Latest / Luke's English Podcast / Joe Rogan Experience _2336 - Ken Burns

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Joe Rogan Experience _2336 - Ken Burns · Luke's English Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Joe Roman Broadcast.
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: Check it out The Joe Rogan Experience, My Day Joe
• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Rogan Podcast by Nay all Day.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: All right, we're up, mister Burns. Pleasure to meet you.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: It's my pleasure. Thank you.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: I'm a huge fan, dude. I've been watching your work
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: for so long, and I've always had so many questions
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: about how a person like you becomes a person like you,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: how you become the pre eminent documentarian of our time.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: I mean, you have so much work out there, it's
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: really extraordinary, and all of it on PBS, right right,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: all of it, all of it, which is also shordinary.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: You know, it's the Public Broadcasting Service. It's the Declaration
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: of Independence applied to communications, just as the National Parks.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: You could say, was the Declaration of Independence applied to
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: the landscape, like manifestations of really American things that may
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: not seem obvious to us, but it seemed obvious to
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: me that that's where I should go. So I had
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: lots of you know, I had for the Hills out
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: of New York, you know, forty six years ago, because
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: I thought I was taking a valvanonymity and poverty to
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: do this stuff. And I've lived in the same house
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: that I've lived in since. They're in the same bedroom
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: for forty six years. And it's tiny little village in
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: New Hampshire. And when the first film was nominated for
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: an Academy Award, that was a film called Brooklyn Bridge,
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: everybody said, oh, you're coming back to New York, You're
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: going to la And I said, you know, I'm staying
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: here is so labor intensive. And I can sit here
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: in front of you and tell you that every single
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: one of my films is a director's cut. I'm not
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: going to sit here and give you an excuse. Well
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: that one. They wouldn't let me do this, or they
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: didn't give me this amount of time. And so I could,
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: with the reputation I have, go into a streaming service
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: or a premium cable and say I need thirty million
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: dollars to do a history of the Vietnam War and
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: they give it to me. Well, but they wouldn't. They
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: wouldn't give me the ten and a half years it took.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: Me to tame.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: Oh, you see what I mean.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: It's the time.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: It's the time and the ability to marinate the ideas,
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: to do the deep dive into the scholarship to triangulate
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: to various scholarships. As you know better than anybody, there's
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: lots of different viewpoints and perspectives, and you want to
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: find a way in which you can kind of, if
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: not average them out. You can find a way in
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: which you can understand them, and you can have a conversation,
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: a sort of a campfire around which you can discuss
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: the complexity and the undertow of any subject you pick.
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: At the Brooklyn Bridge, the American Revolution most recently.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: How early on did you realize that the only way
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: to get this like full autonomy was to do with PBS.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: I'd like to attribute some consciousness to it, and I
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: honestly can't do it. I realized that I was striking
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: out trying to raise funds from folks and the people
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: who were interested in helping me, like the National Endowment
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: for the Humanities or this all required me to give
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: it for free, as they still do. Two PBS, and
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: we had foundations and that, and so suddenly that dream
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: of being a filmmaker, which I'd had twelve, I wanted
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: to be a filmmaker at twelve. Of the Communion of
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: Strangers in Dark Rooms, the cinematic experiences. Suddenly I had
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: to go, you know what, It's okay, I'm trading hundreds
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: or maybe thousands of viewers for millions of viewers on
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: a smaller screen, and they're not watching it together, but
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: they're they're having an experience, and I can I can
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: do something over time. I can do a Civil War
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: series and it can be eleven and a half twelve
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: hours and get deep, deep into that experience, or Vietnam
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: which is eighteen hours, ten episodes, or country music, the
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: National Parks, jazz, baseball. I mean, they're like forty different
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: different things in Americon Buffalo, American Buffalo, most recently Leonardo
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: da Vinci, the first non American topic, or just finishing
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: the American Revolution is just it was right for me.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: It was right for me, and I like the fact
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: that they have BBS has one foot in the marketplace
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: and the other out. You know that foot is tentatively there,
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: and so it's also reached, which is all parts of
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: the country. It's the largest network in the country, three
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: hundred and thirty stations, and they really serve rural stations mostly.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: It's not this Upper West Side knob Hill snobby kind
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: of thing. It's homeland security and crop reports and weather
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: and continuing education and classroom of the air, as well
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: as children's programming and what I think is a pretty
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: damn good primetime schedule, you know. So it works in
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: the context of all of America, not just some of America.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: So this is sort of a fortuitous sort of a
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: thing that you came to be, I think, so, I
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: mean operative with them.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: The filmmaking thing was born in tragedy. My mom got
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: cancer when I was two years old. There's never a
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: moment when she wasn't dying that I was aware. She
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: died when I was eleven, a few months short of
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: my twelfth birthday, and my dad had a pretty tough
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: curfew for my younger brother and me, but he forgave it.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: If there was a movie on TV that might go
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: to one am on a school night, school night, or
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: he'd take me out to the you know, the cinnamon
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: ce like Old Silence or French New Wave that was
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: happening in the mid sixties, and I saw my dad
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: cry for the first time. He didn't cry when she
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: was dying, didn't cry when she died, didn't cry at
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: this impossibly sad funeral. But we're watching this movie called
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: odd Man Out by Sir Carol Reid about the Irish
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: troubles in the nineteen nineteen teens and twenties James Mason,
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: you know, very tragic. And I saw him cry and
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: I got it immediately. I just want that provided him
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: with this safe haven to express himself in a way.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: Nothing in his life, for whatever reasons, for his own psychology,
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: his own history, his own trauma, is his own whatever
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: it is. He didn't, and I said, that's what I
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: want to do. And it wasn't about sentimentality or nostalgia.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: It was about authentic emotional stuff, higher emotional stuff. The
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: way our founders would talk about we'd be able to
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: create a republic hor you'd have higher emotions, something sentimental
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: about it. It's that you would just get closer, be
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: more virtuous. And so I said, and that meant, you know,
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: I was going to be Albert Hitchcock or John Ford
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: or Howard Hawke's, you know, big Hollywood directors. And I
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: went to Hampshire College in Amherston, Massachusetts, which was a
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: brand new experimental school, came in its second year in
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: nineteen seventy one, and all of the teachers. There were
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: social documentaries still photographers and filmmakers, and they reminded me
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: correctly that there is as much drama in what is
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: and what was as anything the human imagination makes up right,
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: and so fiction's fine. But all of a sudden, my
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: molecules are rearranged again. I'm no longer just a filmmaker
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: going to hopefully go to Hollywood. I'm now a documentary filmmaker.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: And all of that merged with this latent Joe. I
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: don't know how to describe it. Love of my country
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: and its history. I mean, where everybody else growing up
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: with reading novels and stuff like that, I was reading
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: encyclopedias and reading histories, trying to get at some aspect
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: of who we are. And I think every single film
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: that I've made has asked the same question, who are we?
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: Who are those strange and complicated people who like to
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: call themselves Americans? And what does an investigation to the
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: past tell us about not only where we've been, but
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: where we are and where we may be going? Which
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: is the great gift of history. It's the best teacher
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: we have, as you know.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: One of the more fascinating things about documentary work, and
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: particularly your work, is it provides this entertainment pathway to
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: education where it's engrossing and gripping and fascinating, and it's
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: really well edited, and there's music, and there's recreations of
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: these scenes, and it makes becoming educated fascinating. Yes, it
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: makes it exciting where instead of those stale, boring classrooms
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: a lot of children face if they could be to
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: something like your Peace on Vietnam, right was it? Eighteen hours?
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: Eighteen hours episodes?
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: That piece on Vietnam is so fascinating. It's it's so incredible,
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: and to see those the people that survived it express
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: something like there's this one moment where one of the
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: guys is realizing that they're about and it's just the
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: very simple statement he goes, Okay, here we go. We're
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: going to war, and you could see it in his face,
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: him recalling that, and you're like, you don't get that
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: from the written word, seeing that man's face him recounting it.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: And you don't get it from churning it out either.
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: So I spent five and a half years working on
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: the Civil War and I really was like daunted by it.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: But the first all of the first five or six
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: films that I've made. The Brooklyn Bridge wouldn't have been
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: built without this new metal called steel, which the Civil
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: War helped to promote the use of The second film
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: on the celibate religious sector, Shakers wouldn't have declined so precipitously,
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: not because they were celibate. Celibate celibacy exists and lots
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: of religious traditions, but because a country that had just
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: murdered six hundred and fifty thousand of its own people
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: was not interested after the Civil War in the questions
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: of the sole survival in the in the intensity that
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: it had before the Civil War. The next film I
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: made was on the Statue of Liberty, and it was
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: originally a gift from the French to Missus Lincoln to
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: commemorate the survival of the Union despite her husband's ultimate sacrifice.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: The next film was on Huey Long, the turbulent Southern demagogue.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: He came from a North Louisiana parish that refused to
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: secede from the Confederacy, I mean the Fruz to secede
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: from the Union. They saw the Confederacy the ownership of
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: slaves as a rich man's cause, and so they became
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: a hotbed of kind of radicalism and populism and later
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: would spawn this swamp thing called Huey Long. You know,
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: we made a film in the history of the Congress.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: Obviously the most important time in the Congress was when
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: you know, there were two congresses, one in in Washington,
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: obviously won in Montgomery and then later Richmond. And so
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: I began to see the centrality and after the Civil
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: War was done, and it was really just brought to
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: life by those voices of the people that what you're
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: talking about, well, well here we go, Like we didn't
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: want to do another film on war. The guys both
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: north and South who'd been in it, who said here
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: we go were they said they'd seen the elephant. That's
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: how they described it. They said they'd seen the elephant.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: I assume it was the most exotic thing they could
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: think of. That's what combat was something that no one
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: else experiences, seeing the elephant. And we just even removed
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: from it. We're just looking at it still. Photographs still
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: got us to our core, and we just sort of
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: said we're not gonna do any more war films. And
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: then at the end of the nineties that Civil War
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: came out of nineteen ninety the end of the nineties,
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: were working on lots of things baseball and jazz, and
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: biographies on Frank Laudryant Lewis and Clark and Mark Twain
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: and all sorts of stuff. Jack Johnson. Later on, I
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: heard that lots of graduates, high school students walking off
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: the podium with the diploma I think we fought with
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War,
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: and that a thousand veterans, American veterans of the Second
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: World War were dying each day in America, and I
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: was like, fuck, you know the we're losing them. And
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: by the way, that figure today is so small. It's
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: just actuarily true that it's not a thousand anymore. It's
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: maybe five or six today, and pretty soon it will
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: be nobody and there will be no memory. And so
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: I wanted to make a film about that. Before the
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: ink was dry on the World War II film, I said,
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: we're doing Vietnam, and before the ink was dry, meaning
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: were locking it and we're mixing it and doing all
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: the stuff we have to do. Ten and a half
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: years on Vietnam came out in September of seventeen. In
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: December of fifteen, Barack Obama still has thirteen months left
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: in his presidency. I said, we're doing the revolution, and
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: I am now speaking to you where we are almost
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: done with it. We're still mixing, we're still mastering, we're
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: so onlining some stuff. But what it allowed us to
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: do in all of the cases of all the war
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: is get exactly at that thing that you're talking about,
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: what actually takes place in war? What is this thing
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: like life is vivified to an extent that we can't describe.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: Like our imminent death right now as we speak is
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: not a possibility, but if we're on the front lines,
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: it is at any moment, and life is vivified. We
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: understand why people come home and can't compartmentalize it. We
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: understand why people have problems. We're amazed at the people
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: who don't. It obviously brings out the worst. We're the
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: most dangerous species on this planet, clearly, but it brings
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: out the best, and it's worth pursuing. And I think
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: particularly when you take most recently, we've spent so many
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: years studying the American Revolution, we kind of accept the
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: violence of the civil war. We except the violence of
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: the twentieth century wars. But this American Revolution, you know,
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: they're in breaches, and they're and stockings and they have wigs,
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: and the ideas are too important. We don't want to
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: admit that this was as bloody per capita as our
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: Civil war, that it was in fact a civil war
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: in ways that even our civil war wasn't. Our civil
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: war was a sectional war north south.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: And that.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: We were forged in violence. And it's okay those ideas,
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: those big ideas that we seemingly want to protect by
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: putting it a bug and amber. You know, guys in
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, it doesn't in any way get diminished.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: In fact, it enlarges. It makes them more inspiring and
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: more exhilarating. The understanding that what happened when our country
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: was formed is one of the most important events in
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: the entire history of humankind. I mean, you and I
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: were talking about some of the punctuated equilibriums of comments
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: or meteors or striking this you o ice ages. I
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: mean the Ecclesiastes, the Old Testament says there's nothing new
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: under the sun. There will and I agree with that.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: Human nature doesn't change. But for a few minutes right
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: here we started something that was brand new. Thomas Paine
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: said it, like, not since the time of Noah do
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: we have a chance to do this. And so we've
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: just plowed ourselves into hearing not just those top down voices,
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: the boldface names that we all know, the Washington's and
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: the Thomas Pains and the Jeffersons and the John Adams,
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: but also the people you've never heard of. Right point
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: zero one percent of people have a painting made of
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: them or a drawing. Everybody else is visually anonymous. But
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: somewhere they wrote their name down, somewhere, they're in a
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: church record, somewhere, they're here, somewhere they wrote a memoir
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: and they got handed down. And so we could bring
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: to life a fourteen year old kid who joins militia
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: surrounding the British in Cambridge after Lexington conquered. A fifteen
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: year old who's from Connecticut who fights during the war.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: A ten year old girl who's you know, from ten
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: to sixteen from Yorktown who's a refugee for most of
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: the time as her family's well to do circumstances are
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: diminished as she has to be on the road because
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: Yorktown is so vulnerable to attack from British in addition
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: to all of this, And who are the native players?
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: Who are the black players? Who are the Germans, the
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: hired soldiers, you know, they're real people. Who are the
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: Irish and Scottish and Welsh grunts of the British army?
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: Who are the generals? Who are the diplomats? Who are
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: the French? And then if you charge yourself with that,
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: you can't turn that out in a year and a half.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: You have to spend a decade marinating that stuff, finding
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: out what's too much. You know, you don't want to
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: make an encyclopedia. I mean you started off by talking
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: about entertainment, that you could make something that is, you know,
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: technically educational entertaining. This is a good story. I mean,
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: the word history is mostly made up of the word
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: story plus high, which is really good. Which is a
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: really good way to begin a story, right high, and
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: then we begin the thing. And so I've tried to
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: treat it as that way. I understand. And PBS is
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: really good And one of the reasons to stay with
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: them is that they can reach every classroom in the country.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: So today's a school day in America, and hundreds of
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: classrooms are showing a little bit of the Civil War,
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: a little bit of baseball, a little bit of jazz,
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: Lewis and Clark, the Roosevelts, country music, you name it.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: And I love that idea that it isn't like broadcast
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: television or even just the release of anything like skywriting
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: the first breeze and then all of a sudden you
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: can't see the words anymore. I like the fact that
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: a film I made thirty five years ago in the
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: Civil War is like as durable now as it was then.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: That's all PBS.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: That's amazing, it really is. And it is so cool
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: that they do show these in classrooms because I think
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: that same moment where you had where you saw your
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: father cry, where it gave him some sort of a
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: vehicle to express some emotions that he couldn't show in
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: real life. This will give children a way to be
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: educated but also entertained, and it will spark this sort
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: of It gives them a pathway to maybe maybe children
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: that are like very bored with school and just can't
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: wait to get out. All of a sudden, you have
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: the spark of excitement and a pathway to like maybe
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: education is cool, Like maybe there's something about this it's
• 17:33
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• 18:57
  Speaker 2: And we have let a lot of what is fun
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: about it. We've sort of taken history out, we've taken
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: civics out. We don't know about ethics, we don't know
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: about values. We've placed everything over into one sort of
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: set of educational prerogatives forgetting that you want to build.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: As our founders said, these well rounded citizens. Remember we
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: invented that everybody up intol the point of our revolution
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: were subjects. Right, And Jefferson says a few phrases beyond
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: the famous second sentence. He goes, all experience has shown
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: Meaning the whole history of human beings is like, Okay,
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: I'm going to be under the a boot of an authoritarian.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: I just you know, that's my lot. I'm just going
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: to accept it. And he's going No. Central to the
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: success of this new thing you were creating citizens was
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: the responsibility to educate and to be educated, and to
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: do that your life long. In fact, he could have
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: said Jefferson could have said life liberty, and he didn't.
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: He said the pursuit of happiness. That was not the
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: chasing of objects things in a marketplace of objects, but
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: it was lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. It
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: was making the story of how we acquire virtue. And
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: they used that word all the time. They imported it
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: from the classical they went over the Dark Ages, over
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: the Middle Ages, over the medieval period, and pulled back
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: from classical times this idea of virtue, of temperance, of
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: tolerance and all of that. There's a wonderful moment when
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: John Adams, who's the big worrier of the revolution, he's
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: always worrying. He's saying, I just don't know if there's
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: if there's enough virtue to have a republic. Everybody is
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: so ambitious and so greedy and so out to do this,
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: and so for him, if we were going to create
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: this new thing, something new under the sun, you know,
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: the world started over again. As Thomas Paine is suggesting
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: an asylum for mankind, he called it. Then maybe you
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: had to figure out how to educate your stuff. And
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: so when you go back and say, what are we lost?
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: Whether we're just we're now just repeating. Are we trying
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: to get to the test or are we trying to
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: make a well rounded human beings? So if I tell
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: you in eighteen thirty eight, there is this lawyer in Springfield, Illinois,
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: who is just a few days short of his twenty
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: ninth birthday, who is addressing the young men's I see
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: him on an afternoon and the topic is foreign policy,
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: and he says, whence shall we expect the approach of danger?
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: Shall some Transatlantic giants step the earth and crush us
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: with a blow? Then he answered his own question. Never
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: all the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa could not
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: by force take a drink from the Ohio River, or
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: make a track in the Blue Ridge in the trial
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: of freemen, we shall live through all time or die
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: by suicide. Whoa you know who said that? That's Abraham Lincoln.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: He would come the closest to overseeing our near national
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: suicide in the Civil war, but he understood, here you
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: got these two magnificent oceans, big relatively benign neighbors north
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: and south. And so what we've been able to do
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: is incubate so many extraordinary things. But we've also been
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: able to incubate lots of less than extraordinary things. And
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: he was saying, it's thous less than extraordinary things are
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: gonna trip us up or we'll live forever, because if
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: you think about it, the greatest naval and vision in history,
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: you know, June sixth, nineteen forty four, d DA eight Normandy,
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: Nobody can do that for us. Nobody's gonna land at Montalk,
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: nobody's gonna land at you know, Saint Augustine. Nobody's gonna
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: land at Galveston. And help us right, We'll sink or
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: swim by the extent to which we are knowledgeable of,
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: and adhere to the blessings that we've received from that
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: founding generation, the sacrifice made not by those boldface names,
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: but by the people that you've never heard of that
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: we are trying to tell you about. The John Greenwood,
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: the fourteen year old fifer, Joseph Plumartin, the fifteen year
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: old kid from Connecticut, Betsy Ambler. You know loyalists too.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: I mean we're umpires, Joe, we call balls and strikes.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: You know, be a loyalist and the revolution is what
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: would be like saying, well, you're conservative, right, Well you
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: think I live under the greatest political system, the British
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: constitutional monarchy. Why would I want to change this great life,
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: this great prosperity. I have for this idea that a
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: sounds foolhard and radical, but also b has zero chance
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: of working out, zero chance of working out. Right at
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: Lexington two hundred and fifty years ago on April nineteenth,
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: the chances of the patriots prevail are zero. And to
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: tell the story of how it went from zero to
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: one is scary, violent, complicated, lots of undertow, and as
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: exhilarating as you could possibly imagine.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: There's a great line in the trailer for this piece
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: on the Revolutionary War. We say it's the first war
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: that was fought in history for the unalienable right.
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: Proclaiming the unalienable rights of all people. Now, let's let's
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: be honest. Thomas Jefferson meant all white men of property,
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: free of debt. But the words are beautiful. The words
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: are vague, and the door got opened a crack, and
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: everybody else put their foot in it. Women put their
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: foot in it, the poor, the not landed people, the folks,
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: the craftsmen who just had a regular job, black people.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: So and it has sponsored revolutions all around the world,
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: democratic revolutions. The greatest thing that we invented was the
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: idea that we could govern ourselves, that we would no
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: longer been under the boot of a an authoritarian master
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: who had just set himself up like King George, you know,
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: because of hereditary privilege, you know, his grandfather and his
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: grandfather and his father and his uncle, and going back
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: and and on what basis is it talent? Is it?
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: Is it.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: Showing the things? And so all these people that we
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: consider the boldface names of our revolution, the Washington's and
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: the Jefferson's, and the Patrick Henrys and the John Adams.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: And they didn't know they were those people, right, they
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: didn't know there they were a planter, and they were
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: a businessman, and they were a lawyer, and they were
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: this guy and a planter or a scientist, and they
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: were just risking their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: honor for something much bigger than anything else.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: It's also the incredibly complex system of checks and balances
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: they divide to prevent tyranny.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, it's so unbelievably beviutiful. I can't believe you brought
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: that up. So we have a technical problem, which I'll
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: share with you, or I thought it was a technical problem,
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: which is the climax. If you're making a film called
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: the American Revolution, the climax is the Battle of Yorktown
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: happens in October of seventeen eighty one. The British don't
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: leave New York for two more years until seventeen eighty three.
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: They're occupying New York, which they took over in the
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: summer of seventy six. And our articles of Convention are
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: doing nothing. Our articles of Confederation are doing nothing. They're toothless.
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: They can't be a government. And so in seventeen eighty
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: seven we have this constitutional Convention that happens in Philadelphia.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: Four months the hammer together the shortest constitution in the world.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: And it is exactly that Jefferson's writing in from Paris,
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: who representing our interests? Going, but what about this? What
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: about They're trying to check the possibility of some boddy
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: being somebody who try to take advantage of the system
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: and rig it to their own benefit, and so all
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: of those elaborately beautiful checks and balances. Article one is
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: the legislative, Article two is the executive. It delineates, Article
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: three the judicial. It delineates what the responsibilities are and
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: the way in which the system has worked and fits
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: and starts with lots of problems. And you know, there's
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: something encouraging about seeing how divided Americans were back then,
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: because we're always wringing our hands. Oh we're so divided. Okay,
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: human beings are divided. And my feeling is that if
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: you succumb to argument, right, which is what we do.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: The novelist Richard Powers said, the best arguments in the world,
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: and that's all we do, is argument. The best arguments
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: in the world won't change a single person's point of view.
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: The only thing that can do that, that is to say,
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: change somebody's point of view is a good story, because
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: a good story allows contradiction. And undertow you can have
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: a George Washington who is complex, flawed, rash, makes terrible
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: tactical decisions on the battlefield, and yet without him historian
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: after historian after historian says, without him, we don't have
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: a country. And you can take that and put that
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: in the bank, and at the same time understand the
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: dimensions of we all have feet of clay, We're all
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: flawed in some way, and to try to design a
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: narrative that isn't filled with that kind of morning and
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: again sanitized Madison Avenue kind of view of American history.
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: Nor is it that unforgiving revisionism, what that wants to
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: throw out anybody who did something bad back? Then you
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: then permit a world to exist in which they suddenly
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: seem familiar to you. Like you can argue with other
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: people and see that you get nowhere. But you also know,
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: if you're married, or you have kids, or you have friends,
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: or you're in business, that you actually are more engaged
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: in story and tolerance and understanding and listening. And so
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: part of our job as filmmakers, strangely enough, is not
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: to impose ourselves on the material. As I said before,
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: we're umpires calling balls and strikes. It's to listen to
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: the material. What is it telling us, What is it
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: saying about this circumstances of say, the resistance in Boston
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: in the early days leading up to the Revolution to
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: try to understand nuance. Every school kid knows that when
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: the sixty or seventy people, why of all white males,
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: both rich and poor in Boston dump the forty tons
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: of tea forty tons of tea in the harbor. They
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: were dressed crudely as Native Americans. And if you ask
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: a kid, why were they dressed that way that, well,
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: you know, just to disguise to put the blame on
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: somebody else. It was to say we're not part of
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: them other country anymore. Really, we're here, We're Aboriginal, we
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: are Americans, we are distinct. We've been having complaints about
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: British and citizenship. We're arguing British law, but all of
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: a sudden those laws have been broken out into natural laws,
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: and we're telling you that we're not trying to blame
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: it on anyone else. Nobody would for a second have
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: thought that the Native Americans would have dumped the tea.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: They weren't burdened by the tea tax. What they were
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: doing was saying we are And it's so ironic given
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: the history of our relationship to the dispossession of Native lands.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: Right they are saying we are Aboriginal. This is what
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: the scar for the Laurious says.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: So yeah, wow, and then you get aboriginal.
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: Right, we're saying we're not of the mother country. We're
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: in essence kind of filing divorce papers by dressing as
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: the people who originally inhabited this country dressed. Nobody's fooled,
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: nobody's trying to blot it's listening to scholars. It's thinking,
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: of course that you're not going to have No one
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: in the right mind is going to say, oh, the
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: Native Americans did it because they're protesting the detext they're
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: not paying the detax right. So it's like you then
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: go and then you talk to a scholar, in this
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: case Phil Delaurie, who's been studying Native stuff, and he goes,
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: just think about it. You're dressed crudely as this. You're
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: making a statement to Britain that we are no longer
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: we're severing ties. Now this is well before this is
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: December of seventeen seventy three. The guns are going to
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: fire in about eighteen months at Lexington a little bit
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: less than eighteen months at Lexington and conquered on April nineteenth,
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: but it is all of these little moments that lead
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: up to boycott of British goods. Women take a huge
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: part of the role of the resistance. You've got people
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: like Samuel Adams, who is a failure as a brewer
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: and a tax collector. It's sort of interesting. You can't
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: make this shit. Who is his whole job is to
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: keep his fellow colonists alive to their grievances. When things
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: come down, Britt sort of retreat. He goes, oh, no, no, no,
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: it's just going to get worse. It's going to get worse.
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: And so you meet these characters that sound an awful
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: lot like characters that occupy our large media space, and
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: it was occupying the large media space of the colonists
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: from New Hampshire. I live in a tiny village. The
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: Walpole Gazette was read all the way in Georgia. People
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: exchanged ideas and thought about things and were trying to
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: figure out even as late as the even after Lexington Concord,
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: even after the Battle Bunker Hill, which is June of
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: seventy five, even after the other things that were happening
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: by early seventy six. Nobody's absolutely not nobody, but there's
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: not a majority will for independence, independency as they called it.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: And then Thomas Paine comes in and writes this pamphlet
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: Common Sense, and all of a sudden people go, oh yeah.
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: And by June there's a committee of the Second Continental
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: Congress and Franklin's in charge of it, and there's John
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: Adams's on the committee. And then it's a thirty two
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: year old lawyer from Virginia named Thomas Jefferson who's given
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: the first cracket at doing this thing. And what does
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: he write. He writes, we hold these truths to be
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: sacred and undeniable. And Franklin, who's the old man, the
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: chairman of you will of this little committee, goes, uh uh,
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: we hold these truths to be self evident, Joe. There
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: is nothing in the world less self evident. Then the
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: idea that all men are created equal, that they're endowed
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But as
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: someone pointed out, it's the old lawyer's dodge, you know.
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: You just tell them that it's self evident, not just
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: sacred and undeniable. Lovely phrasing on Jefferson's part. But if
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: you say self evident, then we're not arguing about this thing.
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: We're saying that everything that you're about to hear is
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: without argument, which is like really in your face bold
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: move and the intimacy, the human intimacy that gets communicated
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: when you spend even a little amount of time trying
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: to parse this, trying to get at the heart of
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: the dynamics of dumping tea and dressed as Indians or
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: writing these words, you know that mankind are disposed to
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning, yeah, we've taken it
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: all this through human history and guess what, we're not
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: gonna take it anymore.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: When they first devised this system of government, what were
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: they basing it on? I know part of it was
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: on the Greeks, but like, what was the How did
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: they make it to the point where even today we
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: marvel at it. Yeah, two hundred and fifty years later
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: people go back and like, look what they did.
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: This extraordinary, it's extraordinary. So lots of factors. First of all,
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: it was true what I said, they have experienced at
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: a reserve and a sort of as somebody said, salutory neglect.
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: People didn't pay attention to the colonists, and they had
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: learned suddenly they were more literate than their British compatriots.
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: They paid less taxes, and they paid it to local stuff,
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: and they were headland and most folks in England and
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: Wales and Scotland and Ireland were living dependent lives. They'd
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: worked the land of somebody else for a thousand years.
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: So they've got this British constitutional monarchy, which is a
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: really strong thing. And King George is not a bad guy.
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: He really does believe that Parliament has this role to
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: play in the House of Lords and the House of Carmens.
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: They're kind of the checks and balances that we'd think of.
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: But they're also in the middle of the Enlightenment where
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: they're beginning to say that there are certain rights that
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: are natural. That's the word that I think Jefferson would use.
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: That is to say, they're not bestowed by a monarch,
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: they're natural, that all men are created equal. This is
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: big stuff. Is distilling in Jefferson's words and the declaration
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: a century of Enlightenment thinking, and the Enlightenment has been
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: a kind of philosophical and human and kind of governmental
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: dynamic that's coming out of the Renaissance. Right, we know
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: what the Renaissance is and art Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini,
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: you know, all of this stuff. Music. But what it's
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: doing on a social scene is it's and a philosophical
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: scene is it's doing that. And they're reaching back to antiquity,
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: as you say, and they're pulling back some of the
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: best ideas of self discipline, of temperance, of virtue, all
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: of these sorts of things. But then because they've experienced
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: all these years of this misuse and distrust from the
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: mother country three thousand miles away, takes you know, at
• 36:45
  Speaker 2: least a month for information to get there. The Britain
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: wins with our help what we call the French and
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: Indian War, which was a global war called the Seven
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: Years War, and they've got now the biggest, most far
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: flung a higher on Earth. But they can't protect its
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: own colonists who are trying to pour over the Appalachians
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: to take Native American land, and it's causing uprisings and
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: so they say, you can't go over seventeen sixty three,
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: you can't go over that. And oh, by the way,
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: we're broke, so we need you to help us pay
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: for this stuff, but we don't have any representation there.
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: So Native lands taxation, representation become this thing, and it
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: goes on for so long. They've watched the ineffectiveness of
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: their government while they're prosecuting the revolution and the ineffectiveness
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: of the Articles of Confederation that emerges from fighting the
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: war and is trying to figure out how to make
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: it work. That they go into that constitutional Convention and
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: they are determined to figure out every possible angle to
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: forestall authoritarianism, to balance their relationships between the states, to
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: have the checks and balances between the three forms of government,
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: the judicial, the legislative, and the executive. It is a
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: beautiful thing. And what was so incredible is that it
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: fostered one of the greatest public debates ever in human
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: history because they had emerged from this bloody, bloody, costly
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: civil war. Civil war means lots of deaths of civilians
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: that didn't happen in our Civil War except in Missouri
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: and a little bit of Kansas. You know, six people
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: died at the Siege of Vicksburg, less than twenty at Atlanta.
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: Two in Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America.
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: But the American Revolution lots of their battles in the South,
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: in which you might have one British officer leading loyalist troops,
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: every person on each side is an American, and they're
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: killing each other. And they're doing it not just in
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: set battles, but in little guerrilla actions, almost like the
• 38:46
  Speaker 2: Viet Cong attacking patrols in South Vietnam. And it is
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: really bad stuff. And so they say, we're going to
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: ratify this, but we want a bill of rights to
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: we want to enshrine these things, things that we fought for.
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: And so you have no establishment of religion, freedom of speech,
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: freedom of press, freedom to assemble and redress grievances, right
• 39:12
  Speaker 2: to bear arms, you know, free and fair trial, end
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: of cruel and unusual punishment. All these things become the
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: set pieces of I made a film a couple of
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: years ago on the US and the Holocaust, What we
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: knew when we knew it, what we did, what we
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: didn't do, what we perhaps what we should have done.
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: And I was at some event and somebody raised their
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: hand and said, is the Holocaust the most important event
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: since the birth of Jesus Christ in world history? And
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: I just immediately said, no, it's the American Revolution. It's
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: the American Revolution. I mean, this is a sea change
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: in the course of human events, and man, we don't
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: know enough about it. We don't know enough of the
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: interiors of it that are complicated. I have in my
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: editing room a neon sign. I've had it for a
• 39:59
  Speaker 2: decade and a half, incursive, lowercase cursive. It says it's complicated,
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: you know, because there's not a filmmaker on earth that
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: if you know, if the scene's working, you don't touch it.
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: But we have spent the last fifty years touching those scenes, right,
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: you know what I mean? Going in Maybe it's lesser,
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: but it's truer, and it's got more dynamism, and it's
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: got more contours. It feels like it's accurate to what
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: actually happened, which is more complicated than our sort of
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: simple binary discussions of what history is.
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: What it's just it's so hard for people to recognize
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: that that was a civil war. So I think most
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: people think it was the United States colonists against the British,
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: but the separatists and the loyalists battling it out together.
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: I think most people are completely.
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: On completely unaware. We wrote a for lack of a
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: better word, a topic sentence early in the film is
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: that I might get toly wrong, but the American Revolution
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: was not just a dispute between Englishmen over Indian land
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: taxation and representation, but a bloody struggle that involved more
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American,
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: that somehow came still to represent some of the highest
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: aspirations of humankind. So our ours is like the fourth
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: Global War over the prize of North America, and we're
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: treating Native nations not as them, but as distinct entities.
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: The Shawnee, for example, in the middle of the eighteenth
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: centuries seventeen fifty, are as important an entity on the
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: world trading stage with French or British or others as
• 41:47
  Speaker 2: say the state of Virginia or the Colony of Virginia
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: is at that time. And that they're different from the
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: Delawares their allies, and they're different from the Hodshone, the
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: Iroquois Confederacy, the Six five, and then it was six tribes,
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Tuscarora, the Oneida,
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: and the Mohawk, and I've just walked from western New
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: York State all the way into New England right and
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: up into Canada. And they had formed a union of
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: their own that had operated, a democracy, that had operated
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: for centuries, that had allowed the independence of each of
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: these separate nations states, and yet yielded to the larger
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: thing when their interests were threatened, so essentially with regard
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: to foreign policy. And Franklin looks at this and goes
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: seventeen fifty four, He goes, Wow, this is a great idea.
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: We should be doing this. He's been the postmaster, he's
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: travel he's the only person who's been to New Hampshire
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: and he's been to Georgia and all the places in between.
• 42:49
  Speaker 2: He said, we should do this, and he calls a
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: conference in Albany, and he's got a picture of a
• 42:54
  Speaker 2: cut up snake above the dire warning join or die.
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: And they passed. Seven of the thirteen colonies attend and
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: they pass this thing called the Albany Plan of Union
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: in seventeen fifty four. And then they go home to
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: try to sell it, and none of the states take
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: it because no one wants to. None of the colonies
• 43:12
  Speaker 2: take it because no one wants to give up their autonomy,
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: so the plan dies, But twenty years later, join or
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: Die is the war cry in the most consequential revolution
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: in history. Wow, isn't that great? So you're taking the
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: Native American riffing on that, And then as you're forming this,
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: you're bringing in what you've had and inherited for tech
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: of centuries of British constitutional monarchy, and you're borrowing from
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: the New Enlightenment things, and you've got biblical references and
• 43:40
  Speaker 2: classical references having to do with the conduct of individuals
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: and personal responsibility, all of these just utterly American but
• 43:48
  Speaker 2: also been out there forever. And we end up with
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: what we have, which is this you glorious, wonderful but
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: also dysfunctional republic.
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: Yea terrible, but it's the best one out there.
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: Is the best one out there? Yeah, that's exactly right.
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: When you started this project. So you have this idea
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: to start this project. What was your understanding of the
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: revolutionary war versus what is it like when you really
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: delve into the material and you start to formulate a
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: plan for this documentary series, Like, how much did you
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: know about it when you first started?
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: I'm pretty well versed in American history, but nothing. I
• 44:28
  Speaker 2: mean like, I've worked on two films where I made
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: the mistake of thinking, oh, I know about this subject,
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: Baseball and Vietnam, because I grew up in the sixties
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: and I went through it. I lived on a college campus.
• 44:40
  Speaker 2: I knew all the stuff I thought was it college
• 44:44
  Speaker 2: as the war was winding down, and I love baseball.
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: Every day of both those productions were daily humiliations of
• 44:51
  Speaker 2: what I didn't know. And so what happens is you
• 44:54
  Speaker 2: come in with a humility that I wish to know,
• 44:58
  Speaker 2: and rather than tell you what I know the last
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: time I checked, that's called homework, we would rather share
• 45:04
  Speaker 2: with you our process of discovery. Joe, you cannot believe
• 45:08
  Speaker 2: what we just found out. Can I just set Can
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: I use these mugs to tell you how Daniel Morgan
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: won the Battle of Cowpens against Banister Tarleton in South Carolina,
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: just below the North Carolina border, and he trusts to
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: his militia, who are unreliable. Please just fire twice the
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: first line of militia, and then you can retreat. Then
• 45:28
  Speaker 2: you can run, but please promise me you're filed twice,
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: and the second line of militia, my more inexperience, Please
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: just fire twice and then run behind the third line,
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: which are these scraggly kids, teenagers, felons near do Wells,
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: second and third sons without the chance of an inheritance,
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany. And they stop the British.
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: So Tarleton goes, oh, they're doing what all the militias do.
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: They're retreating. They're retreating, They're retreating. And then the third
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: line comes up and they go after them and they
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: the Americans actually attack, which is very rare, an attacking
• 46:09
  Speaker 2: thing to drive into the British line. Tartan gets away,
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: but a huge part of Cornwallis's army has been diminished,
• 46:14
  Speaker 2: and they uttering this war cry that they have adapted
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: from the Cherokee, from Native American tribes, which is a
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: yell that will reverberate in Southern battlefields for decades. Wow,
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: wow is right, and like I can take. I mean, look,
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: there's Lexington and conquered. And then maybe somebody says bunker Hill,
• 46:37
  Speaker 2: which is really breeds Hill, Barker Hill too, and then
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: maybe Trenton he takes over each surprises them on Christmas night,
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: and then maybe some people know that Saratoga is the
• 46:46
  Speaker 2: surrender of an entire British army that gives the French
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: the confidence to come in on our side and give
• 46:52
  Speaker 2: us the equivalent of thirty billion dollars plus navy and soldiers.
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: And then New Yorktown. But there are dozens of battles
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: that we'll tell you about, Like Germantown is a wonderful thing.
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: The Battle of Brandywine. What's the largest battle in the
• 47:07
  Speaker 2: entire The largest battle is the Battle of Long Island.
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: George Washington makes a terrible blunder, a tactical blunder. He
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: leaves his left flank exposed in the British see it,
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: and they completely surround him. And then a year later
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: at Brandywine, he leaves his right flank exposed and they
• 47:25
  Speaker 2: go around. He's not the greatest tactician, but he is
• 47:29
  Speaker 2: the man of the time. This leadership, this ability to
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: understand subordinate talent, this reserve, this kind of confidence. I mean,
• 47:38
  Speaker 2: you cannot come away from this without extraordinary admiration for
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: this person, without whom we don't have a country. We
• 47:45
  Speaker 2: just literally don't have a country.
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: Which is so crazy when you think of like pivotal
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: figures in human history. This one person, were they not
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: born when they're not in that position at that time,
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: extraordinary circumstances, unusual character a historian.
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: The only time really in the film that any of
• 48:03
  Speaker 2: our talking heads break the fourth wall. You know, we
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: don't have we don't have first person voices. I mean,
• 48:08
  Speaker 2: we don't have witnesses. We have hundreds of first person voices.
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: But we have some scholars and writers who are on
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: the thing. And there's one Christopher Brown who just shakes
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: his head and he goes like, I'm not a big
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: fan of the great Man theory of history or interpretation
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: of history, but let's put it this way. I don't
• 48:27
  Speaker 2: see how the United States survives without Washington's leadership. And
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: it's this wonderful moment in which you go, right, we
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: don't have to throw out the heroes. In order to
• 48:37
  Speaker 2: do that, more often than not, we sort of elevated
• 48:40
  Speaker 2: these people to a supernatural position that they don't really
• 48:43
  Speaker 2: necessarily deserve. He deserves it, and yet he's also deeply flawed.
• 48:48
  Speaker 2: Feats of clay, as I said, And that's to me
• 48:51
  Speaker 2: what makes a good story, Like, how is it that
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: he can be tactically so wrong in two extraordinary places.
• 48:58
  Speaker 2: He's also very rash. Joe. He runs out at kIPS Bay,
• 49:01
  Speaker 2: which is halfway up Manhattan, after he's lost the Battle
• 49:04
  Speaker 2: of Long Island. He's now abandoning New York Or he's
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: taking a good number of his men up to Harlem.
• 49:11
  Speaker 2: And at kIPS Bay, which is sort of midtown on
• 49:13
  Speaker 2: the East River, there's a battle and we're just being
• 49:16
  Speaker 2: rolled up and he comes charging onto the battlefield and
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: his age are going crazy and they're grabbing the reins
• 49:21
  Speaker 2: of his horse. He's going to be killed. If he's killed,
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: that's it, right. And then later on at the Battle
• 49:27
  Speaker 2: of Princeton he does the same thing, and one aid
• 49:29
  Speaker 2: puts his hands over his face, thinking I cannot watch
• 49:33
  Speaker 2: my commander in chief be killed. And in the Battle
• 49:35
  Speaker 2: of Monmouth Courthouse in New Jersey, he rise out and
• 49:38
  Speaker 2: just is very present, turns what is a retreat of
• 49:42
  Speaker 2: continental soldiers and militiamen into steadying their lines and basically
• 49:48
  Speaker 2: holding their own against the prime, the elite of the
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: British army. And it's where does that come from? Who
• 49:55
  Speaker 2: does that? How did we do? And from the very
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: beginning everybody knew you needed a Virginian. The New Englanders
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: where the war start. The war is a symphony in
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: three movements, right, the New England is the first movement,
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: Central States and then the Southern States. And there is
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: a sense early on, when after Lexington and conquered, where
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: we've driven the British back into Boston and they've got
• 50:20
  Speaker 2: ways to get in but they can't get out besides
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: by ship, that we need a real army. And the
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: army is formed, and it is very obvious from the
• 50:30
  Speaker 2: very start that there can be no other person than
• 50:33
  Speaker 2: George Washington. The New Englanders want a Virginian. It's the
• 50:37
  Speaker 2: most populous, it's the richest state, and they know this
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: person has been around since. He's a twenty two year
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: old militia officer who probably fires the first shot in
• 50:48
  Speaker 2: the French and Indian War that starts the global conflict
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: that everyone else on earth calls the Seven Years War
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: that will set the stage for the American Revolution. And
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: then he acts bravely in many other situations, and he
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: is denied a commission in the British Army, and he's like,
• 51:05
  Speaker 2: if you you know, and then you go and then
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: and he's a speculator in Native American land that he
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: doesn't own. He wants to sell to new colonists. And
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: when the British put the line of demarcation in seventeen
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: sixty three, that separate says you can't go over because
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: we can't afford to protect you. He's now pissed again.
• 51:23
  Speaker 2: And then he's still this voice of reason that arrives
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: in Philadelphia just poised, and people look to him for leadership.
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: He's very good at picking out you know, that guy
• 51:34
  Speaker 2: has got great he's got great executive function and great
• 51:39
  Speaker 2: ability to pick subordinates without fear of being overshadowed. One
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: of his great generals, Nathaniel Green. Another great general, Benedict Arnold.
• 51:47
  Speaker 2: And we introduced Benedict Arnold in the opening seconds of
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: our first our second episode, and it isn't until you're
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: a third of the way through the sixth and last
• 51:55
  Speaker 2: episode that you go, uh oh, you know, but he's
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: a hero at that back city, He's a hero at
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: the Battle of Saratoga. He's been painted out of most
• 52:05
  Speaker 2: of the paintings because he became Benedict Donald. Isn't it
• 52:08
  Speaker 2: nice to know that he's that great a general before
• 52:11
  Speaker 2: he becomes Benedict Donald.
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: That term when I was a child, when I was
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: in school, a Benedict Arnald Trader. I think that's gone now.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: I think if I brought that up to my children,
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: I said, do you know what a Benedict Donald is? Oh?
• 52:23
  Speaker 2: God, They say it was a mixture of Uh, it's
• 52:27
  Speaker 2: like Obama is a mixture of iced tea and lemonade. Yeah,
• 52:30
  Speaker 2: And you know what, that's so terrifying to me, And
• 52:32
  Speaker 2: I'm no, it's it's what happens when you atrophy this
• 52:36
  Speaker 2: interest in American history, or you think that it can
• 52:38
  Speaker 2: be so simplified that you don't have to do anything.
• 52:41
  Speaker 2: I'm that's my job. I mean, I love it, and
• 52:44
  Speaker 2: I love the fact that we can bring back these
• 52:46
  Speaker 2: things for people and they can they can experience. And
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: there isn't a person in the country that's listening to
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: me now or that we're going, you know, thirty five
• 52:55
  Speaker 2: different cities all around the country talking about this for everybody.
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: This is not made for the eighth grader taking American history,
• 53:04
  Speaker 2: of the eleventh grader making it's for you. It's for
• 53:07
  Speaker 2: anybody who cares about where the country came from and
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: is willing to say, I probably don't know the full
• 53:15
  Speaker 2: dimensions of this.
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: It's probably impossible to teach it in the way that
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: you can at a documentary. I think it's the most
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: effective form of expressing these things. I mean, obviously there's
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: some things that can be documented in books, numbers, dates,
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: history that would be kind of cumbersome to certain documentaries
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: because it would interfere with the flow of the entertainment
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: aspect of it. But in terms of absorption, in terms
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: of stimulation and absorption, human beings are much more inclined
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: to take it through one of your long pieces like
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: the Vietnam One, the eighteen hour piece.
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: That's exactly right. I think what happens is that it's
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: so interesting because we understand as your refer and seeing
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: the power of a book still the greatest mechanical invention
• 54:04
  Speaker 2: there is that it can go into some depths that
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: documentary do. But a documentary can hold lots of different
• 54:10
  Speaker 2: opposing points of view, not make them arguments, but allow
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: people to have different points of view and sort of
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: collect almost like spokes in the wheel. You want to
• 54:17
  Speaker 2: get to the hub that's whatever it is that you're after,
• 54:21
  Speaker 2: But the wheel is much stronger by all those spokes,
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: and unfortunately that too often in history or in teaching,
• 54:28
  Speaker 2: we subscribe to one particular theory of history, right that
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: it's got to be this or it's got to be that.
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: And what we've done is we've found the documentary and
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: the storytelling aspects of it hugely, hugely valuable in communicating
• 54:44
  Speaker 2: the complexity of the subject without putting your thumb on
• 54:48
  Speaker 2: the scale and making a political point. We're just you know, look,
• 54:51
  Speaker 2: I will be totally honest. History doesn't repeat itself. No
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: event has ever happened twice. But Marktoine is supposed to
• 54:59
  Speaker 2: have said history doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes. If
• 55:02
  Speaker 2: he did say that, he's exactly right, because human nature
• 55:05
  Speaker 2: doesn't change. And so you watch these events and when
• 55:09
  Speaker 2: we finished working on it, and I told you we
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: began this when Barack Obama had a year and a
• 55:14
  Speaker 2: half to go in his presidency, or a year and
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: a month ago at his presidency, it's a totally different world.
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: And we know that it rhymes. But we never once
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: have concentrated and saying, oh, we're going to put our
• 55:25
  Speaker 2: thumb on the scale here, we want everybody to watch.
• 55:28
  Speaker 2: We have no extra grind we're just as I'm saying,
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: calling balls and strikes. And when I mean that, it
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: would be like saying, let me tell you about Babe
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: Ruth and Reggie Jackson. They struck out a lot, thanks
• 55:41
  Speaker 2: so much, right, right, I mean, And I'm true, I
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: have not told you anything that is not true. Correct,
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: They also hit a hell of a lot of home ones.
• 55:50
  Speaker 2: And so calling balls and strikes is saying that what
• 55:53
  Speaker 2: happens is the way we teach history, is the way
• 55:56
  Speaker 2: ESPN does sports highlights, It's always the home run. It's
• 56:02
  Speaker 2: never the guy turned the double play, or he doubled
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: some guy off, or there was some other thing. It's
• 56:08
  Speaker 2: always the home run. And so nobody takes a strike
• 56:12
  Speaker 2: in these highlights. And what we're trying to say is,
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: isn't it better to watch the game and see that
• 56:19
  Speaker 2: even Babe Ruth can only come up to bat every
• 56:23
  Speaker 2: nine times, and even Babe Ruth fails seven times out
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: of ten. He's a three hundred hitter, a little bit
• 56:31
  Speaker 2: more than three hundred hitter. That's the great beauty of it.
• 56:34
  Speaker 2: And so I think that we don't ever now think
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: that he is a failure. We understand that the dynamics
• 56:41
  Speaker 2: of life. The dynamics of this particular game mean that
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: the people who fail seven times out of ten and
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: do it significantly are in the Hall of fame. I mean,
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: that's the beauty of these storytellings. See, I'm not taking
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: anything away from George Washington by making it complex, making
• 57:00
  Speaker 2: him human. He's not a statue out in the park
• 57:03
  Speaker 2: collecting bird shit. He's a real, breathing human being. He's
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: one of the richest people in America. He marries one
• 57:09
  Speaker 2: of the richest people in the area America, a widow's
• 57:14
  Speaker 2: and like he's away, he makes one visit home. I think,
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: to Monticello during the whole I mean, to Mount Vernon
• 57:20
  Speaker 2: during the whole war. He's dedicated to this, saying, I mean,
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: he doesn't have to do this right, He's he's committed
• 57:28
  Speaker 2: to this project of us. And that's the ultimate point
• 57:33
  Speaker 2: I want to make about not just this film or
• 57:35
  Speaker 2: Vietnam or that all the things we've been talking about,
• 57:38
  Speaker 2: is that I've had the great privilege of making films
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: about the US for nearly fifty years, but I've also
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: made films about us. That is to say, the lower
• 57:49
  Speaker 2: case two letter plural pronoun all of the intimacy of
• 57:53
  Speaker 2: us and we and our and all of the majesty
• 57:57
  Speaker 2: and the complexity and the contradiction and even the controversy
• 58:01
  Speaker 2: of the US, and that is a privileged space to
• 58:04
  Speaker 2: be operating it. To be have and been given the
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: permission to do this for nearly fifty years is just great.
• 58:11
  Speaker 2: I think I have the best job in the country,
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: and I'm always happy to meet somebody who's willing to
• 58:15
  Speaker 2: contradict mery. But it's only because you have a chance
• 58:19
  Speaker 2: to work hard at telling the story. I mean, we
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: lock the picture back in January, that means you're not
• 58:25
  Speaker 2: going to do any more work on it. We've unlocked
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: it hundreds of times just to make it better as
• 58:30
  Speaker 2: some history and said, I'm not sure if you can
• 58:32
  Speaker 2: be that categorical, and then we put in a perhaps right,
• 58:36
  Speaker 2: or you find out that image isn't as stunning as
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: we thought it could be. Could we swap that out?
• 58:42
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that works better than before, even after we
• 58:44
  Speaker 2: were done done. And I like the ability that by
• 58:47
  Speaker 2: the time we're letting it go, it's like your kids,
• 58:50
  Speaker 2: you're still licking the smudge off their face, and you know,
• 58:53
  Speaker 2: making sure that their hair is tied up in a
• 58:56
  Speaker 2: nice bow and you know, have a good day, sweetie.
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: You know, yeah, well, I think that gratitude that you
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: have towards your work and this dedication to truth, because
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: there's one of the problems with problematic historical figures is
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: we tend to use modern ideological perspectives when we describe
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: these people, and you know, we try to show that
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: we have a disdain for the way they live their
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: lives and the choices they made in perspective with how
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: we do today, you know. And the problem with that
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: is it comes off political or ideological.
• 59:38
  Speaker 2: Or exactly, and you lose the real.
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: Understanding of the complexities of history and of these human
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: beings that lived in a very different time. Seventeen seventy six,
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: even though it's only three people ago is a very
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: you know, people live to be one hundred three people ago,
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: so it's a very different time.
• 59:55
  Speaker 2: It's a very different time. And you make a really
• 59:57
  Speaker 2: really good point when you take the judge of what
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 2: we know now you can apply them and then you
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 2: end up with what I called that unforgiving revisionism, where
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 2: you throw out some significant people with the bathwater of revisionism.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 2: But let me just tell you. They all knew slavery
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 2: was wrong. They all knew it was wrong, and they
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: still did it. And there's a historian and Anette Gordon
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: Reid who just says, you know, found slavery's foundational to
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 2: Thomas Jefferson, and he knew all his life it was
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 2: wrong and said it and wrote about it and tried
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 2: to put in something to end the slave trade and
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 2: in the Declaration of Independence, which no one would have.
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: And she goes, well, how could somebody do something they
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 2: knew was wrong? She goes, well, that's a question for
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 2: all of us. And so Jefferson's neighbor freed all his
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 2: slaves and urged him do it, and he didn't, and
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 2: his cousin freed all his slaves. So there's already that.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 2: The question is, if you are just taking the judgments
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: of today to cancel somebody, you've just missed the possibility
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 2: of getting to know George Washington or getting to know
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 2: Thomas Jefferson. And if you only do people who are perfect,
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 2: you are either lying about them or you're You've got
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 2: very few characters.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 2: I mean, because I don't know about you, I'm not
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 2: I presume you're not. I don't think you know anybody
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 2: who's perfect. I don't know anybody who's perfect. And so
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 2: then it's like history becomes honey, how is your day?
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: It doesn't begin. I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 2: the garbage can at the curb, you know, unless you
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 2: get teepone. And in case, that's exactly why you do it.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: You edit human experience and you tolerate the vast experiences
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 2: that human beings are are are so complex, and it's
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 2: it's the interest. It was very interesting. We did an
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 2: update of our baseball series called The Tenth Inning, and
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 2: being a from New England and being a Red Sox fan,
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 2: the whole thing was just a disguise to be able
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: to do the Red Sox come back in two thousand
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: and four. But we were dealing with the great Atlanta
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: team and the nineties and the great Joe torri led Yankees,
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 2: and then Sosa and Maguire and then Bonds and then
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: steroids and whatever. At the end of it, we're really
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: trying to come to some thing about steroids and try
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: to figure out how to deal with it. And Thomas Boswell,
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 2: now retired as a great sports writer for The Washington Post, said,
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 2: I think it's Keith's writing about William Shakespeare, who's a
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 2: pretty good play right, said that Shakespeare had negative capability.
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 2: That means you could hold intention the positive and negative
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 2: aspects of a character for as long as you possibly
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 2: could without making that quick and fascile and easy judgment
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 2: that we make all the time in our lives. When
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 2: the guy cuts us off, we give him the finger,
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 2: you know, we yell if you whatever that is, we
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 2: make judgments about it. And Shakespeare had that ability even
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 2: with the darkest characters, know the Iagos and the Richard,
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 2: you know, people who are deep and dark. He had
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 2: negative capability. He said, that's what we need to grow
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 2: in order to understand the Stareide era, in order to
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 2: understand how to deal with all of that. And I
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 2: think that that in a way, all of us have
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 2: to kind of grow that negative capability, that ability to
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: distinguish that nobody's perfect, and that if you, if you
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 2: superimpose this kind of abstract sets of judgment, nobody passes
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 2: the test, right, No one passes the test.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: That sort of performative purity test too. I think it's
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: a real problem with our current culture where I think
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: this is a sort of a natural progression of an
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: improvement of society, because we could all agree that society
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: is far more just today than it was in seventeen
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: seventy six, and we know we're on this path, but
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: it's a very bumbling stumbling. Certainly fail, figure out why
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: you fail, kind of succeed, but then also take it. Yeah,
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: it's consistent, and I think in this process of this, unfortunately,
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: you have performative virtue that's correct. And this is a
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: lot of people that want to tear down statues and
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: throw paint on, you know, paintings, and do things where
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: they're trying to show that I am better than the
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: people who came before me. And the problem with doing
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: that in regards to history is we don't learn anything
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: if you're not truthful, if we don't give this sort
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: of like a really objective analysis of all the factors
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: that were taking place with these extraordinary human beings who
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: were experiencing this thing that was wholly unique on this
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: new continent and with this new idea of forming this
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: experiment and self government that hadn't existed before, and that
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: you're gonna you have to say, you have to do
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: it the way you do it. It's really the only way.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 2: I think is only way, and it takes time, and
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 2: I am very I have to acknowledge that there's no
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: other place on the dial that dates me, you know
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 2: than PBS, right where I have the time to do it.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 2: It's sort of like an NIH grant, like here, we'd
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 2: like you to explore the possible cure to this disease.
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 2: Can you have it next Thursday? Well, no, you can
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 2: have it next Thursday. That's what Hollywood says. I need
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 2: it out because the other Marvel thing is coming out
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 2: at the same time. What you need is we want
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 2: to set you up with a certain set of circumstances
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 2: that are going to permit you to have the best
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 2: possibility of doing this. And so we've always hit our marks.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 2: We've always come. If we haven't been in budget, it's
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 2: because we've expanded the film and then I've gone out
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: and raised the money. So no one else was responsible
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: for the fact that we decided Vietnam is not going
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 2: to be seven episodes, it's going to be eight and
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 2: oh you know what, it's going to be ten and
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 2: that's eighteen hours and that's you know, the way the
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: Vietnam and It had to do with listening to the material,
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 2: understanding how it's spoke to us, you know, committing ourselves
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 2: to recording Vietnamese voices, not just South Vietnamese soldiers and
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 2: South Vietnamese civilians, but viet Cong guerrillas, North Vietnamese soldiers,
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 2: North Vietnamese civilians, as well as the range of Americans.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 2: And so one of my favorite scenes is a North
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 2: Vietnamese soldier and a viet Cong soldier and an American
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 2: all saying exactly the same thing about the same moment
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 2: in a battle, early battle, before there were technically boots
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 2: on the ground. This was an advisor, an American advisor.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 2: But they're they're all talking about a helicopter flying over
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 2: this one hedge, and and the Vietcong guys behind the hedge.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 2: The South Vietnamese officer is is, you know, next to
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: the American guy, and they all have an experience of
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 2: war that is exactly the same. And I love that.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: I love that. What was your first piece, Brooklyn Bridge?
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 2: I had i'd started, so it came out. It was
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 2: first broadcast in eighty or eighty two. I had been
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 2: working on it since seventy seven. I looked twelve years old,
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 2: and I was trying to sell people to the Brooklyn Bridge,
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 2: and people were, you know, telling me, oh, this child
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 2: is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. No. And
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 2: I used to keep these two big, thick three binders
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 2: on my desk, all filled with rejections for that one film.
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 2: I mean literally hundreds of rejections. But I had read
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 2: David McCullough's The Great Bridge, the epic story of the
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 2: building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and I went out to
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 2: my partners. We just founded our company where called Florentine Films.
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 2: We were starving. We'd like maybe get a day's work
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 2: or two days work a month as cinematographers and soundman
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 2: and grips, and we were paying the rent. And that
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 2: was that. I said, we're going to do this and
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 2: I'll raise all the money. And I did and it
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 2: got I moved up to New Hampshire so I could
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 2: live on nothing in seventy nine and eighty and I
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 2: both those years I made less than twenty five hundred
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: bucks and chopped all the wood for my stove, split
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 2: it carried it kept the stoves going. You wake up
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 2: in the middle of the night and four am in
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 2: February and you go, I just heard the heater kick on.
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 2: I gotta go down and feed the sove. But it
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 2: came out I got nominated for an Academy Award, and
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 2: that that was the sign to me that, like I
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 2: needed to, I'd hit a fork and road and like
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 2: Yogi Para said, you'd take it. It was to not
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 2: go back to New York, to not go back to
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 2: LA but to say I'm going to be staying here
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 2: because this is labor intensive. We're going to have to
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 2: raise grants to do this stuff. I'm not looking for investors,
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 2: We're looking for underwriting so that we are liberated from
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 2: the suits that would come in and give the notes
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 2: and say, oh, you need to be less sexy or
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 2: more sexy, or longer or shorter, or more violent or
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 2: less violent. I can sit here and tell you with
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 2: a great deal of pride, and not just for me,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: but on behalf of the extraordinary people that work with me,
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 2: and some of them have been for fifty years, and
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 2: some of them for thirty years, and some of them
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 2: for forty. And you know a lot of people that
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: these are director's cuts, that we haven't let it go.
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 2: And there the way the country has responded to them,
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: like the Civil War series still thirty five years old,
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 2: it's still the highest rated program in the history of
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 2: public television.
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: That's incredible. How did you have that clarity of vision
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: as a young man to recognize that working in isolation
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: in a small town was the best option. Because I
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: would imagine if you had aspirations to being a filmmaker
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: when you were younger, the call of Hollywood, just the
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: call of being a part of an enormous organization, like
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: being respected by your peers in this enormous like that
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: had to be at least somewhat attractive. But how did
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: you have the clarity to realize that that was not
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: the correct path for you.
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 2: I can't take credit for it, you know. I went
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 2: to Hampshire College. My teachers were social documentary still photographers.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 2: I had a mentor named Jerome Leebling is so firmly
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 2: rooted in a kind of you know, another word we've
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 2: been talking about virtue. Another word is honor or honorable
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 2: that it is not engaged and people don't really use
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 2: it in ordinary conversation. He just instilled in all of us.
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 2: I believe all of his students a sense of honor.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 2: So there was this responsibility to follow it through, to
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 2: work really hard. I mean, I don't know anybody that
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: works harder than us. You know, we really work seven
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 2: days a week.
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: We love it.
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 2: I put my head on a billow. I want to
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 2: know that my girls are okay, my daughters, and I
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 2: want to know that I've made a film better. You know,
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 2: in some ways, seven days a week. And it's not
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 2: that you can't take a day off and you can't
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 2: do something, but you're always thinking about this stuff and
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 2: you want to make them better. And it was It's
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 2: very funny. We're out on the road and we're showing
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 2: the clips and you know, we've seen these clips of
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 2: gazillion times, and I'm talking to Sarah bus Signed, the
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 2: co director, and we just look at each other that
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 2: simultaneously and say, got to get rid of that. We
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 2: have to change that shot. And so suddenly we're working
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 2: with an editor who happens to be in Paris this
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 2: semester and the editor that's in New York, and we're
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 2: changing things. And I love the fact that we did that.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 2: You know, I'm actually embarrassed that I'm telling you about it,
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 2: because I feel like in some ways, I'm advertising the
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 2: fact that that's what we do. I'm just trying to
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 2: say that somewhere along the line, I've made the opposite
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 2: of decision of what was sort of career wise supposed
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 2: to be what I was supposed to do. In fact,
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 2: Robert Penwarren, the poet and novelist, told me that he
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 2: looked at me once and he just said, careerism is death.
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 2: And I've never used the worry word career. I've always
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 2: said my professional life, because careerism suggests that you're following
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 2: some sort of rut, and that's not what I wanted
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 2: to do. And so by not by just a carve
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 2: path that's already well worn, I mean, look, if you
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 2: want to be a doctor or a lawyer, you've got
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 2: to follow some well worn paths just by virtue of that.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 2: Everybody that I know that's working in documentary, that has
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 2: been working at it for a long time and makes
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 2: their living from it, have come from completely unique paths.
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 2: It's been their own way. And I like the fact
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 2: that I made this. No, I'm not going to go
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 2: back to New York. I know, why would I move
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 2: to LA I'm going to be here in this little
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 2: town in New Hampshire where any number of Oscar nominations
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 2: and Grammys and Emmys means zero to the people that
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 2: I live with. It's like, did you shovel the lawn
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 2: of the walk of the lady next door who's not
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 2: doing so well? Did you do this? Are you a
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 2: good neighbor? That's the stuff that matters, and it's a
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 2: good place to raise kids as well. And then the
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 2: splendid isolation. There's a great tradition, as you know, in
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 2: American history, of the way in which wildness nature becomes
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 2: part of the American catechism that it's possible. Walt Whitman
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 2: is saying that you can work worship God more closely
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 2: in nature than in cathedrals made by man. This is
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 2: the American catechism of being out in nature, and it
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 2: manifests itself in different people who are aware of the
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 2: power of nature. Nature reminds you of your insignificance, and
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 2: that is inspiriting. This is paradoxical, right, that's inspiriting even
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 2: though you're feeling insignificant. It's inspiriting. Just as the egotist
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 2: in our midst is divin is diminished by his or
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 2: her self regard right, So anybody who says this, it's
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 2: actually diminished. The person who is humble is humiliated by
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 2: their atomic insignificance. As one person said about Mount Denali
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 2: in Alaska in the nineteen teens, a reporter is actually
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 2: inspirited by that. And I wish to be inspirited, because
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 2: I think that's the only condition in which we're then
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 2: able to make the kinds of decisions, the creative decisions
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 2: that Noll decisions, this sort of the thoughtfulness, or to
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 2: have that regard for not necessarily following the well worn path.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: It's just amazing.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 2: That makes sense.
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: It does, It does make sense. It resonates, It resonates
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: completely the natural art of nature, the true majesty of
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: experiencing the vastness of the mountains and of the woods
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: and of the It humbles you in a way that
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: nothing else does, and it grounds you in a way
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: of recognizing. I don't want to say your insignificance, your
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: relative insignificance, but it puts like it's not just you.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: This whole thing is massive. You're so fortunate experience.
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 2: Oh you know how fortunately. I feel so grateful.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: Joe.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 2: You know, my best friend once said to me when
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 2: we were much much younger. We've been friends for more
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 2: than fifty years. He said, there's only one center of
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 2: the universe, and you're not it. It was a great gift.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 2: It was a really great gift. And I don't know
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 2: what I was doing or whether I was even doing
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 2: anything that was inviting it, but he just wanted me
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 2: to remember that there's no center of the universe.
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: Well, you also get to see the stars too.
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, out there, And that's another thing I was thinking,
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 2: you know, there is that the beauty. Emily Dickinson called
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 2: sunsets and sunrises the far theatricals of day. It's a
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 2: perfect description of it. But when you go out and
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 2: it's ten below zero in my town and I'm up
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 2: a mile and a half out of town, which has
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 2: five or six street lights, so there's no glare, and
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 2: you see the milky Way, and you just you are
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 2: just what can you do but just be humbled by
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: the vastness of the universe and how relatively insignificant our
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 2: lives are. But that in itself compels you, drives you
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 2: to try to do something that would have not significance
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 2: but just would add something. So I live in a state.
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 2: Politics comes through all the time. Everybody's got a lawn
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 2: sign right, left, right, center. My lawn sign says love multiplies.
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 2: It's the only functioning theory of the entire universe. It
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 2: is what it's all about.
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 2: It doesn't matter what religion, what philosophy you might subscribe
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 2: to or not. Thomas Jefferson says in our film, if
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 2: my neighbor believes in twenty gods or no god at all,
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 2: it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg right,
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 2: like we are so religiously intolerant today. Well, I know
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 2: that if I had been born in Riad, Saudi Aravi,
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 2: I'd still be a born again Christian. No, you wouldn't.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 2: Need'd be a schi Heite, you know, I mean Assuni,
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 2: and you'd be at war with the with the Sieites
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 2: across the border in Iran. You know, I'm sorry to
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 2: break the news to you, and that all of them,
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 2: all the great religions, have the same thing in mind.
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: And it's still the problem that people have with this
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: rigid perspective, that they would be so arrogant as to
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: believe that they would be unique in that environment. Right, No,
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: I would get it. I would understand it, like, I
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: know you that's.
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 2: Crazy, and who's to say. I mean, what was essential
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 2: about the Founders, particularly Jefferson, is that they were Deists,
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 2: and while they all had their own particular mostly Protestant
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 2: denominations that they were had come out of, and I
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 2: think still to some extent in some cases practice less
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 2: so Jefferson, is that they believed that there was a
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 2: supreme being who was disinterested in the affairs of man
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 2: and did not distinguish between faiths, so that you know,
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 2: you see the baseball player who hits a home run
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 2: across his home bait and looks up in thanks. They
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 2: never do that when they hit into a game ending
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 2: double play in the ninth inning, right They don't say, oh,
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 2: thank you God for giving me that. I've only seen
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 2: that once Pedro Marcina had given up a fairly significant lead,
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 2: not the entire lead, to the Yankees in one of
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 2: those great playoffs, and as he walked off and was
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 2: pulled by the manager, he walked off and looked up,
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 2: and I spoke to him about it. I said, I've
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 2: never seen anything like that. But this idea that all
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 2: of our affairs are governed in that way is not
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 2: what many of the Founders believed in that it is
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 2: our obligation to lead that virtuous life. Don't mean to
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 2: keep bringing you back there. Yes, moves you closer up
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 2: the stairway to Heaven, up the ray of creation to
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 2: God and that that you're it's it's your movement, not
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 2: that supreme being's movement towards you. Oh, let's make sure
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 2: that's a ground root double. Oh, let's you know that's
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 2: not happening. It is the ongoing chaos of the sequence
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 2: of a and human nature. And we've got to be
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 2: aware of the sort of incredible current, the force of
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 2: the current of that human nature, but also the way
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 2: in which my individuality, my will, the discipline, the virtue
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 2: that I might be able to have, could in some
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 2: ways be singular and do something significant, not because of that,
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 2: but in order to be closer to that high thing.
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 2: And that's where they're all talking about it, that they
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 2: want the Founder's higher emotions, as I said, not sentimentality,
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 2: not nostalgia. Those are the enemies of anything, but the
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 2: higher emotions. Sometimes we say that the whole is greater
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 2: than the sum of the parts. What is the difference
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 2: between that if You've added up all the sum of
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 2: the parts and it comes here.
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: What's that?
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 2: And what it means is that as much as to
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 2: build a table, to build a bridge or a highway,
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 2: one in one always has to equal to the things
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 2: that matter in our lives are where one and one
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 2: equals three, where we are able to see something that's bigger,
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 2: that there's something is produced by the collision of two
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 2: musical notes, by two images, and a documentary, by the
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 2: conversation between two human beings. Whatever in which something is possible.
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 2: I'm interested in whatever energy that creates and with whom
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 2: I mean. You just don't know that that person at
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 2: the convenience store that you just kind of like don't
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 2: even look and don't even think about, has a life
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 2: as important as yours. You're driving on the highway, We're
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 2: coming down from Dallas this morning on thirty five. You know, thousands,
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 2: thousands of cars going out of the direction. The person
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 2: in that car is looking and their life is as
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 2: full as what I'm seeing out of my eyes. And
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 2: I know sitting here that you are seeing something totally
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 2: different than what I'm seeing, and that life is as full.
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 2: And I think good history, good friendship, good storytelling, good conversation.
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 2: All half at its base, the respect for the other
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 2: point of view, the ability to listen, and that kind
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 2: of desire to be better. And in our country, we've
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: actually got lots of blueprints for it. We've got lots
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 2: of plans. They're out there. It's in the Declaration, it's
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 2: in the Constitution, it's in the Bill of Rights, it's here,
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 2: it's in that speech, it's in the Lincoln speech. You know,
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 2: we're gonna live forever and die by suicide, all right?
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 2: Or then he's got two speeches. Lincoln does once a
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 2: message to Congress in sixty two, what we'd call the
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 2: State of the Union address, and he says, fellow citizens,
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 2: we cannot escape history. The fire trial through which we
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 2: pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 2: the latest generation. And then a few seconds later he goes,
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 2: the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 2: stormy present. As our case is new, let us think
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 2: a new He's both those things right that escape history.
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 2: And guess what the dogmas of the past. He's in
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 2: his second inaugural, one of the most famous addresses of
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 2: all time. He's got old Testament righteousness. You know, if
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 2: we have to spend another five hundred years drawing with
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 2: the sword, the blood that is drawn with the lash,
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 2: meaning fighting to end slavery, will do it. And then
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 2: he stops very old testament. He stops on a dime
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 2: and turns to this new Testament, ending the Peroration, which
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 2: says with malice towards none, with charity for all you know.
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 2: And then it has that kind of unbelievable generosity in
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 2: it and this ability to say, a second ago, I'm
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 2: willing to keep this going for however long it takes
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 2: to end this scourge of slavery. Whatever drawn by the lash,
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 2: drawn by the sword, we will do. It's just an
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 2: amazing ability to understand us. And he took He's the
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 2: one who reached back over the Constitution and plucked Jefferson
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 2: back into significance. So when he gives the Gettysburg address
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 2: four score and seven years after the the eighty seven
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 2: years after the signing of the declaration, he's creating the
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 2: two point zero operating system that we have now, saying
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 2: we really do mean it, that'll matter created equal, and
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 2: that now because of the sacrifice, there's not a proper
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 2: word in that entire address. You know the guy before him,
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 2: Edward Everett noted orator spoke for more than two hours,
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 2: and he spoke for two minutes. And Everett wrote him
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 2: and he said, mister President, I should flatter myself if
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 2: I thought I came to the heart of the matter
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 2: in two hours as you did in two minutes.
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: Wow. It is.
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 2: There's so many wows in the work that we have,
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 2: and people say, well, what what what you learn differently?
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 2: And you go, oh my god, are you kidding? Every
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 2: day is this revelation, this sort of tsunami that breaks
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 2: over you of new information, And then it's just what
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 2: is it that I can save you? You'd assume, you'd
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 2: presume completely understandably that making a doctor coumentary film on
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 2: the American Revolution is additive, right, you're building this thing.
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 2: It's not. I live in New Hampshire. We make maple syrup.
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 2: It takes forty gallons of sap to make one gallon
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 2: of maple syrup, and so it's all reductive. We will
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 2: we have twelve hours in this six part series, and
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 2: we've got more than five hundred hours of material. Filming
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 2: reenactors for years, some of them dressed in French uniforms,
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 2: some of them dressed in militias, some of them in British,
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 2: some of them in you know, Continental, some of them German, Hessian,
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 2: some of them Native, all of that stuff, and then
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 2: we're using it to help the building blocks of doing it.
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 2: At the same time, we've collected more than twelve thousand
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 2: of paintings and drawings. We've taken maps. We've got more
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 2: maps in this than in all the other films we've
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 2: made combined. Sometimes we're just taking an old archival map
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 2: and leaving it alone. Sometimes we're taking an old ar
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 2: caval mapp and just putting red and blue line showing
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 2: the movement of British and Continental soldiers. Sometimes we're taking
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 2: maps and sort of making our own hybrid map that
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 2: gives us a little bit more control. But all of
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 2: these things were just practicing. I mean, I looked at
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 2: something earlier today which was just a minute change on
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 2: a map that we highlight where a British admiral wanted
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 2: to attack all these seaport towns in Massachusetts and New
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 2: Hampshire and Maine. And the last one is Machias, which
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 2: is up near the Canadian border, and we weren't seeing it.
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 2: So we're trying to figure out how to light up
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 2: Marblehead and Cape Ann and Gloucester and Portsmouth, New Hampshire
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 2: and Saco Maine was then the main department of Massachusetts,
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 2: and then Falmouth which is now Portland, Maine, and Machias
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 2: and so we we'll spend months trying to just get
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 2: that one thing right. No one if we hadn't done it,
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 2: no one would care except for us. Except for us, right, yeah,
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 2: is that little thing? You know. I have friends who
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 2: are woodworkers, and they'd never hide a mistake, right, right,
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 2: they'd never had a mistake. It always there's a there's
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 2: a kind of craftsmanship to all of that, you know,
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 2: out in the woods by yourself, just how you relate
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 2: to nature, a kind of purity, a kind of intention
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 2: that you have in relationship to it. I know, you
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 2: know all of that.
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I think one of the things that's fascinating is
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: that the isolation in which you work, in the environment
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: in which you live, which does highlight the majesty of
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: nature and the humility of it all. It you're in
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: the expression of your work, You're giving this vision to
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: people that a lot of them are living in this
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: world that creates uniquely anxious and disconnected people because we're
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: living in the environments without nature, because we're of light pollution,
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: we see no stars. It's I think it's one of
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: the reasons why we're one of the most confused societies ever.
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: And art, and I think documentary film work is clearly art,
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: especially art in an understand in providing an understanding of
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: like the true events of history. Yes, it gives people
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: a sense of what it really means to be a
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: human being in a different way. It illuminates these aspects
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: of humanity in a different way that allows people just
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: this kind of glimpse into like what are we made
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: out of? Like what what is it about us that
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: makes us who we are? And why do we do
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: what we do.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 2: I can't imagine any human being could say it better
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 2: than that, Joe. I think that's exactly right. This disconnection
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 2: that we feel has come from the fact that we
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 2: have become transactional beings. Yeah, nothing is transformational, and that
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 2: we yearn nonetheless for that kind of transformation that takes
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 2: place in our lives. And as Americans, those of us
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 2: fortunate enough to be Americans, with all the problems that
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 2: are attendant to that statement. We have this glorious past
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 2: that has the ability to take us out of that stupor,
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 2: that take us out of that rut, to be able
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 2: to say, and with the exception of a film and Leonardo,
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 2: the forty or so films that I've done, some of them,
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 2: how long, some of them are twenty hours long, are
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 2: all about us, right, all about us. And the thing
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 2: that I was describing about the us and us is
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 2: that I realize there's only us, there's no them. All
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 2: of our world is about them, of creating them. The
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 2: artificiality that despots or autocrats always have to make of
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 2: that there's got to be an enemy out there in
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 2: order to do that, there's only us. And the important
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 2: obligation that we have is to is to tell our
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 2: stories to everybody. That is to say, I do not
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 2: wish to preach to the congregation, whatever my congregation is.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: I do not wish to preach to the choir. I
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 2: wish to say, we have an extraordinary country. I mean,
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 2: I'm I'm I'm interested in its voices. I realize I'm
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 2: interested in its complicated voices, the true, honest, complicated voices
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 2: of American history that's unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 2: equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest an
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 2: abiding faith in the human spirit, and particularly the remarkable
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 2: role this Republic plays in the positive progress of mankind.
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 2: That's that's my play. That's my sandbox. You know, it's
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 2: a great sandbox. You know, it's really it's great. And
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 2: you know, there's there's implied discipline in that. You know,
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 2: work with people, I mean for decades and decades, and
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 2: we work really hard, and we want to do a
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 2: good job. And it's sincere in that regard. And because
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 2: as I said, it's PBS with one foot tentatively in
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 2: the marketplace and the other proudly at you can make
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 2: decisions that don't have to do whether with you know,
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 2: whether it's going to enrich your bank account. I mean,
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 2: there are so many ways to measure richness that don't
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 2: have to do with the bottom line. And you know,
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 2: one of the things that Americans have done, we've incubated
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 2: lots of great ideas because of those two oceans and
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 2: those two relatively benignats. One of the things and Totaufeld
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 2: noticed this when he came through in the eighteen thirties.
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 2: We're so into money and the almighty dollar, he called it.
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 2: That was the religion of America, and that has its cost.
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 2: It obviously has some nice attributes.
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: But it's a spiritual costs.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 2: It has a spiritual cost that is profound.
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 2: The Old Testament again said it is easier for a
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 2: camel to pass through the eye of a needle than
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 2: a rich man to reach the Kingdom of heaven. Yeah,
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 2: and that's tough for Americans to hear. It is so
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 2: tough for Americans to hear, particularly since we have so
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 2: many preachers who are certain that it's okay to be both,
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 2: you know, and at some point you have to realize,
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 2: you know, something is lost. And there is richness in relationships.
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 2: There's richness in children, there's richness in art and associations,
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 2: in knowledge in I mean, your curiosity is so palpable,
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 2: you know. I was listening to you speaking to my
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 2: friend Elliott West, who's written about the Buffalo and Native
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 2: peoples and the sort of prehistory of the American West,
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 2: and you can just hear there is this paternatural sort
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 2: of interest in curiosity, and like, how does it work?
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 2: We're all given a really short period of time. And
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 2: the bad news is maybe it's the bad news, maybe
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 2: it's also the good news is none of us are
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 2: getting out of here alive, none of us. And then
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 2: it comes back to us, what are we going to do?
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 2: What are we going to do? And it doesn't matter.
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 2: You don't have to make documentary films, you don't have
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 2: to have radio shows. You can raise a child, you
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 2: can tend a garden, you can build a bridge. You know,
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 2: all of these things are legitimate. It just requires your
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 2: full attention and willingness to engage in that, whatever it
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 2: might be, whatever it is. I've got a friend in
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 2: my little town. I've known him for forty years. I
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 2: think we probably have opposite political views. I don't know,
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 2: but I adore this man. He builds stone walls. He's like,
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 2: if you come to my house and you see the
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 2: walls that he's built, it's like, you know, you don't
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 2: need to go to Chartra, notredm and just say, WHOA
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 2: Dougie did this really great job here?
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and you.
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 2: Just love him for that dedication to saying I can
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 2: just do this in this moment to the best of
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 2: my ability. People always say, do you ever go back
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 2: to your earlier films and want to change it? And
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 2: I go, no, Right, it's like a photo album where
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 2: you go back and you're wearing a Paisley shirt with
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 2: a big collar, and you go, who the hell thought
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 2: that was a good look? But you don't tear that
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 2: picture out of the album. You say, that's who I was.
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: That's the time, that's the time.
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 2: That's who I was.
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: What a extraordinary hypocrisy to have a rich preacher. I
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: was thinking that while you were saying that, you know,
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: based upon that biblical quote. What a bizarre, like blatant,
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: in your face hypocrisy you have a rich preacher.
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 2: Jesus Christ did not intend to start a religion. Other
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 2: people who liked what he said started a religion long
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 2: after he was crucified. So religions themselves, it is so
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 2: interesting that all of them that have at the root
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 2: of their their philosophy the exact same thing, exact same thing,
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 2: all of them you know about doing too others. It's
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 2: essentially about love, and yet religions seem to be sometimes
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 2: the cause of most of the pain in there. It
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 2: means that somewhere along the line from the original message
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 2: to the expression stuff gets corrupted, and you can convince
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 2: yourself that having as a guru in Oregon fifty two
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 2: rules races.
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: Or of a giant arena, or you have your congregation
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: meet you at every Sunday. It's just such a uniquely
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: American thing, the megachurch pastor and uniquely sort of adapted
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: to this ciz are society where the bottom line is numbers.
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: It's ones and zeros on a ledger.
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 2: It's important, you know, let's not downplay it.
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: Better than not having any money.
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 2: It's better than not having any money. Shouldn't be Shelby Foot,
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 2: who was our talking head in the Civil War, said
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 2: that money the only thing that could buy you is
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 2: privacy and service, meaning you know, you can get somebody
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 2: to mow your lawn if you need that to happen,
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 2: and you can be a little bit private. But if
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 2: you think it's going to be doing a lot lot
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 2: more than that, you've already begun to atrophy those that
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 2: awareness of being alive that I think everybody wants to feel,
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 2: that sense of vivifying oneness.
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: It's also a foolish pursuit to try to be better
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: than people by just having more numbers. It's a it's
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: a really crazy thing.
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 2: Do you know the poor in the United States, the
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 2: studies have shown give away well more of their disposable income.
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 2: You know, if you've got a hundred bucks and your
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 2: friend come up and says, hey, man, I need a
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 2: hundred bucks, you give a hundred bucks. If you've got
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 2: a thousand bucks and somebody goes up and says, hey,
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 2: I want a hundred bucks, you go, well, then I
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 2: will not have a thousand. I will have only nine hundred.
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 2: And this works all the way up to one hundred billion.
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 2: You're right, I know, I know that is it's it's
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 2: it's so interesting that that somehow this is what we
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 2: think is or or even the folks who are dedicated
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 2: to spending prolonging their lives with these these other things.
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 2: It meaning is the quality of life is the much
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 2: more important thing. Right? How generous you are? You know,
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 2: I always tell my girls when they're in trouble, I
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 2: said the three things, and and one is this won't last.
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 2: Get help from others, and be kind to yourself. You know,
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 2: just there's no yes butts to those I mean, which
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 2: is where where a teenager anxious, there's there's always or
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 2: an adult, there's always a kind of a yes. But
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 2: but you know, just things will change. It always does.
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 2: There's always change. Maybe gets worse, maybe gets better, probably
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 2: gets better. And it's no harm in reaching out to
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 2: other people. And the hardest thing it well, is to
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 2: be kind to yourself.
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: Yes, I say the same things, and I also say,
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: find something that you love, not that people love you
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: for right. Find the thing that you whatever, it is
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 1: like that you're uniquely drawn to, and let that change
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: over time. If you don't want if you don't love
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: that anymore and there's a new thing that you love,
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: pursue that. But find the thing that really calls to you.
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 2: This is what Robert Penwarren meant when he said to
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 2: me careerism is death. He just was saying, you gotta
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 2: find that thing. And people, when I talk to students,
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 2: they want to know how you know what the secret is.
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 2: There's only two secrets. One is to know yourself. And
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 2: that may be understanding that I thought I wanted to
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 2: be a filmmaker, but I don't have anything to say.
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 2: And it's perfectly legitimate to do something else to change
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 2: that thing. If you do it, and the others to
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 2: persevere because there's in every single situation much more, many
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 2: more people wanting to be in front of a mic
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 2: every day. Then there are the possibility of being in
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 2: front of the mic every day. So you have to
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 2: work at it really hard. You can't make assumptions about it.
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 2: Sometimes you have to do, you know. I sort of
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 2: felt like moving to New Hampshire was in The Godfather
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 2: going to the Mattresses. You know, It's like, Okay, I
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 2: got handed a job. I needed a job, and I
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 2: was just so worried about that. I was going to
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 2: put the film that I had shot for this first
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 2: film in the Brooklyn Bridge on top of my refrigerator
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 2: and I would just wake up and I'd be forty
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 2: five years old and I would have, you know, not
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 2: finished it. And so I got offered a job, which
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 2: was like, you know, being offered eight hundred thousand dollars
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 2: a year today, and I said no, and I moved
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 2: to New Hampshire where I could live for nothing and
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 2: finish the film.
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 1: And how did you choose New Hampshire.
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 2: I had a lot of friends. I had gone to
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 2: school in Western Massachusetts. I had a lot of friends
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 2: sort of hippies and others that sort of after sort
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 2: of alternative stuff that after they had not some had
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 2: gone to New York and pursued sort of traditional professional lives,
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 2: but others had become book salesmen or opened a natural
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 2: food store, were a weaver, or whatever it might be.
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 2: And so a lot of them gravitated in southern Vermont
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 2: and southern New Hampshire, a little kind of nice little nook.
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 2: And so I ended up going to this town and
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 2: had literally, I mean I walked in and rented the
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 2: house for the first few years, first few years, and
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 2: bought it after my daughters were born, and I've I've
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 2: been in the same bedroom for forty six years. Wow.
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 2: And I don't feel cut off or starved. I know
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 2: every part of the country. My films have covered every
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 2: part of the country. And part of the shoe leather
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 2: that we have to do with PBS, you know, because
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 2: they don't have the big budgets to mather the American
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 2: Revolution coming November sixteenth over every bus and subway and
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 2: billboard is You go out, you talk to people, and
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 2: that puts you in touch and at the same time
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 2: you have this place to retreat and restore and every
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 2: morning I take a three mile walk with my dog
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 2: into the into the you know what looks like eighteenth
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 2: century America? Wow, you know, I mean talk about rich.
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 2: That's rich, right.
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: You can't buy that, you can't. Yeah, that's really so
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: important really because it's like it's the greatest perspective enhancer
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: ever it is. I always say that about going to
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: the mountains. There's nothing different, there's nothing, there's nothing about
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: it that you can recreate artificially, like you you have
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: to go to the actual source of nature, the true
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 1: source of nature to really appreciate that. I think it's
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: like a vitamin. I think, just like you get vitamin
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: D from the sun. I think you get some thing
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: from actual pure nature.
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 2: I agree capital n nature, I agree completely. I think
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 2: you know, Americans, you know, Manifestocity basically says, see that
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 2: you know that river, let's damn it, see that forest,
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 2: Let's calculate the board feet, see that canyon. What minerals
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 2: can be extracted? And that's okay. And we've done that
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 2: with ninety eight percent of the of the of the
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 2: continentally the United States. But we also in the midst
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 2: of all of that set aside these places that were
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 2: so spectacularly beautiful, like Yosemite or Yellowstone, or the Grand
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 2: Canyon or Zion or Bryce or canyons, or the Everglades
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 2: or Acadia or Smokies, and just said, I want my
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 2: children and my children's children's children to be able to
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 2: see these.
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: That's one of the most extraordinary things about this country
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: is what Teddy Roosevelt did with national lands for.
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 2: The That's why I said, it's the it's the declaration
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 2: applied to the land. No other countries. We invented national parks.
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 2: Every other country is every other country has followed suit
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 2: because we were saying land does not belong to a monarch,
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 2: or to the nobleman, or to the very rich. And
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 2: just just reverse engineer that for a second and say, okay,
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 2: we don't have national parks. So Yosemite and Zion are
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 2: gated communities. You can't you maybe have one little observational
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 2: place along the Grand Canyon to look the Everglades where
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 2: is long ago drained in his golf courses and strip
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 2: malls and apartments.
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: It's one of the.
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 2: Most diverse ecological environments on Earth. As flat as it is,
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 2: it's just spectacularly diverse. It's kind now and the and
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 2: a Yellowstone would be a down on its luck heyday
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 2: in the nineteen fifties amusement place called Geyser World, you know.
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 2: And so, But it's not that you and I and
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 2: everyone within the sound of my voice own the most
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 2: beautiful spots on a continent, and I would argue, in
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 2: many cases the most beautiful spots on the Earth. Yeah,
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 2: it is pretty great, and it gives us that unfettered
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 2: ability to go into nature, to get off the trail,
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 2: which ninety percent, we can admit it. There's nothing wrong
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 2: with that. Ninety percent of the people's day within one
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 2: hundred yards of any trail. But to get off the
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 2: trail and go out and see the magnificence of this planet.
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 2: The Colorado River, Yeah, you stand, and you know. The
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 2: thing I like about the parks is that it isn't
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 2: just what you see, it's who you see it with.
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 2: Like you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon,
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 2: and the Colorado River exposes pre Cambrian Vishnu schist that
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 2: is one point seven billion years old. That's almost half
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 2: the age of the planet itself. But the Grand Canyon
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 2: works if you also are holding somebody's hand. Right, It's
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 2: like who you see it with becomes central to the
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 2: experience of it, miracle to a grand geological library, all
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 2: of the strata. It was like a library of telling
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 2: stories of what's going on. It's why I love American sports.
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 2: I really love them. But I focus on baseball because
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 2: in football, the description is, oh, you know, Joe Montana
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 2: threw to Jerry Rice with a few seconds left and
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 2: we scored a touchdown and we won, or Michael Jordan
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 2: hit the three pointer at the buzzer tongue wagging and
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 2: we won. But the baseball story always begins my mom
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 2: or my dad took me to this game, and I
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 2: remember walking out and seeing the green of the thing,
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 2: and then Babyirth hit a home run, or Hank Aaron
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 2: hit a home run, or somebody you know pitched a
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 2: perfect game. It's all gauged with who you see it
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 2: with as well as what the thing is.
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, baseball is a unique American pastime because it's boring,
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: you know, it's exciting.
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 2: Not it's not for those moments. It's not for those
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 2: of us who love it. And it was always the
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 2: national past time it's had competition. I think one of
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 2: the reasons why we sort of relegate it to this
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 2: thing is that it most of the other forms of entertainment,
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 2: particularly in sports, are a little bit more fast moving.
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 2: George will said to me, though, who's a big football fan.
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 2: He says, football has two of the worst features of
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 2: American life. Violence punctuated by frequent committee meetings. Right right,
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 2: what a great cuss fantastic Yeah, no, But but baseball
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 2: has this thing. It's it's the only sport in which
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 2: the defense has the ball, right, the person scores, not
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 2: the ball, right, And where do you go home home? Yeah?
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 2: And statistics matter, like maybe you know how many yards
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 2: Tom Brady has the greatest of all time. Probably you don't,
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 2: but you know how many home runs Babe Ruth Head
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 2: and how many home runs Hank Aaron Head? And you know,
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 2: these are things that matter. And if you look up
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 2: the nineteen nineteen World Series, it says that the Cincinnati
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 2: Red Stockings won the nineteen nineteen World Series. There's no asterisk.
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 2: But then those numbers require you to tell a story
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 2: about the Chicago White Sox known to us forever as
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 2: the Black Sox, who took money from Arnold Rustin and
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 2: other gamblers to throw the nineteen nineteen World Series and
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 2: give it to the much lesser team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings.
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 2: It is great that the statistics matter. A three hundred
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 2: hitter means the same thing to my dad as it
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 2: does to my grandfather and my great great grandfather and
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 2: my great great great great grandfather. But you still have
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 2: to tell stories.
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: Hmmm, yeah, it's I mean it. The stories are so
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: important to people too. I mean it just it's something
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: that is a part of their life that they tune
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: into to give their life more meaning. And that's something
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: that I never understood about tams when I was younger,
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: because I never liked them because I was always in
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: I always felt like I don't like team sports because
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: I don't want to lose because Billy drops the ball
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 1: in the back the outfield. Like I don't want to
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: be a loser because somebody else fucked up. I wanted
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: to be entirely dependent upon me. Then after a while
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: I started realizing, like, no, this there's a richness to
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: being a fan. There's a there's a quality of life
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 1: that comes there's an experience that comes from you everyone
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: being united in this thing, like wanting the team to win.
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: It doesn't exist in individual sports.
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 2: It doesn't. I agree with you completely. There's something wonderful.
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 2: I was just talking to my best friend about it
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 2: the other day that that that my daughter was at
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 2: school and she was the co captain, my oldest daughter,
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 2: of the of her softball game. And twenty five thirty
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 2: years ago, we went to some misty Saturday morning game
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 2: and it was like they were winning three to two
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 2: in the bottom of whatever the last inning was, and
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 2: the other team had the bases loaded and no outs,
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 2: and we got three fource outs and it was like
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 2: the girls just immediately burst into tears. But it was
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 2: just an amazing thing. Or just you're driving in a
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 2: in a you know, a suburban or or a city
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 2: area and there's a ball ball game going on and
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 2: you're kind of slow. You lift your foot off the
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 2: accelerator as the pitch goes, you know, as it goes
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 2: there's something suspended as the pitch is heading from the
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 2: pitcher to the bat or something, everything stops and possibility
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 2: is suddenly there in front of you. So why I
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 2: love the game so much.
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: It's just a game that if you try to introduce
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: it today, it would be very difficult to sell. You know.
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 2: It's so funny. I get to more often than not,
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 2: and haven't been in a while because I'm such a
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 2: dull boy and working so much to Funaway Park, and
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 2: it's always just filled with people, and it's always got
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 2: lots of kids, and they're always there because they want
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 2: to be. My screensaver of my phone. Are my two
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 2: daughters at a Red My two youngest daughters at a
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 2: Red Sox game. You know, ten or fifteen years ago.
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 2: I haven't been taking it off the thing.
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 2: This one's now a sophomore at Georgetown University, and this
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 2: one is going into ninth grade. But they were like
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 2: eight and thirteen then, and look at the expressions on
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 2: their face, just pure joy.
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I mean, it really is uniquely American, and
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 2: it's a company. Nearly every decade of our national narrative,
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 2: even into the seventeenth century, there are bits of pieces
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 2: in which there seems to be some stick and ball game.
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 2: And then before the Civil War, in the decades before
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 2: the Civil War, they begin to combine rounders sort of
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 2: a British schoolyard game with cricket and and do something
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 2: and it's a lot better than both called baseball. And
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 2: you know what, there's a guy in eighteen fifty eight
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 2: named Pete O'Brien. He said, you know, they don't play
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 2: baseball the way they u to when I was a kid.
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 2: This is eighteen fifty eight. I don't mean they don't
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 2: play it with the same with the same rules or
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 2: the same amount of it. They just lost the spirit
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 2: of it. So we've always been saying something's wrong, something's
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 2: gone out of the game, it's not quite right, and
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 2: there's always not true and just it continues on.
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: The steroid era, to me was really fascinating because one
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: of the things about baseball being so uniquely American is
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: that the idea of someone cheating at this uniquely American
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: thing was particularly offensive, whereas at the same time people
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: were one hundred percent taking steroids for football.
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and it was Bill Romanowski was you know,
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 2: there was bottom of the fold of the New York Times,
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 2: but as soon as the baseball player it was implicated,
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 2: it was the top of the fold. And that told
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 2: you even though the NFL had long overtaken baseball as
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 2: kind of the national pastime or football had done that.
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 2: And I think it has to do with the sense
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 2: that it, I mean, it does allow stealing of bases.
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 2: But you're absolutely right.
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: There is there.
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 2: Is that wonderful thing about baseball that it seems kind
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 2: of pure, it seems American, and.
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: His cheat is that.
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 2: And that's why, you know, I used to say, out
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 2: of some I'm embarrassed by the kind of arrogance of it.
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 2: I used to say, well, they should not, they should
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 2: let Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame after he dies.
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 2: Now he's died, and I'm I'm still I sort of
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 2: feel like, who am I to say that? Certainly the
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 2: Hall of Fame isn't like a list of angels. But
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 2: I also still I'm not sure he should go in
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 2: or sholess Joe Jackson. As much as you want to
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 2: resurrect the great story of the of the most promising
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 2: of the Chicago White Stockings in nineteen nineteen that through
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 2: the world Series the Black Stockings, I don't know. I mean,
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 2: it's very complicated. Will Will, Roger Clemens, Will, some of
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 2: these other people that we know we're using Barry Bonds
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 2: where he was Barry Bonds doing interviews is clearly arguably
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 2: the greatest player that's ever played baseball up and you
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 2: could even say to the moment he decided, he looks
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 2: at Maguire and so so he knows he's got tons
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 2: more talent than them, and they're getting all the attention,
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 2: and he says, I can do this. He's still got
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 2: He's right. Then he's a first ballot Hall of Famer
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 2: and would arguably if he just stopped right then and
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 2: just quit and said whatever. But decisions are made, and
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 2: then it becomes back to Shakespeare and negative capability and
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 2: can you hold intention? The great prodigious gifts and the
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 2: in this case, the sort of shortcut of the way
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 2: in which these gifts were corrupted.
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 1: Well, was so uniquely American that there was congressional hearings
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 1: on steroid use in a sport, Yeah, which was very strange.
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: And again while simultaneously it's ubiquitously used in football.
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 2: And you also live in a society in which you
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 2: take a pill to deal with erections, you take a
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 2: pill for this, you take you just the pill to sleep,
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 2: to wake up. We're all drug and once person made
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 2: in our tenth Inning, the update to the series on
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 2: Baseball that came out ninety four, tenth Inning came out
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 2: in twenty ten. They said, look, you know what if
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 2: you're a scrap scraping you know, middle infield or second
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 2: basement shortstop and the everybody's taking steroids in the clubhouse,
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 2: everybody knows about the baseball, is no rules against it
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 2: right now until And it's the difference between you getting
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 2: that four year, twenty eight million dollar contract that in
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 2: which your family is set for life. You're from the
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 2: Dominican Republic, you're from you know, wherever you're from, and
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 2: maybe ending up in triple A and that's it. Yeah,
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 2: And then you you realize, and you're being told by
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 2: every signal of society takes something to be better. This
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 2: then complicates the entire dynamic of our judgments, of the
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 2: facility of saying, oh, I'm really absolutely just I know this,
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 2: you know, And I realize the more I go, the
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 2: more disappointed I am in the arrogance of my certainty. Before,
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 2: you know, I think one of the big things is,
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 2: you know, we think that the opposite of faith is doubt.
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 2: Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty,
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 2: which destroys the mystery of the unknown. And so I'm
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 2: always taken aback, sometimes more often in retrospect than in
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 2: the moment when I could possibly do something about it,
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 2: that I have been more certain about something and less
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 2: trying to see it from another person's point of view
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 2: or from the other side of the coin, or whatever.
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: It might be.
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 2: Or maybe there's many different facets to these things, as
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 2: we were talking about with regard to the revolution and slavery,
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 2: and what responsibility of imposing the morality of this moment
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 2: on the previous moment? How much did that previous moment
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 2: already understand the morality of it? Which they did? What's
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 2: the right answer? And I think staying open to the
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 2: questions I know in filmmaking has made us better filmmakers.
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 2: And it's not a royal we I don't do this alone.
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 2: There are a lot of people that I work with,
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 2: their handmaids. It's a small little nucleus of people, but
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 2: they deserve credits. Writers and co directors and co producers
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 2: and people who are digging in the archive. Cinematographer I've
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 2: worked with for fifty two years.
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 1: I think this is so important for people to hear
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 1: because I think this very unique and noble perspective that
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: you have is why your work resonates so much with people.
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 2: I agree. I think what it is is that whatever
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 2: I don't want to say sacrifices, but whatever discipline has
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 2: been imposed in the process of whatever it is we do,
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 2: people recognize them and they know that they can see something.
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 2: They may not like all the aspects of it because
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 2: it is complicated, and you do see not just the
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 2: intimacy of the US, but you also see the complexity
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 2: and the contradiction and the controversy along with the majesty
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 2: of the US. It's all there. But I do think
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 2: that they know that we have earned their attention. That's
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 2: the biggest thing we have. Like you know this, You're
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 2: asking an extraordinary amount of people right this second. You're
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 2: asking them to devote their attention. I mean, the longest
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 2: episode I've ever done is like in two hours and
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 2: twenty minutes, two hours and thirty minutes. That required every
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 2: skill I had to be able to make that over
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 2: ten years of an episode the fourth episode of World
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 2: War two, a film called The War. But mostly it's
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 2: two hours, and it is a supreme compliment if somebody
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 2: will give me their attention for that amount of time
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 2: and then maybe for ten episodes or nine episodes, or
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 2: in the case of the American Revolution, just six for
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 2: a total of twelve hours. That is a huge, huge
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 2: responsibility of trying to keep trying to earn someone's attention,
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 2: and that's our job is really just making sure that
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 2: that person who does not know who's ignorant but curious,
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 2: which is of course perfectly fine. If you're wilfully ignorant,
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 2: I really can't help you. But if you're curious and ignorant,
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 2: then we want to make sure that if you've given
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 2: us your attention for this two hours of the first
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 2: episode of the Revolution, and then stay for all twelve
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 2: hours that you know, we want to make sure that
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 2: we've earned it in the simplest way. That the equation
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 2: is not at all above there's no communication in this world.
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 2: You already know this except among equals. Like if I
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 2: look up or down, already I've dislocated the possibility and
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 2: the only communication is among equals. And that's you treat
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 2: your audience like they know something, not that they're familiar
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 2: with this subject, but they're not stupid, and don't they
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 2: don't have to be added some sort of problem. You
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 2: don't have to simplify it. It can be complex, because
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 2: if it is, it'll they'll recognize either themselves or they'll
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 2: recognize somebody that they know that's very close to them.
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 2: And that's the essence of good story is it's human
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 2: beings telling stories about other human beings and what they
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 2: do that has a resonance that accruise like the layers
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 2: of a pearl, imperceptibly you can't identify, but you know.
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 2: And of course a pearl is based on an irritant,
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 2: a grain of sand that's bothering the hell out of that,
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 2: you know, oyster, right, You've you've created this gem out
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 2: of the friction and irritation and resistance and perseverance of
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 2: having to do something.
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: I think one of the most uniquely American stories that
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: you've told the story of Jack Johnson.
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's you know, it's interesting because one of the
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 2: great themes in American history is race. I mean, it's
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 2: obvious because we were founded on the ideal that all
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 2: men are created equal. And the guy who wrote that
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 2: sentence owned hundreds of human beings and didn't see fed
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 2: in his life time to free them. But you also
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 2: have individuality, and what is with Jack Johnson like a
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 2: like a good back boxing match. You have a black
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 2: man who also just wants to be a man, wants
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 2: to be fully himself. Now the society doesn't really want
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 2: him to do that, and they're going to put lots
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 2: of constraints, and he's going to overcome those constraints, and
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 2: then when he does, they're going to find another way
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 2: to box him in. But James Earl Jones was really
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 2: great on this. He was almost saying, do not just
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 2: be constantly distracted by the question of rays. This is
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 2: somebody who wanted to be a man, his own person,
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 2: and that a great deal of Jack Johnson and all
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 2: the trivials and all the things that he went through,
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 2: and all the great, great, great great skill. I mean
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 2: Muhammad Ali. We made a film on Ali too, which
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 2: I'm really really proud of. But he's clearly studied Jack Johnson.
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 2: He knew they would watch those films. Robodope is Jack Johnson.
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 2: A lot of that making wearing your opponent out is
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 2: Jack Johnson from you know, an earlier century. And this
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 2: is a time, I mean his heyday is between nineteen
• 2:00:41
  Speaker 2: oh five and nineteen fifteen, when more African Americans were
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 2: lynched for looking sideways at somebody, and he's openly defeating
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 2: every great white hope that came at him, and dating
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 2: white women and marrying white women. And so, you know,
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 2: we called the film it's you know, mostly we'd like
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 2: to have kind of boring things like the American Revolution,
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 2: brooklyn Bridge, Vietnam War. But we call that film Unforgivable Blackness,
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 2: the Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. And I did
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 2: that because the great black scholar W. E. B. Du
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 2: Bois at the turn of the twentieth century said boxing
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 2: is in great disfavor. Jack Johnson seems to be the cause.
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 2: But Jack Dunson did nothing that no other boxer or
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 2: sportsman or even senator is done. Why then, as it
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 2: come as it come to him, it all comes down
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 2: then to his unforgivable blackness, that by taking the crown,
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 2: by defeating all comers, it was an unacceptable situation when
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 2: in those days, being the heavyweight champion was there was
• 2:01:49
  Speaker 2: a sense of this was the supreme masculinity of the world,
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 2: and that everyone went out of their way, from John
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 2: Sullivan to others to avoid fighting a black man. And
• 2:01:59
  Speaker 2: finally somebody paid Tommy Burns guaranteed thirty thousand dollars to
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 2: fight Jack Johnson on boxing day, the day.
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: Always that today.
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 2: Oh my god, oh my god, millions and millions of dollars.
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 2: Jack only got five thousand dollars, but he's happy to
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 2: do it. He's been going after Tommy Burns. No relation
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 2: in Tommy Burns was the pseudonymic guy. Remember his name
• 2:02:21
  Speaker 2: of Canadian anyway in Australia. They fight on the day
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 2: after Christmas nineteen oh eight, and Jack Johnson's just twitter.
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 2: He could probably could have taken care of him in
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 2: the first inning, and he just keeps it going. They
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 2: finally caught the newsreels off. They actually stop the fight
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 2: because they do not want the public to see this.
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 2: And when after having digested, I think is a good word,
• 2:02:43
  Speaker 2: all of the white hopes that were thrown at him
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 2: in the intervieering intervening year and a half, they finally
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 2: convinced Jim Jefferies, the guy who'd retired undefeated, the previous
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 2: champion before Tommy Burns, to come out and then reno.
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 2: On July fourth, nineteen ten, the fight of the century,
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 2: Jack Johnson defeated at You know, no one thought it
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 2: would happen Jim Jefferies, and there were riots all across
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 2: the country, all across the country, white on black riots.
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 2: The Los Angeles Times wrote their lead editorial was a
• 2:03:20
  Speaker 2: word to the black man. Do not lift your chest
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 2: up too high. Do not put your face up to
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 2: the sun. Do not. You are still the same lowly
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 2: person you were yesterday, just because Jack Johnson, and I
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 2: mean the idea that you know it goes back to
• 2:03:38
  Speaker 2: this issue. Washington knew it was wrong, Jefferson knew what
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 2: was wrong. They made so much money it was really
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 2: hard to do this. I mean, Jefferson himself said, slavery
• 2:03:53
  Speaker 2: is like holding a wolf by the ears. You don't
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 2: like it, but you don't dare let it go. Right.
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 2: And so what happens is that somebody like an Abraham
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 2: Lincoln is born anti slavery, right, but they're also a
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 2: developing abolitionist movement. So now they want to abolish slavery.
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 2: They're not just against it and understand that it's a
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 2: moral God never nowhere does God say that black people
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 2: are inferior to white people. But what happens is, even
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 2: though most of the slavers know that it's wrong, but
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 2: there's so many good profits to make. What happens when
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 2: the abolitions come along that they begin to make arguments
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 2: that slavery is actually good and that black people are
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 2: in fact inferior. And so one of the reasons why
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 2: the Civil War happens is this sense of threat to
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 2: their economic power, which are the four million people in
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 2: the nine million populated South that are owned by other
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 2: human beings. And it's an extraordinary dynamic. We face it today,
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 2: the reverberations. And Jack Johnson, I think is one of
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 2: those magnific deficient cases where it just he defies your
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 2: ability to put it in a neat cupyhole. It defies
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 2: your ability to make it binary. Like we live in
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 2: this media culture, right, we live in a computer world.
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 2: Everything's at one or a zero. Everything's a red state
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 2: or blue state. Everything's younger, old, gayor street. It's not
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 2: that way. And so to tell a complex story of history,
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 2: particularly like of Jack Johnson, is just to have your
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 2: molecules rearrange. You know, it really is exhilarating. I probably
• 2:05:31
  Speaker 2: said that word too many times. It's exhilarating.
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 1: I think he's also one of the rare cultural figures
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 1: that where a sports figure defines a time, much like
• 2:05:43
  Speaker 1: Muhammad Ali defined the Vietnam era. Like Muhammad Ali. When
• 2:05:48
  Speaker 1: I was a child, my parents were hippies and they
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 1: never cared about sports at all, except when Muhammad Ali
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: lost to Leon Spinks and then had the rematch we
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 1: all watch. Yeah, I remember this being a child, thinking
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: how strange it was that my parents were so invested
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 1: in Muhammad Ali. But what they were invested in is
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 1: this man that risked his entire career and lively. They
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: took his livelihood for three years for protesting the Vietnam
• 2:06:18
  Speaker 1: War and refusing to go fight, and it was a
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: big thing because he was a cultural hero. It wasn't
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: just that he was the best boxer ever. He was
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: also this guy that said, I'm not doing this. The
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 1: Vietnamese people didn't do anything to me, I'm not participating this,
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 1: I'm not gonna go kill anybody. I'm not doing this.
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 1: And we were all like yes, And then they took
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: his livelihood away and he became a martyr. He became
• 2:06:41
  Speaker 1: a hero and spoke out against the war and then
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 1: it was three solid years in his prime before he
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: came back.
• 2:06:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an amazing story, and we told it just
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 2: a few years ago in a four part eight hour series.
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 2: I I agree with you. I'm a little bit older.
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 2: I remember when Sonny Listened and then Cashus Clay fought
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 2: in Miami, and he was such a new commodity. He
• 2:07:11
  Speaker 2: was rocking the boat with this verbal onslaught that we
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 2: were for a nano second sorry that Sonny Liston lost
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 2: because he was the person that we were familiar with.
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 2: We knew this kind of black man and we did
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 2: not know this other, scarier verbal person. And almost instantly,
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 2: and my dad was an anthropologist. I mean, this was boxing.
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 2: He was not doing this thing. But from then on
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 2: we became just loyal. We watched all the stuff through
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 2: the sixties and then saw his opposition into the war
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 2: and then he said, you know, you could come and
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 2: mow me down with a machine gun. I'm not going
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 2: to go. And the ABC did some interviews with black
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 2: soldiers in Vietnam and they all to a person said
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 2: this is why I'm fighting, this is why I'm here
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 2: fighting for him to say I don't want to be here. Wow,
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 2: And I just thought it was great. And I also
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 2: wanted to do this because nobody people had done certain fights,
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 2: people had done his fight with the government. I wanted
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 2: to do Soup the Nuts. We wanted to do Soup
• 2:08:14
  Speaker 2: to nuts. My daughter, oldest daughter, Sarah, and my son
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 2: in law, David McMahon. We made the film from the
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 2: birth to the death. This guy is in the late sixties,
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 2: the most hated man in America for that stance that
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 2: you were describing about the drug, and he dies the
• 2:08:29
  Speaker 2: most beloved person on the planet. And I really loved
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 2: the idea. I love the opportunity of being able to
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 2: show how that happened in the midst of you know,
• 2:08:39
  Speaker 2: they call it the sweet science, but there are some fights.
• 2:08:43
  Speaker 2: The three fights with Frasier are like as brutal as
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 2: anything you could ever possibly imagine. And what they went
• 2:08:51
  Speaker 2: through and what he ultimately clearly in retrospect lost as
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 2: a result of winning two of the three of the
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 2: fights is one of those miraculous stories. And I agree,
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 2: like Jack Johnson is defining an age and so interesting
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 2: that it's in a marginalized activity even back then, like
• 2:09:14
  Speaker 2: heavyweight boxing.
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 1: Well marginalized but still elevated. The heavyweight champion of the
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: world was still the baddest man on the planet, and
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 1: people still wanted to watch it. But it was thought
• 2:09:25
  Speaker 1: to be a back room, sort of darkly lit dingy pursuit.
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 1: You learned it in the dangerous gyms. It's not something
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 1: that you learn on a college campus with educated professors
• 2:09:40
  Speaker 1: and analysts that have reviewed proper technique, which is how
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 1: they teach in Russia. You know, Russia has a very
• 2:09:50
  Speaker 1: like technical version of it what they do in America's
• 2:09:53
  Speaker 1: well too now, but not back then.
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 2: Now.
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 1: Back then it was it was the dark dingy gym's
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 1: mob run.
• 2:09:59
  Speaker 2: Boarding world, and you were there. There were gamblers, there
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 2: are women of the night. It was, you know, money
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 2: was being mob lots of lots of throne fights, and
• 2:10:11
  Speaker 2: it was in the interest. It was so interesting that
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 2: that emerged this person who was so resolutely himself, just
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 2: as Muhammad Ali would.
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 1: Be decades later.
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 2: It's why I'm drawn to it. I'm not a big
• 2:10:22
  Speaker 2: fan of boxing, but irresistant, we can't take your eyes
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 2: away from these two men when they're fighting their first
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 2: of all spectacular specimens, and they are amazing fighters. They
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 2: changed the whole dynamic. And as you said, there's no
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 2: greater boxer than Muhammad Ali.
• 2:10:38
  Speaker 1: Well, the really terrible thing is Muhammad Ali's best years
• 2:10:42
  Speaker 1: were taken from him. Yeah, because if you go to
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven. I've talked about this numerous times on
• 2:10:47
  Speaker 1: the podcast, when he fought Cleveland Big Cat Williams. Yeah,
• 2:10:51
  Speaker 1: that fight was one of the most extraordinary performances of
• 2:10:54
  Speaker 1: any heavyweight ever. It was Cleveland was a dangerous guy,
• 2:10:58
  Speaker 1: like vicious knocky puncher. He was a real specimen himself,
• 2:11:02
  Speaker 1: Yes he was. And Alie toyed with him, I mean
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 1: toyed with him, just boxed his face off, knocked him out,
• 2:11:09
  Speaker 1: moving backwards, just just picked him apart, popped him and
• 2:11:14
  Speaker 1: showed movement and speed and agility and technique that we
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 1: had never seen from a heavyweight ever. He was the greatest,
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 1: the greatest, the greatest, and then three solid years. But
• 2:11:25
  Speaker 1: here's my taty.
• 2:11:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is what makes him so great.
• 2:11:29
  Speaker 2: This is like Ted Williams, only much bigger because Ted
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 2: Williams loses a lot of time to World War Two
• 2:11:35
  Speaker 2: and to Korea and comes back and you know, still
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 2: hits you know, three fifty or whatever it is he
• 2:11:41
  Speaker 2: hits for the Red Sox. Having lost what you'd consider
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 2: the prime of his career in his early days in
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 2: World War two and then and as a fighter, this
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 2: is not like the Goodwill Ambassador. He's flying fighter, bombing runs,
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 2: you know what I mean. He's like really it's every
• 2:11:56
  Speaker 2: time he can not come back and he's he's magnificent stuff,
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 2: but it's not denying it as they did in both
• 2:12:03
  Speaker 2: Jack Johnson. They took away his title and he was
• 2:12:06
  Speaker 2: fallow from nineteen twelve to nineteen fifteen. And finally they
• 2:12:11
  Speaker 2: put him in the ring in Havana with Jess Willard,
• 2:12:13
  Speaker 2: who's a younger guy's one hundred and five degrees one
• 2:12:15
  Speaker 2: hundred and ten degrees on the canvas. They're going to
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 2: go forty rounds after the twenty six This guy who's
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 2: got ten years on Jess Willard, he's thirty seven. Willard's
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 2: twenty seven.
• 2:12:25
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 2: Willard finally gets in a thing and this's like, oh
• 2:12:28
  Speaker 2: thank god. And they would not let another black man
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 2: fight for a heavyweight champion until he was not Jack Johnson,
• 2:12:35
  Speaker 2: that is to say, until he was Joe Lewis. Light skinned,
• 2:12:40
  Speaker 2: couldn't be seen with a white woman, couldn't smile at
• 2:12:43
  Speaker 2: his victories, and Lewis agreed to all of this. So
• 2:12:46
  Speaker 2: it was the unspoken unwritten rule that you couldn't be
• 2:12:49
  Speaker 2: in your face black man, and that sort of obtained
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 2: for a couple of decades, and then Ali came and
• 2:12:55
  Speaker 2: he said, bro bultamote and essentially basically they used to sit.
• 2:13:00
  Speaker 2: When he was training. Ali was training, there'd be ghost
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 2: in the house. Ghost in the house, and that meant
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 2: that Jack Johnson was there. Oh, and that Ali had
• 2:13:11
  Speaker 2: to be that much better. Wow, ghost in the house.
• 2:13:14
  Speaker 1: Wow. The Ali of three years later was a completely
• 2:13:17
  Speaker 1: different fighter. Unfortunately physically he didn't look the same because
• 2:13:21
  Speaker 1: he didn't train for three years. He didn't do anything,
• 2:13:24
  Speaker 1: and he lost everything. I mean, he still was one
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 1: of the greatest. I mean, still was able to be
• 2:13:28
  Speaker 1: Joe Louis, still was able to be George Foreman. But
• 2:13:32
  Speaker 1: he is a different fighter. He didn't move the same way,
• 2:13:35
  Speaker 1: he didn't have the same physical build, he didn't look
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 1: as good. He'd lost three solid years in his prime
• 2:13:41
  Speaker 1: of training.
• 2:13:42
  Speaker 2: And it makes those post Vietnam years even more spectacular.
• 2:13:48
  Speaker 2: The fact that he could prevail over Frasier and over
• 2:13:52
  Speaker 2: I mean that the Rumbulands of Jungle.
• 2:13:55
  Speaker 1: Is just crazy, crazy crazy. What he did. Yeah, he
• 2:14:00
  Speaker 1: did well. Nobody thought he was gonna win.
• 2:14:01
  Speaker 2: No one thought he was, including Hunter S.
• 2:14:03
  Speaker 1: Thompson, who famously sabotaged his career by not covering the fight.
• 2:14:07
  Speaker 1: He was sent over there to cover the fight and
• 2:14:09
  Speaker 1: instead decided to swim in the pool and drink yeah
• 2:14:12
  Speaker 1: because he didn't want to watch Allie get destroyed. Yeah. I. Meanwhile,
• 2:14:15
  Speaker 1: he missed.
• 2:14:16
  Speaker 2: One of the greatest fights of I remember I was
• 2:14:19
  Speaker 2: in college still and we got soundless, black and white
• 2:14:25
  Speaker 2: footage of the fight, some of it in slow motion,
• 2:14:29
  Speaker 2: and my film teacher showed it to us and none
• 2:14:33
  Speaker 2: of us were interested. I was like, whoa, this is
• 2:14:35
  Speaker 2: stuff I did with my dad ten years before, and
• 2:14:38
  Speaker 2: it was him delivering a blow to Foreman and seeing
• 2:14:45
  Speaker 2: in slow motion this halo of sweat coming off the
• 2:14:51
  Speaker 2: afro of George Foreman. I mean, I will never forget
• 2:14:55
  Speaker 2: just the spectator, almost the beauty of this incredibly brutal sport.
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 1: Mmmmm yeah, incredibly brutal, brutal, but in those moments it
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 1: elevated everybody who watched it. That's the crazy irony of
• 2:15:12
  Speaker 1: it all. It's like, in this brutality, this beatdown of
• 2:15:14
  Speaker 1: another man, everybody who watched it was elevated. It's it's
• 2:15:18
  Speaker 1: because someone did something that we thought was impossible, exactly,
• 2:15:21
  Speaker 1: and it was that person who did it, this guy
• 2:15:24
  Speaker 1: who stood up against the Vietnam War. And you know,
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 1: at the time, we didn't realize how bad the Vietnam
• 2:15:30
  Speaker 1: War would look retrospectively. Yeah.
• 2:15:33
  Speaker 2: No, he did not enjoy any benefit of the doubt. No,
• 2:15:38
  Speaker 2: it was really it was another time of division and
• 2:15:42
  Speaker 2: people exploiting division and making them. He was the worst
• 2:15:46
  Speaker 2: them that there possibly could be. And I think the
• 2:15:50
  Speaker 2: fact that he was able to stick to his guns.
• 2:15:53
  Speaker 2: I mean, he could have said, Okay, I will go
• 2:15:55
  Speaker 2: and do goodwill stuff and it would have been all
• 2:15:58
  Speaker 2: over it. No, I'm not right. Famously, no Vietnamese ever
• 2:16:02
  Speaker 2: called me the N word.
• 2:16:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And just the fact that at the time we
• 2:16:07
  Speaker 1: didn't understand, we were still locked into this perception of
• 2:16:11
  Speaker 1: military conflict being like World War Two, where was imperative
• 2:16:16
  Speaker 1: to save the world from communism, and that there was
• 2:16:19
  Speaker 1: a real problem, there's a real threat to the American
• 2:16:21
  Speaker 1: way of life in America as a whole. That was
• 2:16:24
  Speaker 1: going on in Vietnam, which now seems absurd.
• 2:16:28
  Speaker 2: It seems absurd. There's a wonderful parallel. I mean when
• 2:16:31
  Speaker 2: I said that. Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself,
• 2:16:33
  Speaker 2: but at rhymes like we have a failed invasion of
• 2:16:36
  Speaker 2: Canada in the in the American Revolution, there's a big
• 2:16:40
  Speaker 2: debate over inoculation, there's an eclipse that takes place, you know,
• 2:16:43
  Speaker 2: all of this sort of stuff. And there's always an
• 2:16:46
  Speaker 2: interesting thing is that, particularly in New Jersey and South Carolina,
• 2:16:50
  Speaker 2: the British are always talking about we have now pacified
• 2:16:53
  Speaker 2: New Jersey, the province of New Jersey, we have now
• 2:16:56
  Speaker 2: pacified the province of South Carolina. And then all of
• 2:16:58
  Speaker 2: a sudden they have to admit that it's unpacified because
• 2:17:01
  Speaker 2: the patriots have taken over and done all this guerrilla
• 2:17:04
  Speaker 2: warfare that has made it unpacified. And at one point,
• 2:17:07
  Speaker 2: George the Third and many others within the British government
• 2:17:10
  Speaker 2: are worried about what we would call the Domino theory.
• 2:17:13
  Speaker 2: If we lose them, then we're gonna lose Ireland. And
• 2:17:15
  Speaker 2: if we lose Ireland, we're gonna lose Gibaltar, and we're
• 2:17:17
  Speaker 2: gonna lose the subcontinent of Indian and we're gonna lose
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 2: and so you go, there's nothing new under the sun.
• 2:17:24
  Speaker 1: Right The Vietnam war and your eighteen hour piece on
• 2:17:31
  Speaker 1: the Vietnam War is it's one of the more confusing
• 2:17:35
  Speaker 1: aspects of the United States history because like looking at
• 2:17:40
  Speaker 1: it today, it doesn't make any sense how we sold this.
• 2:17:43
  Speaker 2: And every president from Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, even
• 2:17:49
  Speaker 2: Ford never told us the complete truth about it right
• 2:17:52
  Speaker 2: and did stuff that got Americans killed, unless of other
• 2:17:58
  Speaker 2: people killed over what would have been where there's a
• 2:18:01
  Speaker 2: Geneva convention in fifty four that basically said we could
• 2:18:05
  Speaker 2: separate into two places. And in two years we had
• 2:18:08
  Speaker 2: an election which everyone knew Ho Chi Minh would win.
• 2:18:10
  Speaker 2: If he left it at that, we'd be talking about
• 2:18:13
  Speaker 2: three million people still walking the earth at least crazy crazy,
• 2:18:18
  Speaker 2: And the communist Chinese and the Soviets were very suspicious
• 2:18:23
  Speaker 2: of Ho Chi Minh. They thought he's not a communist,
• 2:18:25
  Speaker 2: he's just a nationalist, and he knew. I'll tell you
• 2:18:31
  Speaker 2: the day that the Japanese surrendered in Tokyo Bay officially
• 2:18:37
  Speaker 2: was September second, nineteen forty five. That same day, in
• 2:18:41
  Speaker 2: Baden Square in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence,
• 2:18:50
  Speaker 2: and he quoted Thomas Jefferson whoa and standing next to
• 2:18:54
  Speaker 2: him were OSS guys. By the end of September, the
• 2:18:57
  Speaker 2: State Department having realized, oh, this World War two is over,
• 2:19:03
  Speaker 2: but we're going to be in a new they didn't
• 2:19:05
  Speaker 2: call it Cold War yet, but we're going to be
• 2:19:07
  Speaker 2: in an epic struggle all around the world with communism.
• 2:19:11
  Speaker 2: And this guy has been to Moscow and whatever, so
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 2: he must be a communist. And so all of a sudden,
• 2:19:16
  Speaker 2: the State Department THESS had saved his life, that parachuted
• 2:19:20
  Speaker 2: into northern Vietnam looking for people that could could mobilize
• 2:19:24
  Speaker 2: in their help against the Japanese and found a second
• 2:19:28
  Speaker 2: dying Ho Chi Minh. We don't know what is malaria
• 2:19:30
  Speaker 2: or whatever, treated him and brought him back and he
• 2:19:33
  Speaker 2: was he didn't see us as the enemy. And yet
• 2:19:37
  Speaker 2: we in those two years in fifty six, when they
• 2:19:40
  Speaker 2: should have held an election, we had already decided to
• 2:19:42
  Speaker 2: place our bets with No Ding Zim, who was a
• 2:19:47
  Speaker 2: corrupt South Vietnamese politician who would eventually be assassinated by
• 2:19:52
  Speaker 2: a general who would be a one in a series
• 2:19:54
  Speaker 2: of generals until we got.
• 2:19:55
  Speaker 1: You and Key.
• 2:19:56
  Speaker 2: And those are the people who took us out of
• 2:19:59
  Speaker 2: it or or were on their watch when when the
• 2:20:03
  Speaker 2: North Vietnamese, you know, finally united their country. It's just
• 2:20:08
  Speaker 2: and the lying. You know that we have the tapes
• 2:20:11
  Speaker 2: of Johnson and of Nixon, and it just you know,
• 2:20:17
  Speaker 2: there's an arrogance to record yourself for posterity, you know,
• 2:20:21
  Speaker 2: and you be careful what you say. The some of
• 2:20:23
  Speaker 2: the things that not all of them have been listened to,
• 2:20:26
  Speaker 2: they haven't all been transcribed, and we were fortunate to
• 2:20:28
  Speaker 2: spend a lot of time just listening and listening and
• 2:20:30
  Speaker 2: finding just some stuff that, you know, if Nixon and
• 2:20:33
  Speaker 2: Kissinger had walked into the peace talks that were already
• 2:20:36
  Speaker 2: started in January of sixty nine and taken the terms
• 2:20:40
  Speaker 2: that the North Vietnamese were offering, they would have had
• 2:20:43
  Speaker 2: better terms than what they had in seventy three, and
• 2:20:46
  Speaker 2: there would be fewer Americans, a lot more Americans alive,
• 2:20:49
  Speaker 2: twenty five thousand more Americans alive, something like that, and
• 2:20:51
  Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laocean sing Cambodians. But they
• 2:20:55
  Speaker 2: didn't want to be the first president to lose a war.
• 2:20:59
  Speaker 2: In fact, they'd all Eddie soured the South Vietnamese, they said,
• 2:21:03
  Speaker 2: as Humphrey was coming up in the pulse. He only
• 2:21:06
  Speaker 2: lost yero point seven points of a percentage in the election.
• 2:21:12
  Speaker 2: He'd been way behind. It was making a lot of speed,
• 2:21:14
  Speaker 2: and a lot of it had to do with what people
• 2:21:16
  Speaker 2: perceived as progress in Paris and the Nixon administration or
• 2:21:19
  Speaker 2: not administration. The Republican part of the Nixon's election came
• 2:21:24
  Speaker 2: reached out through an Inner maryediary to the South Aetnamese
• 2:21:27
  Speaker 2: government and said, boycott the talks in Paris, and if
• 2:21:32
  Speaker 2: you'd had another week or two to the election, you
• 2:21:35
  Speaker 2: would have had Hubert Humphrey as president, or if they
• 2:21:38
  Speaker 2: hadn't reached out to the South Vietnamese. And Johnson got
• 2:21:42
  Speaker 2: it on tape. They were taping the South Vietnamese embassy
• 2:21:46
  Speaker 2: in Washington and the Palace in Saigon, and he knew it,
• 2:21:50
  Speaker 2: and he called up Nixon, there's a tape, and he
• 2:21:52
  Speaker 2: goes and he goes, oh, I would never do anything
• 2:21:54
  Speaker 2: like that. And Johnson either pissed off at Humphrey because
• 2:21:58
  Speaker 2: he's not as much as a hawk as Johnson had become,
• 2:22:01
  Speaker 2: or more than likely unwilling to admit to your allies
• 2:22:05
  Speaker 2: that you had been taping them in their own embassy
• 2:22:09
  Speaker 2: in Washington and their own palace in Saigon did not
• 2:22:12
  Speaker 2: tell the truth of what he knew that Richard Nixon
• 2:22:15
  Speaker 2: had essentially reached out to a foreign power at the
• 2:22:18
  Speaker 2: time of a national election to try to influence that election. Wow. Yeah,
• 2:22:22
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's just endless.
• 2:22:24
  Speaker 1: And the reverberations. Like the one thing that it did
• 2:22:28
  Speaker 1: that I think is like so pivotal is it destroyed
• 2:22:31
  Speaker 1: the faith that the United States citizens had.
• 2:22:34
  Speaker 2: In its government telling them the truth.
• 2:22:37
  Speaker 1: And then engaging in military activities because we had always
• 2:22:40
  Speaker 1: thought we were a just government, we were a just society,
• 2:22:44
  Speaker 1: and that if we got into World War two, it
• 2:22:46
  Speaker 1: was to save the world. If we got into Vietnam,
• 2:22:48
  Speaker 1: it was to save the world. Oh no, it wasn't.
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 1: Not only that we got in on a lie. We
• 2:22:52
  Speaker 1: got literally got into the war on a false flag.
• 2:22:55
  Speaker 1: So it was entirely engineered. And then there was also
• 2:22:58
  Speaker 1: the heroin production, which was a big part of the
• 2:23:00
  Speaker 1: whole thing, the heroin trade. There was money that was
• 2:23:05
  Speaker 1: being allocated to various individuals through the heroin trade that
• 2:23:09
  Speaker 1: was facilitating a lot of it very confusing stuff. When
• 2:23:13
  Speaker 1: you look at it over time and you look back
• 2:23:15
  Speaker 1: at it, you're like what would the United States look
• 2:23:20
  Speaker 1: like had clear heads prevailed? What would we look like today?
• 2:23:24
  Speaker 2: The counterfactory, Well, I think we'd be less divided. I
• 2:23:27
  Speaker 2: think a good deal of the divisions now we're sort
• 2:23:29
  Speaker 2: of born in there, the drench positions that people take. Now,
• 2:23:33
  Speaker 2: I think there's also a sense, you know, the Pentagon
• 2:23:35
  Speaker 2: Papers were McNamara going to a gentleman that we interviewed,
• 2:23:41
  Speaker 2: Rubbert Garde, and saying, I need to find out all
• 2:23:44
  Speaker 2: the decisions. And he learned not only was he lying
• 2:23:49
  Speaker 2: at times, you know, going and getting battlefield reports and
• 2:23:52
  Speaker 2: then coming back and saying it's all rosy, but everybody
• 2:23:54
  Speaker 2: had been lying back to the Truman administration about what
• 2:23:58
  Speaker 2: was going on, and it was just a series of lies.
• 2:24:01
  Speaker 2: And that's what when they asked the Rand Corporation to
• 2:24:04
  Speaker 2: sort of analyze some of the data, that's when Daniel Ellsberg,
• 2:24:08
  Speaker 2: who worked for the Rand Corporation, surreptitiously illegally copied them
• 2:24:12
  Speaker 2: and then released them to various newspapers, and they became
• 2:24:18
  Speaker 2: you know, what we call the Pentagon Papers, but they
• 2:24:20
  Speaker 2: were always the Pentagon papers, and they detail exactly what
• 2:24:25
  Speaker 2: you just described, just a complete presidence, you know, presidence
• 2:24:30
  Speaker 2: of both parties, a military industrial community. You know when
• 2:24:33
  Speaker 2: when when Eisenhower leaves, just before he leaves, he warns
• 2:24:36
  Speaker 2: of the military industrial complex. Yeah, he's not saying this
• 2:24:40
  Speaker 2: is something that happened last Thursday, right, he's saying, this
• 2:24:43
  Speaker 2: happened the second World War two was.
• 2:24:45
  Speaker 1: Over, well even before that, Butler talked about it in
• 2:24:48
  Speaker 1: thirty three people.
• 2:24:50
  Speaker 2: There was so much money to be made that nobody
• 2:24:54
  Speaker 2: wanted to ramp down the armaments. And so you end
• 2:24:58
  Speaker 2: up having these proxy wars. You end up having, you know,
• 2:25:01
  Speaker 2: these places where you're going to not have a hot
• 2:25:05
  Speaker 2: war because that means the end of the world in
• 2:25:08
  Speaker 2: a world of nuclear weapons, but you're going to fight
• 2:25:11
  Speaker 2: these proxy wars in different places. And in Kennedy, it's
• 2:25:14
  Speaker 2: a doctrine that Eisenhower and Kennedy and they all sort
• 2:25:17
  Speaker 2: of embrace and figure out that they that they can
• 2:25:20
  Speaker 2: do it. And then of course Johnson, who you know,
• 2:25:23
  Speaker 2: Kennedy inherits seven hundred advisers from Eisenhower, Johnson inherits seventeen
• 2:25:28
  Speaker 2: thousand advisors now in quotes when he comes in and
• 2:25:32
  Speaker 2: he still has to wait until he wins reelection overwhelmingly
• 2:25:37
  Speaker 2: a year later, and it's only into the following March
• 2:25:40
  Speaker 2: of sixty five that he commits ground forces, first Army
• 2:25:43
  Speaker 2: and first Marines and then Army to Vietnam. And then
• 2:25:48
  Speaker 2: we have the boots on the ground. Even though we'd
• 2:25:50
  Speaker 2: had boots on the ground for a long time and
• 2:25:52
  Speaker 2: engaged in combat, these advisors were very much engaged in
• 2:25:56
  Speaker 2: that sort of stuff. And then it just gets escalates.
• 2:25:58
  Speaker 2: You know, that's the peak. It's well over five hundred
• 2:26:01
  Speaker 2: and fifty thousand soldiers in American soldiers in country.
• 2:26:04
  Speaker 1: Insane, insane. It's also you know, the coming to fruition
• 2:26:08
  Speaker 1: of Eisenhower's warnings. And then this inspires this counterculture of
• 2:26:16
  Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties that short reshapes art reshapes, culture reshapes
• 2:26:21
  Speaker 1: rock and roll, politics, politics, everything, everything changes. And then
• 2:26:25
  Speaker 1: you know, Nixon comes along and to stop the anti
• 2:26:30
  Speaker 1: war movement, to stop the civil rights movement, puts these
• 2:26:33
  Speaker 1: sweeping Schedule one drug acts on all these different you know, psilocybin,
• 2:26:40
  Speaker 1: all these LSD, all these different things that they believe
• 2:26:43
  Speaker 1: these people were involved in, so that they could start
• 2:26:45
  Speaker 1: arresting people and sort of throw water on the entire movement.
• 2:26:49
  Speaker 1: And it's effective.
• 2:26:51
  Speaker 2: It is so interesting to look. And I've got up
• 2:26:53
  Speaker 2: in my office this wonderful two framed maps, if you will,
• 2:26:57
  Speaker 2: and they're the inter twine of the various two parties,
• 2:27:02
  Speaker 2: the Democrats and the Republicans over time. So the Republicans
• 2:27:05
  Speaker 2: are the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party of emancipation
• 2:27:09
  Speaker 2: of whatever, and the party that invented progressivism. In the
• 2:27:12
  Speaker 2: first part of the twentieth century, Democrats had been not
• 2:27:17
  Speaker 2: that place, but in the sixties it began to change
• 2:27:19
  Speaker 2: thanks to Lyndon Johnson of Austin, Texas, who understood that
• 2:27:26
  Speaker 2: it was the right thing to do to put in
• 2:27:27
  Speaker 2: those civil rights and voting rights acts and other things
• 2:27:30
  Speaker 2: that we call part of his Great Society by a
• 2:27:33
  Speaker 2: film by the way, that we're working on now, will
• 2:27:35
  Speaker 2: be out in a few years. But he knew that
• 2:27:40
  Speaker 2: the bargain would be to give up the solid South.
• 2:27:43
  Speaker 2: I mean, you woke up on election day if you're
• 2:27:45
  Speaker 2: a Democrat and you had every one of the states
• 2:27:47
  Speaker 2: of the former Confederacy, all of them, all of them
• 2:27:51
  Speaker 2: in your tally, and that's flipped. And now you wake
• 2:27:54
  Speaker 2: up on election day and you more or less have
• 2:27:57
  Speaker 2: had have all the states of the former Confederacy on
• 2:28:00
  Speaker 2: the Republican side who abandoned what they were about. And
• 2:28:04
  Speaker 2: it's interesting to see in which for self interest, for
• 2:28:07
  Speaker 2: whatever I mean, Nixon begins it. Jackie Robinson is a
• 2:28:12
  Speaker 2: Lincoln Republican, didn't go over as many black people did
• 2:28:15
  Speaker 2: to FDR during the New Deal. He was supporting Nixon
• 2:28:18
  Speaker 2: for president, but Nixon wouldn't come to Carloman campaign. Wow.
• 2:28:23
  Speaker 2: So he ended up voting for Kennedy. And he and
• 2:28:27
  Speaker 2: Goldwater fully understood that we're just going to now switch
• 2:28:32
  Speaker 2: the Republican Party and go after just white voters who
• 2:28:35
  Speaker 2: are disaffected with changes and civil rights. And so it's
• 2:28:39
  Speaker 2: it's an interesting story of the way in which parties
• 2:28:43
  Speaker 2: can change places and be the very opposite of the
• 2:28:47
  Speaker 2: thing they were yeah just a few years before.
• 2:28:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because they're all gross.
• 2:28:54
  Speaker 2: Well, I just find the thing is, you know, the
• 2:28:56
  Speaker 2: bad word is progressive today and this is this is
• 2:28:59
  Speaker 2: the you know, the Republican Party invented progressivism and they
• 2:29:04
  Speaker 2: joined forces with some more liberal Democrats in the big cities. Right,
• 2:29:09
  Speaker 2: But the opposition to the Civil Rights Bill is coming
• 2:29:13
  Speaker 2: from Southern Democrats, and it's Lyndon Johnson knowing that he
• 2:29:20
  Speaker 2: will have to use every bit of his powers of
• 2:29:22
  Speaker 2: persuasion to get it over, and he will require lots
• 2:29:24
  Speaker 2: of Republican votes and he does. So you do have
• 2:29:27
  Speaker 2: something positive happening in American history where the two parties
• 2:29:31
  Speaker 2: are coming together and not just lockstep, where every single
• 2:29:35
  Speaker 2: Republican votes for something and every single Democrat votes against it,
• 2:29:38
  Speaker 2: and you just feel like somebody's they're from two different planets.
• 2:29:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Another thing about the Vietnam War that's so crazy.
• 2:29:46
  Speaker 1: It is like we've kind of accepted the fact that
• 2:29:49
  Speaker 1: the United States military does things overseas that we don't
• 2:29:52
  Speaker 1: want them to do. Because after that war, it's sort
• 2:29:57
  Speaker 1: of set the stage for Afghanistan, Iraq all well, those
• 2:30:01
  Speaker 1: especially Afghanistan, like this prolonged twenty year completely complete failure,
• 2:30:09
  Speaker 1: especially in how we withdrew from it. It's like we've
• 2:30:13
  Speaker 1: lost a lot of faith in the decisions that are made.
• 2:30:17
  Speaker 2: I actually think you have young officers like Colin Powell
• 2:30:22
  Speaker 2: who are learning the lessons of Vietnam, and so what
• 2:30:24
  Speaker 2: you find is extraordinary reticence in the late seventies and
• 2:30:29
  Speaker 2: the eighties and the early nineties. So the first go
• 2:30:31
  Speaker 2: for is very much a reflection of Vietnam chastened by
• 2:30:38
  Speaker 2: the excesses of Vietnam. We're going to do it with
• 2:30:40
  Speaker 2: a coalition, you know, We're going to do it with
• 2:30:43
  Speaker 2: one arm tied behind our back. We're going to stop
• 2:30:45
  Speaker 2: a little bit sooner. We're not going to have the
• 2:30:47
  Speaker 2: full destruction of this. All these sorts of things are
• 2:30:50
  Speaker 2: Vietnam inherited. But then real politique comes in, and then
• 2:30:55
  Speaker 2: all of a sudden you realize we're in Afghanistan because
• 2:30:58
  Speaker 2: of nine to eleven. We're pursuing this person. It's not
• 2:31:03
  Speaker 2: we had a chance to get him. We missed him.
• 2:31:05
  Speaker 2: It was not our fault. And we then switched the
• 2:31:08
  Speaker 2: focus to Iraq and then ended up in both places
• 2:31:12
  Speaker 2: in a kind of you know, terrific stalemate that as
• 2:31:15
  Speaker 2: you say, just was I think back to being Vietnam.
• 2:31:19
  Speaker 2: I mean I always say this that if we you know,
• 2:31:23
  Speaker 2: we made our film on Vietnam, it came out in
• 2:31:25
  Speaker 2: twenty seventeen. If I had done the film ten years
• 2:31:28
  Speaker 2: and this is why history requires perspective, if I had
• 2:31:32
  Speaker 2: done it ten years after the fall of Saigon in
• 2:31:36
  Speaker 2: nineteen eighty five, there's a recession going on in the
• 2:31:40
  Speaker 2: United States, not big, but we talk about the Pacific rim.
• 2:31:43
  Speaker 2: Japan is a scendent. We think Japan is going to
• 2:31:45
  Speaker 2: be the best thing. Vietnam would be this ball and
• 2:31:50
  Speaker 2: chain that we would be dragging around us forever. If
• 2:31:52
  Speaker 2: I had waited twenty years to nineteen ninety five, we're
• 2:31:55
  Speaker 2: the sole superpower. We're in the middle of the largest
• 2:31:59
  Speaker 2: to that point, largest peacetime economic expansion in the history
• 2:32:03
  Speaker 2: of our country, and Vietnam would always be important, but
• 2:32:06
  Speaker 2: it wouldn't be this symbol of our decline. Right if
• 2:32:11
  Speaker 2: I'd waited thirty years to twenty five, when we are
• 2:32:16
  Speaker 2: bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq and people are beginning
• 2:32:20
  Speaker 2: to use the language of the Vietnam and getting stuck
• 2:32:23
  Speaker 2: in these unwanted, perpetual, never ending wars, you'd have another view.
• 2:32:27
  Speaker 2: And so to do good history is to actually get
• 2:32:31
  Speaker 2: some distance and perspective, So you can look at the
• 2:32:34
  Speaker 2: Vietnam War from the mountaintop of eighty five and ninety
• 2:32:36
  Speaker 2: five and two thousand and five and then realize, I've
• 2:32:39
  Speaker 2: still got other experiences. New scholarship has come, classified material
• 2:32:44
  Speaker 2: has been released, more of those tapes have been listened to.
• 2:32:47
  Speaker 2: There's been a mellowing among the veterans and a willingness
• 2:32:51
  Speaker 2: to speak. Gold Star mothers realize they can't hye their
• 2:32:55
  Speaker 2: grief that we have won in the film, she can't.
• 2:32:59
  Speaker 2: She knows that by telling her story she will help
• 2:33:02
  Speaker 2: thousands of other people who've lost their children. We can
• 2:33:06
  Speaker 2: interview soldiers from other sides of the conflict that seem
• 2:33:10
  Speaker 2: to speak exactly like our soldiers, and that you begin
• 2:33:13
  Speaker 2: to develop a way to see it more holistically than
• 2:33:17
  Speaker 2: in just a kind of journalistic and almost political response.
• 2:33:20
  Speaker 2: So that was bad. We did that badly. That we
• 2:33:23
  Speaker 2: did this poorly. You can see it for this hugely,
• 2:33:26
  Speaker 2: hugely complex machine that it was that just ate up
• 2:33:30
  Speaker 2: human beings and ate up credibility. As you're saying that
• 2:33:34
  Speaker 2: the United States had built up as the greatest power
• 2:33:38
  Speaker 2: on earth and certainly the good guy in what we
• 2:33:42
  Speaker 2: euphemistically call the good War. That good war is the
• 2:33:45
  Speaker 2: worst war ever. More sixty million people lives were extinguished
• 2:33:49
  Speaker 2: in World War Two. But as we said it in
• 2:33:51
  Speaker 2: our film about World War Two, called the War, one
• 2:33:54
  Speaker 2: of our pilots said, it was a necessary war. And
• 2:33:58
  Speaker 2: that's what we should be thinking about, fighting necessary ones,
• 2:34:01
  Speaker 2: not the ones that are going to you know, have
• 2:34:05
  Speaker 2: all these ulterior things that you described, and it's also.
• 2:34:08
  Speaker 1: Like unwinding all that bad and sort of reshaping America's
• 2:34:13
  Speaker 1: perspective and the way the world perceives us takes so
• 2:34:17
  Speaker 1: much time, and I think we lost so much of
• 2:34:20
  Speaker 1: that post nine to eleven. I think nine to eleven
• 2:34:22
  Speaker 1: had the entire world in our sympathies. I agree we were,
• 2:34:27
  Speaker 1: we had been attacked. The whole world thought of us
• 2:34:30
  Speaker 1: as being like this shining light, like wow, we have
• 2:34:33
  Speaker 1: to stand against us. Then we go in invade Iraq
• 2:34:36
  Speaker 1: and everyone's like, what are you doing?
• 2:34:37
  Speaker 2: Like what is this?
• 2:34:38
  Speaker 1: There's really no weapons of mass destruction. It's all a lie.
• 2:34:42
  Speaker 2: The thing that the Depression did is it got used
• 2:34:47
  Speaker 2: to Americans doing without, and it made it very easy
• 2:34:51
  Speaker 2: for Americans to segue into the Second World War because
• 2:34:57
  Speaker 2: it was about shared sacrifice. Something they'd earned on a
• 2:35:00
  Speaker 2: domestic level. They could now learn it on an international level,
• 2:35:04
  Speaker 2: and they did that. We had an opportunity at nine
• 2:35:07
  Speaker 2: to eleven, it seems to me, and I haven't made
• 2:35:10
  Speaker 2: a film about it, and I imagine once we get
• 2:35:13
  Speaker 2: enough years out, it might be interesting to sort of
• 2:35:15
  Speaker 2: look at that. We had an opportunity to collectively turn
• 2:35:20
  Speaker 2: the energy that we had, the grief and the sense
• 2:35:24
  Speaker 2: of purpose, even anger of that moment, as well as
• 2:35:29
  Speaker 2: the world's unabashed symphony sympathy for what we've done, and
• 2:35:34
  Speaker 2: turn it into something productive.
• 2:35:37
  Speaker 1: And yet we didn't.
• 2:35:38
  Speaker 2: We then, as you were saying, we moved into sort
• 2:35:40
  Speaker 2: of rationales and justifications for Iraq that were, as we
• 2:35:46
  Speaker 2: know in retrospect, completely fraudulent.
• 2:35:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, from the outside, like me looking at your work,
• 2:35:53
  Speaker 1: I get anxiety just thinking about the daunting task of
• 2:35:58
  Speaker 1: taking on these subjects. You know, you have ten years
• 2:36:01
  Speaker 1: for some of them to like really ruminate and really
• 2:36:04
  Speaker 1: figure it out. But what is your process? Like how
• 2:36:07
  Speaker 1: do you begin? Like you said you're going to do
• 2:36:09
  Speaker 1: something on Lyndon Johnson, or if you're going to do
• 2:36:11
  Speaker 1: something on Vietnam, Like, how do you what does day
• 2:36:14
  Speaker 1: one look like?
• 2:36:15
  Speaker 2: Day one is making sure that you're looking yourself in
• 2:36:17
  Speaker 2: the mirror and you're going to commit to that. Because
• 2:36:19
  Speaker 2: I'm now off like a congressman trying to raise money
• 2:36:22
  Speaker 2: from foundations and corporations and individuals of wealth and the
• 2:36:26
  Speaker 2: Corporation for Public Broadcasting and things like that. But you're
• 2:36:30
  Speaker 2: immediately reading, You're immediately talking to scholars who spent their
• 2:36:34
  Speaker 2: life maybe on this aspect or that aspect of Vietnam.
• 2:36:37
  Speaker 2: We had I think it was twenty three scholars, all
• 2:36:39
  Speaker 2: who knew one aspect, and I knew we were onto
• 2:36:42
  Speaker 2: something when we'd have these screenings and a scholar would
• 2:36:46
  Speaker 2: comment and all the other twenty two would like whip
• 2:36:49
  Speaker 2: over like they hadn't heard that, and so the film
• 2:36:52
  Speaker 2: would do that. It's daunting. I asked Shelby Foot about
• 2:36:55
  Speaker 2: us Grant, and he said, Grant had what they call
• 2:36:58
  Speaker 2: four o'clock in the morning courage. You could wake him
• 2:37:01
  Speaker 2: at four o'clock in the morning and tell him the
• 2:37:02
  Speaker 2: enemy had turned his left flank and he'd be as
• 2:37:04
  Speaker 2: cool as a cucumber. And so what you develop is
• 2:37:09
  Speaker 2: four o'clock in the morning courage. You wake up and go.
• 2:37:11
  Speaker 2: And we're still doing it. I'm still waking up. I
• 2:37:13
  Speaker 2: didn't like the way that sounded. Why didn't we trail
• 2:37:15
  Speaker 2: that a stuff? So you just put one foot in
• 2:37:17
  Speaker 2: the other. You trust to process. Process is a really
• 2:37:21
  Speaker 2: important thing. We're all impatient, and impatience kills process, just
• 2:37:26
  Speaker 2: like comparison is the thief of joy. If you're impatient,
• 2:37:31
  Speaker 2: then process is squandered, and process teaches you really important
• 2:37:36
  Speaker 2: things of how to relate to this subject, how to
• 2:37:38
  Speaker 2: collect the material, and then how to figure out how
• 2:37:40
  Speaker 2: to digest that material into something that's the cohesive story
• 2:37:44
  Speaker 2: that I can give to you who may be ignorant
• 2:37:46
  Speaker 2: of that story. But it's daunting, it's terrifying, and I
• 2:37:50
  Speaker 2: wouldn't have it any other way, you know. And I
• 2:37:54
  Speaker 2: think I'm speaking for the people who work with me,
• 2:37:57
  Speaker 2: because there's something everybody responds at three in the morning,
• 2:38:02
  Speaker 2: you know. Everybody says, Yeah, what do we do that
• 2:38:04
  Speaker 2: we can fix this. We'll find an alternative to that
• 2:38:07
  Speaker 2: to make it better. And sometimes it's the niggling, tiny things.
• 2:38:10
  Speaker 2: So sometimes it's really big to have the courage to
• 2:38:12
  Speaker 2: take out an entire scene that really is working really
• 2:38:15
  Speaker 2: well but destabilizes the film a half an hour later.
• 2:38:19
  Speaker 2: And I did that in our Mark Twain film. I
• 2:38:21
  Speaker 2: took out this beautiful prose thing from Life on the
• 2:38:24
  Speaker 2: Mississippi called White Town drowsing about Hannibal. This disguised Hannibal
• 2:38:29
  Speaker 2: sort of waking up from its slumbers as it sees
• 2:38:32
  Speaker 2: the puff of smoke north, as the steamboats coming down,
• 2:38:35
  Speaker 2: and the whole town is industry and activity and loading
• 2:38:38
  Speaker 2: and unloading and whatever. And then by the time the
• 2:38:40
  Speaker 2: puff of smoke is around the bend South, everybody's back
• 2:38:44
  Speaker 2: asleep again. It was called it was just fantastic and written.
• 2:38:48
  Speaker 2: It was so beautifully Mark Twain is like never wrote
• 2:38:51
  Speaker 2: a bad word. And I just realized we weren't getting
• 2:38:55
  Speaker 2: out of the early biographical stuff soon enough. And I
• 2:38:59
  Speaker 2: said to my partner on the film, the co producer
• 2:39:02
  Speaker 2: and the writer who'd found that quote from Life on
• 2:39:06
  Speaker 2: the Mississippi, I said, we're taking it out. And he
• 2:39:08
  Speaker 2: looked so hurt. I'm so pained. I said, look, I'll
• 2:39:11
  Speaker 2: put it back in if you want it. So we
• 2:39:13
  Speaker 2: left it out and I thought it worked. Brian, he
• 2:39:15
  Speaker 2: came to me, looked sad. I said, I'll put it
• 2:39:17
  Speaker 2: back in. And for about six months we went back
• 2:39:19
  Speaker 2: and forth, and then finally he came to me and
• 2:39:21
  Speaker 2: he said, you were right, And I said, you can
• 2:39:24
  Speaker 2: put it in the book. We'll put it in the
• 2:39:25
  Speaker 2: DVD extras. We'll do all the things that you need
• 2:39:29
  Speaker 2: to do. But that's the kind of four o'clock in
• 2:39:31
  Speaker 2: the morning courage you need to do, is take out
• 2:39:33
  Speaker 2: something that like it. Joe it worked so well, and
• 2:39:39
  Speaker 2: yet you'd remember the movie Ama dais too many notes,
• 2:39:41
  Speaker 2: too many notes, you know, and you just go, you
• 2:39:45
  Speaker 2: gotta do that. I'd rather the reason why we have
• 2:39:48
  Speaker 2: the It's complicated is because there's not a filmmaker on
• 2:39:51
  Speaker 2: earth that doesn't want to change a scene that's working.
• 2:39:53
  Speaker 2: But we have spent our entire professional lives changing scenes
• 2:39:57
  Speaker 2: that were working when we found out new compromise, saying
• 2:40:01
  Speaker 2: sort of contradictory information, and maybe it made the scene less,
• 2:40:05
  Speaker 2: maybe the scene disappeared, but it actually serves the honor
• 2:40:10
  Speaker 2: and the virtue of whatever that story requires. And this
• 2:40:14
  Speaker 2: is true so many things in the American Revolution that
• 2:40:17
  Speaker 2: that that are close to me because we're just coming
• 2:40:19
  Speaker 2: off the months and months of these unbelievable sacrifices of
• 2:40:23
  Speaker 2: having to take out one phrase of a sentence or
• 2:40:25
  Speaker 2: changing one little thing just to help fine tune it.
• 2:40:28
  Speaker 2: Nobody would notice if I left it in and you
• 2:40:30
  Speaker 2: looked at it twice and then I took it out
• 2:40:32
  Speaker 2: the second time, I don't think you'd notice it, but
• 2:40:35
  Speaker 2: I'd notice it, so I'd wanted to be. And that's
• 2:40:39
  Speaker 2: the beauty of public broadcasting, too, is that it gives
• 2:40:42
  Speaker 2: you that chance to do that. There's not a really.
• 2:40:46
  Speaker 1: To do it that way.
• 2:40:47
  Speaker 2: I don't think there is another platform. I assume that
• 2:40:50
  Speaker 2: a list directors in Hollywood who have you know, the
• 2:40:54
  Speaker 2: final say enjoy that is Steven Spielberg, who is you know,
• 2:40:57
  Speaker 2: one of the great directors of all times. I'm sure,
• 2:41:00
  Speaker 2: but there's still suits that are coming in. There's still
• 2:41:03
  Speaker 2: people who are giving him notes. We get notes from scholars,
• 2:41:06
  Speaker 2: we get notes that are sort of like this. You've
• 2:41:10
  Speaker 2: got lots of voices of loyalists in there, and that's
• 2:41:13
  Speaker 2: really good because people tend to ignore the loyalists. They
• 2:41:16
  Speaker 2: are just a de facto bad people, and you don't
• 2:41:19
  Speaker 2: make them bad people. But you don't have a loyalist
• 2:41:22
  Speaker 2: who goes through several episodes that you followed throughout the film.
• 2:41:26
  Speaker 2: So we had this loyalist quote in our fourth episode
• 2:41:29
  Speaker 2: in the Battle of Bennington, where this guy named John
• 2:41:33
  Speaker 2: Peters who's been in Vermont been driven out by the Patriots.
• 2:41:36
  Speaker 2: He's gone to Canada. He's formed a revolution. The family,
• 2:41:39
  Speaker 2: his wife and small infant kids are driven out. They
• 2:41:42
  Speaker 2: find a British patrol boat somehow on Lake Champlain. They reunite.
• 2:41:46
  Speaker 2: He starts a regiment, a loyalist regiment, his fifteen year
• 2:41:49
  Speaker 2: old son. They find themselves with Burgoyne's army around Bennington,
• 2:41:53
  Speaker 2: where they've been told there's great loyalist sympathies and not
• 2:41:57
  Speaker 2: that many patriots. It's the opposite. There's no loyalists of
• 2:42:00
  Speaker 2: these or none that anybody's speaking up for, and there
• 2:42:02
  Speaker 2: are lots of patriots and they're defeated. But at one moment,
• 2:42:05
  Speaker 2: this man, John Peters is on a parapet of a
• 2:42:08
  Speaker 2: quickly made redoubt, a fourth that they've put up to
• 2:42:12
  Speaker 2: try to repel the attacking Americans, and he hears the
• 2:42:16
  Speaker 2: voice of a man named Jeremiah Post, who is saying,
• 2:42:20
  Speaker 2: Peter's you damn Tory, which is the other insult that
• 2:42:23
  Speaker 2: you would give to a loyalist, And he recognizes the
• 2:42:28
  Speaker 2: voice of his best friend growing up and cousin of
• 2:42:32
  Speaker 2: his sister. And at that moment Jeremiah Posts, the rebel
• 2:42:39
  Speaker 2: the patriot stabs him with the bayonet into his bone,
• 2:42:44
  Speaker 2: but it's deflected by the bone of the rib cage.
• 2:42:46
  Speaker 2: At that moment, as Peter said, I was obliged to
• 2:42:50
  Speaker 2: destroy him, and he kills him with his pistol. Wow,
• 2:42:53
  Speaker 2: that's the American Revolution. So we had that quote and
• 2:42:56
  Speaker 2: it was like, waw, but why don't we go and
• 2:42:59
  Speaker 2: put John Peters in episode one in episode two and
• 2:43:02
  Speaker 2: episode three and episode four and then episode six when
• 2:43:05
  Speaker 2: he's leaving and moving to Nova Scotia permanently and not
• 2:43:09
  Speaker 2: going to be a part of this new deal. But
• 2:43:12
  Speaker 2: you want to know what the American Revolution about? It
• 2:43:14
  Speaker 2: killing your best friend on a hill west of Bennington, Vermont.
• 2:43:21
  Speaker 2: Who righto?
• 2:43:25
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean?
• 2:43:25
  Speaker 2: I mean we say kind of without thinking about the
• 2:43:28
  Speaker 2: Civil War, brother against brother, you know, and it's I
• 2:43:31
  Speaker 2: guess it's true a few times. But the Revolution is
• 2:43:34
  Speaker 2: like that Henry Knox, who's this sort of big, amiable
• 2:43:37
  Speaker 2: bookseller who Washington somehow figures out picks out of a crowd,
• 2:43:41
  Speaker 2: and he said, oh, go to is Tae Kwonder Rogan
• 2:43:43
  Speaker 2: and get those canon recaptured earlier in the year and
• 2:43:45
  Speaker 2: bring him back here. I got to drive the British
• 2:43:48
  Speaker 2: out of Boston, and Knox does sleds impossible hundreds of
• 2:43:52
  Speaker 2: miles over land and over Lake Georgia and you know,
• 2:43:55
  Speaker 2: terrible weather and he gets it there. But he's married
• 2:43:59
  Speaker 2: to this young woman named Lucy whose parents are loyalists,
• 2:44:03
  Speaker 2: and so she loses in the revolution, her father, her mother,
• 2:44:08
  Speaker 2: her brother, and her sisters. That's the choice she made
• 2:44:11
  Speaker 2: by marrying Henry Knox, this sweetheart of a bookseller who
• 2:44:16
  Speaker 2: learned most of his stuff about artillery and gun emplacements
• 2:44:20
  Speaker 2: from the books in his bookstore and from serving, as
• 2:44:22
  Speaker 2: you know, in the local militia. And he puts the guns,
• 2:44:25
  Speaker 2: He gets the guns up top, and the British wake
• 2:44:28
  Speaker 2: up and go, oh, we're out of here, and they
• 2:44:31
  Speaker 2: go up to Nova Scotia to regroup. Massachusetts thinks the
• 2:44:35
  Speaker 2: war's over. They thank General Washington for his service and
• 2:44:38
  Speaker 2: enjoy his retirement. He goes kidding me, I'm going to
• 2:44:41
  Speaker 2: New York, which is exactly right, because that's where the
• 2:44:44
  Speaker 2: British will attack next. And the largest battle of the
• 2:44:47
  Speaker 2: American Revolution is the Battle of Long Island, and I
• 2:44:50
  Speaker 2: won't spoil it for.
• 2:44:51
  Speaker 1: You what happens, please don't. Ken Burns, your national treasure.
• 2:44:56
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Thank you, jose We really appreciate
• 2:44:58
  Speaker 1: you being here. I really enjoy and like I said,
• 2:45:01
  Speaker 1: I've been a giant fan of your work for a
• 2:45:03
  Speaker 1: long time, so this is a huge treat for me.
• 2:45:05
  Speaker 1: Thank you, Thank you. Bye, bye, Ready