Latest / Drawn of History / Ken Burns _ This Past Weekend w_ Theo Von _615(M4A_128K)

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Ken Burns _ This Past Weekend w_ Theo Von _615(M4A_128K) · Drawn of History

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Today's guest is a filmmaker. He's a historian. He's a writer.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: He is a cartographer of time, if you will. His
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: name is ubiquitous with documentaries. He's covered some of the
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: biggest events in U.S. history, and his new film, The
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: American Revolution, premieres in November. I had a great chat
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: with the one and only Mr. Ken Burns. Shine!
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: And i will find a song yeah and if you
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: like to sit back whatever you feel like and if
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: you start to feel uncomfortable just let us know and
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: we'll get you.
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  Speaker 3: I'm kind of an edge of the seat.
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  Speaker 1: Guy you are yeah wow excited that's an i've never
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: heard somebody say like i'm an edge of the seat
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: guy yeah like you're edging or whatever and i know
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: that's like It's just I'm excited.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah. Like, you know, if I were an animal, I'd
• 1:03
  Speaker 3: be a puppy. Oh, yeah?
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  Speaker 1: You know, kind of. By the door. Yeah. Come on,
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: come on, come on. Yeah. What are we doing? It
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: must be horrible that an animal, they don't even give
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: it a key on its wrist or anything. That's right.
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  Speaker 1: For it to think it could have any, it's just
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  Speaker 1: sitting by the door. Yes, exactly. Waiting, waiting.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Like if your wife or husband were like that and
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  Speaker 1: they're just sitting by the door. You'd get them help. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: or you'd at least give them like a... Right, a hug.
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  Speaker 1: A hug, yeah. Or a spare key so they could
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  Speaker 1: at least have a chance.
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  Speaker 3: Right.
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  Speaker 1: You'd get them a little button they could hit.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, right, just to walk out.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, that would help. We good, Zach? Ken Burns, thank
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  Speaker 1: you so much for hanging out, man.
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  Speaker 3: My pleasure, my pleasure.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Good to be with you. And thank you for all
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: your examination of.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Through humanity, I guess, through documentaries. I was like, I
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: know about you as most people did, you know, kind
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: of when you burst onto the scene with the Ken
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  Speaker 1: Burns effect. I think that's when it kind of hit
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  Speaker 1: a lot of my culture, you know? You're like, instead
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: of hiring actors and everything, we're just going to slightly, yeah.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Want to hear the story of how that happened? Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: I would love to. It's really pretty cool.
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  Speaker 3: So, you know, I've been trying to make films about
• 2:13
  Speaker 3: American history since like the mid-70s. And I'd had some success,
• 2:18
  Speaker 3: a couple Academy Award nominations, but I hit the jackpot
• 2:22
  Speaker 3: when this big series in 1990 came out on the
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  Speaker 3: Civil War series, which used the photographs and stuff like that.
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  Speaker 3: And our idea was to energetically explore the landscape of
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  Speaker 3: a painting and treat an old photograph like it was
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  Speaker 3: a feature filmmaker's master shot, having a wide, a medium,
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  Speaker 3: a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, an insert
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  Speaker 3: of detail. So we were just sort of very energetically
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: exploring the landscape of each image. And so I got
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  Speaker 3: a call in 2002, November, and it said it was
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  Speaker 3: Steve Jobs.
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  Speaker 1: I went, really? And he goes, yeah.
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  Speaker 3: He said, will you come out and visit me? And
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  Speaker 3: I said, yeah, that's me knocking at the door. So
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  Speaker 3: a few weeks later in December of 2002, I'm in
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  Speaker 3: a room with him.
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  Speaker 1: We're talking.
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  Speaker 3: And he brings in a couple of pretty nervous engineers.
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  Speaker 1: And I'm a Luddite.
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: And particularly- You're a Luddite? Yeah, meaning I'm not a
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: big computer person. It represents a group in England in
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: the 19th century who were opposed to technological changes.
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  Speaker 1: And so- Okay, so Mennonite, Luddite, Amish, similar. Well, not quite.
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  Speaker 3: It wasn't religious as much as a kind of a social.
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  Speaker 1: Anyway- Okay, so Amish without the dairy kind of- That's right. Exactly.
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  Speaker 3: So it's basically folks who are opposed to it.
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  Speaker 1: I'm not.
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  Speaker 3: I'm just inept.
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  Speaker 1: So my children and my grandchildren helped me with all
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  Speaker 1: of that.
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  Speaker 3: Anyway- Steve is saying, look, we've been working on this thing,
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  Speaker 3: and every Mac computer that comes out next month, January
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  Speaker 3: of 2003, is going to have this feature on it.
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  Speaker 3: And he's showing me, and it's sort of like you
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  Speaker 3: can upload your photographs and pan and zoom on them, very,
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  Speaker 3: very simply, a kind of crude, superficial version of what
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: we do or try to do with our stuff to
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: wake up the image, to wake the dead. So I'm
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: looking at it, and I'm kind of going, cool, because
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  Speaker 3: I don't really know what's going on. And he says,
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  Speaker 3: so we'd like to keep the working titles. And I said,
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  Speaker 3: what's that? And he said, the Ken Burns effect. I said,
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  Speaker 3: you know, I don't do commercial endorsements.
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  Speaker 1: He goes, what?
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  Speaker 3: And the engineers kind of blanched. And I'd known a
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: little bit that he had a temper. He never showed
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  Speaker 3: it to me. But we went back to his office.
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  Speaker 3: And after an hour, I worked out agreement that he
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: could use it.
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  Speaker 1: But I'd... Yeah, I heard he had a temper too.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: I heard his iPhone always had a cracked screen. Maybe.
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  Speaker 3: But I know some folks who got yelled at.
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  Speaker 1: He said.
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  Speaker 3: So at the end, I walked out, and he basically
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  Speaker 3: agreed to give us what turned out to be over
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: a million dollars of hardware and software that we gave
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: away to nonprofits, except for one or two computers that
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: stayed in the office because we didn't have a good
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  Speaker 3: Mac computer in the office. And then we became friends
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  Speaker 3: for the rest of his life. And so whenever I
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  Speaker 3: visited Silicon Valley, I'd stay with him, his kids, his daughter,
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: became an intern for us for a couple of semesters.
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  Speaker 3: So it was a really good relationship, but it is
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  Speaker 3: really funny. It's the technological tail that wags the dog
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  Speaker 3: of what I'm trying to do, which is take these
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  Speaker 3: old things where you don't have newsreels or you don't
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  Speaker 3: have living witnesses and try to wake up moments in
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  Speaker 3: the past and make them as dramatically compelling as you
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  Speaker 3: would if you could talk to some veteran, say, of
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  Speaker 3: the Iraq War who's still alive.
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  Speaker 1: Well, you certainly mastered it, man. And the Ken Burns effect,
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  Speaker 1: that was at the time where everybody was trying to
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  Speaker 1: be could suddenly, everybody could suddenly be a filmmaker, right?
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: Well, this is what Steve did. I mean, by inventing this,
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  Speaker 3: he made us all filmmakers. He made us, it democratized
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  Speaker 3: it all. And what you needed were the tools to
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: be able to polish it. I mean, my kids now
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  Speaker 3: and my grandkids can do stuff with this that I
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  Speaker 3: wouldn't have any idea how to do it. And one
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  Speaker 3: of the cruder tools is the Ken Burns effect, which
• 5:57
  Speaker 3: has saved lots of vacations and Lots of birthdays, lots
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: of memorial services, lots of bar mitzvahs, you know.
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  Speaker 1: That's a great point. You know what I mean?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah. And people say, oh, like, man, you didn't ask
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: him for a cut? And I said, no, I don't
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  Speaker 3: do commercial endorsements. But if I'd said, like, I want
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: one one-hundredth of a penny every time it's used, he'd go, okay, we'll.
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  Speaker 1: Call it the Pan and Zoom effect. You know what
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  Speaker 1: I mean? That's a good point.
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  Speaker 3: It was like the great thing was to just sort of,
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  Speaker 3: split the difference in the middle and not be so
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  Speaker 3: obstinate that I couldn't yield. I don't do commercial endorsement,
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: so it was sort of awkward. But at the same time,
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  Speaker 3: I wasn't endorsing a thing. I was endorsing an idea
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  Speaker 3: of how you use and manipulate images.
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  Speaker 1: Which is what I do for a living. And also
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  Speaker 1: you manipulate the past, right? Just in a way to
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  Speaker 1: bring it to life, right? That's right. It's almost like
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  Speaker 1: you're giving CPR to it in a way, you know?
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  Speaker 3: I can't believe that you said that because my mom
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  Speaker 3: was sick. from the time I was born, like a
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  Speaker 3: couple years in.
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  Speaker 1: And you grew up here in New York City, which
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  Speaker 1: is where we are.
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  Speaker 3: No, no, no. I was born in Brooklyn. I grew
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  Speaker 3: up in Delaware and Michigan and came east to Massachusetts
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  Speaker 3: for college. But my mom had cancer from the very,
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  Speaker 3: very beginning. And she died- From when you were a child? Yeah,
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  Speaker 3: when I was 11. And it was just a horrible,
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  Speaker 3: just the worst, shittiest growing up. And my dad had
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  Speaker 3: some mental illness So it was really hard. I'm not
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  Speaker 3: alone in having.
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  Speaker 1: A hard childhood. It's not self-pity. You're just sharing.
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  Speaker 3: But I watched my dad cry at a movie after
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  Speaker 3: my mom died. And I'd never seen him cry when
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  Speaker 3: she was sick or when she died or at the
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  Speaker 3: impossibly sad funeral. And I realized, 12 years old, I go,
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  Speaker 3: I'm going to be a filmmaker. This is 1965. This
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  Speaker 3: is a long time ago, 60 years ago.
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  Speaker 1: A great time.
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  Speaker 3: It's way too long to be without a mom.
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  Speaker 1: But I said.
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  Speaker 3: That meant I'd be John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock, Hollywood directors,
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  Speaker 3: and stuff like that. And then I went to Hampshire
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and they were all documentary still
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  Speaker 3: photographers and filmmakers that reminded me that there's as much
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  Speaker 3: drama in what is and what was as anything to
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  Speaker 3: human imagination. So I'm a documentary filmmaker. By 22, I'm
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  Speaker 3: making films in history, and I've been doing that for
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  Speaker 3: 50 years. So I had a crisis. I was going
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  Speaker 3: through a crisis. My late father-in-law was an eminent psychologist,
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  Speaker 3: and I said, To him one night, I said, I
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  Speaker 3: seem to be keeping my mom alive. And he goes, yeah,
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  Speaker 3: I bet you blew out your candles on your birthday,
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  Speaker 3: wishing she'd come back.
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  Speaker 1: And I go, how'd you know?
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  Speaker 3: And then he named two or three other things that
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  Speaker 3: only I knew, you know, really intimate stuff.
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  Speaker 1: Because that's how children like that operate?
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  Speaker 3: Yes. And it's just, you know, what grief does and
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  Speaker 3: what the inability to express it when you're 11 years
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  Speaker 3: old or when you're two years old and realize there's
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  Speaker 3: never a moment when there's not a, Sword of Damocles
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  Speaker 3: hanging over your head that's going to ruin everything. So
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  Speaker 3: I said, what do you mean? And he goes, well,
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  Speaker 3: look what you do for a living. You wake the dead.
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  Speaker 3: You make Jackie Robinson and Abraham Lincoln come alive. Who
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  Speaker 3: do you think you're really trying to wake up? And
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  Speaker 3: then all of a sudden, I knew that's.
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  Speaker 1: What I do. I'm waking the dead.
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  Speaker 3: And everything is a conversation with this woman that has
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  Speaker 3: not been around, Theo, for 60 years.
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  Speaker 1: 60 years, which is way too long to be without
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  Speaker 1: a mom. It's all a love story, isn't it, in
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  Speaker 1: a way? It's all a love story. You know, there's
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  Speaker 1: a musician, Stephen Wilson Jr., who's really great. He's a
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  Speaker 1: great poet. And he says that grief is only love
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  Speaker 1: that's got no place to go. Yeah, that's perfect.
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  Speaker 3: And, man, I just— Well, just think about the energy,
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  Speaker 3: the propulsion of this loss, just for me. And also
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  Speaker 3: my father is sort of the smartest guy I knew,
• 9:41
  Speaker 3: but kind of a Maserati without a clutch, you know?
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: looked really good, sounded, boom, boom, really good, but couldn't
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  Speaker 3: get into first gear, that made me, you know, such,
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  Speaker 3: you know, keep working. I mean, I've got 40 films,
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  Speaker 3: you know, I'm not stopping. All my friends are retiring,
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  Speaker 3: and I'm like, what?
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: What's retiring? You know, I'm, you know. Yeah, you're drinking
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: plasma at the house and taking electrolytes.
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  Speaker 3: I got stuff to do. I got, you know, if
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  Speaker 3: I were given a thousand years to live, I would
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  Speaker 3: never run out of topics in American history. Like, so
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  Speaker 3: this is sort of a, you know, I make films
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  Speaker 3: about the US, but I make films about us.
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  Speaker 1: You know what I mean? Got you.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah. Lowercase, two letter, plural pronoun, all of the intimacy
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  Speaker 3: of us and we and our, and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction,
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  Speaker 3: and even controversy of the U S and it is
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: a magnificent space to operate in. I feel incredibly lucky
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: and privileged to be, have the responsibility. It's a huge
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: responsibility to dive into something like the Vietnam war right now,
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  Speaker 3: the American revolution, which we just finished and you know,
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: or the civil war or world war two, Or the
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: biographies we did. Huey Long, you know, we're talking about
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: from your state of Louisiana, which is just like one
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: of the great unknown stories. It's such an amazing story.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. There he is.
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  Speaker 3: Good job.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, man. Oh, he was like, he was definitely a
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: big guy.
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  Speaker 3: He had amassed more personal power than anyone else in
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  Speaker 3: the history of the United States in a state context.
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  Speaker 3: He was both governor and United States senator, which is
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  Speaker 3: not legal. And he was already running for president against
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: Franklin Roosevelt. In 1936, when he was assassinated in September
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: of 1935 in the statehouse in Baton Rouge, in the big,
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: magnificent Art Deco statehouse he built as a kind of
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: monument to himself when he was governor.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, kind of wild to build a monument while you're alive.
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  Speaker 1: And then it immediately kind of turns into a mausoleum. Yeah,
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: exactly right. Pretty wild how that works. As children, we
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: would go there and, yeah, it was like a big
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: part of the field trips and stuff like that when
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: we were growing up in Louisiana. But, yeah, there was
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: something really amazing about him that he riled the poor,
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: but he also was able to operate with the elite.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: You know, you have– But it was hard to know
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: if he was just out for himself. That's how I
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: felt at the end of watching your documentary.
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  Speaker 3: There's a kind of ultimate corruption of power. And Jefferson
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so
• 12:03
  Speaker 3: I think Huey has that. But unlike all the other
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: demagogues that we know. He actually did provide schools. He
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: did provide school books. He did build bridges. He did
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: pave roads so that the poor of Louisiana could bring
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: their products to market.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: He did create hospitals.
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  Speaker 3: He did do all the things that he said he
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: was going to do, but he did it in a
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: corrupt fashion and basically leveled, as the journalist I.F.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: Stone said in our.
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: Film, all the liberties of the republic. He was kind
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: of like a Caesar who took charge and thought it
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: was his right to destroy the democratic institutions, that had
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: more or less work. And so we have this woman
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: from the Garden District in Louisiana, beautiful woman, to the
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: manor born. And she says in the film, right in
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  Speaker 3: the first couple of minutes, there wasn't a Saturday night
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: when we didn't talk about killing Huey Long. It didn't
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: mean you were going to do it. You just wish
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: there was some way to rid the state of this incubus,
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: which is like an old evil thing.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Because he wasn't born into wealth.
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: No, no.
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  Speaker 1: So that's another thing. If you're not in that, if
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: you're not part of that echelon, especially in a traditional
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: area like New Orleans, like Louisiana, then you never really
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: can get to those rungs of that ladder.
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: Well, you know it's really many different states, but certainly
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: there's New Orleans, there's the Catholic South, there's the Protestant North.
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: And he's from a wind parish in North Louisiana.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. There's nothing up there.
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: And was able to articulate the aspirations of people who
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: then surrendered to him and then also had to then
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: pay the price for the kind of dictatorial stuff. He
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: was surrounded by jackbooted state troopers. He had bodyguards. He's
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: eventually killed by the son-in-law of a judge that he fired,
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: got out of his job. And so Uh, or, or
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: so we think, right. Cause with all, you know, things
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: like that, there's an attached conspiracy theory that maybe he
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: didn't even have a gun.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: Carl Austin Weiss was his name.
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: Maybe he didn't do anything except confront Huey about this
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: and that bodyguard shot him and the ricocheting bullet in
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  Speaker 3: the close quarters of the, of the hallway of this
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: state house, um, uh, ricocheted and killed him. But you know, we,
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: we just don't know 100% what happened, but it's, One
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: hell of an American story.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I love it, man.
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: I think one thing about documentaries is it makes people
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: think that you feel cared about, you know?
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: I think the past feels cared about. And there's something
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: that's very beautiful about that. The American Revolution, it's a
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: new series. It comes out next month.
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: It comes out in November, November 16th. And I've been
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: working on it for, when it comes out, it'll be
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: nine years and 11 months. I started it. I said
• 14:58
  Speaker 3: yes to it when Barack Obama had 13 months to
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: go in his presidency. And, you know, Mark Twain says
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: history doesn't repeat itself. He's absolutely right. No event has
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: happened twice. But the Bible, Old Testament, says there's nothing
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: new under the sun, meaning human nature doesn't change. So
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn't repeat itself,
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: but it rhymes. So I've never worked on a film
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: in which it wasn't rhyming in the present moment. And
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: so the revolution is just another one of these extraordinary stories.
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: Our origin story, which we've lost touch with.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Oh, I think there's no doubt about it.
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: It's at arm's length because there's no photographs, there's no newsreels,
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: they're in buckled shoes, they got hoes, they got breeches,
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: they got waistcoats, they got powdered wigs, and somehow we
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: don't want to fuss with the great ideas. And the
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: great ideas are the greatest ideas ever. I actually think
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: the American Revolution is the most important event since.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: The birth of Christ. I heard you say that.
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: I really, really firmly believe that because if you think
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: about it, up until that moment, everybody was under an
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: authoritarian rule. They were subjects. They were superstitious peasants. And
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: we created citizens. And that's a big deal. When we
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: say we hold these truths to be self-evident, there was
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: nothing self-evident about what Jefferson was about to say, that
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: all men are created equal. No one on earth had
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: made that proposition that they're endowed by their creator with
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: the pursuit of happiness.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: Let's go.
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: That is not stuff that the world had ever really heard.
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: He had distilled a century of enlightenment thinking. He'd been
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: goaded on by what was happening in the breakdown of
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: relationships with the British over stuff, and what became a
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: quarrel between Englishmen suddenly got broken out into natural rights. Like,
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: this is what we all not only deserve, but the
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: world needs to change. And it did from that moment on.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: And that was Jefferson?
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: And that's Jefferson distilling it, but it's the sensibility of everybody.
• 16:54
  Speaker 3: The other thing is that it's a process thing. It's
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: like democracy isn't something that you, it's a thing, it's
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: a process, it's something you do. So when it says
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: pursuit of happiness, the key is, we can get to
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: happiness in a second, but the key is pursuit.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: It's like after a more perfect.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: Union as the constitution says. The pursuit means it's a process,
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: you're never getting there. And happiness did not mean the
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning.
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: So that you would be virtuous enough, they borrowed from
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: the classical traditions, to earn the right of citizenship. And
• 17:30
  Speaker 3: everybody talked to hear it as we're working on that virtue, virtue, virtue.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: It's all about character. It's all about the idea that
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: character is destiny. John Adams is petrified that there's too
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: much ambition and avarice, too much lust for profit. that
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: we won't be virtuous enough to sustain this republic. It's
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: so interesting because they're all the ideas that we wrestle
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: with today.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: So the Declaration is kind of like a love letter
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: to the future in a way.
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: Oh, my God, that's the best expression I've ever heard.
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: That's exactly what it is.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: That's so interesting.
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: Failure in everything, and he contracted dysentery or typhus on
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: the way. And he writes this pamphlet that's published in January,
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: early January of 1776. At that point, the war has
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: already started at Lexington and Concord the previous April, but
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: nobody's really sure what we're going to do with this rebellion.
• 18:25
  Speaker 3: And certainly, independency, as they called it, is not on
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: the mind of everybody. But he writes this thing called
• 18:31
  Speaker 3: Common Sense. It's this pamphlet, the most important pamphlet in
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: American history and just comes out and says the king
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: is an ass.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: And who is this, Thomas Paine? Yeah, Thomas Paine.
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: And he then says, not since the time of Noah,
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: you know what happened with Noah, do we have a
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: chance to remake the world. And that's the American Revolution.
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: It's suddenly, you're no longer quarreling over Native American land
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: or taxes or representation. You're actually into the biggest idea
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: of that human beings have suggested that we could actually
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: govern ourselves. No, that had never happened before. And that
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: we could, we could sustain her. And we then sponsor
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: these ideas, sponsor revolutions for the next 200 plus years. And,
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: you know, we've been going along for 249 years, uh.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: Pretty well. Thank you. And we're in it. Thank you
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: very much. That's, that's a great answer.
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: I love the love letter to the future though, man.
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: I'm not going to forget that. That's a great gift
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: you gave me today.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: Thank you, man.
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: That's, that's what it is because, uh, It's all about possibility.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: You said it's the pursuit of happiness, right? That's right.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: Even now you're challenging the way that I've thought about
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: some of this because it's like– and the documentary does this,
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: and I think it's eight parts. I'm not sure. Six parts,
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: 12 hours. I haven't watched all of it. But it
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: challenges you to think about that. It's like you're not
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: just here to just be here, right? You're not just
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: here like you got this Willy Wonka ticket, like to
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: be in a citizen or a part of a society.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: It's something that is alive and that's evolving and and
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: you need to constantly put it under the microscope. And
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: you need to put you under the microscope, right? We
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: don't have a relationship with ourselves. That's one thing I
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: think a lot of people don't have a relationship with
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: themselves anymore. And so I think when you're not sitting
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: there and thinking and contemplating where you're at and how
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: the world's affecting you and how you can affect the world,
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: I think it starts to limit us to just looking
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: at our declaration of independence almost just as like a
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: receipt of times instead of as a living document, or
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: more of like a living will and testament.
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: I don't know how it could be said any better
• 20:32
  Speaker 3: than that. I think we wear too many things instead
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: of be too many things. We wear our faith and
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: use it as a cudgel. If there's one thing I
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: learned about making films about the U.S. and us is
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: that there's only us. There's no them. I mean, and
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: people are always creating a them to make an enemy
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: in order to postpone the active work that I have
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: to do, that self-investigation. And that's, interestingly enough, that self-reflective
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: sense that I need to improve, you know? Mark Twain
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: once said, nothing so needs improving as other people's habits. Like,
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: we're always ready to say how Man, you should do
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: this differently. You should do that differently. But we're not
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: willing to, you know, my, I have an ancestor, the
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: Scottish poet, Robert Burns, who said, oh, would some power
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: the gift to give us to see ourselves as others
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: see us. And I think that this whole work of
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: not just wearing your ideas like a piece of clothing,
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: a fashion, but absorbing them and living it is the
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: big dynamic. So everybody is, It is in the interest
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: of an authoritarian to have everybody be a kind of
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: superstitious peasant, right? Uneducated, not improving, not in pursuit of
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: happiness and lifelong learning, which is what they all meant.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: Right, that's where they want us. That's where the rulers
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: want you there.
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: They want you in a place where you're passive, where
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: you're distracted by your things and your whatever and this
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: scandal and stuff like that. Eleanor Roosevelt once said that
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: that great people discuss ideas, average people discuss events, and
• 22:14
  Speaker 3: small minds discuss other people. And you realize the extent
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: to which our old culture is based on kind of judgment,
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: not of ourselves, not with the self-reflective scrutiny that all
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: of our religious teachings, all of our philosophy, and all
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: of the common sense of negotiating this complicated thing that
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: we call our lives, suggest, but abandoning that in favor of,
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: I can tell you what you're doing and I could
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: tell you what he's doing wrong, but Oh no, I'm, I'm.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: I'm, I'm fine here. You know, I believe it's nice.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: It's nice to reflect because it's fucking painful to look
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: at yourself. And I think it's painful or I don't
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: know if it's painful. It was inventive of these guys, um,
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: at the time. And the American Revolution, it often gets
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: classified as like 1776. That's the year everybody has. But
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: your documentary, it kind of goes, I think, from 75
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: to 83.
• 23:12
  Speaker 3: Well, we start at 55 and back up and show
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: you the French and Indian War, what we call the
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: French and Indian War. It was really called the Seven
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: Years' War, which is probably the third global war over
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: the prize of North America. And our revolution is the
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: fourth global war. We don't like to think of it
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: as a, global war. So it leads up to it.
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: But at the end of the first episode, Lexington Concord
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: happens in 1775. By 1776, the land we're sitting on,
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: by the way, is farmland. The biggest battle of the
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: revolution will take place on the Battle of Long Island,
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: which we lose because of George Washington, who's the most
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: important person in the history of the United States. Without him,
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: we don't have a country because of his mistakes. So
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: nobody's perfect. Everybody's pretty complicated.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: And- Wait, we don't have a country because of his mistakes?
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: No, no, no. If he didn't live, if he didn't survive,
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: or if he was surrendered, we wouldn't have a country.
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: He's central to it. And at the same time, he's flawed.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: He's rash.
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: He rides out on the battlefield at Kips Bay, just
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: over there. And his aides grab the reins of the
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: horse because he's going to get killed if he gets killed.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: It's all over.
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: He rides out in Princeton in the next January in
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: the middle of the battle. And some aide covers his
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: eyes he's going to get killed. But he makes a
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: classic mistake at the Battle of Long Island in Brooklyn,
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: what is now Brooklyn, and he doesn't protect his left
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: flank and the British curl him up. Makes the same
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: mistake again the next year at the Battle of Brandywine.
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: And yet he keeps his army together and he suddenly
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: realizes he doesn't have to win. He just can't not
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: completely lose. The British have to win and they're 3,000
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: miles away from headquarters and nobody knows what weather is
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: coming and it takes Six weeks to get back the news,
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: to get back to England. It takes even longer because
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: the Gulf Stream's not working in your favor. Coming the
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: other way. And so what are you going to do?
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: So it's an amazing story. So New York, 249 years ago,
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: is in British hands. And it stays in British hands
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: through the rest of the war. Ends in the fall
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: of 1781 at Yorktown. And another two years and two
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: months later, before the Treaty of Paris and the British evacuate.
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: Evacuation day is November 25th, so it's two months and
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: 10 days.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: That's when the Brits had to take a hike?
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: Eight years when they finally leave. And it just drove
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: Washington crazy. And in fact, everybody's going saying, go to Virginia.
• 25:35
  Speaker 3: The French are going, go to Virginia. Let's get them there,
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: which they do.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: And he's going, no, no, no. What about New York?
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: Why don't we take back New York? Because he's the
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: humiliation of having lost this city. And this is the
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: big British stronghold and loyalist stronghold for the war. And
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: people don't remember that our revolution was a civil war,
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: more than our civil war was. Our civil war was
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: a sectional war, one part of the country against the other.
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: But this is a civil war in which people in
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: your own town, in your own family, might be loyalists,
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: and you might be a patriot, or you might be disaffected.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Please leave me alone.
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: I just want to keep my head down and not
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: be bothered by it. So there's a constant set of
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: interesting struggles that we don't tend to deal with. I
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: think we don't want to accept the violence of the revolution.
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: because we think it might diminish those big ideas we've
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: been talking about, they're not in any way diminished. They're
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: made even more inspirational and more impressive.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: Right, it's better when you look at it.
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: Because of how incredibly violent and bloody this revolution was.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: Well, people were willing to die for something, you know?
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: I think you should know that Bitcoin just hit an
• 26:41
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• 26:45
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• 26:50
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• 27:16
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• 27:16
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• 27:19
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• 27:54
  Speaker 1: Take me into those 20 years before. There's two groups, right?
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: The patriots and the loyalists. We discovered America, right? We
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: developed these colonies along the eastern seaboard. So there's 13 colonies.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: But there's also the Native Americans. I mean, there's so
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: many things going on.
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: There's so many elements going on. So what happens is,
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: is everybody wants to bust out, cross over the Appalachians
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: and take more Native American land. And it isn't just them.
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: They are many, many nations that are lined up again.
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: And there is different... You mean, so is it many
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: nations wanted to go over there?
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: No, no, no.
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: Many Native American nations are there. So you might have
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: the Delaware, the Shawnee. You might have the six nations
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Seneca, Onondaga, Tuscarora.
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: The Oneida. Oneida and Mohawk.
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: You've got, you know, all the Cherokees in the South.
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: You have all these different... And there is separate and
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: as unique... as say Virginia is, or say France is,
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: or the Netherlands. And so you need to treat them
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: not as a monolithic them, you need to treat them
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: as themselves. In fact, Franklin's whole idea, Benjamin Franklin has
• 28:58
  Speaker 3: the idea of uniting the colonies because he reads about
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: the Iroquois Confederacy and they said we are a powerful confederacy,
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: never fall out one with the other. So they had
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: their individual interests, we call that states' rights, but they
• 29:10
  Speaker 3: had the federal connection that protected them in their general rights.
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: So it's The great irony is the American Revolution destroys
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: their confederacy. But what's going on here is people are
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: wanting to move west. The British win the French and
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: Indian War. Their treasury is bankrupt, and they have no
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: way to protect the settlers as they're pouring across the
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: land trying to take land.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: So the British are trying to control everything from over there.
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: Yes, but remember they have no money to protect their
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: own people. They're all Brits from that. They also have
• 29:43
  Speaker 3: 13 other colonies in the Caribbean, which are much more profitable.
• 29:46
  Speaker 3: They're all based on slave labor. Oh, yeah. Only Virginia
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: and South Carolina are profitable. All the rest aren't. But
• 29:51
  Speaker 3: we're the most populist. We're the most literate.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: We make things. We trade with them. And we're also.
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: on the continent, which is what everybody wants. The French
• 30:00
  Speaker 3: want it, the Spanish want it, the Dutch want it.
• 30:03
  Speaker 3: Everybody wants this.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: To be in the Americas? To own what we call
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: North America.
• 30:08
  Speaker 3: And of course, the native peoples who've been there for 20,000
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: years want to keep it. And so there's all these tensions.
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: And so they're big land speculators too. Like normally, you
• 30:20
  Speaker 3: and I, we'd be working our land for 1,000 years
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: for somebody else in Wales or Scotland or Ireland or England.
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: now we're over here and we can get 125 acres
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: of our own. But there's big speculators like Franklin and
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: Washington and they just decided that Native American land is mine.
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: Why don't I divide it up and sell it and
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: be the middleman for land they didn't yet own? The
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: British are like, we can't protect you. Our treasury is whatever.
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: So not only can you not cross the Appalachians in 1763,
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: they made a rule, you can't go over there. That
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: enraged the colonists. And then They said, we need you
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: to help pay.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: The Stamp Act, is that it?
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: Various things that they were going to tax us. Stamp Act,
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: they proposed and everybody went crazy.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: That was amazing. That was a good sign of how
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: the people had a lot of control. Well, this is
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: what happened.
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: The individual colonies that had no interest in connecting with
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: one another, Franklin had suggested back in the 1750s, let's
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: get together and do a union like the native peoples do.
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: And we all said, no, we're not giving up our autonomy.
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: Nobody came. Nobody wanted to do it. But then as
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: these taxes happened, as the decision to not allow colonists
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: to go into Indian land was enforced, they just suddenly
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: started coming together. And there's committees of correspondence. There's the
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: Sons of Liberty. There's resistance. Women are hugely part of it.
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: You never hear about this. They keep this thing going.
• 31:46
  Speaker 3: They said, we can do without these imported goods. We'll
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: make our own homespun cloth. And so people are in competition.
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: The ladies of this province are this and And so
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: what happens is eventually, as always happens, and this happens
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: in history so much, is that I tell you, you're
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: acting radical. You may not be acting radical, but then
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: you start acting more radical. You say me, you're being tyrannical.
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: And I may not be tyrannical, but I start acting
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: more tyrannical. And you get to this point where somebody says,
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: we think they're storing arms in Lexington and Concord. Let's
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: go and capture their leaders, this firebrand Samuel Adams and
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: John Hancock. And let's collect this stuff.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: So it's the weapons of mass destruction.
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: Well, it's their rifles and muskets and flints and gunpowder.
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: And they go and, you know, the Patriots meet them
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: on the green at Lexington and the British say disperse.
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: And they'd start to and shot fires out. Somebody said,
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: it's a massacre. The British kill eight or nine of
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: us and wound others. And then they march on to Concord.
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: And then finally at Concord, everybody said, F this, you know,
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: we're going. And so they fight back. And the whole way,
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: the retreat back to Boston is just a slaughter for
• 32:58
  Speaker 3: the British. And then they're hemmed in. They're not, they
• 33:01
  Speaker 3: can get out. They've got their, the most powerful Navy
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: on earth, but they can't, they can't move out because
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: there's just thousands of patriots who've rushed from Rhode Island
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: and Connecticut and New Hampshire, as well as Massachusetts towns
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: to the defense of Boston. And they ring them and
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: they've got them in. And then it begins again. a
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: war that is going to take six and a half
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: years until Yorktown. And any time you're in telling a story,
• 33:29
  Speaker 3: you have to remember that everyone who's in it doesn't
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: know how it's going to turn out. And that if
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: you're a good storyteller, you have people tune in, pay
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: attention to the story, because you think it may not
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: turn out the way you know it did. That's the
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: essence of it. So I have people telling me about
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: my Civil War series. They say, you know, I went
• 33:49
  Speaker 3: into that Ford's Theater hoping the gun would.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: Jam this time.
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: And I went, yes, that's exactly what you want, right?
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: That's exactly what you want.
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: Because even when the French decide to come in after
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: the Battle of Saratoga, it's still not a given that
• 34:02
  Speaker 3: we're going to win. Washington isn't totally sure that we're
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: going to win. And when Charleston falls in the spring
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: of 1780, it's like, I think the game is over.
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: I'm not sure how we can continue.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: And he does.
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: And then the French... We have a few engagements. The
• 34:20
  Speaker 3: first couple of engagements with the French are disasters, and
• 34:22
  Speaker 3: we're thinking, maybe their help isn't going to be helpful.
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: And then their army comes, and they march with Washington,
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: not to New York to liberate it, but around and down.
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: And they trap Cornwallis, and the French Navy defeats the
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: British and allows the big guns to come in from
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: New York. I mean, it is as riveting a story—
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: as you could ever tell. And it's our story, and
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: nobody knows it. It's our origin story. It's our origin mythology.
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: It's our Valhalla. It's our Thor and Odin. These are
• 34:58
  Speaker 3: all the founding stuff. And what could be more important,
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: and particularly today, when we feel like we're divided, so divided, well,
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: you go, well, we're pretty divided back then, and we
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: were pretty divided during the Vietnam War. We were really
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: divided during the Great Depression and we were really, you know,
• 35:14
  Speaker 3: in America first and we were really divided during the
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: Civil War. So maybe we're always divided and maybe the
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: essence is not to just keep pointing and escalating it,
• 35:23
  Speaker 3: but say, what do we share in common? Well, I'll
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: tell you what we share in common. We share an
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: origin story that on July 4th in 1776, very few
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: countries know exactly when they were born, where, Philadelphia, when,
• 35:38
  Speaker 3: July 4th, 1776, and what.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: We hold these truths to be self-evident. That's our story.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: What's our zodiac sign? So we are cancer.
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: That's our zodiac sign.
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, July 4th.
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: Although I read an article the other day that suggests
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: that actually these borders of the signs might be shifting.
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: So now I'm going to put an asterisk next.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: Okay. So America's a cancer. Cancer with an asterisk. Okay.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: I love that. Um, take me character. Cancer is characterized
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: as highly emotional, imaginative and loyal. There you go. That's
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: pretty American.
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: So maybe, maybe we ought to, uh, work on those things. Tenacious, sympathetic, creative, protective.
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: That's pretty good.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: Weaknesses are moodiness, insecurity, pessimism, and being easily hurt. So
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: we're here. So this is us, right? This is the US.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: This is us, right? This is us. So this is us.
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: You know, there was a cartoonist named Walt Kelly, and
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: he had a cartoon series called Pogo Strip. And at
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: one point, the main character, who's this odd animal figure, says,
• 36:45
  Speaker 3: we have met the enemy, and he is us. Right?
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: Because it's a variation on a military moment. And it's
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: really true. Lincoln- as a young lawyer, not yet 29
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: years old, 28 years old, addresses the young men's Lyceum
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: in Springfield, Illinois, and they're discussing foreign policy. And he says,
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow?
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: And then he answers his own question.
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: not by force take a drink in the Ohio River
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: or make a track in the Blue Ridge in a
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot,
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: we must ourselves be its author and finisher. We are
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: a nation of free men who will live forever or
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: die by suicide. So there's our challenge, right? You want
• 37:42
  Speaker 3: to get self-involved. You want to make your neighbor your enemy.
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: You want to make lots of them. Then you are
• 37:47
  Speaker 3: headed towards that self-destruction that Lincoln's talking about. You want
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: to figure out what we share in common, this corny
• 37:55
  Speaker 3: sort of civic virtue civic energy that comes from the
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: Declaration of Independence, like how you can work together to
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: do it. And a lot of people who are unbelievable citizens,
• 38:07
  Speaker 3: it's like they go to the school board meeting. They
• 38:11
  Speaker 3: participate in, I live in New England and we have
• 38:14
  Speaker 3: a town meeting and sometimes the biggest decision is whether
• 38:17
  Speaker 3: to buy a new pumper for the fire department.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: That's a big deal.
• 38:20
  Speaker 3: That's civics. That's dealing with the stuff. And it's also saying,
• 38:24
  Speaker 3: I've got to vote. And I have a responsibility as
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: a citizenship to do it. And then we'll save our country. Then,
• 38:32
  Speaker 3: you know, if you like the abstraction of disagreement and
• 38:37
  Speaker 3: violence and all that sort of stuff, where suddenly just
• 38:39
  Speaker 3: because your feed tells you one thing that somebody's an enemy,
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: then you're lost. But if you look across the room
• 38:45
  Speaker 3: and you say, you know, I don't share in common
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: that much with somebody who comes from Louisiana and lives
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: in Tennessee. I'd I was born in Brooklyn and grew
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: up in Delaware and Michigan and now I've lived in
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: New England for the last, you know, 54 years. What
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: will we have in common? We share a love of
• 39:04
  Speaker 3: those ideas. We share a love of that process, the
• 39:08
  Speaker 3: pursuit of happiness. God.
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it comes so much back to like your own
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: integrity with yourself, you know? And I think it's interesting whenever,
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: like as I'm watching your documentary, it's like you learn
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: that like, Even as you were saying earlier that this
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: is like the first time that people thought of themselves
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: um as not under rule but of like it's almost
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: like we were away at summer camp or something and
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: you kind of your imagination started to bloom that's right
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: you know like that's kind of the feeling that i
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: get of those uh the first colonists.
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: Here so it's so exciting There's a moment in the-
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's blooming on somebody else's land as well.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: It's definitely blooming on Native Americans' land. So I don't
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: want to not say that. So here's the deal.
• 39:54
  Speaker 3: You ask any school kid, how were the colonists who
• 39:59
  Speaker 3: threw the tea in Boston Harbor dressed? And they say,
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: as Native Americans. Why were they dressed as Native Americans?
• 40:05
  Speaker 3: And they go, to deflect the blame. And you go, no,
• 40:09
  Speaker 3: they were dressing, and it's so ironic and poignant and
• 40:13
  Speaker 3: sad and also ennobling- that we were saying to Britain,
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: we're no longer part of you. The scholar Phil Deloria says,
• 40:23
  Speaker 3: we're aboriginal. We choose to dress this way because we're
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: severing our feelings and our affections with.
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: The motherland because of what you're doing to us.
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: And who do you choose? Oh, the people that you've
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: spent the last 150 years dispossessing of their land. And oh,
• 40:39
  Speaker 3: by the way, you're going to spend the next 150
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: years continuing to dispossess them of their land.
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: So there's a great irony.
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: But there was a point you made a second ago,
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: a little bit later in the Declaration, after he says
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: pursuit of happiness. There's the phrase he says, Jefferson says,
• 40:53
  Speaker 3: all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to
• 40:59
  Speaker 3: suffer while evils are sufferable. It's not that difficult to
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: figure out. Take me through that a little bit, but
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: can you break that down for me a little bit
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: so I can understand it? So he says, Basically, he says,
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning, heretofore, all human beings
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: have been under the boot of an authoritarian. And basically,
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: it's the human lot to just put up with it.
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: And we are creating something new called a citizen. It's
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: going to take hard work. It's going to take that self-examination.
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: It's going to take that self-criticism, which we're so unwilling
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: to do. It's rather criticize the other than ourselves, rather
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: to assume the discipline necessary to have the virtue, getting
• 41:42
  Speaker 3: better as a human being, to be a citizen. But
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: he's putting it right down there. You will devolve back
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: to that state where when somebody comes in who is
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: acting as an authoritarian, you'll go, fine, take it over
• 41:56
  Speaker 3: for me, Mussolini. The trains are running on time.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: That's all I.
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: Need is for the trains to run on time. You
• 42:01
  Speaker 3: think that's what it's about? It's not about. We know
• 42:04
  Speaker 3: what the story of tyranny is, and we know what
• 42:08
  Speaker 3: our story is. And our story is not the story
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: of tyranny. And that we, and it never happens with
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: a light switch. It happens incrementally. Yes. You know, you don't,
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: it's like two frogs sitting in the boiling pot of water,
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: and somebody says, they're still saying to each other, I
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: really like a hot bath, you know, until they're cooked, right?
• 42:29
  Speaker 3: And so at some point, what Jefferson is saying is,
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: do not be so disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning,
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: do not put up with the yoke of authoritarianism. Be
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: more active as a citizen and understand that that person
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: that you disagree with, we want them to disagree. Remember,
• 42:52
  Speaker 3: we're the first country on earth that didn't establish a religion.
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: Almost all of the wars that are fought are over
• 43:00
  Speaker 3: some interpretations of religion or some other such thing that
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: devolves from that. And we were saying, make no notice
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: of it. Thomas Jefferson himself said, if my neighbor believes
• 43:10
  Speaker 3: in 20 gods or no god at all, it neither
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. And like New
• 43:17
  Speaker 3: York and Pennsylvania have worked into their state constitutions, just
• 43:21
  Speaker 3: not paying attention to a particular religion means you are
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: free from all the tyrannical thou shall rather than this is.
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: Like the thing that you're talking about, that individual responsibility.
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: That's a bit of a them and me.
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: That's exactly, when it is, this is, and it is
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: an acceptance. Thou shall is telling somebody else how to
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: be and how that's wrong. So the whole story is
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: trying to figure out, you could say that we're a
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: nation in the process of becoming.
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: Like, And what do you want to be? Ever see
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: the movie? It's a wonderful- And you should always be
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: a nation in the process of becoming. Of course. Otherwise,
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: what are you? You are static.
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: You're Putin's Russia. You're Xi's China. You've just got people
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: telling you what to do. And nobody wants that. You
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: want to develop ideas. You want to pursue science. You
• 44:11
  Speaker 3: want to pursue arts. You want to have a lot.
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: You want to tolerate lots of different points of view.
• 44:16
  Speaker 3: And right now, we've gotten to the place where we
• 44:19
  Speaker 3: don't even want to listen to another point of view.
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: We only want to hear the information- that, you know,
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: sad as, oh yeah, that's what I agree with, you know,
• 44:26
  Speaker 3: and not sort of expand ourselves and say, I can
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: listen to someone that I totally disagree with and I
• 44:33
  Speaker 3: don't have to then make that person the enemy. That's
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: the key to the American experiment. Yeah.
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: Well, I think even as a conversation like this, man,
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: it's so good for me. Like it's so good. It
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: takes me out of this, like, I don't get too
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: caught up in the like us and them thing, but
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: it puts me back in a place of like, oh yeah, well,
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: I'm here with a purpose, right? Like it gives you
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: a purpose of like being a citizen, of being a human, right?
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: Of like a Rubik's cube that will never be solved, right?
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: It's like, I don't need to win, right? Like, but
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: I do need to keep playing and also be a
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: good competitor and an earnest competitor. And- Yeah, it puts
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: it more back on you, right? It makes the mirror
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: a little bit stronger. I think it's nice.
• 45:21
  Speaker 3: That is a beautiful thing, and it goes along with
• 45:23
  Speaker 3: your dream. I mean, Jefferson wrote that to Adams. They
• 45:26
  Speaker 3: were friends, and they were enemies, and then they were
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: friends again at the end of their life. They both
• 45:30
  Speaker 3: died on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the moment
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: of the signing of the Declaration, and they both thought
• 45:37
  Speaker 3: the other was alive. Jefferson had died first. Adams survived
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: him by a couple of hours. But just before he died,
• 45:43
  Speaker 3: he said, you know, I like the dreams of the
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: future better than the history of the past. And so
• 45:50
  Speaker 3: we shall go on, so we will go on and
• 45:53
  Speaker 3: shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: history of mankind. And I love that idea that's puzzled
• 46:01
  Speaker 3: and prospering. I gave a commencement address last year at
• 46:04
  Speaker 3: Brandeis University. And I was talking about how we're so
• 46:08
  Speaker 3: preoccupied with these binaries, you know. Red state, blue state, Democrat, Republican, young, old, black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, east, west, north, south.
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: We always have these divisions.
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: They don't exist in nature.
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: They're just arbitrary divisions that we've imposed on things. And
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: so I said, when you look at things and you
• 46:28
  Speaker 3: see how it's going, the opposite of faith is not doubt.
• 46:34
  Speaker 3: Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty.
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: I was going to say certainty.
• 46:40
  Speaker 3: Certainty destroys the mystery of this thing that you and
• 46:44
  Speaker 3: I have been talking about. Who wants to stop that?
• 46:47
  Speaker 3: Unless it's a thou shall. You can't dance. You can't
• 46:51
  Speaker 3: do this. You can't do this. You can't do all
• 46:54
  Speaker 3: the things that we're told. Or because you do this,
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: you are not a good person. Or you are not
• 47:01
  Speaker 3: a real American. Or what's a real American? I mean,
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: there are a group of Native Americans, and I'm very
• 47:07
  Speaker 3: pleased to report— that there are more Native Americans now
• 47:10
  Speaker 3: in the United States, not in the best of circumstances
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: in many cases, but more than there were when the
• 47:17
  Speaker 3: American Revolution took place. However, they do have a legitimate
• 47:21
  Speaker 3: claim to saying, you know, we're the real Americans. And
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: so all of this stuff in the revolution then has
• 47:27
  Speaker 3: to parse that. Who are we in Massachusetts? Who are
• 47:30
  Speaker 3: we in Georgia? Who are we in New Hampshire and
• 47:32
  Speaker 3: South Carolina? what are the native people in our midst?
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: What are the native people at our borders? And there
• 47:38
  Speaker 3: are lots of different cultures, as distinct, I said, as
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: any other cultures. And we've also imported by force 500,000
• 47:46
  Speaker 3: enslaved African-Americans. Where are they going to go and what
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: are they going to do? And then we have all
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: this pressure from all these big superpowers like Britain that
• 47:57
  Speaker 3: owns us and France that is sorry that they lost us.
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: And Spain that wants, that gots the bottom and they
• 48:04
  Speaker 3: wants more. And the Dutch who used to be in there,
• 48:07
  Speaker 3: you know, New York was a, this was a Dutch city.
• 48:11
  Speaker 3: And so, and Brooklyn is a Dutch name. Harlem is
• 48:15
  Speaker 3: a Dutch name. I mean, so you've got this overlay
• 48:19
  Speaker 3: of all of these cultures competing here. And so the
• 48:21
  Speaker 3: revolution is the place where we coalesce. We bring together
• 48:26
  Speaker 3: the best ideas that had ever been thought in humankind
• 48:30
  Speaker 3: about human amongst a huge variety of people. And we've
• 48:35
  Speaker 3: made it work for at least 249 years. And I'm
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: super proud to be an American. I mean, with the
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: exception of one film, all of the things I've done
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: have been about American history because I'm trying to ask
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: this deceptively simple question.
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: Who are we?
• 48:52
  Speaker 3: Who are these strange and complicated people who like to
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: call themselves Americans? And what does an investigation of the past,
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: that particular moment, that particular person, that particular war. Tell
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: us about not only where we were back then, but
• 49:03
  Speaker 3: where we are now.
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: And where we may be going. This episode is sponsored
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: by BetterHelp. Did you know that October 10th is World
• 49:12
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  Speaker 1: dot com slash T-H-E-O. Thank you so much, man. This
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  Speaker 1: is so fun. It is fun. It is fun.
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: I'm having the best time.
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I appreciate that. let's look at a little bit
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: of the minutia. So just to make, just to like add,
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: just to get into a little bit of the storytelling
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: to add some like blush to the cheeks of this conversation.
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: What about Paul Revere's ride? What was real about that?
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: Was he just a loud mouth? Some people said it
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: was autism. He got ahold of a horse and some booze.
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of like, a lot of rumors going
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: on out there. Some of that's TikTok, but still.
• 50:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, so let me dispel the most important thing
• 50:49
  Speaker 3: which is he did not say the British are coming,
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: the British are coming.
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: He didn't.
• 50:52
  Speaker 3: He didn't say the redcoats are coming or the redcoats
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: are coming. What he yelled was the regulars are coming out.
• 50:59
  Speaker 3: The regulars are coming out, meaning the regular British army
• 51:03
  Speaker 3: that has been stationed in Boston for whatever it is,
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: almost two years, um, are, are coming out. And so
• 51:10
  Speaker 3: he is a patriot. He has made, he's a silversmith
• 51:13
  Speaker 3: and an engraver, and he's made an engraving of the eight, uh, uh,
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: That 1770 event in March called the Boston Massacre. He
• 51:23
  Speaker 3: calls it the Bloody Massacre. We end up calling it
• 51:25
  Speaker 3: the Boston Massacre when some of these occupying a standing army.
• 51:28
  Speaker 3: I mean, this is the big deal, right? You didn't
• 51:31
  Speaker 3: send an army to a place unless you were protecting them.
• 51:35
  Speaker 3: You didn't send an army there to police the population.
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: That's not what free people have, right, is the army
• 51:43
  Speaker 3: in your midst.
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: So the British army is in there in the colonies.
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: They're in Boston because there's so much particularly. Only in
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: Boston or in all the colonies?
• 51:49
  Speaker 3: They've got a presence to protect the stuff, but they
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: are in Boston particularly to try to put down the
• 51:57
  Speaker 3: resistance to their taxes, the resistance to that.
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: So the people realize that the military is there kind
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: of against them. Uh-huh. And that's kind of what we
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: have a lot going on right now, hypothetically.
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: I had a premiere of the film at the Telluride
• 52:13
  Speaker 3: Film Festival, episode one.
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: Telluride, beautiful over there. Gorgeous, gorgeous.
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: And we go every year, even whether we have a
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: film or not. Anyway, so they were doing it. And
• 52:22
  Speaker 3: when they got to the point when General Gage imported
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: these number of ships from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to go
• 52:28
  Speaker 3: to occupy Boston, not to protect it, but to police it.
• 52:31
  Speaker 3: And then you hear the voices from the past saying,
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: a standing army in peacetime? This is horrible, you know,
• 52:36
  Speaker 3: like that. And the audience in Telluride erupted because they're going, wait,
• 52:41
  Speaker 3: that's happening now. That's where history can be your best teacher.
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: To go, wait a second, did we just get, did
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: they just raise the temperature on that pot I'm sitting in?
• 52:50
  Speaker 3: Am I about to be boiled? You know, what's going on?
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: So anyway, he does an engraving, Paul Revere does an
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: engraving of the massacre.
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: Before you move on, actually, do you mind, Ken?
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry. They just had a thing in Britain the
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: other day where people showed up in I don't know
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: if it was half a million, a million people showed
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: up to support like the British, just what being British, right?
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: And so like, I'm not sure exactly what they were doing,
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: but this is just incredible.
• 53:20
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: Unite the kingdom rally in Britain. And it wasn't, they
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: weren't putting this on a lot of news channels. I
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: think a lot of the news were trying to label
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: this as like a far right thing. You know, the
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: news I don't think has done a good job. It
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: feels like they want us to be at odds a
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: lot of times. Do you think that's a fair statement? Yeah,
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: I think that in many ways, media, regardless of its orientation,
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: depends on conflict. And that we spend a lot of time,
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: that's the essence of a story, is we think conflict
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: rather than, you know, it's so funny. You get involved.
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: This is incredible. It's just street after street. You get
• 54:02
  Speaker 3: involved in a war. And then after the war, you
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: get involved in negotiations and you just wonder, we were
• 54:09
  Speaker 3: making our film on Vietnam and you were introducing a
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: Marine who just did some amazing thing. Got a chest
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: full of medals, just, you know, almost the congressional medal
• 54:17
  Speaker 3: of honor, just amazing stuff for his action. And we
• 54:19
  Speaker 3: kept pressing him wanting to hear this stuff. And he
• 54:22
  Speaker 3: finally looked up and he said, it's the history of
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: the world.
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: Meaning, warfare. It's what we do.
• 54:28
  Speaker 3: And you would think that at some point we get
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: to a place, all of our religious teachings, all of
• 54:33
  Speaker 3: them are just big tributaries flowing into the same sea,
• 54:37
  Speaker 3: do unto others as you would have others do unto you,
• 54:40
  Speaker 3: that we would just jump from the argument to the
• 54:46
  Speaker 3: negotiation and the solution rather than what we seem to have.
• 54:52
  Speaker 3: And I'm Guilty of focusing as, you know, I tell
• 54:56
  Speaker 3: other things, but, you know, history of country music, history
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: of jazz music, baseball, all of that stuff. But I
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: focus on Civil War and World War II and Vietnam
• 55:04
  Speaker 3: and the American Revolution now because they're so instructive about
• 55:08
  Speaker 3: human behavior.
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: Bad, of course, but also really good.
• 55:12
  Speaker 3: These ennobling ideas that we've been talking about first ever,
• 55:15
  Speaker 3: which is why I feel comfortable saying it's the most
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: important event in world history ever. Since the birth of Christ.
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: And yet.
• 55:25
  Speaker 3: The violence is unnecessary. And certainly political violence is unnecessary.
• 55:29
  Speaker 3: And certainly reactive violence. Well, that because they did that,
• 55:33
  Speaker 3: then we have to do that. And you realize that
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: it's like the Old Testament, an eye for an eye.
• 55:40
  Speaker 3: And you realize you keep going with that and everybody's blind.
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, everybody has a seeing eye dog or something. Go
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: back to that rally. I just want to even read
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: who was there. I just want to even know a
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: little bit about it. I just saw videos of this
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: and it blew my mind. I think a lot of...
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: What I liked about this is it's people showing up
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: for something, right? It's people in the streets.
• 56:03
  Speaker 3: Well, they're expressing what they're allowed to do. And that's
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: what in a democratic society, which Britain is, you get
• 56:11
  Speaker 3: a chance to.
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: As our First Amendment.
• 56:15
  Speaker 3: Says, the government will establish no religion. You have freedom
• 56:20
  Speaker 3: of the press and freedom of assembly. These are the hallmarks,
• 56:25
  Speaker 3: the number one thing. After the Constitution was done, everybody said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: time out. We've got a Constitution. We've got an operating manual.
• 56:33
  Speaker 3: But we're not going to go forward in this unless
• 56:35
  Speaker 3: we get a Bill of Rights that tells us, what,
• 56:38
  Speaker 3: you know, that enshrines the things we just fought for,
• 56:42
  Speaker 3: the things we just died for. There's, you know, there's one,
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: you know, the Saving Private Ryan story of, you know,
• 56:49
  Speaker 3: sons are dying. It's based on a true story where
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: a woman, I think from Iowa, his last name is Sullivan,
• 56:54
  Speaker 3: lost four sons in a battleship that went down and
• 56:56
  Speaker 3: the Department of War said, you know, we're now going
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: to separate everybody, all the brothers. Rebecca Tanner, a Mohegan woman,
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: meaning probably Connecticut, lost four. five sons, not four, but
• 57:09
  Speaker 3: five sons fighting for the patriot cause. This is a
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: Native American woman. So you realize that's the sacrifice that
• 57:16
  Speaker 3: people have made in order for us to be able
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: to hold a demonstration, express our point of view nonviolently,
• 57:26
  Speaker 3: and to be able to tolerate lots of ideas. I mean,
• 57:31
  Speaker 3: you can't say we're only going to tolerate our ideas
• 57:34
  Speaker 3: and everybody else who doesn't agree with us are therefore bad,
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: you know? I mean, across the street from us, on
• 57:44
  Speaker 3: 23rd Street in New York City, where we are right now,
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: is the headquarters of the Communist Party of the United
• 57:49
  Speaker 3: States that has as much right to its office space
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: as the Republican National Committee or the Democratic National Committee.
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: Huh. Doesn't it?
• 57:58
  Speaker 3: In a country in which all ideas are free?
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: Is the head of the Communist Party?
• 58:03
  Speaker 3: The American Communist Party has its headquarters. Hmm.
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: Across the street.
• 58:08
  Speaker 3: And they have had their headquarters there for decades and
• 58:12
  Speaker 3: decades and decades.
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, what's funny to me, Ken, is that
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: it feels like just being a regular American that's hopeful,
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: you're almost a communist these days in our own country.
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying? That idea, that's what I
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: think is interesting about these. Let me just start here.
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: The Unite the Kingdom rally was a massive And this says,
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: far-right demonstration held in London on September 13, 2025, organized
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: by anti-immigrant activist Tommy Robinson. The event attracted between 110,000
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: and 150,000 people, making one of the largest protests in
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: British history. The rally was billed as a free speech festival.
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: And the demonstration featured chants like, we want our country back.
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: What I think is interesting about this, it's people who
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: have a set of beliefs and ideals of what British
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: life is, right? And history is to them and that
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: they want to speak out for it, right? That's one
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: thing that I thought was pretty cool, you know?
• 59:08
  Speaker 3: This is the democratic right. Right. I mean, I remember
• 59:11
  Speaker 3: when I was growing up.
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: People tweeting with their feet.
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: I said this the other day in a conversation, but
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: it's like it's not people sitting in the fucking background
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: yelling stuff or screaming or, you know, but it's people
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: who are actually out.
• 59:24
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: And this this to me is always inspiring because it's
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: you're putting your face out there with your voice. Right.
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: And you're putting your feet out there with your voice.
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: And that to me feels like.
• 59:36
  Speaker 3: A real tweet. They could be left wing. They could
• 59:40
  Speaker 3: be right wing.
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: I agree.
• 59:41
  Speaker 3: They could be immigrants saying we're as much Britons as
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: any of that is possible within a peaceful context. Yeah.
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: And it's people that like, you know, people get an
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: idea of what a culture is, right?
• 59:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: And especially, I mean, Britain was predominantly white probably, I
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: would guess, until they took in slaves and Native Americans.
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure. Or Caucasian, I guess they would have
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: called it at the time, or European?
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: They were European, but they're also a mixture of lots
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 3: of European cultures, and their whole worldwide economy was dependent
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 3: on slavery, mostly in the Caribbean, as the Spanish had it,
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 3: mostly in South and Central America. And then we had
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 3: it in the southern states. Slavery was legal in the
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: colonies from New Hampshire to And then one by one,
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 3: the northern states sort of realized it. And George Washington
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 3: freed his slaves. I mean, they all knew.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: He kept a couple, somebody said. I don't know if
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: that's true.
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: Thomas Jefferson understood. They understood that slavery was morally wrong.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 3: And yet it was an impossible, what's the right word?
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 3: They're making too much money not to give it up.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 3: And it's only later in the 19th century when the
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: abolitionist movement comes, we should abolish slavery, that then you
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 3: find slaveholders now making really big arguments about how, oh,
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 3: they're inferior, they're children, they can't handle freedom and all
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 3: of this stuff, all of which they didn't really express.
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 3: Thomas Jefferson did a little bit in his notes on
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 3: the state of Virginia. It's very, very complicated, but we're
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 3: always looking for a way to say that some people
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 3: are more equal than others. And if you believe in equality,
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: that's not the case. That if you believe in the
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 3: second line of the declaration, which is our catechism, then
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 3: it's everybody. And that people have the ability to rise
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 3: according to their abilities and opportunities. And you try to
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 3: provide as many opportunities for as many people. But The
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 3: minute you transform this civic, you know, just explosion, this
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 3: beautiful civic compact that we have and racialize it, it
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 3: can only be white, it can only be black, and
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: it can only be this, it can only be that,
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 3: it's already lost. It is not one thing or one
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 3: type of people. That's where you go wrong.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: But history does that, like, it's kind of interesting because
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: it's like, even like... even whenever they were declaring America, right,
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: and deciding what it meant to be American, and they were,
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: in this period that you investigate in the American Revolution documentary,
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: it's like they were saying this is who we are, right?
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: At the same time, they're also colonizing. It's interesting when
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: colonization and human and being human started to sort of,
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: I don't know. Do you know what I'm kind of saying?
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: It's just such a weird dichotomy.
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 3: It's the difference between the ideal and the human possibility
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: at any given moment. And what the founders were saying
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 3: is that in order to have a government that operates,
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 3: not only do all people have to be created equal,
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: but you have to be pursuing this self-examination. We should
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: be interested in improving ourselves. So when Thomas Jefferson wrote
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 3: All Men Are Created Equal, he meant all white men
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 3: of property free of debt. He did not mean a
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 3: majority of the white population of.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: The colonies, women.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 3: He did not mean the 500,000 free and enslaved African Americans.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 3: He did not mean the native peoples both intermixed with
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 3: people and part of the rest of the continent. And remember,
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 3: we didn't say when we started our Congress and when
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 3: we started our army, we didn't say the Eastern Seaboard Congress.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: We didn't say the Eastern Seaboard Army. We said the
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 3: Continental Congress, the Continental Army. We knew where we were
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: going and we knew who we were going to run
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 3: over to get it. And even when the Constitution was started,
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 3: women were let out. One of the leading women of Philadelphia,
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: Elizabeth Willing Powell, met Benjamin Franklin as he came out
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 3: in mid-September in 1787 from Independence Hall where they had
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: been figuring out the Constitution and getting it down. and said,
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 3: what have you created, Dr. Franklin, a monarchy or a republic?
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 3: And he said, a republic if you can keep it,
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 3: meaning we're going to do this. Now, when they went
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 3: into it in 1776, they were not after a democracy.
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 3: Democracy meant mob rule to a lot of people. They
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 3: were interested in an aristocracy of the elites, right? But
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 3: in order to win the war, they had to enlist
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 3: not the sturdy militiamen who... often left to go plant
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 3: a crop or often left to go harvest that crop.
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 3: But they ended up with an army, the Continentals, the
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 3: regular army of the United States of America, the Continental Army,
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 3: were teenagers, second and third sons without a chance of
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 3: an inheritance, felons, ne'er-do-wells, recent immigrants from Germany and England,
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 3: and they won the war. And so as they're beginning,
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 3: the dogs won the war. And as they're beginning, and
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 3: we follow them, as you'll see, you know, in this story,
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 3: 14 year old kid from Boston named John Green, 15
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 3: year old kid, Joseph Plum Martin from Connecticut, you know,
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 3: a 10 year old girl from Yorktown, who's a refugee
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 3: all of the way, you get to meet them. So
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 3: it's not just George Washington and all of that stuff.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 3: But when they start trying to figure out their state constitutions,
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 3: Pennsylvania says, well, why don't we give votes to every
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 3: white man who's 21 or older, whether their own property
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 3: or not? And, and, and John Adams is like, wait, wait, wait,
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 3: we're not going to, what about the aristocracy? Not, you know,
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: not the land. So what happens is, is that democracy
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 3: is not an object of our revolution. It's a consequence
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 3: of it, which is okay because if you've got an
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 3: unintended consequence of democracy, that's pretty good.
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Pretty cool.
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it's just so exciting. I mean, I have
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 3: the best job in the country. I have the best
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 3: job in the country. It educates all my parts. I
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 3: don't go in knowing about the revolution and telling you
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 3: what you should know because, Theo, that is like saying
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 3: there's a test on next Tuesday. I'm sharing with you
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 3: the process of discovery. Like, Betsy Ross isn't mentioned in here.
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 3: We don't actually know who made the first flag. No
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 3: one says, don't fire till you hear the whites of
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 3: our eyes. Paul Revere did not say, the redcoats are.
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: Coming, the redcoats are coming. He said the regulars are coming.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: The regulars are coming out. The regulars are coming out.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: And he meant the regulars are coming out of their homes.
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 3: Out of Boston, out to Lexington and to Concord. Concord
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 3: was the place where they thought everything was hidden. And
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 3: they were right and they just never found it. And
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 3: then we started fighting back. We didn't fight back so
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 3: much on Lexington Green. It was It was a massacre
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 3: on Lexington Green and then conquered at the North Bridge.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 3: We meet a guy named Isaac Davis, who's a gunsmith
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 3: from Acton, Massachusetts, and he leaves early in the morning
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 3: and he's at the North Bridge and he is, along
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 3: with a fellow guy, Abner Hosmer, is one of the
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 3: first Americans to be killed at the North Bridge. But
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 3: then the fury of the militia, Patriot militia, just overwhelms
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: the British and they start a retreat and it's, if
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 3: there hadn't been some reinforcements that caught up with them
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: when they were limping back, retreating back through Lexington, it
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 3: would have been a rout. And it was still all
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 3: the way, every spot of ground, all the way back
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 3: to Boston was contested. And everybody's sitting there going, like yesterday,
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 3: these were our brothers. Yesterday, these were our fellow countrymen. Yesterday,
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 3: we were arguing. Today, we're at war. And there's a
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 3: great sense of thing.
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: I mean, Abigail's, I mean.
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 3: Adam says something, we're in the midst of a revolution,
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 3: the most glorious, and the fate of millions yet unborn
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 3: are being decided, meaning you and me.
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: So great.
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 3: And then Abigail, his own wife, his greatest correspondence between
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 3: anybody in history. And she maybe wrote better than anybody.
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 3: She said we should be very cautious about tearing down
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 3: empires because of all the blood and suffering that attends
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 3: to it. That's in the first minutes of our film,
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 3: which meaning be careful what you wish for. You know,
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 3: she's something else.
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 3: And, you know, when people say, who's the best writer?
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 3: Is it Thomas Paine? Is it Thomas Jefferson? Is it
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 3: George Washington?
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: Great writer.
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 3: Is it John Adams?
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: Great writer.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 3: Abigail holds her own. She's pretty good.
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: That's cool, man.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 3: And she's got a friend named, I bet you can
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 3: call this up too, named Mercy Otis Warren.
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: Pull up with a friend, girlie.
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 3: Mercy Otis Warren.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: Little kiki.
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah, there she is. You've got a book of her.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 3: She writes one of the first histories of it.
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: There she is.
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 3: She's in our film. There.
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 3: Meryl Streep reads her verse. That's the one thing we
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 3: haven't talked about. We've got Peter Coyote as the third-person narrator.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 3: But we have the best cast that has ever been assembled.
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 3: They're all reading off-camera of any film or every television show.
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 3: So the longest day about D-Day had a cast list,
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 3: but we've got Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep who reads
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 3: Mercy Otis Warren, and Claire Danes who reads Abigail Adams,
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 3: and Paul Giamatti, and Josh Brolin, and Sir Kenneth Branagh,
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 3: and Morgan Freeman, and Samuel L. Jackson, and Liev Schreiber,
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 3: and Ed Norton, and.
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: That have all voiced in your docs?
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 3: In this doc. Oh, in the American Revolution? In American
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 3: Revolution alone. And Dom Nell Gleeson.
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: Jeff Daniels?
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 3: And Jeff Daniels. He's the voice of Thomas Jefferson. It is,
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 3: I probably listed a fifth of the voices. Do you
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 3: ask them or no? How does it happen?
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we ask them.
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 3: And, you know, a lot of people have read for
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 3: us before. A lot of new people have read this time.
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 3: But we ask them. Tom Hanks has read for us.
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 3: for almost 25 years.
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: Well, he did the D-Day Museum in New Orleans. He's
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: their whole D-Day guy. Have you been there? Yeah. Oh, man.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 3: I took my little girl a year and a half ago,
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 3: my then 13-year-old. And we just loved it. And I've
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 3: been there many, many times. Stephen Ambrose, the late historian,
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 3: really started it. But Tom and many other people made
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 3: it possible.
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: And he's just so, so phenomenal. He's so smart.
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 3: And he's also, like Meryl Streep and Jeff Daniels and others,
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 3: Josh Brolin couldn't be nicer. You know, I recorded long
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 3: distance a Morgan Freeman who's, you know, in his mid
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 3: to late 80s. He's getting up there and he lives
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 3: on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi. And I'm saying, and
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 3: so I'm just making idle chat. I said, Morgan, so
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 3: why are you in Mobile? He says, I'm recording for
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 3: Ken Burns. Like he'd driven up Oh yeah. To come
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 3: and do this thing. And that, it just made me
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 3: feel really good.
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: That's cool.
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 3: And you know, and I'll bump into someone and they go,
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 3: why haven't you called me? Like, cause this, they're not
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 3: making anything. We pay them SAG minimum. And I always
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 3: tease Tom. I always go, and I'm giving you a
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 3: check for $ 313. 22. Please don't spend it all in one place. Please,
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 3: you know, save it. But you know, they come and
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 3: they work.
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: Look at, look at that list. Oh, that's remarkable.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 3: You know?
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Josh Brolin is an exceptional man. Oh, he's great.
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 3: He's George Washington. And what I did is I told
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 3: him George Washington is unknowable and opaque, and yet he's
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 3: able to motivate men in the dead of night when
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 3: they're losing. And you somehow have to be somebody that
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 3: is both unknowable, like only as a historian, one of
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 3: the historians in the film says, maybe Martha gets in there,
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 3: his wife, maybe Lafayette, maybe Hamilton, but very, very few
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 3: people get into that inner space of him, and yet
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 3: his rectitude, he's taller than most of the folks, but
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 3: he has a bearing that is so powerful that men
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 3: that are leaving, men that are deserting, men that are
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 3: mutinying stop when he starts and talks, and they sign
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 3: up and say, okay, we'll fight for another six weeks,
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 3: or you're right, I'm going to put down my arms,
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 3: this is crazy, and There are moments when the entire fate,
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 3: even after the revolution, the entire fate of the United
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 3: States of America is dependent on the army, angry that
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 3: they haven't been paid by Congress, not marching on Philadelphia
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 3: and turning this into a military dictatorship. And it's George
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 3: Washington who stops. And then what does he do when
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 3: everything's got together? He resigns his military commission. And then
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 3: he is asked to be the president of the Constitutional Convention.
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 3: He lends his stuff. He has voted unanimously president. And
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 3: what does he do after two terms?
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: He leaves it. He's kind of the coach of the
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: bad news bears kind of in a way.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 3: George III, who's not the idiot that we try to
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 3: make him out to be.
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: George W. Bush? No, George III. I was going to say.
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: The King George III. He says when he hears that Washington.
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: He even voted he was an idiot, I think. He
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: might have.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 3: When Washington resigned his military commission and then resigned to presidency,
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 3: he said then he is the most powerful character of
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 3: the age. So imagine what that means today, that we're
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 3: in an age where everybody wants me and that he is, no, you.
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 3: He understood that the actual highest office is citizen. And
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 3: he was determined to go back to that and to
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 3: not claim for himself wealth, didn't make money during the war,
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 3: didn't try to amass personal power. He just said, it
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 3: is my service to this new idea. You know, as
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 3: Paine was saying, not since the time of Noah do
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 3: we have a chance to reset and go back to
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 3: zero and create something new, as he called it, an
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 3: asylum for mankind. That's the second episode of our film.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 3: Every one of our episodes is named after a phrase
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 3: from Thomas Paine. The first is, in order to be free,
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 3: you know, that the feeble engines of despotism only work,
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 3: he said, unless you can will it. In order to
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 3: be free, you just need to will it and then
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 3: Asylum for Mankind, and then When Things Are Dark, The
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 3: Times that Try Man's Soul, and then a great title
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 3: called Conquer by the Drawn Game. It's what Washington understood. Britain,
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 3: they have to win, and they can't do it. They
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 3: can't sustain armies 3,000 ways from home in an area
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 3: that they misunderstand how big we are. And of course,
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 3: nobody's got a weather report, so that storm.
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: Right, he realized the battle's not, it's not right here
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: in this moment. It is, but if you look at
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: the different legs of it, There's more than a couple
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: of ways to win this thing.
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 3: The historian Jane Kaminsky says he knows what every insurrectionary
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 3: leader means, meaning guerrilla, that.
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: You just eat at them there.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 3: More British and Hessian, they're mercenaries, soldiers die in New
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 3: Jersey from being picked off in guerrilla moments, foraging, than
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 3: they are in three big set battles of Trenton, Princeton,
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 3: and Monmouth Courthouse. So it is a down and dirty war.
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 3: And there are terrorist organizations of loyalists. It's like Grand
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 3: Theft America. It's pretty wild. And yet out of it
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 3: comes an extraordinary order. And yet out of it comes
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 3: the echo of Lincoln, who understood the founding better than
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 3: anyone else and delivers the Declaration of Independence 2.0 at Gettysburg,
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 3: in which he said, we really do mean all men are.
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: Created equal, right? He gets that. We're going to live.
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 3: Through all time or die by suicide. Like nobody's coming
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 3: to attack us and conquer us. If we dissolve, it's
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 3: on us. And so that's the message for today. It's
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 3: what Washington's example of giving up power.
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: It's of the.
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 3: Non-authoritarian stuff of Thomas Paine and Jefferson. And this sense
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 3: of the power of the civic example. And then, of course,
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 3: Lincoln's warning that you have to stay together. And he
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 3: presided over the closest we ever came to national suicide
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 3: or civil war. And without him, like without Washington, who
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 3: knows what happens. Yeah.
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Lincoln was the guy that like, just that really
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: that kept the pilot light of what these other guys
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: had lit going, right? I have, like, one or two questions.
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: Do you think... There's been this thing in my lifetime
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: where you felt like colonialism ended, right? You kind of
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: felt like that through articles that were written and just
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: looking like, that's bad, this is wrong, right? But then
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: you still have things that happen, like, you still have
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: genocides happening, you still have, like, ethnic cleansing in Gaza
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: that some people believe is happening. You know, you still
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: have colonial... Is that just something the media tricked us
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: to think? Is it safe for us to think that
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: that kind of thing has ended? Like, you know, because
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: you almost want to evolve as a species and think
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: that that's not happening anymore because it seems so brutal, right?
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: That war and conquering isn't happening anymore because it seems
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: so brutal. But do you think it will always be
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: a part of us? And then a second question is like, yeah,
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: like these guys like lit like this pilot light a
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: long time ago, like being a citizen and reflection of yourself.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: and how that's going to need to always be a
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: part of what it means to be an American and
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: for this to evolve and to stay alive. And the
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: only way it can die is by suicide, right? It
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: really puts it immediately back on you, especially with that
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: word suicide. But what can we do now? Where do
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: you feel like we're at now? And not in a
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: judgmental way, but just in like a hopeful way even.
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: Where do you think that we're at now and what
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: can we do? Because it feels scary now. Yeah, it
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: is scary.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 3: I think we pull out the fuel rods of our
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 3: own self-righteousness and just take it down a notch and
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 3: realize that all the people we're saying are evil and
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 3: whatever are just fellow citizens who disagree with us and
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 3: then just let it go. The first part of your
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 3: question is the sadder one. Ecclesiastes says, That's the Old Testament.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 3: It says what has been will be again. What has
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 3: been done will be done again. There's nothing new under
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 3: the sun. War, ethnic violence, religious disagreements, the pain of slavery,
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 3: of some form of subjugation of other, totalitarianism. It's as
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 3: my Marine, Tommy Vallely was his name, Corporal Tommy Vallely.
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: It's the history of the world.
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 3: And what we, the United States, represent is the beacon,
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 3: the pilot light. I love that phrase of yours, Theo,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 3: better than the beacon. It's the pilot light of where
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 3: we could be, who we could be. So if we
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 3: are a nation in the process of becoming we got
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 3: a lot of work to do and we take a
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 3: few steps forward and you think, ah, it's the end
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 3: of colonialism. It's the end of partisan rancor. It's the
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 3: end of this.
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: It's the progress.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 3: Uh, we're at some, you know, we're colorblind, you know,
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 3: isn't it? We like a black president.
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: Isn't it all, you know, right. We solved it.
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I, I have friends would say, I, I've
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 3: centered race in a lot of my films and I've
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 3: gotten some criticism for it, you know, telling the story that,
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 3: you know, uh, of that, the, our, our asterisk, our yes, but, um,
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 3: And then when Obama was inaugurated, they said, now will
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 3: you stop talking about that? And I held up the
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 3: Onion magazine and it said, black men given worst job
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 3: in nation. And I just said, just watch what happens.
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 3: And what it did is it actually awoke in some
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 3: people the darker sides in which you judge people not
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 3: by the content of their character, as Dr. King suggested,
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 3: but by the color of their skin. That somehow I
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 3: could know everything about you by the color of your skin. Oh,
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 3: what your type is, what it is, and that's of course.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: Not- I think Obama got us out of that in
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: a lot of ways.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 3: I think he moved it in a way, and then
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 3: all of a sudden there was a reactive thing, which
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 3: is almost lawful as well, it's physics in a way,
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 3: that allowed people to play to their worst basis instincts.
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 3: Basis instincts that had been in some ways by both
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 3: parties sort of suppressed. No, no, no. We're not going
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 3: to manifest that way. Kids behave. We've still got two
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 3: hours before we get to the beach.
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 3: And suddenly by the time we got to the beach,
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 3: we're at war again. And you know, we're not, okay,
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 3: we're turning around, we're going home. There's no ice cream today,
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 3: whatever it is. There's got to be that thing that
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 3: you and I, the essence of what we've talked about,
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 3: it seemed to me has been about this incredibly difficult thing,
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 3: which is self-discipline. Like I need to actually do the
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 3: work on myself. I cannot assume, I cannot insist that
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 3: you do the work for you before I'm willing to
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 3: do it for myself.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: But there are people now where it seems like a
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: lot of people are doing, people like the people who
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: have been doing the work and following the rules hypothetically
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: and trying their best to be an American. I feel
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: like some of those people are starting to wear thin.
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: because it seems like everybody doesn't want to. And that
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: may be that their idea of what being an American
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: is isn't the same as the other people, right?
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 3: Well, I don't think that's the case. I think a
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 3: lot of it has to do with this device in
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 3: our back pocket and all the atomized sources of information
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 3: that we have. Like when I grew up, there were
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 3: three channels and PBS, which I worked with all my
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 3: films on PBS, and maybe an independent channel. you basically
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 3: got your local newspaper that had a staff of lots
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 3: of people who covered the school board meeting and this.
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: And so people knew what it was.
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 3: Now, you know, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Senator from
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 3: New York here said, everybody's entitled to their own opinion,
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 3: but not their own facts, right? We do know that
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 3: the battle of Gettysburg happened on July 1st, 2nd and 3rd, 1863.
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 3: But what we're now in a situation is, and this
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 3: is the greatest danger, is that we are being told
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 3: things that aren't true. And there's not amongst the exponentially
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 3: greater number of possibilities of outlets that everyone has, anybody saying, well, actually,
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 3: that's not true. And so what happens, that demoralization that
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 3: you're talking about, or that sense that I played by
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 3: the rules or whatever, it may be more imbalanced by
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 3: the fact that they have been convinced of a lot
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 3: of things that aren't necessarily true. One and one has
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 3: got to equal two, right? Except in our faith, in
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 3: that faith, where one and one has to equal three,
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 3: that we say the whole is greater than the sum
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 3: of the parts. So here are the sum of the parts,
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 3: and here's the whole. And so what's the difference? That's
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 3: where we want to spend our lives here, not in
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 3: parsing how you really don't get it, and you're wearing that,
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 3: and you've got this thing, you've got your hat backwards,
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 3: so I know exactly who you are. Right. Right? And
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 3: that's not who I am.
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: And we are all the same.
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 3: You know, Shakespeare has it when the Shylock in the
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 3: Merchant event, are we not human, have we not eyes, organs, senses, dimensions, affections,
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 3: fed by the same foods, subject to the same diseases?
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 3: If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 3: tickle us, do we not laugh? I mean, if you
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 3: poison us, do we not die? We are all the same.
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 3: And unless you can stop and turn and not say, oh,
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 3: you're a radical leftist destroying and you're looking at this
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 3: person who's like this Midwestern whatever, or you are a
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 3: right wing, you know, fascist that. you don't have a chance.
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're boiling gay people in your apartment or whatever.
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: But just shit like that, it's like, what is going,
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: it is crazy.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 3: Well, you think about what happens in an unchecked information world.
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 3: That is to say, where you don't have the self-discipline
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 3: of the traditional media outlets.
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: That was reliable too. That was reliable.
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 3: I mean, I would still, when people say, what would
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 3: you do? I would say, I would watch one of
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 3: the nightly news of the three networks or all of them,
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 3: if you can get them. And I would read the
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 3: Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or the
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 3: Washington Post or maybe all three and don't look at
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 3: anything else because the other things will tell you that
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 3: all Democrats are into pedophilia and all, you know, and
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 3: you just, after a while, you have to go, stop.
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: This noise is crazy.
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 3: What you've done is by telling the lie up on
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 3: top of the mountain and formed it into this snowball,
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 3: it's rolled down the hill and it's now this giant
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 3: thing where, Truth is lies and knowledge is ignorance and
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 3: everything is the opposite of what it actually is. And
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 3: what you have to get back is to what is verifiable.
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 3: And as much as people say, oh, the mainstream media
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 3: or the lamestream media or whatever it is, the New
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 3: York Times and the Wall Street Journal that have opposite
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 3: editorial positions, their actual papers, if you really want to
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 3: follow what's going on, and pretend that it's not just, oh, well,
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 3: their interest is this in promoting the elites. It's just
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 3: they're actually really good at what they do. And I
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 3: think if Americans were to sort of say, I mean,
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 3: Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, just in the middle
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 3: of our tragedy, he said, turn your phones off, turn
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 3: off social media, because you know what?
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: I want to have him on here. Spencer Cox, I
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: would love to get to have a conversation with you.
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 3: I met him last January at the Governor's Association. I
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 3: was talking about the revolution, and we showed some clips
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 3: at the National Governors Association, and he came up and
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 3: he asked a question. He said, you talk about virtue.
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 3: I want to pursue this question of virtue. And I said,
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 3: thank God, here's a place where we can have it.
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 3: But he's the guy who said, Turn off your social media.
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 3: Go out into nature. Hug somebody that you know. Because
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 3: if you look at it, social media isn't. You ever
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 3: been in a room of teenagers where they've all got
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 3: their phones?
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's nothing social about it.
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 3: There's nothing social about it. It's all an interior dialogue
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 3: with yourself.
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: It's schizophrenic.
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 3: It actually creates a thousand people in you when our object,
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 3: as we've been talking for the entire time we talked about,
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 3: is to find out who this person is inside. Who
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 3: am I is the central question. I start with an
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 3: easier question, very hard. Who are we, the United States
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 3: of America? But then, inevitably, All of those questions form
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 3: a mirror. And I don't know if you get out
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 3: in nature much, but nature is perfect. And nature puts
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 3: a mirror back to all of your imperfections. And that's tough.
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: A lot of people would rather be.
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 3: Completely occupied by other stuff all the time rather than say,
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 3: what is it that I could do that could make
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 3: me a better person? Yeah.
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you. Some of these thoughts are so great.
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: A group of friends of mine.
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 3: Oh, you've given me the, I mean, just this dream
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 3: of the future, the pilot light, all of that stuff.
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: Thank you. Well, it's important that we're thinking about this
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: stuff together. And I would even, like, I would disagree, like,
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: on the news outlets that you mentioned, right? I would disagree.
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: For me, I don't need to disagree with you about it.
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: But I see when you and I are here talking,
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: we probably have a lot of the very same ideas
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: and hopes. But I don't need to sit there and
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: tell you, hey, I disagree with a news source you
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: might like. It just shows that what you're even saying
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: is just like us conversating about something is what really matters.
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 3: That's all that matters.
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: This is real media right here. Exactly.
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 3: It's when we talk about each other. All I meant
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 3: about choosing stuff is that you want to make sure
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 3: that the source is is fact-checking itself, that it has
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 3: its own responsibility, you know, because, like, when the cat's away,
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 3: the mice will play, and that's all we have now
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 3: are mice out there, and you just need a little
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 3: bit of people who go, we have to check this
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 3: to make sure it's true.
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I wonder if we'll get to a place where
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: there's some sort of a purity test of some, you know,
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: that we could all agree on. I wonder if AI
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: or something in some way gets us to a purity test.
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 3: Well, that would be a wonderful unintended consequence because, right,
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 3: isn't it supposed to destroy us because it's going to
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 3: drive us crazy and maybe the opposite will happen.
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: We're going to be data slaves. You and I are
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: going to have pickaxes. We'll be in a bit mine
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: somewhere and we'll literally be hammering out statistics from old
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: NBA games. So some guy can upload them for his
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: DraftKings account. That's right. It's all, that's exactly how it's,
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: that's where we're going to go. And years later, your
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: son or some orb that you created will be doing
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: a documentary on that or your daughter who you just
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: had a nice time with at the D-Day Museum. Last year,
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: she will be doing a documentary on you and I
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: working as miners in a bit mine somewhere.
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 3: I'm running back to New Hampshire so that I can
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 3: go back to my little tiny town where things work
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 3: and people are civil and they've got their signs out,
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 3: but nobody says, you know, you're wrong. They just say,
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 3: that's what you believe. I disagree with that.
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: It's really good. Yeah. And I think there's, there's a
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: lot of good places out there that do have a
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: lot of peace in them. Uh, so since we're talking
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: about kind of information and stuff, where do you get
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: your information? How do you do it? Do you have
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: a team that helps you source? Like, what do you
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: guys do? Do you walk into the library of Congress
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: and you know.
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 3: They do know my face. Um, so in the American revolution,
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 3: we've got materials drawn from 340 sources, archives, libraries around, uh,
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 3: the world. we have drawn on thousands of volumes, and
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 3: we have gone to scholars who spent their lives delving
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 3: deep into one aspect of it. Maybe it's the British
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 3: Empire's economic structure, right? Just to understand the difference between
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 3: the 13 colonies that we are and the other 13
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 3: colonies that really make their money for them, because in Jamaica,
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 3: they got 90% of the population is enslaved, and Barbados,
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 3: same thing, as opposed to, you know, very few in
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 3: Massachusetts and maybe half in South Carolina. So, you know,
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 3: we just want to find out that. We want to
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 3: check the dates. So we always have lots of different sources.
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 3: We want to source thing from scholars who've been working
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 3: and you find there's sometimes a little desperate stuff, different stuff.
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 3: So we will say, even after we lock the film,
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 3: we might have the word 16. It might be battleships.
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 3: It might be days. It might be dead, whatever the
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 3: number is. But we've got footnotes on our script of
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 3: all the sources that have contributed to why we believe
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 3: it's 16. And then you read a fifth source and
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 3: it says, I'm not sure. So we go somewhere in
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 3: all the narration that Peter Coyote has read and found
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 3: the word perhaps, cut it, duplicate it, and pull it
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 3: and go, perhaps 16. We do not sleep at night
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 3: until we know we're absolutely dead certain.
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: We don't want to slander even the past. We don't
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: even want to slander.
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 3: Particularly don't want to slander the past because the past
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 3: is our greatest teacher. And people manipulate the past. We
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 3: know what it's like in a Soviet system where they
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 3: cut somebody else out of the picture or they're on
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 3: the Presidium, you know, and the Politburo in front of
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 3: the May Day Parade and somebody's out of favor. So
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 3: suddenly they edit it out of the pre-Photoshop.
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: It's like the libraries in Cuba. You can't even get
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: history books before certain years. Because people want to manipulate
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: this stuff.
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 3: And what's so great about a free country is we go, Yeah,
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 3: we screwed up there.
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean?
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 3: It's so funny that we live in a country that
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 3: is totally devoted to football, right? Understandably so.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: Every level.
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 3: Friday night, high school.
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: Saturday, college. Sunday, pro.
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 3: And if that coach comes up and says, yeah, well,
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 3: you know, we're okay. You go, he's fired. You go,
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 3: we really sucked on special teams this time. We really
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 3: need to do some work here.
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: And we do.
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 3: And there's a sense of, and we do this in
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 3: business all the time. And we just say, how do
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 3: we get better? What is it that we did wrong?
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 3: And so there is that incredible American drive to be
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 3: super honest and just say, I really messed up here.
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 3: and I can do better the next time. If you
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 3: think that Tom Brady wins his first Super Bowl and
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 3: he goes, okay, cruise control for the rest of my career, right?
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 3: And I'll get six more Super Bowls. He is phenomenally
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 3: dedicated to self-criticism and where you can improve. If we
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 3: extended that into our civic and our political world, we
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 3: would not be in the kind of argumentative.
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: Mud that we're in right now where.
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 3: We feel stuck and unable to move and this, and
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 3: it's always the other person, not me. And I'm in
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 3: the mud because of you, not because of I stepped
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 3: in it. It's just, if we brought that ethic of self-improvement,
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 3: it's what we've been talking along all along. It's my response.
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 3: My mom used to say that to me. You know,
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 3: if he's got a problem with you, it's your responsibility.
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 3: If you've got a problem with him, it's your responsibility, right?
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 3: Which means- I don't need you to change. I need
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 3: to figure out what it is. If this is worth repairing,
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 3: which I think our experiment is, then it always begins
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 3: with myself. And it's so rare to see people, particularly
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 3: in politics, take a stand that says, you know, a
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 3: George Washington stand.
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: I'm leaving. I'm giving up power. Or you know what?
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: my party is wrong in this, right?
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 3: I am not going to do this.
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 1: More people would vote for that guy. Of course. Of course.
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: I think it's one of the reasons why it's like, um,
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: I think we're getting down to people don't trust entities
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: for information, right? I think it's one of the problems
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: that you have with news and stuff. And because some
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: of those are, uh, you know, they make money based
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: on advertising. So there's a bit of, there's somewhat of
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: a conflict of interest in a way, not really, it
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: didn't seem like there used to be, but then that
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: kind of evolved. So I think people now are trying
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: to find a person that they believe, right? Because it's
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: easier for them to analyze, right? Like I can figure
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: out if I believe this person, so I'll get information
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: from them. Whereas I think entities, people don't trust entities
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: anymore as much.
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 3: Well, I have spent my entire professional life as an
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 3: independent filmmaker, but all of my films are made for PBS.
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: And let me tell you why.
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 3: They are the declaration of independence, the pursuit of happiness
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 3: applied to communications. There's rigorous fact checking. I cannot put
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 3: a film out unless I have been vetted by scholars
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 3: from all different perspectives and understandings and knowledge. And they
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 3: also are not, they're free of that advertising thing, right?
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: So that I am able.
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 3: To do it. Like I could tell you, like, let
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 3: me just say, Our Vietnam series took 10 and a
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 3: half years to make, cost 30 million bucks. I spent
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 3: 10 of the 10 and a half years with my
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 3: cup out going to foundations and corporations. Bank of America
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 3: has been a corporate underwriter. They're not a sponsor, so
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 3: they're not saying, hey, we don't.
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: Like that content.
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 3: They accept whatever content I'm going to do because they
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 3: know my process is rigorous. Foundations, individuals of wealth, government
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 3: granting agencies until they were just killed. So that CPB,
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 3: you know, the death of CPB is a big thing.
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: I was going to ask you about that, your funding.
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: How's that been affected by? It's huge. It's huge.
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 3: But it's, you know, more importantly, it's such a short-sighted
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 3: decision because you know what's going to hurt most?
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: Most of CPB's money went to rural stations. What is CPB?
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 3: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was just not only
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 3: they took back money, they'd already appropriated $ 4 million for
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 3: an upcoming project, but we had been in discussions for
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 3: another $ 10 million. So I just lost $ 14 million for about,
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 3: three or four projects coming up in the future.
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: I'll recover.
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 3: But the problem is most of the money goes to
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 3: rural stations, which would be, and will be when these
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 3: stations die, a news desert. They're used to the PBS,
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 3: not just for the children's programming, not just for the
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 3: great prime time, but for their homeland security, their alerts.
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 3: They may be the most important, the only signal they get.
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: And you don't want to.
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 3: Be a news desert where you've got somebody telling you
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 3: because you want somebody there covering the school board.
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: You want somebody there.
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 3: At the city council meeting. You want a personal person
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 3: that you know. So I have worked with them. So
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 3: go back to my Vietnam example. I spent 10 of
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 3: the 10 and a half years trying to raise that.
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 3: I could have walked into a streaming service or a
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 3: premium cable and with my reputation, walked in and given
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 3: them a description of Vietnam and walked out in half
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 3: an hour with a check for $ 30 million. They would
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 3: not have given me the 10 and a half years
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 3: it took me to do the good job. Now that
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 3: film came out in the fall, in September of 2017.
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 3: If I do my math right, that's eight years ago.
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 3: It is still... even though it's a film, one-stop shopping
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 3: for the most aggregation of the most recent information about
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 3: the Vietnam War still after eight years. I am so
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 3: proud of that. But I didn't take the money, do
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 3: it in a year or a year and a half,
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 3: and have it be.
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: A piece of shit. Oh, you're not a T-bill, you're
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: a bond, dude. Yeah, I am long-term.
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 3: That's exactly it. And I need to marinate and mature
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 3: and come to term, and I need to just redeem
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 3: it at its face value. I'm not making a, I
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 3: am trying to share this. And you know what PBS
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 3: stands for? It's not system.
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: It's public. I like that part, meaning you and me.
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 3: Broadcasting, obviously.
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: Service. Service.
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 3: It's not the Columbia Broadcasting System.
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: It's not the public broadcasting self. It's not a top-down.
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 3: It's not a network saying, what part of our primetime
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 3: schedule don't you understand? You're taking it all. It's individual
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 3: stations working with independent filmmakers, making stuff and sending it up,
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 3: and then it's going out. And there's no, you have
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 3: to take this. It is exactly the Declaration of Independence
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 3: applied to the communications world, just as the national parks
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 3: are the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape. Because we,
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 3: for the first time in human history, and you could
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 3: have only done that operating under a Declaration of Independence,
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 3: We set aside the most beautiful landscape in the world,
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 3: not for kings, not for noblemen, not for the very rich,
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 3: but for you and for me and for more importantly,
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 3: our posterity, our children's children's children. That's what Theodore Roosevelt says.
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 3: We are not saving this for a day. We know
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 3: we're saving it for all time. And that's beautiful stuff
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 3: because if we didn't have that, if we had a
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 3: different kind of system, Zion and Yosemite would be gated communities.
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 3: The rim of the Grand Canyon, there may be one
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 3: little place where you could go and look out, but
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 3: the rest would be owned.
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: By other people.
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 3: The Everglades would have been drained and be endless strip
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 3: malls and golf courses and condominiums. And Yellowstone would be
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 3: a down on its luck sort of amusement place called
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 3: Geyser World. Yeah.
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: You know? And just think about it. There'd be a
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: lot of hippies. There'd be a lot of EDM festivals
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: out there.
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 3: Manifest Destiny says, we're going to take the whole continent
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 3: and you're going to have to get out of the way,
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 3: whoever you are. And that stand of trees, I look
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 3: at and I think bored feet. That river, I think dam.
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 3: That canyon, I think mineral rights.
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: That's fine.
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 3: But some of those places you can set aside free
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 3: from that.
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: So that we can go.
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 3: So there are places in the United States like the
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 3: South Rim or the North Rim and the Grand Canyon
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 3: or Zion or Yosemite, what I think is one of
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 3: the most beautiful places on earth, if not the most
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 3: beautiful place, or Yellowstone. And you can go there and
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 3: look at it and see exactly what Theodore Roosevelt saw.
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 3: And more importantly, you can see in the case of
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 3: the native people who occupied Yosemite what they saw 2,000
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 3: years ago. And that gives you an access to all time,
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 3: which then gives you a perspective. Some journalist, when he
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 3: went up to Alaska and he saw what was then
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 3: called Mount McKinley and has been called Denali, said, McKinley
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 3: never saw the mountain. He said, it reminds me of
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 3: my atomic insignificance, meaning the way nature dwarfs you. You
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 3: just look up at a night sky and you're like,
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 3: when it's 10 below zero and you just see all
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 3: those stars and you go.
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: Oh, I mean, I'm like nothing. I need a drink
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: or whatever.
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 3: But the, the thing is about that, it's paradoxical nature.
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 3: And I would suggest our national parks because they, that
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 3: feeling of insignificance in spirits, you makes you larger just
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 3: as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 3: or her self-regard, right?
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: You know that.
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 3: Like you see somebody who's so full of shit, so
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 3: full of themselves and you think they just get smaller
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 3: and smaller. But the person who goes, wow, you know,
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 3: I'm nothing in the scheme of things.
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: And that's true. Seems bigger.
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah. You know, seems like somebody I want to listen to,
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 3: you know?
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah. All, all, all the great gurus of.
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 3: The national parks like Emerson and, and, and particularly John
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 3: Muir and Theodore Roosevelt. They're all, they have distance in
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 3: their eyes. That's what, Stuart Udall, who's a former secretary
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 3: of the interior of Kennedy and Johnson, he said he
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 3: had distance in his eyes.
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 1: I just love that phrase.
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 3: As if somebody could almost look around the curve of
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 3: the earth and see not only physically what's gonna happen,
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 3: but in time. So he's this blustery guy that we
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 3: love for all his belligerence, walks awfully, but carry a
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 3: big stick. But what does he do? He sets up
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 3: the Grand Canyon, the grandest canyon on earth.
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: I assure you. And had that longevity of thought to
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: have the, I don't want other people to come here
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: and see the same thing.
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 3: And I want my great, great grandchildren to enjoy it.
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: And guess what? They are. We touched on Spencer Cox
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: really quickly. I think we're in a new space for
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: an American revolution in the sense, you know, I know
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: part of it was the Bill of Rights. We don't
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: have an internet Bill of Rights. We don't have a
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: social media Bill of Rights.
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 1: And I think it's stuff like that that's killing us.
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: I agree. If I'm a restaurant and you come there
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: and I poison you, you can sue me. You can
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 1: file charges against me that will shut me down. But
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: there's all these algorithms that are poisoning people, right? Feeding people,
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: literally poisoning them. And they know what they're feeding. They
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: have a log of it. They have a log of
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 1: the recipe. If you go here, we're going to send
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: you here. They're poisoning people to the point where People
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 1: are sick. People are literally sick, addicted and sick, and
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: there's no way to kind of stop them, it feels like.
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 3: I agree completely. I think that's beautifully said. And so
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 3: one would hope that there was a health department that
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 3: might have noticed that that restaurant had ingredients or there
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 3: was mice or rats around in the kitchen that might
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 3: be uh, poisoning, they're going to contribute to this, that
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 3: shuts them down or gives them a, a bad grade
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 3: as they do in New York city. You see the
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 3: a or the B or the C and.
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: You know, be forewarned. I'll eat a little C. You'll
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: eat a C now and then. I draw the line
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: at B. I'm sorry.
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 3: This is where you and I disagree on this, but
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 3: you know, maybe there is some overarching sense of discipline
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 3: or maybe there's self-discipline. Maybe I realize that, you know, in,
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 3: in Fantasia and the Sorcerer's Apprentice, where he's got the
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 3: endless number of brooms carrying the buckets of water. Like
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 3: it's just so proliferated. We're just so out of control
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 3: and unable to make sense of anything that at some
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 3: point you need someone in this case, the wizard to
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 3: come and recast the spell. So it goes back to
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 3: being one room that's carrying these things. And then you've got,
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 3: you know, we've got, that possibility. And that's my impulse
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 3: is always to just reduce, reduce, get down to something
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 3: that you know you can trust. And I think what
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 3: you're saying is, could we agree to maybe a set
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 3: of rules that would govern facts, that we would say
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 3: that facts were primary, that we couldn't just constantly, not
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 3: just speculate, but wildly lie? Because the toxicity of that is,
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 3: as you say, as lethal over the long term as
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 3: that poison is in your restaurant. Yeah.
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: And the algorithms, the fact that you can continue to pull,
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: imagine a 15 year old kid. If it bleeds, it leads.
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 3: So then right now that used to be the thing
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 3: in the seventies when there's still just three stations and whatever,
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 3: but then you've got millions of outlets who have no
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 3: responsibility and they can say that up is down and
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 3: down is up. And what's your problem? You're, you know,
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 3: you're wrong. It's a big conspiracy that you've been thinking.
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 3: that up is down all of your life. And I
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 3: can prove to you why you're absolutely dead wrong. So
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 3: follow me over this cliff.
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: Well, I guess it goes to show, like even as
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: we said in the beginning, that this doesn't end, right?
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: The idea to be free, to think free, to feel,
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: all those things, well, you're going to constantly have to
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: come into, bring those into the present day to keep
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: America evolving. And I think that it's no more evident
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: than ever than right now with a just a new
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 1: front line if like war for information for pure for
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: facts for the ability for our children not to be
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: contaminated you know maybe it used to be by dirty
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: water but now it's by bad information it's by algorithms
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 1: that aren't like shackled by any facts, you know, or
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 1: that they don't want to poison people, you know?
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 3: So I think one of the impulses 10 years ago
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 3: was to go back to the story of our founding,
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 3: to our creation story, and ask essential questions. What happened?
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 3: It isn't just Lexington and Concord. And then he crosses
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 3: the Delaware and captures Trenton, and then they surrender at Yorktown, boom, done.
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 3: And in the middle, these great documents were signed. But
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 3: it's a really complicated story about very complicated and very
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 3: interesting people who were able to, as you said at
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 3: the very beginning, what cause are you willing to serve?
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 3: What are you willing to risk your life for? And
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 3: these people coming from a wide variety of backgrounds, it's
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 3: not like the purity of it's only one type of
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 3: person that makes up our country. We've been a huge variety.
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 3: from the very beginning and of many different faiths and
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 3: of many different perspectives, were able to figure out how
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 3: they could govern themselves. And it set an example for
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 3: the world. And so maybe going back and collecting, you know,
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 3: as maybe as unsexy as it sounds like American history, oh, Jesus,
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 3: last thing I need to know. I'm so glad I'm
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 3: out of high school because I don't have to take
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 3: another history class. as Harry Truman said, the only thing
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 3: that's really new is the history you don't know. And
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 3: that by telling a story of our creation, we might
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 3: have the ability to to save the experiment because we
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 3: could rededicate ourselves to the things that the people who
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 3: are willing to give, as they said in the declaration,
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 3: our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to.
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: I think it's worth a shot. Let's do it. Let's
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 1: do it. Ken Burns, thank you so much, man.
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 3: It's been so much fun.
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: It's been so cool, dude.
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 3: I'm so happy to meet you. Yeah. Really, really happy
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 3: to meet you.
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: You too. And thank you for all your commitment and, uh,
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 1: your undying desire. And I bet your mother's very proud
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 1: of- Can.
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 3: I tell you, my mother's name was Lila, L-Y-L-A. And
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 3: so that name forever was just draped in black crepe, right?
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 3: We didn't say it, we called her mommy. My oldest daughter,
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 3: who's now 42, on January 18th, 2011, had her first child,
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 3: my first grandchild, And named her after a grandmother she
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 3: never met named Lila. So now we say Lila every day.
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 3: And we smile and flowers bloom and birds chirp and
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 3: it's the music plays.
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 1: So it's a.
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 3: Wonderful kind of, you know, nosedive.
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: The pilot light's relit. The pilot light is relit. Lila.
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: We'll have to put a picture of her up there
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: at the end if you'll send us a cute one. L-Y-L-A.
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 3: We'll get it to you.
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: Oh, that'd be awesome. Thank you so much. Keep working.
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 3: Stay alive.
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, no. Get on peptides. We need more.
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: We need more Ken Burns forever. We need the pile
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: lights to keep burning. Thank you so much, brother. Thank you.
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 2: Cornerstone oh but when i reach that ground i'll share
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 2: this piece of mind i found i can feel it
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 2: in my bones