:12.200 You can't do this.

00:48:13.340 You can't do this.

00:48:14.400 All the things that we're told or because you do this, you are not a good person or you are not a real American or what?

00:48:23.320 What's a real American? 0.99

00:48:24.940 I mean, there are a group of Native Americans, and I'm very pleased to report that there are more Native Americans now in the United States, not in the best of circumstances in many cases, but more than there were when the American Revolution took place.

00:48:39.460 However, they do have a legitimate claim to saying, you know, we're the real Americans.

00:48:45.480 And so all of this stuff in the revolution then has to parse that.

00:48:49.620 Who are we in Massachusetts?

00:48:51.460 Who are we in Georgia?

00:48:52.760 Who are we in New Hampshire and South Carolina?

00:48:55.320 What are the Native people in our midst? 0.79

00:48:57.260 What are the Native people at our borders?

00:48:58.960 And there are lots of different cultures as distinct, I said, as any other cultures.

00:49:02.780 And we've also imported by force 500,000 enslaved African-Americans.

00:49:09.560 Where are they going to go?

00:49:11.980 And what are they going to do?

00:49:13.640 And then we have all this pressure from all these big superpowers like Britain that owns us and France that is sorry that they lost us and Spain that wants that gots the bottom and they wants more.

00:49:26.280 And the Dutch who used to be in there, you know, New York was this was a Dutch city.

00:49:32.300 And so in Brooklyn is a Dutch name.

00:49:35.180 Harlem is a Dutch name.

00:49:37.240 I mean, so you've got this overlay of all of these cultures competing here.

00:49:42.160 And so the revolution is the place where we coalesce.

00:49:45.380 We bring together the best ideas that had ever been thought in humankind about human organization amongst a huge variety of people.

00:49:56.280 And we've made it work for at least 249 years.

00:49:59.660 And I'm super proud to be an American.

00:50:02.220 I mean, with the exception of one film, all of the things I've done have been about American history because I'm trying to ask this deceptively simple question.

00:50:11.920 Who are we?

00:50:13.120 Who are these strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans?

00:50:16.880 And what does an investigation of the past, that particular moment, that particular person, that particular war, tell us about not only where we were back then, but where we are now and where we may be going?

00:50:26.960 This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

00:50:31.560 Did you know that October 10th is World Mental Health Day?

00:50:35.020 And this year we're saying thank you, therapists.

00:50:39.200 BetterHelp therapists have helped over 5 million people worldwide on their mental health journeys.

00:50:44.920 That's millions of stories.

00:50:47.100 And behind everyone is a therapist who showed up, listened, and helped someone take a step forward.

00:50:52.860 I want you to know that the right therapist can help change everything.

00:50:57.580 And BetterHelp has 12-plus years experience in matching people to the right therapist.

00:51:03.280 BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the U.S.

00:51:08.880 This World Mental Health Day, we're celebrating the therapists who have helped millions of people take a step forward.

00:51:15.480 If you're ready to find the right therapist for you, BetterHelp can help you start that journey.

00:51:20.360 Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash Theo.

00:51:26.820 That's BetterHelp.com slash T-H-E-O.

00:51:32.880 Thank you so much, man.

00:51:34.320 This is so fun.

00:51:35.500 It is fun.

00:51:36.200 It is fun.

00:51:36.720 I'm having the best time.

00:51:38.080 Yeah, I appreciate that.

00:51:40.300 Let's look at a little bit of the minutia.

00:51:42.180 So just to make, just to like add, just to get into a little bit of the storytelling, to add some like blush to the cheeks of this conversation, what about Paul Revere's ride?

00:51:53.780 What was real about that?

00:51:55.660 Was he just a loud mouth?

00:51:57.680 Some people said it was autism.

00:51:59.200 He got a hold of a horse and some booze.

00:52:01.340 There's a lot of like, a lot of rumors going on out there.

00:52:04.700 Some of that's TikTok, but still.

00:52:06.120 Yeah, well, so let me dispel the most important thing, which is he did not say the British are coming, the British are coming.

00:52:13.460 He didn't.

00:52:13.920 He didn't say the Redcoats are coming or the Redcoats are coming.

00:52:16.900 What he yelled was the regulars are coming out.

00:52:20.820 The regulars are coming out, meaning the regular British army that has been stationed in Boston for whatever it is, almost two years, are coming out.

00:52:30.360 And so he is a patriot.

00:52:32.440 He has made, he's a silversmith and an engraver, and he's made an engraving of the 1770 event in March called the Boston Massacre.

00:52:43.700 He calls it the Bloody Massacre.

00:52:45.440 We end up calling it the Boston Massacre.

00:52:47.200 When some of these occupying a standing army, I mean, this is the big deal, right?

00:52:51.780 You didn't send an army to a place unless you were protecting them.

00:52:56.200 You didn't send an army there to police the population.

00:52:59.160 That's not what free people have, right?

00:53:02.920 Is the army in your midst.

00:53:04.980 So the British army is in there, in the colonies.

00:53:06.920 They're in Boston because there's so much particularly.

00:53:08.620 Only in Boston or in all the colonies?

00:53:10.260 They've got a presence to protect the stuff, but they are in Boston particularly to try to put down the resistance to their taxes, the resistance to that.

00:53:22.000 So the people realize that the military is there kind of against them.

00:53:26.240 Uh-huh.

00:53:26.560 And that's kind of what we have a lot going on right now, hypothetically.

00:53:30.880 I had a premiere of the film at the Telluride Film Festival, episode one.

00:53:36.020 Telluride, beautiful over there.

00:53:37.440 Gorgeous, gorgeous.

00:53:38.460 And we go every year, even whether we have a film or not.

00:53:41.480 Anyway, so they were doing it.

00:53:42.760 And when they got to the point when General Gage imported these number of ships from Halifax, Nova Scotia to go to occupy Boston, not to protect it, but to police it.

00:53:52.420 And then you hear the voices from the past saying, a standing army in peacetime, this is horrible, you know, like that.

00:53:58.420 And the audience in Telluride erupted because they're going, wait, that's happening now.

00:54:03.860 So that's where history can be your best teacher to go, wait a second, did we just get, did they just raise the temperature on that pot I'm sitting in?

00:54:11.220 Am I about to be boiled?

00:54:12.700 You know, what's going on?

00:54:14.580 So anyway, he does an engraving, Paul Revere does an engraving of the massacre.

00:54:20.840 Before you move on, actually, do you mind, Ken?

00:54:22.580 Yeah.

00:54:22.840 I'm sorry.

00:54:23.720 They just had a thing in Britain the other day where people showed up and I don't know if it was half a million, a million people showed up to support like the British, just what it, what being British.

00:54:35.160 Yes.

00:54:35.880 And so like, I'm not sure exactly what they're doing, but this is just incredible.

00:54:41.880 Wow.

00:54:42.660 Unite the kingdom rally in Britain.

00:54:44.440 And it wasn't, they weren't putting this on a lot of news channels.

00:54:46.860 I think a lot of the news we're trying to label this as like a far right thing, you know, the news I don't think has done a good job.

00:54:53.300 I feel like they want us to be at odds a lot of times.

00:54:57.620 I think, I think that since.

00:54:59.360 Do you think that's a fair statement?

00:55:00.680 Yeah.

00:55:00.960 I think that in many ways, media, regardless of its, you know, orientation depends on conflict and that we spend a lot of time.

00:55:11.220 That's the essence of a story is we think conflict rather than, you know, it's, oh, it's, you know, it's so funny.

00:55:19.400 You get involved.

00:55:20.280 This is incredible.

00:55:21.460 It's just street after street.

00:55:22.980 You get involved in a war and then after the war, you get involved in negotiations and you just wonder.

00:55:28.400 We were, we were making our film on Vietnam and we were introducing a Marine who just did some amazing thing, got a chest full of medals, just, you know, almost the Congressional Medal of Honor, just amazing stuff for his action.

00:55:40.540 And we kept pressing him, wanting to hear the stuff.

00:55:42.940 And he finally looked up and he said, it's the history of the world, meaning warfare.

00:55:48.300 It's what we do.

00:55:49.340 And you would think that at some point we get to a place, all of our religious teachings, all of them are just big tributaries flowing into the same sea, do unto others as you would have others do unto you, that we would just jump from the argument to the negotiation and the solution rather than what we seem to have.

00:56:13.020 And I'm guilty of focusing as, you know, I tell other things, but, you know, history of country music, history of jazz music, baseball, all of that stuff, but I focus on Civil War and World War II and Vietnam and the American Revolution now because they're so instructive about human behavior, bad, of course, but also really good, these ennobling ideas that we've been talking about, first ever, which is why I feel comfortable saying it's the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ.

00:56:42.000 And yet the violence is unnecessary and certainly political violence is unnecessary and certainly reactive violence.

00:56:53.260 Well, that because they did that, then we have to do that.

00:56:56.140 And it's, you realize that it's like the Old Testament, an eye for an eye, you know, and you realize you keep going with that and everybody's blind.

00:57:05.460 Yeah.

00:57:05.980 Everybody has a seeing eye dog or something.

00:57:08.160 It's getting, go back to that rally.

00:57:10.380 God, I just want to even read who was there.

00:57:12.100 Just, I just want to even know a little bit about it.

00:57:13.500 I just saw videos of this and it blew my mind.

00:57:16.700 I think a lot of, well, what this, what I liked about this is it's people showing up for something, right?

00:57:23.100 Yes.

00:57:23.300 It's people in the streets.

00:57:25.020 Well, they're expressing what they're allowed to do.

00:57:28.020 Right.

00:57:28.200 And that's what, in a democratic society, which Britain is, you get a chance to, you know, as our First Amendment says, it's, it's, the government will establish no religion.

00:57:40.500 You have freedom of the press and freedom of assembly.

00:57:43.380 You have the ability to, these are the hallmarks, the number one thing.

00:57:47.800 After the constitution was done, everybody said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, time out.

00:57:52.000 We've got a constitution.

00:57:53.040 We've got an operating manual, but we're not going to go forward in this unless we get a bill of rights that tells us what, you know, that, that enshrines the things we just fought for.

00:58:03.740 The things we just died for.

00:58:05.360 There's, you know, there's one, you know, the Saving Private Ryan story of, you know, sons are dying.

00:58:11.160 It's based on a true story where a woman, I think from Iowa, his last name is Sullivan, lost four sons in a battleship that went down.

00:58:17.820 And the Department of War said, you know, we're now going to separate everybody, all the brothers.

00:58:23.160 Rebecca Tanner, a Mohegan woman, meaning probably Connecticut, lost five sons, not four, but five sons fighting for the Patriot cause.

00:58:32.700 This is a Native American woman. 1.00

00:58:34.680 So you realize that's the sacrifice that people have made in order for us to be able to hold a demonstration, express our point of view nonviolently, and to be able to tolerate lots of ideas.

00:58:51.100 I mean, you can't say we're only going to tolerate our ideas and everybody else who doesn't agree with us are therefore bad, you know.

00:59:00.620 I mean, across the street from us, on 23rd Street in New York City, where we are right now, is the headquarters of the Communist Party of the United States that has as much right to its office space as the Republican National Committee or the Democratic National Committee.

00:59:18.120 Doesn't it?

00:59:19.140 In a country in which all ideas are free?

00:59:22.380 Is the head of the Communist Party?

00:59:24.000 The American Communist Party has its headquarters across the street.

00:59:29.960 And they have had their headquarters there for decades and decades and decades.

00:59:34.740 Well, you know, what's funny to me, Ken, is that it feels like just being a regular American that's hopeful, you're almost a communist these days in our own country.

00:59:43.540 Well, that's, you know what I'm saying, that that idea, that's what I think is interesting about these, let me just start here.

00:59:50.840 The Unite the Kingdom rally was a massive, and this says, far-right demonstration held in London on September 13, 2025, organized by anti-immigrant activist Tommy Robinson.

01:00:00.200 The event attracted between 110,000 and 100,000 people, making one of the largest protests in British history.

01:00:04.900 The rally was built as a free speech festival, and the demonstration featured chants like, we want our country back.

01:00:13.320 What I think is interesting about this, it's people who have a set of beliefs and ideals of what British life is, right?

01:00:21.760 And history is to them, and that they want to speak out for it, right?

01:00:26.060 That's one thing that I thought was pretty cool, you know?

01:00:29.200 That this is the democratic right.

01:00:31.160 Right.

01:00:31.400 I mean, I remember when I was growing up.

01:00:33.140 Well, it's people tweeting with their feet, right? 0.77

01:00:34.720 I said this the other day in a conversation, but it's like, it's not people sitting in the fucking background yelling stuff or screaming or, you know, but it's people who are actually out, right?

01:00:45.400 And this, this to me is always inspiring because it's, you're putting your face out there with your voice, right?

01:00:52.360 And you're putting your feet out there with your voice, and that to me feels like a real tweet.

01:00:58.560 Any, any, they could be left-wing, they could be right-wing.

01:01:02.160 Any, I agree.

01:01:02.800 They could be immigrants saying we're as much Britons as, and any of that is possible within a peaceful context.

01:01:10.640 Yeah.

01:01:10.900 And it's people that, like, you know, people get an idea of what a culture is, right?

01:01:14.760 Yeah.

01:01:14.940 And especially, I mean, Britain was predominantly white, probably, I would guess, until they took in slaves and Native Americans, I'm not sure.

01:01:21.320 Well, they, they, there was not as-

01:01:23.600 Or Caucasian, I guess they would have called it at the time, or European?

01:01:25.800 They were European, but they're also a mixture of lots of European cultures, and they, their whole worldwide economy was dependent on slavery, mostly in the Caribbean, as the Spanish had it, mostly in South and Central America.

01:01:41.320 And then we had it in the southern states.

01:01:44.820 It was, slavery was legal in the colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia.

01:01:50.540 And then, one by one, the northern states sort of realized it.

01:01:54.160 And George Washington freed his slaves.

01:01:55.800 I mean, George, they all knew.

01:01:57.420 He kept a couple, somebody said.

01:01:59.040 I don't know if that's true.

01:01:59.940 Thomas Jefferson understood, they were, they understood that slavery was morally wrong.

01:02:04.760 Right.

01:02:05.080 And yet it was an impossible, what's the right word?

01:02:09.660 It was a, they're making too much money not to give it up.

01:02:12.040 And it's only later in the 19th century, when the abolitionist movement comes, we should abolish slavery, that then you find slaveholders now making really big arguments about how, oh, they're inferior, they're children, they can't handle freedom, and all of this stuff.

01:02:28.660 All of which they, they didn't really express.

01:02:31.640 Thomas Jefferson did a little bit in his notes on the state of Virginia.

01:02:34.400 It's very, very complicated, but we're always looking for a way to say that some people are more equal than others.

01:02:43.700 And if you believe in equality, that's not the case.

01:02:48.200 That if you believe in the second line of the declaration, which is our catechism, then it's everybody.

01:02:56.240 And that people have the ability to rise according to their abilities and opportunities.

01:03:03.440 And you try to provide as many opportunities for as many people.

01:03:07.580 But the minute you transform this civic, you know, just explosion, this beautiful civic compact that we have and racialize it, it can only be white, it can only be black, and it can only be this, it can only be that, it's already lost. 0.89

01:03:24.080 It is not one thing or one type of people.

01:03:27.460 That's where you go wrong.

01:03:29.240 But history does that, like, it's kind of interesting because it's like, even whenever they were declaring America, right, and deciding what it meant to be American, and they were, in this period that you investigated in the American Revolution documentary, it's like they were saying this is who we are, right?

01:03:52.540 At the same time, they're also colonizing.

01:03:56.000 It's just, it's interesting when colonization and human and being human started to sort of, I don't know, do you know what I'm kind of saying?

01:04:06.480 I know what you're talking about.

01:04:07.360 It's just such a weird dichotomy.

01:04:10.780 It's the difference between the ideal and the human possibility at any given moment.

01:04:15.580 And what the founders were saying is that in order to have a government that operates, not only do all people have to be created equal, but you have to be pursuing this self-examination.

01:04:27.260 We should be interested in improving ourselves.

01:04:30.520 So when Thomas Jefferson wrote All Men Are Created Equal, he meant all white men of property free of debt. 0.61

01:04:36.220 He did not mean a majority of the white population of the colonies, women.

01:04:40.120 He did not mean the 500,000 free and enslaved African-Americans.

01:04:44.180 He did not mean the native peoples both intermixed with people and part of the rest of the continent.

01:04:50.480 And remember, we didn't say when we started our Congress and when we started our army, we didn't say the Eastern Seaboard Congress.

01:04:56.960 We didn't say the Eastern Seaboard Army.

01:04:59.100 We said the Continental Congress, the Continental Army.

01:05:02.000 We knew where we were going, and we knew who we were going to run over to get it.

01:05:06.160 And even when the Constitution was started, women were let out. 1.00

01:05:09.140 One of the leading women of Philadelphia, Elizabeth William Powell, met Benjamin Franklin as he came out in mid-September in 1787 from Independence Hall, 0.87

01:05:19.180 where they had been figuring out the Constitution and getting it down, and said,

01:05:23.620 what have you created, Dr. Franklin, a monarchy or a republic?

01:05:26.560 And he said, a republic if you can keep it, meaning we're going to do this.

01:05:31.120 Now, when they went into it in 1776, they were not after a democracy.

01:05:36.040 Democracy meant mob rule to a lot of people.

01:05:38.780 They were interested in an aristocracy of the elites, right?

01:05:42.760 But in order to win the war, they had to enlist not the sturdy militiamen who often left to go plant a crop or often left to go harvest that crop,

01:05:55.680 but they ended up with an army.

01:05:58.080 The Continentals, the regular army of the United States of America, the Continental Army, were teenagers,

01:06:06.260 second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance, felons, ne'er-do-wells, recent immigrants from Germany and England, and they won the war. 0.96

01:06:15.040 And so as they're beginning, the dogs won the war, and as they're beginning, and we follow them, as you'll see, you know, in this story,

01:06:23.800 14-year-old kid from Boston named John Greenhorn, 15-year-old kid Joseph Plum Martin from Connecticut,

01:06:28.540 you know, a 10-year-old girl from Yorktown who's a refugee all of the war.

01:06:32.440 You get to meet them.

01:06:33.520 So it's not just George Washington and all of that stuff.

01:06:36.380 But when they start trying to figure out their state constitutions, Pennsylvania says,

01:06:41.580 well, why don't we give votes to every white man who's 21 or older, whether their own property or not?

01:06:48.360 And John Adams is like, wait, wait, wait, we're not going to, what about the aristocracy?

01:06:52.520 Not, you know, not the landed.

01:06:54.300 So what happens is, is that democracy is not an object of our revolution.

01:06:58.420 It's a consequence of it, which is okay, because if you've got an unintended consequence of democracy, that's pretty good.

01:07:06.840 Pretty cool.

01:07:07.360 Pretty cool.

01:07:07.860 Pretty cool.

01:07:08.320 Yeah.

01:07:08.900 Yeah, it's just so exciting.

01:07:10.880 I mean, I have the best job in the country.

01:07:13.100 I have the best job in the country.

01:07:14.640 It educates all my parts.

01:07:15.920 I don't go in knowing about the revolution and telling you what you should know,

01:07:19.900 because, Theo, that is like saying there's a test on next Tuesday.

01:07:24.800 Yeah.

01:07:25.260 I'm sharing with you the process of discovery.

01:07:28.500 Like, Betsy Ross isn't mentioned in here.

01:07:30.840 We don't actually know who made the first flag.

01:07:33.040 No one says, don't fire to hear the whites of our eyes.

01:07:35.760 Paul Revere did not say the redcoats are coming, the redcoats are coming.

01:07:38.180 He said the regulars are coming.

01:07:38.760 The regulars are coming out.

01:07:39.920 The regulars are coming out.

01:07:41.540 And that meant the regulars are coming out of their homes to-

01:07:44.000 Out of Boston, out to Lexington and to Concord.

01:07:48.560 Concord was the place where they thought everything was hidden.

01:07:51.600 And they were right, and they just never found it.

01:07:53.820 And then we started fighting back.

01:07:55.980 We didn't fight back so much on Lexington Green.

01:07:58.260 It was a massacre on Lexington Green and then Concord at the North Bridge.

01:08:03.360 We meet a guy named Isaac Davis who's a gunsmith from Acton, Massachusetts.

01:08:08.160 And he leaves early in the morning.

01:08:09.700 And he's at the North Bridge, and he is, along with a fellow guy, Abner Hosmer, is one of

01:08:16.640 the first Americans to be killed at the North Bridge.

01:08:18.780 But then the fury of the militia, Patriot militia, just overwhelms the British.

01:08:25.520 And they start a retreat.

01:08:26.800 And if there hadn't been some reinforcements that caught up with them when they were limping

01:08:31.160 back, retreating back through Lexington, it would have been a route.

01:08:34.340 And it was still all the way, every spot of ground, all the way back to Boston, was contested.

01:08:39.780 And everybody sitting there going, like, yesterday, these were our brothers.

01:08:44.480 Yesterday, these were our fellow countrymen.

01:08:46.720 Yesterday, we were, you know, arguing.

01:08:49.840 Today, we're at war.

01:08:52.080 And there's a great sense of thing.

01:08:55.460 I mean, Abigail's, I mean, Adams says something.

01:08:59.080 We're in the midst of a revolution, the most glorious, and the fate of millions yet unborn

01:09:05.220 are being decided, meaning you and me.

01:09:07.580 So great.

01:09:08.360 And then Abigail, his own wife's greatest correspondence between anybody.

01:09:12.580 Oh, yes, here's a dime.

01:09:13.780 And she maybe wrote better than anybody.

01:09:16.040 She said, we should be very cautious about tearing down empires because of all the blood

01:09:21.520 and suffering that attends to it.

01:09:23.480 That's in the first minutes of our film, which meaning, be careful what you wish for.

01:09:27.380 You know, she's something else.

01:09:28.600 Yeah.

01:09:29.100 She's, and you know, when people say, who's the best writer?

01:09:31.700 Is it Thomas Paine?

01:09:33.760 Is it Thomas Jefferson?

01:09:34.740 Is it George Washington?

01:09:35.520 Great writer.

01:09:36.140 Is it John Adams?

01:09:37.040 Great writer.

01:09:38.640 Abigail holds her own.

01:09:40.900 She's pretty good.

01:09:42.400 That's cool, man.

01:09:43.220 And she's got a friend named, I bet you can call this up too, named Mercy Otis Warren. 0.74

01:09:49.140 Pull up with a friend, girlie.

01:09:50.640 Mercy Otis Warren.

01:09:52.220 Look, Kiki.

01:09:54.520 O-T-I. 0.98

01:09:55.640 Yeah, there she is. 1.00

01:09:56.380 There, you got a book of her.

01:09:57.600 She writes one of the first histories of it.

01:10:00.800 There she is.

01:10:01.160 She's in our film.

01:10:01.960 There.

01:10:02.080 Oh, yeah.

01:10:02.820 She, she, Meryl Streep reads her verse.

01:10:05.300 That's the one thing we haven't talked about.

01:10:07.280 We've got Peter Coyote as the third person narrator, but we have the best cast that has ever

01:10:12.200 been assembled.

01:10:12.840 They all reading off camera of any film or every television.

01:10:16.440 Okay.

01:10:16.540 Maybe, so the longest, the longest day about D-Day had a cast list, but we've got Tom Hanks

01:10:23.060 and Meryl Streep who reads Mercy Otis Warren and Claire Danes who reads Abigail Adams and

01:10:30.320 Paul Giamatti and Josh Brolin and Sir Kenneth Branagh and Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson

01:10:36.400 and Liev Schreiber and Ed Norton and, um, that have all voiced in your docs.

01:10:42.180 In this doc.

01:10:43.340 Oh, in the American Revolution.

01:10:44.920 In this doc alone, in American Revolution alone, and Domnell Gleeson.

01:10:48.320 Jeff Daniels.

01:10:49.040 And, uh, Jeff Daniels.

01:10:50.780 He's the voice of Thomas Jefferson.

01:10:52.560 It is, uh, I, I probably listed a fifth of the voices that are in the film.

01:10:57.520 Do you ask them or no?

01:10:58.700 How does it happen?

01:10:59.400 Yeah, we ask them.

01:11:00.120 And, and, you know, a lot of people have read for us before.

01:11:02.380 A lot of new people have read this time, but we ask them.

01:11:04.960 Tom Hanks has read for us for almost 25 years.

01:11:09.740 Well, he's, he did the D-Day Museum in New Orleans.

01:11:12.020 He's their whole D-Day guy.

01:11:13.060 Have you been there?

01:11:13.660 Yeah.

01:11:14.220 Oh man, that's, I took my little girl a year ago to, a year and a half ago, my then 13 year

01:11:19.420 old, she, and we just loved it.

01:11:21.500 And I, and I've been there many, many times.

01:11:23.460 Steven Ambrose, the late historian, um, uh, really started it, but Tom and many other people

01:11:29.860 made it possible.

01:11:30.800 And he's just so, so phenomenal.

01:11:33.860 Phenomenal.

01:11:34.700 And he's also like, like Meryl Streep and, and, and Jeff Daniels and others, Josh Brolin

01:11:40.440 couldn't be nice.

01:11:41.680 Sammy, you know, I, I, I recorded, uh, long distance, um, uh, Morgan Freeman, who's, you

01:11:48.220 know, in his, in his mid to late eighties, he's getting up there and he lives on the Gulf

01:11:52.000 coast and in Mississippi.

01:11:53.740 And I'm saying, um, and so I'm just making idle chat.

01:11:57.040 I said, Morgan, so why are you in mobile?

01:11:59.880 He says, I'm recording for Ken Burns.

01:12:02.700 Like he'd driven up to come and do this thing.

01:12:06.560 And that, it just made me feel really good.

01:12:08.980 That's cool.

01:12:09.340 And you know, and I, I'll bump into someone and they go, why haven't you called me?

01:12:12.480 Like, cause this, they're not making anything.

01:12:14.740 We pay them SAG minimum.

01:12:16.040 And I always tease Tom.

01:12:17.360 I always go, and I'm giving you a check for $313 and 22 cents.

01:12:21.560 Please don't spend it all in one place.

01:12:23.280 Please, you know, save it.

01:12:24.740 But you know, they come and they work.

01:12:26.720 Look at, look at that list.

01:12:28.020 Oh, that's remarkable.

01:12:28.820 You know?

01:12:29.420 Yeah.

01:12:30.260 Josh Brolin is an exceptional man.

01:12:32.260 Oh, he's great.

01:12:32.840 He's George Washington.

01:12:33.960 And what I did is I told him George Washington is unknowable and opaque.

01:12:39.280 And yet he's able to motivate men in the dead of night when they're losing.

01:12:46.320 And you somehow have to be somebody that is both unknowable, like only, only as a historian,

01:12:54.100 one of the stories in the film says, maybe Martha gets in there, his wife, maybe Lafayette,

01:13:04.020 maybe Hamilton, but very, very few people get into that inner space of him.

01:13:10.360 And yet his rectitude, he's taller than most of the folks, but he has a bearing that is so

01:13:16.640 powerful that men that are leaving, men that are deserting, men that are mutinying, stop

01:13:23.300 when he starts and talks.

01:13:25.220 And they sign up and say, okay, we'll fight for another six weeks.

01:13:28.760 Or you're right, I'm going to put down my arms.

01:13:30.780 This is crazy.

01:13:32.160 And there are moments when the entire fate, even after the revolution, the entire fate

01:13:37.620 of the United States of America is dependent on the army, angry that they haven't been

01:13:42.400 paid by Congress, not marching on Philadelphia and turning this into a military dictatorship.

01:13:47.840 And it's George Washington who stops.

01:13:50.040 And then what does he do when everything's got together?

01:13:52.960 He resigns his military commission.

01:13:55.760 And then he is asked to be the president of the constitutional convention.

01:14:00.060 He lends his stuff.

01:14:01.680 He has voted unanimously president.

01:14:04.540 And what does he do after two terms?

01:14:06.780 He leaves it.

01:14:08.000 He's kind of the coach of the bad news bears kind of in a way. 0.99

01:14:10.660 George III, who's not the idiot that we try to make him out to be. 0.99

01:14:14.360 And George W. Bush? 1.00

01:14:16.340 No, George III.

01:14:17.440 I was going to say.

01:14:18.220 George, the King George III.

01:14:19.640 I think.

01:14:20.520 He says when he hears that Washington. 1.00

01:14:21.660 He even voted he was an idiot, I think. 1.00

01:14:23.500 He might have. 1.00

01:14:24.280 When Washington resigned his military commission and then resigned to presidency, he said,

01:14:29.280 then he is the most powerful character of the age.

01:14:31.800 So this, imagine what that means today, that we're in an age where everybody wants me

01:14:38.120 and that he is, no, you.

01:14:41.060 He understood that the actual highest office is citizen.

01:14:46.340 And he was determined to go back to that and to not claim for himself wealth, didn't make

01:14:53.240 money during the war, didn't try to amass personal power.

01:14:59.780 He just said, it is my service to this new idea.

01:15:03.380 You know, as Payne was saying, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to reset and

01:15:09.620 go back to zero and create something new, as he called it, an asylum for mankind.

01:15:14.960 That's the second episode of our film.

01:15:16.780 Every one of our episodes is named after a phrase from Thomas Payne.

01:15:19.840 The first is, in order to be free.

01:15:21.800 You know, that the feeble engines of despotism only work, he said, unless you can will it

01:15:27.680 in order to be free.

01:15:28.760 You just need to will it.

01:15:29.900 And then Asylum for Mankind, and then When Things Are Dark, The Times That Try Men's 0.83

01:15:34.860 Soul, and then a great title called Conquer by the Drawn Game.

01:15:38.320 It's what Washington understood.

01:15:40.400 Britain, they have to win and they can't do it.

01:15:43.260 They can't sustain armies 3,000 ways from home in an area that they misunderstand how big

01:15:49.200 we are.

01:15:49.740 And of course, nobody's got a weather report.

01:15:51.820 So that storm.

01:15:52.880 Right.

01:15:53.100 He realized the battle's not, it's not, it's not right here in this moment.

01:15:56.340 It is, but there's, if you look at the different legs of it, there's more than, there's more

01:16:00.920 than a couple of ways to win this thing, you know?

01:16:02.660 The historian Jane Kaminsky says he knows what every insurrectionary leader means, meaning

01:16:07.700 guerrilla, you know, that you just, you eat at them there.

01:16:12.400 You know, like more British and Hessian, they're mercenaries, soldiers die in New Jersey from 1.00

01:16:20.260 being picked off in guerrilla moments foraging than they are in three big set battles of

01:16:25.820 Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth Courthouse.

01:16:28.020 So it is a down and dirty war.

01:16:30.680 And there are terrorist organizations of loyalists.

01:16:33.660 It's like Grand Theft America.

01:16:35.260 Okay.

01:16:36.200 It's pretty, it's pretty wild.

01:16:37.740 And yet out of it comes an extraordinary order.

01:16:42.280 And yet out of it comes the echo of Lincoln who understood the founding better than anyone

01:16:47.400 else and delivers the Declaration of Independence 2.0 at Gettysburg, in which he said, we really

01:16:53.620 do mean all men are created equal.

01:16:55.800 Oh yeah.

01:16:56.320 Right?

01:16:56.940 Lincoln was that wide-eyed person. 0.82

01:16:58.580 We're going to live through all time or die by suicide.

01:17:01.700 Like nobody's coming to attack us and conquer us.

01:17:05.920 If we dissolve, it's on us.

01:17:08.540 And so that's the message for today.

01:17:10.920 It is.

01:17:11.200 It's what Washington's example of giving up power, it's of the non-authoritarian stuff

01:17:19.300 of Thomas Paine and Jefferson, and this sense of the power of the civic example.

01:17:27.880 And then, of course, Lincoln's warning that you have to stay together.

01:17:32.740 And he presided over the closest we ever came to national suicide or civil war.

01:17:38.000 And without him, like without Washington, who knows what happens?

01:17:44.260 Yeah.

01:17:45.320 Yeah.

01:17:45.720 Lincoln was the guy that like, just that really that kept the pilot light of what these other

01:17:51.300 guys had lit going.

01:17:52.660 Right?

01:17:54.040 I have like one or two questions.

01:17:55.280 Do you think there's been this thing in my lifetime where you felt like colonialism ended?

01:17:59.740 Right?

01:17:59.980 You kind of felt like that through articles that were written and just looking like, that's

01:18:05.080 bad.

01:18:05.660 This is wrong.

01:18:06.580 Right?

01:18:06.900 But then you still have things that happen.

01:18:08.940 Like you still have genocides happening.

01:18:10.660 You still have like ethnic cleansing in Gaza that some people believe is happening.

01:18:14.980 Um, you know, you still have colonial, is that just something that the media tricked us to

01:18:20.940 think?

01:18:21.960 Is it safe for us to think that that kind of thing is ended?

01:18:24.840 Like, you know, cause you almost want to evolve as a species and think that that's not

01:18:28.500 happening anymore because it seems so brutal, right?

01:18:30.980 That war and conquering isn't happening anymore because it seems so brutal.

01:18:34.480 But do you think it will always be a part of us?

01:18:37.480 And then a second question is like, yeah, like these guys like lit like this pilot light

01:18:43.160 a long time ago, like being a citizen and reflection of yourself and how that's going

01:18:47.800 to be, that's going to need to always be a part of what it means to be an American and

01:18:52.160 for this to evolve and to stay alive. 0.85

01:18:55.160 And then the only way it can die is by suicide. 0.88

01:18:57.880 Right?

01:18:58.520 It really puts it immediately back on you, especially with that word suicide.

01:19:02.340 But what can we do now?

01:19:04.660 Where do you feel like we're at now?

01:19:07.320 And not in a judgmental way, but just in like a hopeful way, even where do you think that

01:19:11.920 we're at now and what can we do?

01:19:14.540 Because it feels scary now.

01:19:16.460 Yeah, it is scary.

01:19:17.620 I think we pull out the fuel rods of our own self-righteousness and just take it down a

01:19:24.440 notch and realize that all the people we're saying are evil and whatever are just fellow

01:19:31.080 citizens who disagree with us and then just let it go.

01:19:36.540 The first part of your question is the sadder one.

01:19:39.620 Ecclesiastes, that's the Old Testament, says what has been will be again.

01:19:44.080 What has been done will be done again.

01:19:45.980 There's nothing new under the sun.

01:19:47.540 War, ethnic violence, religious disagreements, the pain of slavery, of some form of subjugation

01:19:59.520 of another, totalitarianism.

01:20:03.540 It's as my Marine, Tommy Vallely was his name, Corporal Tommy Vallely.

01:20:08.120 It's the history of the world.

01:20:11.880 And what we, the United States, represent is the beacon, the pilot light.

01:20:18.080 I love that phrase of yours, Theo, better than the beacon.

01:20:22.180 It's the pilot light of where we could be, who we could be.

01:20:27.320 So if we are a nation in the process of becoming, we've got a lot of work to do.

01:20:31.520 And we take a few steps forward and you think, ah, it's the end of colonialism.

01:20:35.240 It's the end of partisan rancor.

01:20:37.500 It's the end of this.

01:20:38.540 It's the progress.

01:20:40.020 We're at some, you know, we're colorblind, you know, isn't, if we like a black president,

01:20:45.340 isn't it all, you know.

01:20:46.340 Right, we solved it.

01:20:47.380 Yeah.

01:20:47.720 Well, I have friends would say, I've centered race in a lot of my films.

01:20:52.000 I've gotten some criticism for it, you know, telling the story that, you know, of that,

01:20:57.300 our asterisk, our yes, but.

01:20:59.360 Um, and, um, and then when Obama was, uh, was inaugurated, they said, now will you stop

01:21:06.020 talking about that? 0.96

01:21:06.840 And I held up the onion, onion magazine and it said, black men given worst job in nation, 0.97

01:21:13.000 you know? 0.97

01:21:13.540 And I just said, just watch what happens.

01:21:15.980 And, and what it did is it, it, it actually awoke in some people the darker sides in which

01:21:23.960 you judge people, not by the content of their character, as Dr. King suggested, but by the

01:21:29.600 color of their skin.

01:21:30.420 That somehow I could know everything about you by the color of your skin.

01:21:34.720 Oh, what your type is, what it is.

01:21:37.080 And that's of course not.

01:21:38.080 I think Obama got us out of that in a lot of ways.

01:21:40.260 I think he moved it in a way.

01:21:41.920 And then all of a sudden there was a reactive thing, which is almost lawful as well.

01:21:46.860 It's physics in a way that allowed people to play to their worst basis instincts, basis

01:21:53.300 instincts that had been in some ways by both parties sort of suppressed.

01:21:57.840 No, no, no.

01:21:58.180 We're not going to manifest that way.

01:22:00.160 Kids behave.

01:22:01.780 We've still got two hours before we get to the beach, right?

01:22:05.040 And suddenly by the time we got to the beach, we're at war again.

01:22:08.860 And, you know, we're not, okay, we're turning around, we're going home.

01:22:12.420 There's no ice cream today, whatever it is.

01:22:15.720 There's got to be that thing that you and I, the essence of what we've talked about,

01:22:19.880 it seemed to me, has been about this incredibly difficult thing, which is self-discipline.

01:22:26.100 Like I need to actually do the work on myself.

01:22:29.600 I cannot assume, I cannot insist that you do the work for you before I'm willing to do

01:22:36.480 it for myself.

01:22:37.060 But there are people now where it seems like a lot of people are doing people like the

01:22:40.840 people who have been doing the work and following the rules hypothetically and be trying their

01:22:46.280 best to be an American.

01:22:47.740 I feel like some of those people are starting to wear thin because it seems like everybody

01:22:51.700 doesn't want to.

01:22:53.300 And that may be, and that may be that their idea of what being an American is, isn't the

01:22:58.900 same as the other people, right?

01:23:00.380 Well, I don't think that's the case.

01:23:01.860 I think a lot of it has to do with this device in our back pocket and all the atomized sources

01:23:09.220 of information that we have.

01:23:11.200 Like when I grew up, there were three channels and PBS, which I work, all my films on PBS and

01:23:17.600 maybe an independent channel, you basically got your local newspaper that had a staff

01:23:22.640 of lots of people who covered the school board meeting and this.

01:23:26.920 And so people knew what it was.

01:23:29.220 Now, you know, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York here said, everybody's

01:23:34.640 entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts, right?

01:23:38.520 We do know that the Battle of Gettysburg happened on July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, 1863.

01:23:44.280 But what we're now in a situation is, and this is the greatest danger, is that we are

01:23:49.920 being told things that aren't true.

01:23:52.580 And there's not amongst the exponentially greater number of possibilities of outlets

01:23:59.080 that everyone has, anybody saying, well, actually, that's not true.

01:24:03.560 And so what happens, that demoralization that you're talking about or that sense that I

01:24:08.040 played by the rules or whatever, it may be more imbalanced by the fact that they have

01:24:16.240 been convinced of a lot of things that aren't necessarily true.

01:24:20.200 You know, one in one has got to equal two, right?

01:24:23.700 Except in our faith, in that faith, where one in one has to equal three, that we say the

01:24:29.980 whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

01:24:32.260 So here are the sum of the parts, and here's the whole.

01:24:35.520 And so what's the difference?

01:24:36.960 That's where we want to spend our lives here, not in parsing how you really don't

01:24:41.840 get it, and you're wearing that, and you've got this thing, you've got your hat

01:24:45.360 backwards, so I know exactly who you are, right?

01:24:48.500 And that's not who I am.

01:24:51.300 And we are all the same.

01:24:53.080 You know, Shakespeare has it when the Shylock in the Merchant event, are we not human? 0.93

01:24:59.280 Having not eyes, organs, senses, dimensions, affections, fed by the same foods, subject to

01:25:04.940 the same diseases.

01:25:05.840 If you prick us, do we not bleed?

01:25:07.480 If you tickle us, do we not laugh? 0.63

01:25:09.260 I mean, if you poison us, do we not die?

01:25:11.580 We are all the same. 0.93

01:25:13.880 And unless you can stop and turn and not say, oh, you're a radical leftist destroying, and

01:25:20.720 you're looking at this person who's like this Midwestern whatever, or you are a right-wing,

01:25:25.800 you know, you know, fascist, you don't have a chance. 1.00

01:25:29.920 Yeah, you're boiling gay people in your apartment or whatever. 1.00

01:25:32.700 Yeah, yes. 1.00

01:25:33.240 But just shit like that, it's like, what is going, it is crazy. 0.99

01:25:35.960 Well, you think about what happens in an unchecked information world, that is to say, where you 0.99

01:25:40.720 don't have the self-discipline of the traditional media outlets.

01:25:45.120 That was reliable, too.

01:25:46.360 That was reliable.

01:25:47.260 I mean, I would still, when people say, what would you do?

01:25:49.500 I would say, I would watch one of the nightly news of the three networks, or all of them

01:25:56.540 if you can get them, and I would read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or the

01:26:02.520 Washington Post, or maybe all three, and don't look at anything else, because the other things

01:26:09.680 will tell you that all Democrats are into pedophilia and all, you know, and you just, after a while,

01:26:15.280 you have to go, stop, this noise is crazy.

01:26:19.820 What you've done is, by telling the lie up on top of the mountain and formed it into this

01:26:24.220 snowball, it's rolled down the hill, and it's now this giant thing where truth is lies and

01:26:29.940 knowledge is ignorance, and everything is the opposite of what it actually is, and what

01:26:35.040 you have to get back is to what is verifiable.

01:26:40.040 And as much as people say, oh, the mainstream media or the lamestream media or whatever it is,

01:26:46.460 the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that are, you know, have opposite editorial

01:26:52.320 positions, their actual papers, if you really want to follow what's going on, and pretend that it's

01:26:59.100 not just, oh, well, their interest is this in promoting the elites, it's just, they're actually

01:27:05.760 really, really good at what they do. And I think if Americans were to sort of say, I mean,

01:27:13.500 Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, just in the middle of our tragedy, he said, turn your phones

01:27:17.660 off, turn off social media, because you know what?

01:27:19.640 I want to have him on here. Spencer Cox, I would love to get to have you have a conversation with him.

01:27:23.740 I met him last January at the Governor's Association. He was, I was talking about the

01:27:28.480 revolution, and we showed some clips at the National Governors Association, and he came up and he

01:27:32.340 asked a question, he said, you talk about virtue, I want to pursue this question of virtue. And I

01:27:36.880 said, thank God, here's a place where we can have it. But he's the guy who said, turn off your social

01:27:42.900 media, go out into nature, hug somebody that you know, because if you look at it, social media isn't.

01:27:52.040 You ever been in a room of teenagers where they've all got their phones?

01:27:54.680 Yeah, there's nothing social about it.

01:27:55.780 There's nothing social about it. It's all an interior dialogue with yourself. It's schizophrenic. It's,

01:28:00.800 it actually creates a thousand people in you when our object, as we've been talking for the entire

01:28:06.820 time we talked about, is to find out who this person is inside. Who am I? Is the central question.

01:28:15.620 I start with an easier question, very hard. Who are we? The United States of America. But then

01:28:23.040 inevitably, all of those questions form a mirror. And I don't know if you get out in nature much,

01:28:28.660 but nature is perfect. And nature puts a mirror back to all of your imperfections. And that's,

01:28:35.080 that's tough. A lot of people would rather be, you know, less completely occupied by other stuff

01:28:41.520 all the time, rather than say, what is it that I could do that could make me a better person?

01:28:47.740 Yeah. Um, yeah, thank you. Some of these, some of these thoughts are so great. A group of friends

01:28:54.000 of mine. Oh, you've given me the, I mean, just this dream of the future, the pilot light, all of that

01:28:59.140 stuff. Thank you. Well, it's important that we're thinking about this stuff together. And I would even

01:29:03.960 like, I would disagree, like on the news outlets that you mentioned, right? I would disagree for me.

01:29:08.180 I don't need to disagree with you about it. But I see when you are, and I are here talking,

01:29:12.980 we probably have a lot of the very same ideas and hopes, but I don't need to sit there and tell

01:29:18.780 you, Hey, I don't, I don't, I disagree with a news source. You might like, you know, it's like,

01:29:24.160 it just shows that like what you're even saying is just like us conversating about something is what

01:29:28.840 really matters. This is real media right here. Exactly. It's when we talk about each other,

01:29:33.700 all I meant about choosing stuff is that you want to make sure that the source is fact checking

01:29:39.620 itself, that it has its own responsibility, you know, because like when the cat's away,

01:29:46.060 the mice will play. And that's all we have now are mice out there. And you just need a little bit of

01:29:51.960 people who go, we have to check this to make sure it's true. Yeah. I wonder if we'll get to a place

01:29:57.760 where there's some sort of a purity test of some, you know, that we could all agree on. I wonder if

01:30:02.900 AI or something in some way gets us to a purity test. Well, that would be a wonderful unintended

01:30:08.040 consequence. Cause right. Isn't it supposed to destroy us because it's going to drive us crazy

01:30:12.900 and maybe, maybe, maybe the opposite will happen. You know, we're going to be data slaves. You and

01:30:17.520 I are going to have pickaxes. We'll be in a bit mine somewhere and we'll literally be hammering out

01:30:23.780 like statistics from old NBA games. So some guy can upload them for his draft Kings. That's right.

01:30:29.900 It's all, that's what's exactly how it's, that's where we're going to go. And then, and years later,

01:30:35.040 your son or some orb that you created will be doing a documentary on that. Or your daughter,

01:30:40.300 who you just had a nice time with at the D-Day museum last year, you, she will be doing a

01:30:45.060 documentary on, on you and I working as mining miners in a bit mine somewhere.

01:30:52.040 I'm running back to New Hampshire so that I can go back to my little tiny town where things work

01:30:57.040 and people are civil and they've got their, their signs out, but nobody says, you know,

01:31:02.580 you're wrong. They just say, that's what you believe. I disagree with that. It's really,

01:31:06.860 yeah. And I think there's, there's a lot of good places out there that do have a lot of peace in

01:31:10.960 them. Uh, where, so since we're talking about kind of information and stuff, where do you get your

01:31:16.120 information? How do you do it? Do you have a team that helps you source? Like, what do you guys do?

01:31:19.980 Do you walk into the library of Congress and you know, like Kenny boy, you know, what happens?

01:31:24.980 They do know my face. Um, so in the American revolution, we've got materials drawn from

01:31:30.860 340 sources, archives, libraries around, uh, the world. We have drawn on thousands of volumes and we

01:31:39.840 have gone to scholars who spent their lives delving deep into one aspect of it. Maybe it's

01:31:46.300 the British empire's economic structure, right? Just to understand the difference between the 13

01:31:52.440 colonies that we are and the other 13 colonies that really make their money for them. Because

01:31:57.020 in Jamaica, they got 90% of the population is enslaved and Barbados, same thing as opposed to,

01:32:03.080 you know, very few in Massachusetts and maybe half in South Carolina. So, you know, we just want to

01:32:09.340 find out that we want to check the dates. So we always have lots of different sources. We want to

01:32:15.060 source thing from scholars who've been working in, and you find there's sometimes a little

01:32:19.720 desperate, desperate stuff, different stuff. So we will say, um, even after we lock the film,

01:32:26.060 we might have the word 16. It might be battleships. It might be days. It might be dead, whatever the

01:32:30.720 number is. But we've got footnotes on our script of all the sources that have contributed to why we

01:32:36.480 believe it's 16. And then you read a fifth source and it says, not sure. So I, so we go somewhere in

01:32:44.620 all this, uh, narration that Peter Coyote has read and found the word perhaps cut it, duplicate it and

01:32:51.060 pull it and go perhaps 16. That we do not sleep at night until we know we're absolutely dead certain.

01:32:58.860 We don't want to slander even the past. We don't even want to, we particularly don't want to slander

01:33:03.000 the past because the past is our greatest teacher and people manipulate the past. We know what it's

01:33:07.680 like, you know, Soviet system where they cut somebody else out of the picture or they're on

01:33:12.540 the, uh, presidium, you know, and the Politburo in front of the Mayday parade and that somebody's

01:33:17.520 out of favor. So suddenly they edited out of the pre pre, uh, it's like the libraries in Cuba. You

01:33:23.760 can't even get history books before certain years because people want to manipulate this stuff.

01:33:28.600 And what's so great about a free country is we go, yeah, we screwed up there. You know what I mean?

01:33:32.880 It's so funny that we're in a, we live in a, in a, uh, a country that is totally devoted to football,

01:33:39.320 right? Understandably. So every level Friday night, high school, Saturday, college Sunday pro. And if

01:33:47.020 that coach comes up and says, yeah, well, you know, we're, we're, we're okay. You go, he's fired. You

01:33:52.980 go, we really sucked on special teams this time. We really need to do some work here. And we do,

01:33:57.220 and there's a sense of, and we do this in business all the time. And we just say, how do

01:34:02.820 we get better? How, how, what is it that we did wrong? And so there is that incredible American

01:34:08.560 drive to be super honest and just say, I really messed up here and I can do better the next time.

01:34:15.300 If you think that Tom Brady wins his first Superbowl and he goes, okay, cruise control for

01:34:19.660 the rest of my career. Right. And I'll get six more Superbowls. He is phenomenally dedicated

01:34:28.460 to self-criticism and where you can improve. Yeah. If we extended that into our civic and our

01:34:35.680 political world, we would not be in the kind of argumentative mud that we're in right now where

01:34:44.440 we feel stuck and unable to move and this, and it's always the other person, not me. And I'm in

01:34:50.720 the mud because of you, not because of I stepped in it. It's just, if we, if we brought that ethic of 0.58

01:34:57.200 self-improvement, it's what we've been talking along all along. It's, it's my response. My mom

01:35:02.100 used to say that to me, you know, if, if he's got a problem with you, it's your responsibility.

01:35:07.100 If you've got a problem with him, it's your responsibility. Right. Which means I don't need

01:35:12.380 you to change. I need to figure out what it is. If this is worth repairing, which I think our

01:35:18.580 experiment is, then it always begins with myself. And it's so rare to see people, particularly in

01:35:26.680 politics, take a stand that says, you know, a George Washington stand, I'm leaving, I'm giving

01:35:32.120 up power or you know what? My party is wrong in this, right? I am not going to do this.

01:35:39.980 More people would vote for that guy. Of course. Of course. I think it's one of the reasons why

01:35:44.300 it's like, um, I think we're getting down to people don't trust entities for information.

01:35:49.260 Right. I think it's one of the problems that you have with news and stuff. And because some

01:35:52.700 of those are, uh, you know, they make money based on advertising. So there's a bit of,

01:35:57.620 there's somewhat of a conflict of interest in a way, not really, it didn't seem like there

01:36:01.200 used to be, but then that kind of evolved. So I think people now are trying to find a person

01:36:06.280 that they believe, right. Cause it's easier for them to like, to like, uh, concept to, to

01:36:12.320 analyze, right? Like I can figure out if I believe this person. So I'll get information

01:36:16.680 from them. Whereas I think entities, it's people, people don't trust entities anymore

01:36:22.140 as much, you know, I, I've spent my entire professional life as an independent filmmaker,

01:36:27.640 but all of my films are made for PBS. And let me tell you why they are the declaration of

01:36:34.220 independence, the pursuit of happiness applied to communications. There's rigorous fact

01:36:38.960 checking. I cannot put a film out unless I have been vetted by scholars from all different

01:36:46.500 perspectives and understandings and, and, and knowledge. And they also are not, they're free

01:36:54.520 of that advertising thing. Right. So that I am able to do it. Like I could tell you, like,

01:37:00.520 let me just say our Vietnam series took 10 and a half years to make cost 30 million bucks.

01:37:05.680 I spent 10 of the 10 and a half years with my cup out going to foundations and corporations. Bank of

01:37:11.920 America has been a corporate underwriter. They're not a sponsor. So they're not saying, Hey, we don't

01:37:16.300 like that content. They accept whatever content I'm going to do because they know my process is

01:37:21.340 rigors. Foundations, individuals of wealth, government granting agencies until they were just

01:37:26.160 killed. So that P that CPB kill, you know, the death of CPB is, is a big thing. I was going to ask

01:37:32.060 you about that. You're funding. How's that been affected? It's huge. It's huge. But it's, you know,

01:37:35.460 more importantly, it's such a short sighted decision because you know, what's going to hurt

01:37:39.020 most? Most of CPB's money went to rural stations. What is CPB? The corporation for public broadcasting,

01:37:44.460 which was just not only they took back money, they'd already appropriated 4 million for upcoming

01:37:49.480 project, but they, we had been in discussions for another 10 million. So I just lost 14 million for

01:37:54.900 about three or four projects coming up in the future. I'll, I'll recover. But the problem is

01:38:00.520 most of the money goes to rural stations, which would be, and will be when these stations die,

01:38:06.920 a news desert, right? They're used to the PBS, not just for the children's programming, not just for the

01:38:12.440 great prime time, but for their homeland security, their alerts. They may be, you know, the, the most

01:38:19.420 important, the only signal they get. And you don't want to be a news desert where you've got

01:38:24.400 somebody telling you because you want somebody there covering the school board. You want somebody

01:38:29.200 there. You want somebody, you want a personal, you want a personal person that you know. So I

01:38:33.700 have worked with them. So go back to my, my Vietnam example. I, I spent 10 of the 10 and a half years

01:38:41.040 trying to raise that. I could have walked into a streaming service or a premium cable and with my

01:38:46.860 reputation, walked in and given them a description of Vietnam and walked out in half an hour with a

01:38:52.000 check for $30 million. They would not have given me the 10 and a half years. It took me to do the

01:38:59.080 good job. And that film came out in the fall in September of 2017. If I do my math right, that's

01:39:05.360 eight years ago. It is still, even though it's a film, one-stop shopping for the most aggregation of

01:39:13.760 the most recent information about the Vietnam war still after eight years. I am so proud of that,

01:39:20.800 but it, I didn't take the money, do it in a year or year and a half and have it be a piece of shit. 0.99

01:39:27.080 Oh, you're not a T-bill. You're a bond, dude. 1.00

01:39:28.960 Yeah, I am long-term. That's exactly it. And I'm, and I need to marinate and mature and come to term.

01:39:36.680 And I need to just redeem it at its face value. I'm not making a, I am trying to share this. And

01:39:43.120 you know what PBS stands for? It's not system. The S is not, it's public. I like that part,

01:39:49.580 meaning you and me broadcasting, obviously service, service. It's not the Columbia broadcasting system.

01:39:57.800 It's not the public broadcasting self.

01:39:59.340 It's, it's a, not a top down, like it's not a network saying, what part of our, our primetime

01:40:05.660 schedule don't you understand? You're taking it all. It's individual stations working with

01:40:11.200 independent filmmakers, making stuff and sending it up. And then it's going out and there's no,

01:40:17.260 you have to take this. It's, it is exactly the declaration of independence applied to, um,

01:40:24.860 uh, the communications world, just as the national parks or the declaration of independence applied

01:40:30.940 to the landscape. Because we, for the first time in human history, and you could have only done that

01:40:35.700 operating under a declaration of independence, we set aside the most beautiful landscape in the world,

01:40:44.320 not for Kings, not for noblemen, not for the very rich, but for you and for me and for more

01:40:51.600 importantly, our posterity, our children's children's children. That's what Theodore Roosevelt

01:40:57.080 says. We are not saving this for a day. We know we're saving it for all time. And that's

01:41:02.820 beautiful stuff because if we didn't have that, if we had a different kind of system,

01:41:07.300 um, Zion and Yosemite would be gated communities. The rim of the Grand Canyon, there may be one little

01:41:13.460 place where you could go and look out, but the rest would be owned by other people. Um, the Everglades

01:41:18.420 would been drained and be endless strip malls and golf courses and condominiums. And, um, Yellowstone

01:41:24.060 would be a down on its luck, um, sort of amusement place called Geyser World. Yeah.

01:41:31.640 You know, and, and just think about it. There'd be a lot of hippies. There'd be a lot of be a lot

01:41:35.660 of EDM festivals out there. Manifest Destiny says, we're going to take the whole continent and you're

01:41:41.820 going to have to get out of the way, whoever you are. And that stand of trees, I look at, I think

01:41:46.220 bored feet. That river, I think dam. That canyon, I think mineral rights. That's fine. But some of

01:41:53.840 those places you can set aside free from that so that we can go. So there are places in the United

01:41:58.860 States like the South Rim or the North Rim of the Grand Canyon or Zion or Yosemite, what I think is

01:42:06.440 one of the most beautiful places on earth, if not the most beautiful place or Yellowstone. And you can

01:42:11.560 go there and look at it and see exactly what Theodore Roosevelt saw. And more importantly,

01:42:18.720 you can see in the case of, um, the native people who occupied Yosemite, what they saw 2000 years ago.

01:42:29.440 Right. And that gives you an access to all time, which then gives you a perspective. Some journalist,

01:42:38.000 when he went up to Alaska and he saw what was then called Mount McKinley and has been called

01:42:43.840 Denali said, McKinley never saw the mountain. Um, he said, it reminds me of my atomic insignificance,

01:42:54.520 meaning the way nature dwarfs you. You just look up at a night sky and you're like, when it's 10 below

01:42:59.880 zero and you just see all those stars and you go, Oh, I mean, I'm like nothing. And then, but the,

01:43:06.840 the thing is about that, it's paradoxical nature. And, and I would suggest our national parks because

01:43:13.520 they, that feeling of insignificance in spirits, you makes you larger just as the egotist in our

01:43:20.540 midst is diminished by his or her self-regard, right? You know that like you see somebody who's so full

01:43:26.640 of shit, so full of themselves and you think they just get smaller and smaller. But the person who goes, 1.00

01:43:31.980 wow, you know, I'm nothing in the scheme of things. And that's true. Seems bigger.

01:43:38.260 Yeah.

01:43:38.660 You know, seems like somebody I want to listen to, you know?

01:43:42.760 Oh yeah.

01:43:43.700 All, all, all the great gurus of the national parks like Emerson and, and, and particularly John Muir and

01:43:50.100 Theodore Roosevelt, they're all, they have distance in their eyes. That's what Stuart Udall, who's a

01:43:54.740 former secretary of the interior of Kennedy and Johnson, he said he had distance in his eyes. I just love

01:43:59.880 that phrase as if somebody could almost look around the curve of the earth and see not only

01:44:05.460 physically what's going to happen, but in time. So he's this blustery, you know, guy that we love

01:44:11.900 for all his belligerents, walks awfully, but carry a big stick. But what does he do? He, he sets up

01:44:18.160 the Grand Canyon, the grandest Canyon on earth, I assure you.

01:44:22.740 And had that longevity of thought to have the, I don't want other people to come here and see the

01:44:26.660 same thing. And I want my great, great grandchildren to enjoy it. And guess what? They are.

01:44:32.380 We touched on Spencer Cox really quickly. I think we're in a new space for an American revolution

01:44:36.960 in the sense, you know, I know part of it was the bill of rights. We don't have an internet bill of

01:44:43.300 rights. We don't have a social media bill of rights. And it's, I think it's stuff like that,

01:44:47.780 that's killing us. You know, it's like, you can have, if I'm a restaurant and you come there and

01:44:52.240 I poison you, you can sue me, you can pile charges against me. That will shut me down.

01:44:57.740 But there's all these algorithms that are poisoning people, right? Feeding people,

01:45:03.940 literally poisoning them. And they know what they're feeding. They have a log of it. They

01:45:07.500 have a log of the recipe. If you go here, we're going to send you here. They're poisoning people

01:45:12.640 to the point where people are sick. People are literally sick, addicted and sick. And there's

01:45:19.080 no way to, um, to kind of stop them. It feels like I agree completely. I think that's beautifully

01:45:27.080 said. And so one would hope that there was a health, uh, department that might have noticed

01:45:34.040 that that restaurant had, uh, ingredients or there was, you know, mice or rats around in

01:45:40.960 the kitchen that might be, uh, poisoning. They're going to contribute to this, that shuts them down

01:45:46.260 or gives them a bad grade as they do in New York city. You see the A or the B or the C and

01:45:51.100 you know, be forewarned. I'll eat a little C. You'll eat a C now and then. I draw the line

01:45:56.860 at B. I'm sorry. This is where you and I disagree on this, but you know, maybe there is some overarching

01:46:03.400 sense of discipline or maybe there's self-discipline. Maybe I realize that, you know, in, in Fantasia

01:46:10.320 and the Sorcerer's Apprentice where he's got the endless number of brooms carrying the, the buckets

01:46:16.580 of water. Like it's just so proliferated. We're just so out of control and unable to, um, make

01:46:24.420 sense of anything that at some point you need someone in this case, the wizard to come and

01:46:29.140 recast the spell. So it, it goes back to being one broom that's carrying these things. And then

01:46:36.000 you've got, you know, we've got that possibility. And that's my impulse is always to just reduce,

01:46:42.600 reduce, get down to something that, you know, you can trust. And I think what you're saying

01:46:45.680 is, could we agree to maybe a set of rules that would govern facts, that we would say

01:46:51.500 that facts were primary, that we couldn't just constantly, not just speculate, but wildly

01:46:57.360 lie because the toxicity of that is, as you say, as lethal over the longterm as that poison

01:47:04.320 is in your restaurant. Yeah. And the algorithms, the fact that you can continue to point, imagine

01:47:09.360 a 15 year old kid. But it pays. If it bleeds, it leads. So then right now that used to be

01:47:14.680 the thing in the seventies when there's still just three stations and whatever. But then

01:47:19.160 you've got millions of outlets who have no responsibility and they can say that up is down

01:47:25.420 and down is up. And what's your problem? You're, you know, you're wrong. It's a big conspiracy

01:47:30.480 that you've been thinking that up is down all of your life. And I can prove to you why you're

01:47:35.320 absolutely dead wrong. So follow me over this cliff. Well, I guess it goes to show, like,

01:47:41.400 even as we said in the beginning, that this doesn't end, right? The, the, the, uh, the idea

01:47:46.660 to be free, to think free, to feel all those things will, you're going to constantly have

01:47:52.500 to come into, uh, bring those into the present day to keep America evolving. And I think that's,

01:47:59.080 it's no more evident than ever than right now with a, just a new front line, if like war for

01:48:06.980 information, for pure, for facts, for the ability of our children not to be contaminated, you know,

01:48:13.300 maybe it used to be by dirty water, but now it's by bad information. It's by algorithms that aren't

01:48:18.700 like, uh, shackled by any, um, facts, you know, or, or, or their, or their, that, that, that they

01:48:26.620 don't want to poison people, you know? So I think one of the impulses 10 years ago was to go back

01:48:32.280 to the story of our founding, to our creation story and ask essential questions. What happened?

01:48:40.100 It isn't just Lexington and Concord. And then he, he crosses the Delaware and captures Trenton. And

01:48:45.240 then they surrender at Yorktown, boom, done. And in the middle, these great documents were signed,

01:48:49.760 but say it is a really complicated story about very complicated and very interesting people

01:48:56.300 who were able to, as you said at the very beginning, what cause are you willing to, to serve? What,

01:49:03.820 what are you willing to risk your life for? And these people coming from a wide variety of

01:49:09.960 backgrounds. It's not like the purity of it's only one type of person that makes up our country. We've

01:49:15.680 been a huge variety from the very beginning and from, and, and of many different faiths and of

01:49:20.980 many different perspectives, we're able to figure out how they could govern themselves. And it's set

01:49:27.000 an example for the world. And so maybe going back and collecting, you know, as maybe as unsexy as it

01:49:34.680 sounds like American history, Oh Jesus, last thing I need to know. I'm so glad I'm out of high school

01:49:38.680 because I don't have to take another history. Maybe as Harry Truman said, the only thing that's really

01:49:44.340 new is the history you don't know. And that by telling a story of our creation, we might have

01:49:50.600 the ability to save the experiment because we could rededicate ourselves to the things that the

01:49:58.160 people who are willing to give, as they said in the declaration, our lives, our fortunes and our

01:50:04.180 sacred honor too. I think it's worth a shot. Let's do it. Let's do it. Ken Burns. Thank you so much,

01:50:10.980 man. It's been so much fun. It's been so cool, dude. I'm so happy to meet you. Yeah. Really,

01:50:16.100 really happy to meet you. You too. And thank you for all your commitment and, uh, your undying desire.

01:50:20.900 And I bet your mother's very proud of, uh, can I tell you, my, my, my mother's name was Lila,

01:50:25.900 L Y L A. And so that name for ever was just draped in black crepe, right? We didn't say it. We called

01:50:32.240 her mommy. Um, my daughter, oldest daughter, who's now 42 in, on, uh, January 18th, 2011 had her

01:50:43.800 first child, my first grandchild and named her after a grandmother she never met named Lila. So

01:50:49.700 now we say Lila every day and we smile and flowers bloom and birds chirp. And it's, it's, um, the music

01:50:56.260 plays. So it's, it's a wonderful kind of, um, you know, nosedive and then. The pilot lights relit.

01:51:03.280 The pilot light is relit. Lila. We'll have to put a picture of her up there at the end. If you'll

01:51:06.980 send us a cute one. L Y L A. We'll get it to you. Yeah. Oh, that'd be awesome. Uh, thank you so much.

01:51:11.640 Keep working. Stay alive. No, no, no, no, no, no. Get on peptides. We need more. We need more Ken Burns

01:51:16.860 forever. We need the, uh, the pilot lights keep burning. Thank you so much, brother. Thank you.

01:51:20.600 Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must be

01:51:27.400 cornerstone. Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind. I found I can

01:51:37.580 feel it in my bones, but it's going to tell you.

This Past Weekend with Theo Von - October 07, 2025

#615 - Ken Burns

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript