Latest / The Chuck ToddCast / Full Episode - Iran & Collapsing Economy Are Sinking Trump's Presidency + Lessons From History On America’s 250th Birthday w/ Ken Burns

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Full Episode - Iran & Collapsing Economy Are Sinking Trump's Presidency + Lessons From History On America’s 250th Birthday w/ Ken Burns · The Chuck ToddCast

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1:53
Speaker 1: Hello thereon, Welcome to the Monday episode of the check podcast.
1:56
Speaker 1: It is our first one for I guess it's not
2:00
Speaker 1: calendar spring because we haven't hit calendar spring yet. I
2:04
Speaker 1: think meteorological spring has already happened. So I guess we
2:09
Speaker 1: have the government control version of spring, meaning Congress decided
2:14
Speaker 1: to set this ridiculously early version of daylight savings into
2:18
Speaker 1: early March, and so here we are. But I have
2:21
Speaker 1: to tell you it actually is coinciding with our first
2:26
Speaker 1: seventy degrees, sort of multiple seventy degree to days in
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Speaker 1: a row. So what does this mean? Short sleeves, actual
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Speaker 1: short sleeves. I'm not ready to put the quarter zip,
2:36
Speaker 1: the long sleep quarter zips in the mothballs just yet. Mothballs.
2:42
Speaker 1: I am probably dating myself. I don't know anybody uses
2:45
Speaker 1: mouthballs anymore, but I go back. It's a distinct smell
2:51
Speaker 1: of my old great grandmother's house back in the day,
2:53
Speaker 1: the smell of mothballs and protecting all of her winter clothes.
2:58
Speaker 1: But I digress. Here we are a tad bit of
3:02
Speaker 1: a wardrobe change, so we've got good fun there. But hey,
3:07
Speaker 1: it hasn't been a light weekend, and that's the thing
3:11
Speaker 1: we are in. We are in some heavy days these days,
3:16
Speaker 1: and it doesn't look like it's going to get lighter
3:21
Speaker 1: anytime soon. Let me give you a quick rundown. Got
3:24
Speaker 1: sort of a big picture, sort of big picture sort
3:27
Speaker 1: of political analysis for sort of the moment we're in,
3:30
Speaker 1: the moment, the president's in the moment, the Republican Party
3:32
Speaker 1: is in. My interview today is none other than ken Burn's.
3:37
Speaker 1: I booked him a while ago, back during when the
3:41
Speaker 1: American Revolution. It was sort of peeking and interested people
3:44
Speaker 1: were downloading, but we went bigger than that. We talked
3:47
Speaker 1: a lot about America to fifty you know, how to
3:52
Speaker 1: make documentary films, sort of how he pulled off the
3:55
Speaker 1: American Revolution in a polarizing era and didn't really have
4:00
Speaker 1: people angry at him left or right, which is a
4:03
Speaker 1: remarkable thing. So I know, no one, my listeners, you're
4:08
Speaker 1: gonna love the ken Burns conversation. I've done Ken a
4:10
Speaker 1: long time, and it is always a treat to spend
4:13
Speaker 1: time with him, whether it's ten minutes or an hour,
4:16
Speaker 1: and to have an hour with him, I count myself lucky.
4:19
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy that conversation. But we got sort
4:23
Speaker 1: of everything you need to know about politics at this moment.
4:26
Speaker 1: We got my ken Burns interview we will have this
4:29
Speaker 1: week in history. Here's a clue. I'm actually there's two
4:33
Speaker 1: remarkable anniversaries this week, March tenth and March twelfth. They
4:38
Speaker 1: both have to do with mass with communications, not necessarily
4:42
Speaker 1: mass communications, but with communications. That's the hint I will
4:45
Speaker 1: give you now. But we will go into the time
4:48
Speaker 1: machine after we do the ken Burns interview. Then we'll
4:52
Speaker 1: do some questions, and let's just say I have a
4:54
Speaker 1: few thoughts on President Trump's ridiculous attempt to try to
5:02
Speaker 1: fix college sports, of which I don't think he really
5:06
Speaker 1: had any interest in fixing college sports. But I digress.
5:09
Speaker 1: I'm not kicking off with that as tempting as you
5:12
Speaker 1: might think it might be for me. But instead we're
5:16
Speaker 1: going to start where it's just one of those moments.
5:19
Speaker 1: And I've talked to you about it before. You don't
5:22
Speaker 1: know when presidencies end. You don't know when they're essentially
5:26
Speaker 1: over as far as the public's concerned until after the fact.
5:29
Speaker 1: I'm not guaranteeing we're in one of those moments at
5:32
Speaker 1: this moment, but boy, does this start to look like
5:35
Speaker 1: one of those moments when you compare it to other
5:37
Speaker 1: times in history. So I think the best way to
5:41
Speaker 1: describe the moment President Trump is currently in is that
5:45
Speaker 1: he's got himself in what I would call presidential Quicksand
5:50
Speaker 1: one of the defining features of second term presidencies in
5:53
Speaker 1: particular is that once events begin moving against you, it
5:57
Speaker 1: becomes much harder to reverse the momentum. Right, you know,
6:00
Speaker 1: I love that Haley barberism, who I know he stole
6:03
Speaker 1: from somebody else, so don't bother with the sending me
6:06
Speaker 1: notes about that. But you know, good gets better, bad
6:09
Speaker 1: gets worse. Well, when you look at the last three
6:11
Speaker 1: weeks of the Republican Party, bad and Donald Trump's efforts
6:15
Speaker 1: on it, bad is certainly slipping into worse all over
6:19
Speaker 1: the spectrum. And that's why I think the moment I
6:22
Speaker 1: would describe him in is quick saying, because every decision
6:26
Speaker 1: that is meant to stabilize things can actually deepen the problem. Right,
6:30
Speaker 1: you thrash, you get stuck even more. I guess you
6:33
Speaker 1: could also say it's a Chinese finger trap, right, but
6:36
Speaker 1: every show of strength actually ends up revealing weakness, particularly
6:40
Speaker 1: with this president, and it's the nature of quicksand the
6:44
Speaker 1: hearder you thrash, the deeper you sink. And right now,
6:47
Speaker 1: that's what the presidency looks like. You see it in Iran,
6:49
Speaker 1: you see it in the economy, you see it in
6:52
Speaker 1: this tariff mess, you see it actually in corporate America
6:54
Speaker 1: starting to push back. I think an underreported story from
6:58
Speaker 1: last week, I understand why it is on are reported.
7:00
Speaker 1: We're we're we're just we just created an open ended
7:03
Speaker 1: war in Iran that I don't know how we get
7:05
Speaker 1: out of and increasingly you actually see it show itself
7:08
Speaker 1: on the political map. So let's start with Iran. This
7:12
Speaker 1: is the clearest example of the quick stand effect. The
7:14
Speaker 1: war is now more than a week old. More than
7:17
Speaker 1: a thousand people are dead in Iran. Videos of massive
7:19
Speaker 1: fires in Tehran after strikes on oil storage facilities dominated
7:24
Speaker 1: social media over the weekend. Across the region. The conflict
7:27
Speaker 1: is already expanding beyond simple military targets. There are now
7:30
Speaker 1: attacks on infrastructure, including desalination plants across the Gulf. This is,
7:36
Speaker 1: you know, the more infrastructure we destroy in Iran that
7:40
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with their with their military, that's
7:46
Speaker 1: that's how you lose hearts and minds. So I certainly
7:49
Speaker 1: think our targeting needs needs to improve. And if they
7:53
Speaker 1: think that, hey, let's punish more of the Iranian people
7:57
Speaker 1: because you don't think they're rising up enough to overthrow
7:59
Speaker 1: the regime, I don't think you quite understand what you've done.
8:04
Speaker 1: So the opening phase of this war has already cost,
8:06
Speaker 1: according to what the Pentagon has told Congress in this
8:09
Speaker 1: first week, six billion dollars. So essentially it's six billion dollars.
8:14
Speaker 1: Is that what we're looking at six billion dollars a week. Okay,
8:18
Speaker 1: so he says four or five weeks, thirty billion dollars, right,
8:25
Speaker 1: we already know they're thinking about a fifty billion dollars supplement.
8:29
Speaker 1: Do we really think this is going to end in
8:30
Speaker 1: four or five weeks? But here we are six billion
8:35
Speaker 1: dollars one week. Conflict of course, shows no shine, no
8:38
Speaker 1: sign of show slowing down. Now there are reports of the
8:41
Speaker 1: United States and Israel are discussing the possibility of sending
8:44
Speaker 1: special forces into Iran to seize the uranium stockpiles. This
8:48
Speaker 1: is Mission Creek right, much deeper involvement, actual boots on
8:54
Speaker 1: the ground. Sure, you may say it's just special forces.
8:57
Speaker 1: I have to tell you, I can't tell you how
8:58
Speaker 1: many times presidents think US special forces, our special forces
9:03
Speaker 1: are outstanding, whether they're the Navy Seals, the Army rangers.
9:08
Speaker 1: But his boots on the ground. Let's not pretend it
9:10
Speaker 1: is anything otherwise. And for those guys, we put more
9:16
Speaker 1: on their shoulders than we probably should any set of
9:19
Speaker 1: human beings. But I digress. Meanwhile, the President is describing
9:23
Speaker 1: the war as a short excursion, while also leaving the
9:27
Speaker 1: door open to putting American troops on the ground if
9:29
Speaker 1: there were, in his words, a very good reason. So
9:32
Speaker 1: the fact that he's listening to this and one thing
9:34
Speaker 1: about military commanders, they don't like. They're not going to
9:36
Speaker 1: want to lose a war. They're not going to want
9:38
Speaker 1: to walk away. And trust me, Trump's going to this
9:41
Speaker 1: is what's coming. Trump's going to want to walk away
9:44
Speaker 1: sooner than is possible, and it is going to cause
9:47
Speaker 1: even more chaos when he gets to that moment. That said,
9:51
Speaker 1: there are two ideas that don't coexist very easily, right,
9:56
Speaker 1: which is this idea that we might put troops on
9:58
Speaker 1: the ground or we might just get it and out.
10:01
Speaker 1: When presidents get into conflicts like this without a clear
10:05
Speaker 1: strategic endgame, and trust me, there is none, the logic
10:09
Speaker 1: of escalation begins to take over. First it's air strikes,
10:12
Speaker 1: then it's deeper strikes. Right, we went from military infrastructure.
10:16
Speaker 1: Now we're going to basic country infrastructure. Then it's the
10:20
Speaker 1: special forces. Right, we're just talking about it now, but
10:24
Speaker 1: we feel the need we have to secure their radio.
10:27
Speaker 1: Then someone inevitably asks whether boots on the ground are
10:29
Speaker 1: necessary to finish the job keep the peace. In order
10:32
Speaker 1: to try to help this country stand itself up. I
10:36
Speaker 1: unfortunately left out the likelihood of a civil war because
10:42
Speaker 1: that's growing with every day that there is not a
10:45
Speaker 1: full fledged regime change. History is a very clear record
10:48
Speaker 1: on this question. If you want regime change from the
10:50
Speaker 1: air alone, then you need to have a coherent opposition
10:54
Speaker 1: ready to step in. And while there is plenty of
10:57
Speaker 1: discontent all around, Iran do not have a unified opposition
11:01
Speaker 1: ready to run this country tomorrow, despite the fantasies in
11:06
Speaker 1: President Trump's head, and whatever networks did exist were severely
11:11
Speaker 1: weakened by the regimes cracked down on protesters over the
11:13
Speaker 1: past two months. So the potential leaders are either being
11:17
Speaker 1: killed or they're very far underground. So the fantasy scenario
11:23
Speaker 1: that you remove the leadership with in a new political
11:26
Speaker 1: order magically appears. This is simply not grounded in reality.
11:30
Speaker 1: And there's another irony here. Trump of all people, should
11:33
Speaker 1: understand the ideological loyalty that exists in Iran. His own
11:39
Speaker 1: political basis stuck with him through every controversy imaginable. In fact,
11:43
Speaker 1: the most remarkable thing about all the polling we've seen
11:45
Speaker 1: in the last week is how those that describe themselves
11:48
Speaker 1: as maga are more supportive of these strikes than those
11:50
Speaker 1: who say they're not a part of the Mega movement. Right,
11:55
Speaker 1: the MAGA influencers don't like this war and don't let right,
11:58
Speaker 1: But for now, you know Trump's The devotion to Trump
12:03
Speaker 1: among MAGA is real. Right, They're more devoted to Trump
12:06
Speaker 1: on this issue than the Mega influences are, which is
12:09
Speaker 1: an interesting Now. That doesn't mean this won't chip away
12:12
Speaker 1: over time, But right now, the president has blind loyalty
12:17
Speaker 1: among his base, and so it shouldn't surprise him that
12:22
Speaker 1: the Iranian regime, a theocracy that's been in place for
12:29
Speaker 1: nearly fifty years, has blind loyalty. But the fact that
12:36
Speaker 1: he seems surprised that the Iranian regime has these supporters
12:40
Speaker 1: willing to defend itself despite hardship or chaos. The fact
12:43
Speaker 1: that he's surprised by this shows you how how he
12:47
Speaker 1: doesn't quite understand how the world works. It's a fundamental
12:50
Speaker 1: misunderstanding of political movements, and it leads to some bad
12:55
Speaker 1: strategic assumptions, because when you misread the internal dynamics of
12:58
Speaker 1: another country, for some rarely produces the outcome you imagine,
13:03
Speaker 1: which brings us back to the bigger problem. Once you
13:05
Speaker 1: are in the quicksand of a conflict like this, it's
13:09
Speaker 1: very difficult to exit cleanly. At some point, the president
13:13
Speaker 1: is likely going to just say, hey, we did it.
13:16
Speaker 1: It's time to move on, right when he knows that
13:21
Speaker 1: this thing is just killing him domestically, politically, right, I
13:26
Speaker 1: sort of joke remembered, remember when Pam Bondy lost her
13:29
Speaker 1: shit talking about Dow. Why are you asking about Dow
13:31
Speaker 1: fifty thousand? Well, how about Dow forty nine thousand, how
13:35
Speaker 1: about Dow forty eight thousand, how about Dow forty seven thousand.
13:39
Speaker 1: It's almost as if Pam Bondy said it out loud, right,
13:43
Speaker 1: don't say it out loud, she says it out loud.
13:46
Speaker 1: And it's been nothing but a sell off, nothing but
13:49
Speaker 1: a sell off. And mark my words, this is selling Trump.
13:54
Speaker 1: This is selling Trump. This market collapses, Trump realizing he
13:59
Speaker 1: has no idea what he's doing in this war, no
14:01
Speaker 1: idea what he's doing on the economy. They're starting to
14:04
Speaker 1: sell him. This really is his economy and his stock market.
14:13
Speaker 1: And we know how much this is impacting his head,
14:15
Speaker 1: and it will so he's you know, he's going to
14:18
Speaker 1: try He's been trying all sorts of things. We're winning,
14:20
Speaker 1: it's going great, it's over. They've apologized all these crazy
14:24
Speaker 1: truth social posts that like have nothing in common with
14:28
Speaker 1: reality on the ground, And so his impatience is coming.
14:34
Speaker 1: We know this. I mean, I actually am pretty confident
14:37
Speaker 1: he isn't going to put boots on the ground because
14:39
Speaker 1: he's so scared politically. But the ineptness of what he's
14:44
Speaker 1: doing here is actually going to create more chaos and
14:46
Speaker 1: more instability, and we're actually going to get to the
14:49
Speaker 1: point where we might we might almost have no choice
14:53
Speaker 1: but to put boots on the ground. Now, let's talk
14:57
Speaker 1: about the economic quicksan, and the danger for Trump is
15:01
Speaker 1: that Iran is not the only front where the ground
15:03
Speaker 1: is getting unstable beneath his feet. Look at this economy.
15:07
Speaker 1: This latest jobs report has raised more questions than it answered.
15:11
Speaker 1: One month doesn't make a trend, we all know that.
15:13
Speaker 1: But the broader signals that's in this report is increasingly concerning.
15:18
Speaker 1: So you've got a bunch of slower growth indicators. You've
15:21
Speaker 1: got rising energy anxiety because of the war. You've got
15:24
Speaker 1: uncertainty around tariffs and trade policy. Federal Reserve is staring
15:28
Speaker 1: at the worst possible combination slow in growth and rising prices.
15:34
Speaker 1: It's what was deemed stagflation. Right, it's like the worst
15:39
Speaker 1: of all worlds. Look in this. It's one month's job report,
15:45
Speaker 1: but just like the last. It's interesting that last job
15:48
Speaker 1: report we got was shockingly good. This job's report for
15:54
Speaker 1: some people with shockingly back. The question is which one
15:57
Speaker 1: fits the world you're actually living in. That good job's
16:01
Speaker 1: report was more of a shocker because it didn't seem
16:03
Speaker 1: to fit what was happening in real life. This job's
16:07
Speaker 1: report sadly fits what appears to be happening in real life. Right.
16:12
Speaker 1: The fact that productivity went up, can you say, AI,
16:15
Speaker 1: anybody but we but are but the but the job
16:20
Speaker 1: jobs actually shrink again one month does not make a
16:26
Speaker 1: trend extraordinarily concerning. And we haven't even and this hasn't
16:32
Speaker 1: even factored in rising gas prices and rising energy costs,
16:36
Speaker 1: which are a whole other level of economic uncertainty. So now, politically,
16:43
Speaker 1: this is incredibly dangerous territory for Trump because voters did
16:47
Speaker 1: not elect him to manage a complicated geopolitical crisis. They
16:51
Speaker 1: did not want this. In fact, it was one of
16:52
Speaker 1: the features of Trump's candidacy is that he was loudly
16:55
Speaker 1: proclaiming he wasn't going to do things like this. Ronald
17:00
Speaker 1: Trump got elected for one reason by this small slice
17:02
Speaker 1: of voters who decided to go from Biden to Trump.
17:06
Speaker 1: They believed he would bring down the cost of prices,
17:09
Speaker 1: that he was going to manage the economy better than
17:12
Speaker 1: Biden or Kamala Harris. That was the job description, period
17:18
Speaker 1: and distory. But the policies we've seen so far have
17:21
Speaker 1: done the exact opposite. Tariffs raising prices, trade disruption raising prices,
17:26
Speaker 1: geopolitical instability raising prices, all moving this economy in the
17:30
Speaker 1: opposite direction. Prices are under pressure, the markets are jittery,
17:36
Speaker 1: businesses are uncertain about the rules. And that matters because
17:41
Speaker 1: the voters who put Trump back into the White House,
17:44
Speaker 1: not his loyal base who will literally do whatever he says,
17:49
Speaker 1: but the ones, the actual swing voters. They were not
17:52
Speaker 1: the diehard loyalists. These voters will stick with him. The
17:56
Speaker 1: loyalists will stick with them through everything we're seeing. This.
17:58
Speaker 1: The fact that the so called self described magabase as
18:01
Speaker 1: sticking with him with this foreign war excursion that he's
18:04
Speaker 1: doing tells you everything you need to know about the
18:06
Speaker 1: loyalty of the magabase, and you see it in the polls.
18:09
Speaker 1: There's great new NBC News, you know, the premium NBC
18:12
Speaker 1: News poll is out, Hart mcinturf, Bill McInturff, Jeff Horwick,
18:20
Speaker 1: and it shows that in some ways his base hasn't
18:25
Speaker 1: really gone anywhere, but everybody else has moved hard against him,
18:31
Speaker 1: including that slice of swing voters that took him from
18:34
Speaker 1: losing in twenty twenty to winning in twenty twenty four.
18:40
Speaker 1: And the voters who matter politically the most at the
18:43
Speaker 1: moment are the conditional supporters, the people who said, I
18:45
Speaker 1: may not love the chaos that he brings, but he
18:48
Speaker 1: understands the economy and at the end of the day,
18:50
Speaker 1: that's really all I care about. And if that bargain breaks,
18:53
Speaker 1: the coalition breaks, and we're already seeing, right, the last
18:56
Speaker 1: ones in have been the first ones out in first
19:00
Speaker 1: out is a rule at corporate America sometimes when there's
19:03
Speaker 1: job cuts, and it's also a rule in political coalitions.
19:07
Speaker 1: The last ones to join your coalition are usually the
19:09
Speaker 1: first ones at flee when the going gets tough. It's
19:12
Speaker 1: another way that presidential quicksand works. The response from a
19:16
Speaker 1: president like Trump is usually more aggression, more promises, more
19:19
Speaker 1: dramatic actions, but usually those actions simply deepen the instability.
19:28
Speaker 1: Then there's the tariff mess. This is quicksand in legal form,
19:32
Speaker 1: Supreme Court is struck down right Trump's emergency terff regime.
19:36
Speaker 1: The administration is continues to find ways. You know, they're
19:40
Speaker 1: looking for ways to discourage companies from collecting stolen money.
19:43
Speaker 1: Now right, it's now money that does not belong to
19:47
Speaker 1: the government. It belongs to these businesses that paid them.
19:50
Speaker 1: And then, of course they may belong to the consumers
19:53
Speaker 1: that those businesses raise prices on. We're talking billions of
19:57
Speaker 1: dollars that businesses were forced to pay under a policy
19:59
Speaker 1: the court has deemed unconstitutional illegal. So even after losing
20:05
Speaker 1: in court, the administration appears to be looking for ways
20:08
Speaker 1: to hold onto this money, such a Donald Trump move, right,
20:12
Speaker 1: the guy who never pays his contractors. It's not just
20:15
Speaker 1: politically risky. It reinforces a deeper pattern here, right, just
20:22
Speaker 1: governing by improvisation instead of building policy through Congress. The
20:27
Speaker 1: administration imposted sweeping terriffs through more emergency authority. More emergency
20:31
Speaker 1: authority that's likely unconstitutional, unclear at this time, I think
20:36
Speaker 1: businesses are going to be more likely to sue the
20:40
Speaker 1: bigger businesses. It is ironic that none of the big
20:43
Speaker 1: businesses who were hit harder by tariffs than the small
20:46
Speaker 1: businesses had the guts to sue this administration. I'm looking
20:49
Speaker 1: at you, Amazon in Walmart. But it was the small
20:53
Speaker 1: business it said, had the guts to stand up to
20:55
Speaker 1: the tyranny of these tariffs, and they want. But instead
21:02
Speaker 1: of accepting the ruling of the Judiciary branch, the White
21:06
Speaker 1: House is still searching for another workaround, and all it's
21:09
Speaker 1: turning into is more quicksand. A shortcut creates a mess,
21:13
Speaker 1: The mess requires a workaround. The workaround creates another legal vulnerability,
21:18
Speaker 1: and instead of projecting strength, the Presidency begins to look
21:21
Speaker 1: reactive and trapped again quicksand and it may explain why
21:28
Speaker 1: corporate America feels comfortable to start pushing back. This was
21:33
Speaker 1: something that felt very unlikely even just six weeks ago.
21:37
Speaker 1: But we're starting to see corporate America very quietly, very
21:41
Speaker 1: slowly projects some independence. And it's not because CEOs suddenly
21:45
Speaker 1: discover their inner activist. Because the cost of compliance became
21:49
Speaker 1: too high. Anthropic recently refused the Pentagon demands to remove
21:54
Speaker 1: safety guardrails from its AI systems for military use. They
22:02
Speaker 1: pushed back. Netflix walked away rather than to abide by
22:07
Speaker 1: the forced firings from their board, essentially allowing the president
22:17
Speaker 1: to manage their private company. The irony is that both
22:20
Speaker 1: Aranthropic and Netflix walking away from the government instead of
22:23
Speaker 1: being coerced by the government was actually good business. If
22:29
Speaker 1: you go look at Claude usage rates over the last week,
22:32
Speaker 1: their way up CHATCHIPD usage weights are either flattered down
22:39
Speaker 1: and now since small business is one, now the major
22:42
Speaker 1: retailers are speaking of Costco, FedEx, Hasbro. Now they're suing
22:46
Speaker 1: the administration for their terar free funds. They didn't have
22:49
Speaker 1: the guts to jump on and sue from the beginning,
22:51
Speaker 1: but now that they are owed money, now they want
22:53
Speaker 1: their money. These aren't ideological revolts, their strategy calculations. It's
23:03
Speaker 1: the whiff of weakness that's what these corporations now smell.
23:06
Speaker 1: Businesses push back when the risks of going along outweigh
23:10
Speaker 1: the risks of resisting, and suddenly the calculation is shifting. Historically,
23:17
Speaker 1: corporations do not challenge presidents they believe are firmly in
23:20
Speaker 1: control or can really give them, create problems for them
23:24
Speaker 1: first year of Trump's presidency. In this second second presidency,
23:29
Speaker 1: it's pretty much how corporations treated them. Corporations will push
23:35
Speaker 1: back when they sense drift, instability, or overreach. It's another
23:39
Speaker 1: signal that the aura of inevitability around Trump's political power
23:44
Speaker 1: is weakening by the hour. This episode of the Chuck
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Speaker 1: use the code Chuck podcast and That brings us to
26:45
Speaker 1: the political matter that also radically has changed over the
26:49
Speaker 1: last few weeks, because the quick sand effect isn't just
26:52
Speaker 1: showing up in these policy fights, it's showing up in
26:55
Speaker 1: the coalition itself. Look, the coalition is not going to
26:59
Speaker 1: collapse overnight. For Tis, his base is not going to
27:01
Speaker 1: go anywhere. He's got a high floor, and those running
27:04
Speaker 1: against mega Republicans got to understand that it's a high
27:08
Speaker 1: floor right now. Still, the coalitions, while they don't collapse overnight,
27:14
Speaker 1: they begin to fray. And this one's fraying. And you
27:18
Speaker 1: know when it's fraying because the politicians in tougher terrain
27:21
Speaker 1: begin hedging. First, I think it's a very big deal
27:27
Speaker 1: that a Republican member of Congress in California thought, you
27:30
Speaker 1: know what, the best path the reelection is for me,
27:32
Speaker 1: drop the r That's what California Congressman Kevin Kylie has
27:37
Speaker 1: decided to do. He really recently announced that he's leaving
27:40
Speaker 1: the Republican Party and he's going to run for reelection,
27:43
Speaker 1: but he's going to do so as an independent officially
27:46
Speaker 1: no party preference. Now, obviously there's a practical reason for
27:49
Speaker 1: that decision. California's redistricting blew up his old district, left
27:53
Speaker 1: him choosing between a safe Republican seat already held by
27:56
Speaker 1: another Republican so the possibility of a member member primary.
28:00
Speaker 1: Chose not to do that, or a competitive seat that
28:02
Speaker 1: leans democratic. It's not dark blue, but it's light blue.
28:07
Speaker 1: This new seat for Kylie, and he chose the harder seat,
28:11
Speaker 1: and he chose to run without the Republican labe. So
28:15
Speaker 1: why do you do that? Well, because in the district
28:18
Speaker 1: he now needs to win, the label is a liability.
28:22
Speaker 1: Kylie has already been distancing himself with Trump on tariffs
28:25
Speaker 1: and criticizing the hyperpartisan culture in Washington, and yes, he
28:30
Speaker 1: did so out of self interest. He was one of
28:31
Speaker 1: the only Republicans to criticize Trump and Texas for what
28:35
Speaker 1: they were doing with redistricting, knowing that it was going
28:39
Speaker 1: to impact him directly and impact his political career. So
28:42
Speaker 1: certainly it's self interest. But he also you know, this
28:49
Speaker 1: is a guy, by the way, that voted against Trump
28:52
Speaker 1: on tariffs. So if he wants to be who he
28:57
Speaker 1: really wants to be, he's got a declare political independence
29:01
Speaker 1: because you're not allowed to stray too far from the
29:04
Speaker 1: party line on the right, and increasingly there's a belief
29:07
Speaker 1: you can't straight too far from the party line on
29:09
Speaker 1: the left. Democrats used to be a bit more open.
29:12
Speaker 1: It's funny how this works. Used to be the first
29:14
Speaker 1: you know, when whatever parties out of power usually is
29:17
Speaker 1: a bit more open to letting people use their party
29:20
Speaker 1: label and define it in any way they want. But
29:23
Speaker 1: then the more success you have, the more purity you want.
29:29
Speaker 1: In these polarized times, right, we're seeing an increasingly an
29:34
Speaker 1: increasing number of progressives who want to essentially emulate Trump.
29:38
Speaker 1: If Trump can run rough shot over constitutional norms to
29:42
Speaker 1: get his agenda in, then why can't a progressive president
29:46
Speaker 1: do the same thing. Still, this Kylie decision is a
29:55
Speaker 1: big deal. Democrats will argue that he's just rebranding just
29:59
Speaker 1: to try to win a seat, that it's cosmetic. They'll
30:01
Speaker 1: point out that he voted with Trump most of the time,
30:04
Speaker 1: but it actually reinforces the larger point. He would not
30:07
Speaker 1: be shedding the party label if he thought the label
30:09
Speaker 1: still helped him win. That's how That's how you're seeing
30:13
Speaker 1: a coalition fray in real time. Yes, it's it's California,
30:16
Speaker 1: I understand that, But this is a guy who's been
30:19
Speaker 1: a Republican a long time, and not like some liberal
30:23
Speaker 1: Republican either. Just to frankly, what pre Trump would have
30:27
Speaker 1: been considered a conventional conservative Republican. Then let's look at Montana.
30:36
Speaker 1: Steve Dames retirement. Someone didn't want to spend another six
30:42
Speaker 1: years defending these policies. He's stunned to the state by
30:47
Speaker 1: withdrawing his reelection bid just minutes before the filing deadline.
30:50
Speaker 1: And then he did some shenanigans, right. He cleared the
30:52
Speaker 1: way for an anointed person, no real competitive primary, and
30:57
Speaker 1: I think it's possible Republicans pay a price for this.
31:00
Speaker 1: So the US Attorney Curt Holmy is jumping in the race.
31:03
Speaker 1: He's immediately got the endorsement of Danes and Trump. So
31:05
Speaker 1: it's this sort of quick handover without Republican primary voters
31:10
Speaker 1: in Montana getting a say, uh, it's you know, this
31:15
Speaker 1: is what feeds deep cynicism about party politics these days.
31:20
Speaker 1: But the maneuvers open the door for a serious independent
31:24
Speaker 1: bid from Seth Bodner. Ironically, the day that Danes pulled
31:29
Speaker 1: his withdrawal trick is the day Bodner announced his independent candidacies.
31:33
Speaker 1: The former president of University of Montana. He's a Rhodes scholar,
31:36
Speaker 1: he's a former Green Beret. Couldn't have asked for a
31:41
Speaker 1: better news development to reinforce the independent idea of an
31:45
Speaker 1: independent candidacy. Bodner explicitly is running on the argument that
31:49
Speaker 1: both parties have become too insulated from voters. And what
31:51
Speaker 1: does Steve Danges do. Let me show you how insulated
31:54
Speaker 1: we are over here. Watch us do this little backdoor
31:58
Speaker 1: trick and not give voters a se I mean it was.
32:03
Speaker 1: It literally could not have been better. It could not
32:07
Speaker 1: have been scripted better by the Bodner campaign themselves. Now, look,
32:11
Speaker 1: Montana is still a Republican leaning state, but the very
32:15
Speaker 1: existence of a strong independent lane is telling because this
32:19
Speaker 1: anti establishment energy I think is real in this cycle,
32:23
Speaker 1: and it's not neatly contained within one party, right, It
32:26
Speaker 1: is the Democrats that that, you know, Bodner. John Tester
32:30
Speaker 1: has already endorsed the Independent over any of the Democrats
32:33
Speaker 1: running because he believes the Democratic brand is just not
32:38
Speaker 1: an electable brand in the state of Montana, just like
32:41
Speaker 1: Kevin Kylie does not believe the Republican brand is electable
32:44
Speaker 1: in the state of California. You put those two things
32:48
Speaker 1: together and you see a broader pattern. Here in California,
32:53
Speaker 1: Republican decides he has to distance himself from the party.
32:55
Speaker 1: Lade on Montana, it's a it's a perhaps a I'm
33:03
Speaker 1: not sure if he's Democratic leaning or just not comfortable
33:05
Speaker 1: with where the Republican Party was headed in Bodner, But
33:07
Speaker 1: either way, it's an Oh, it's an opening for an
33:11
Speaker 1: outsider campaign attacking the entire system. So the coalition that
33:16
Speaker 1: once rallied around Trump is now loosening at the edges.
33:19
Speaker 1: Remember Trump was the outsider at one point. Trump was
33:22
Speaker 1: the essentially the independent, and he is not considered an outsider.
33:27
Speaker 1: He is considered part of the problem, part of the establishment.
33:32
Speaker 1: And that's that's what happens to second term presidencies. And
33:37
Speaker 1: once they lose that aura of political usefulness, discipline becomes
33:42
Speaker 1: harder to maintain. This is only going to accelerate. Good
33:48
Speaker 1: gets better, bad gets worse. Members are going to start
33:51
Speaker 1: asking now how to stay close to the president, but
33:55
Speaker 1: how to protect themselves from the fallout that appears to
33:58
Speaker 1: be inevitable. And one more thing that often happens when
34:03
Speaker 1: presidencies enter this political quicksand that Donald Trump has found
34:07
Speaker 1: himself in. They start chasing side battles, looking for anything
34:13
Speaker 1: to improve, to either distract from the crankiness of the electorate,
34:18
Speaker 1: to do something. You know, college sports, we try that.
34:23
Speaker 1: By the way, good grief, the optics of that. The
34:26
Speaker 1: Secretary of State. Look, Marco Rubio has the same amount
34:31
Speaker 1: of interest and influence in college football as I have.
34:40
Speaker 1: He is the father of a college athlete, so sure
34:43
Speaker 1: I would be curious of what he thinks of the system.
34:48
Speaker 1: But the fact that he spent two hours of his
34:50
Speaker 1: day on Friday when there are strand I mean, I'm
34:53
Speaker 1: curious what a stranded American in the Middle East thinks
34:56
Speaker 1: of the head of the State Department, who did not
34:58
Speaker 1: plan at all, apparently to evacuate Americans anywhere, did have
35:05
Speaker 1: time to pontificate about college sports. But the point is,
35:13
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna, like I said, I have a lot
35:14
Speaker 1: more about the college sports. But boy, was that just
35:17
Speaker 1: terrible optics. Timing couldn't have looked worse. And I mean,
35:24
Speaker 1: this was an unseious event and I'm going to get
35:26
Speaker 1: to it later of how un serious it was. But
35:28
Speaker 1: these little side side shows that Trump is going to
35:31
Speaker 1: continue to try to do for distraction, right, so it's
35:34
Speaker 1: college sports. Maybe they're executive order fantasies. You know, he
35:38
Speaker 1: may start pontificating again about emergency powers over elections like
35:42
Speaker 1: this crazy truth. I'm not signing any bill until they
35:44
Speaker 1: passed the Save Act, which includes you know, demands for
35:47
Speaker 1: birth certificates before you can vote. I mean, really cuckoo stuff.
35:53
Speaker 1: But what it really is, it's what is really showing
35:57
Speaker 1: you is that he's losing control, and he knows it,
36:01
Speaker 1: and he's desperate to try to project some sort of
36:03
Speaker 1: strength or some sort of control. He's obviously trying to
36:09
Speaker 1: do this because he knows when core problems are getting
36:13
Speaker 1: harder to solve, the temptation is to dominate the headlines
36:16
Speaker 1: with just anything else. And Donald Trump he thinks spectacle
36:22
Speaker 1: is a strategy. But trust me, spectacle is no strategy.
36:27
Speaker 1: So this is what presidential quicksay looks like. A war
36:32
Speaker 1: expanding while the President calls it limited, an economy sending
36:35
Speaker 1: warning signals while the White House insists everything is fine,
36:38
Speaker 1: remain calm all as well, a terriff regime that collapsed
36:42
Speaker 1: in court. Corporate America now feeling comfortable resisting without fear
36:47
Speaker 1: of punishment. Politicians and the president's own coalition quietly repositioning
36:52
Speaker 1: either just leaving they're done, they can't do it, or
36:55
Speaker 1: they leave the party and run as an independent. None
36:59
Speaker 1: of this means the whole thing collapses tomorrow, quick saying
37:03
Speaker 1: is slower than that. It's cumulative, but the pattern is
37:08
Speaker 1: very recognizable. This is starting to look a lot like
37:11
Speaker 1: two thousand and six. There's a few things that are
37:13
Speaker 1: different I'll get to in a minute, but it's unchecked.
37:18
Speaker 1: Trump more insulated than he was in his first term,
37:20
Speaker 1: more convinced of his instincts, less constrained by advisors. He's
37:24
Speaker 1: not mastering events. Events have overtaken him. He just hasn't
37:29
Speaker 1: accepted that reality yet because he's just reacting again. And
37:34
Speaker 1: when a president starts reacting more than governing, that's usually
37:38
Speaker 1: when the ground beneath beneath them will give way completely.
37:47
Speaker 1: And let me put a let me button it up
37:49
Speaker 1: with this. When you look at the Biden presidency in
37:56
Speaker 1: the one term, and I'd spent a lot of time
38:01
Speaker 1: during that time, and even saying in how Afghanistan was
38:05
Speaker 1: was sort of a moment that he seemed to lose
38:07
Speaker 1: the presidency, and he never got the plot back right,
38:11
Speaker 1: because if you look at the Joe Biden approval rating,
38:13
Speaker 1: right once it hit, once Afghanistan happened, and there was
38:19
Speaker 1: a reason why the voters never he never recovered from
38:22
Speaker 1: that moment. And I'm gonna and and I'll explain where
38:26
Speaker 1: why this is this is relevant to Trump in a second.
38:28
Speaker 1: He didn't, you know, the vote average voter knew Biden
38:32
Speaker 1: was very you know, foreign policy was his best subject.
38:37
Speaker 1: This was a core competency that the public thought he had.
38:41
Speaker 1: You know, there was less there was less uh confidence
38:46
Speaker 1: in his ability to uh deal with the economy, less
38:50
Speaker 1: confidence and his ability to sort of galvanize the public
38:53
Speaker 1: around a big idea. But on foreign affairs there was
38:57
Speaker 1: a core competency and a core expertise perceived expertise with him.
39:01
Speaker 1: So when that was a total calamity and all the
39:05
Speaker 1: chaos that went with the Afghanistan withdrawal, his approval rating
39:10
Speaker 1: drop a low forty five, never recovered again. With Donald Trump,
39:15
Speaker 1: the core competency that voters attributed it to him is
39:17
Speaker 1: managing the economy. I know some of you think he
39:22
Speaker 1: never had, you know, you don't know, but the majority
39:24
Speaker 1: of voters remember it's a choice, and they they looked
39:29
Speaker 1: at Kamala and they looked at Trump and they decided, well,
39:32
Speaker 1: Trump's first term, that the economy the first three years
39:34
Speaker 1: was pretty good. Yes, he likely The only reason was
39:38
Speaker 1: any good is he inherited a healing economy from Obama,
39:41
Speaker 1: juiced it with tax cuts, and by the time it
39:44
Speaker 1: was going to probably start slowing down in twenty twenty,
39:47
Speaker 1: COVID happened. And then COVID masked whatever weaknesses that might
39:50
Speaker 1: have been opening up in his management of the economy. Then, rightfully,
39:55
Speaker 1: I think the public said, well, that's nobody's fault. Right,
39:58
Speaker 1: COVID was going to create an economic challenge no matter
40:00
Speaker 1: who was president, But those swing voters came in and
40:05
Speaker 1: assumed he had a core competency. So there were sort
40:11
Speaker 1: of two basic promises with Donald Trump that you thought
40:14
Speaker 1: were You knew you were going to get a lot
40:16
Speaker 1: of bullshit, right, that's just who he is. And there
40:18
Speaker 1: was sort of for the second presidential term, there were
40:21
Speaker 1: these groups of voters that were willing to accept it
40:24
Speaker 1: if two things, If he kept two promises, improve the
40:28
Speaker 1: economy and don't get us into any new wars. This
40:38
Speaker 1: is why, this is why this is only going to
40:44
Speaker 1: get worse if this turns around. There's something that happens
40:49
Speaker 1: and none of us can foresee at the moment, but
40:52
Speaker 1: this is setting up to be a catastrophic political problem
40:55
Speaker 1: for the Republicans right now. You see it. It's a
41:00
Speaker 1: crack here, it's a crack there. But sometimes right it's
41:04
Speaker 1: like you see a couple of cracks, a couple of
41:06
Speaker 1: cracks in it everything shatters. So whether you want to
41:10
Speaker 1: use my quicksand metaphor or my shattering glass metaphor, either
41:15
Speaker 1: one applies to where this presidency is headed. All right,
41:21
Speaker 1: let's sneak in a break. And I didn't even get
41:24
Speaker 1: to the Christine Nome craziness. In some ways, that's all
41:27
Speaker 1: part of it. We do it is there was always
41:34
Speaker 1: a point in you know, sheet in Trump's Washington, when
41:40
Speaker 1: you have everybody mad at you. Right this happened. I
41:44
Speaker 1: was a part of one of these when nobody came
41:46
Speaker 1: to run Aroundney's defense. When I was critical of what
41:49
Speaker 1: NBC was doing, No Republican came to her defense, right,
41:54
Speaker 1: Christine nom you know there's this point when you when
41:56
Speaker 1: you've lost everybody, you kind of know it. And Christy
42:01
Speaker 1: Nome lost everybody left, right, center, maga, non, maga, you
42:10
Speaker 1: name it, so it became easy to do. We'll see
42:14
Speaker 1: how Mark white Mullin does. You know he's an interesting cat.
42:20
Speaker 1: I know he's very much He follows his electorate when
42:23
Speaker 1: it comes to Trump. But he's also somebody that, if
42:28
Speaker 1: you talk to many senators want He's somebody that likes
42:30
Speaker 1: to be He likes to be in the middle of negotiations.
42:34
Speaker 1: He wants to be a compromiser. He doesn't want to
42:36
Speaker 1: be seen as an obstacle to get shipped done. Is
42:42
Speaker 1: he going to showcase that part of him? And we're
42:49
Speaker 1: going to find out real quick. We'll see what how
42:51
Speaker 1: good his relationships are because of his relationships in the
42:54
Speaker 1: Senate are as good as some people claim they are,
42:59
Speaker 1: And it's conformation should coincide with the reopening of the
43:02
Speaker 1: entire DHS. But to me, this is the real test.
43:05
Speaker 1: If to me, I wouldn't confirm him if he can't
43:08
Speaker 1: get the deal, I think that's fair trade. Now, maybe
43:14
Speaker 1: Trump doesn't want to let them let him get the deal,
43:18
Speaker 1: but to me that should be you don't get your
43:20
Speaker 1: confirmation vote until you cut the deal, until you find
43:24
Speaker 1: a deal to reopen dhs. Anyway, all right, let's stick
43:28
Speaker 1: in the break and when we come back, my fabulous
43:31
Speaker 1: conversation with the one and only Ken Burns. Do you
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46:47
Speaker 1: hate this cliche, but sometimes some people actually live the cliche.
46:51
Speaker 1: This person needs no introduction. It's Ken Burns, and he
46:56
Speaker 1: is as I was joking with him before. In my
46:58
Speaker 1: own team, I may season pass subscriber to Ken Burns,
47:01
Speaker 1: and yet there are still Ken Burns documentaries. I have
47:04
Speaker 1: not fully consumed my biggest regrets so far as Jazz
47:09
Speaker 1: I have not fully consumed Jazz. I will make that confession.
47:14
Speaker 1: But you know, it's one of those cases where every
47:16
Speaker 1: time you think there isn't a new story to tell,
47:19
Speaker 1: there's a new story to tell, and Ken Burd defuys
47:21
Speaker 1: that story to tell. Ken, It's good to see you.
47:23
Speaker 3: It's good to see you too, check thank you. You know,
47:25
Speaker 3: I think if I were given a thousand years to live,
47:28
Speaker 3: which I will not, I wouldn't run out of topics
47:31
Speaker 3: in American history. And there's something just incredibly wonderful about
47:36
Speaker 3: saying that, particularly in tough times where we're sometimes avoid
47:40
Speaker 3: the tough times. But history's so instructive. You know, we're
47:43
Speaker 3: way more divided during our Revolution, way more divided obviously
47:47
Speaker 3: during our Civil War, way more divided during depression, way
47:50
Speaker 3: more divided during the Vietnam years. I mean, we tend
47:54
Speaker 3: to think as kind of narcissist dick Chicken littles that
47:58
Speaker 3: our time is the worst. It's got to be bad,
48:01
Speaker 3: and there's history is there to say, you know what.
48:04
Speaker 3: I had a friend in the financial services you'll appreciate
48:07
Speaker 3: this who came to me in the after the eight meltdown,
48:10
Speaker 3: and he said, this is a depression. And I just
48:13
Speaker 3: I said, you know, in the depression, in many American
48:16
Speaker 3: cities the animals in the zoo were shot and the
48:19
Speaker 3: meat distributed to the poor.
48:21
Speaker 1: When that happens, that's a depression.
48:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a depression. And so like right now, we're not.
48:25
Speaker 3: I don't want to minimize whatever pain he was personally
48:28
Speaker 3: going through or professional going through. But I do think
48:32
Speaker 3: having perspective is a really important thing in history. Is
48:36
Speaker 3: the best teacher there is for giving you a kind
48:38
Speaker 3: of perspective.
48:39
Speaker 1: No, And obviously we're having an argument on history sometimes
48:42
Speaker 1: right we're having I and I actually this I want
48:45
Speaker 1: to begin here. I think the most remarkable accomplishment you
48:48
Speaker 1: made with American Revolution was how limited the critiques were,
48:56
Speaker 1: what I would call the partisan critiques. You know, I
48:58
Speaker 1: know you felt I'm sure you saw them now I'm.
49:00
Speaker 3: Sure you're right. You're right, You're right. I mean, my
49:03
Speaker 3: feeling is and I do this with every film. You know,
49:06
Speaker 3: Mark Twain once said, I, if you tell the truth,
49:08
Speaker 3: you don't have to remember anything. So I said the
49:11
Speaker 3: same thing in the year of promotion of this thing
49:15
Speaker 3: last year, to Joe Rogan and theo vanas I said
49:18
Speaker 3: to the New York Times editorial board, as I said
49:21
Speaker 3: to inner city school kids in Charleston and Detroit, and
49:24
Speaker 3: suburban kids in Chicago and the forty cities we went
49:27
Speaker 3: to in the eighty different screenings and the six million podcasts,
49:31
Speaker 3: I felt like I did, and all the other interviews,
49:35
Speaker 3: and because I was trying to reach everybody, this is
49:37
Speaker 3: a story for everybody. And problem is that right now
49:40
Speaker 3: we've gotten to a place where we want to limit everything.
49:42
Speaker 3: It's you have to pass a litmus test, you have
49:45
Speaker 3: to sign a loyalty oath and nda to your real feelings.
49:50
Speaker 3: And I want to speak to everyone. So I assumed,
49:53
Speaker 3: if I could just get to October before the mid
49:56
Speaker 3: November broadcast, I'd be okay. Well, October came and went,
50:00
Speaker 3: and then November broadcast came, and in the middle of it,
50:03
Speaker 3: there were a couple half hearted this is woke sort
50:06
Speaker 3: of superficial dismissals. It was really clear that the people,
50:10
Speaker 3: the authors of two or three of these things had
50:13
Speaker 3: watched maybe twenty minutes of the thing. And this is
50:15
Speaker 3: the film in the way that suggests that the American
50:18
Speaker 3: Revolution is the most important event in world history in
50:22
Speaker 3: the last two thousand years, and that, oh, by the way,
50:25
Speaker 3: a guy I'm sure you've never heard of named George
50:27
Speaker 3: Washington is the person most responsible for our success in
50:30
Speaker 3: the creation of our country. And somehow because there were
50:33
Speaker 3: women in it, and somehow because they were oh my god,
50:36
Speaker 3: black people in it, and somehow because they were Native Americans,
50:40
Speaker 3: and there were other people from other countries who were
50:42
Speaker 3: engaged in this world war in addition to our revolution
50:45
Speaker 3: and a bloody civil war, that somehow this is woke.
50:47
Speaker 3: And then you realize where is the wokeness? Actually is
50:51
Speaker 3: it in the litmus tests of one side of what
50:54
Speaker 3: it should be. And that's what it is. Wokeness is
50:56
Speaker 3: just as test that is fearful of the truth, and
51:00
Speaker 3: it occurs in both ends of the spectrum. And and
51:03
Speaker 3: in fact, I don't think their ends. I think there
51:05
Speaker 3: you know, we discussed this before. You know, a third
51:08
Speaker 3: of Bernie's supporters stay home, a third voted for Hillary,
51:12
Speaker 3: and a third voted for Trump. So you've got a
51:14
Speaker 3: circle here in which the far left and the far
51:17
Speaker 3: why right are often much closer than we would think.
51:20
Speaker 1: No, I mean, that's why you know, we're all taught
51:22
Speaker 1: the pendulum right when it comes to that, is that
51:26
Speaker 1: at some point the two ends could meet. And you know,
51:30
Speaker 1: in fact, I like to warn some of my friends
51:33
Speaker 1: in the business community, watch out if there is a
51:37
Speaker 1: if if the populace on the right drop their cultural
51:40
Speaker 1: a grievance and you just have all of the economic
51:44
Speaker 1: grievance parts of the electorate unite, we would call it
51:48
Speaker 1: the FDR coalition, and it could it could end up
51:54
Speaker 1: not be pretty transformational. I don't want to say that.
51:57
Speaker 3: I agree. You know, for a couple of different times,
52:00
Speaker 3: in a cup roll of different positions, standing in very
52:03
Speaker 3: different political ideological places, the Republican Party has been the
52:08
Speaker 3: most successful political party on Earth, and a lot of
52:10
Speaker 3: ways in the last fifty years, is getting.
52:13
Speaker 1: The most successful third party.
52:16
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, exactly started it, by the way, in a
52:18
Speaker 3: schoolhouse in rip On, Wisconsin in eighteen fifty four with
52:21
Speaker 3: one platform out of the Demond.
52:24
Speaker 1: Dispute, there's still a dispute between a place in Illinois
52:27
Speaker 1: a place in Wisconsin.
52:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, I hear that all the time. I'm
52:31
Speaker 3: opting for RIP. But the whole idea is that they're
52:33
Speaker 3: anti slavery, you know. And so then you come full
52:36
Speaker 3: circle where you know it's successful in that it's gotten
52:38
Speaker 3: so many people to vote against their economic self interest
52:42
Speaker 3: because they've been able to interpose enemies. The great bugaboo
52:46
Speaker 3: of political distraction and ledger domain and sleight of hand
52:50
Speaker 3: is to say it's oh, it's them, and to create them.
52:54
Speaker 3: And I can tell you right now, I mean, my
52:56
Speaker 3: bottom line is I've been making films about the US,
52:58
Speaker 3: but I've been also making films about us, right the
53:02
Speaker 3: lower case two lighter thing. And there's only us, there's
53:04
Speaker 3: no them. And whenever anyone tells you there's a them,
53:08
Speaker 3: you're having the wool pulled over your eyes. You're having
53:12
Speaker 3: a distraction take place in order for you to think
53:15
Speaker 3: it's actually an economic interest that is of central value
53:19
Speaker 3: to me is not as important as the thing that
53:22
Speaker 3: those people might be doing to me.
53:27
Speaker 1: What's always helpful about your documentaries is that I do
53:30
Speaker 1: think they have a point of view, but it's not
53:32
Speaker 1: this left right.
53:33
Speaker 3: Point no, no, no, no.
53:34
Speaker 1: It is it is more of a larger, you know,
53:39
Speaker 1: sense of you know. Just so, how would you describe,
53:42
Speaker 1: for instance, your point of view for the American Revolution?
53:44
Speaker 1: You clearly at a framework that you want to do
53:47
Speaker 1: check the story with.
53:49
Speaker 3: Not really, because what happens is when any whenever you
53:52
Speaker 3: say yes and your heart and your gut, whatever you do, choose,
53:56
Speaker 3: you don't know anything about it. I mean, I got
53:58
Speaker 3: the general edit, I got a good educ I know
54:00
Speaker 3: a lot about history. And yet when you say I'm
54:03
Speaker 3: going to do country music or I'm going to do
54:05
Speaker 3: baseball something I grew up playing, Oh well, finally a
54:08
Speaker 3: subject I know about. Each day of baseball was a
54:11
Speaker 3: humiliation of what I didn't know. And so revolution you
54:14
Speaker 3: just automatically, so you're not looking. You've got a chronological structure,
54:18
Speaker 3: it's already there, that is to say, and then and
54:20
Speaker 3: then and then, so then how you begin to put
54:23
Speaker 3: it together. You're absolutely right that there's no political thing.
54:28
Speaker 3: You just want to say what happened, and you want
54:31
Speaker 3: to call balls and strikes. And I would suggest that
54:34
Speaker 3: in our media culture, as diverse and as multitudinous as
54:38
Speaker 3: it is a kind of tsunami of information, it's relatively
54:42
Speaker 3: the same. And so we've become a kind of highlight reel.
54:47
Speaker 3: Baybruth only hits home runs. Well, Baybruth struck out way
54:50
Speaker 3: more times than he hit home run. And more importantly,
54:53
Speaker 3: Babbruth only comes up once every nine times at bad.
54:56
Speaker 3: So sometime, as the last World Series showed you, a
54:58
Speaker 3: second basement, a middle infielder, not the star, becomes central
55:03
Speaker 3: to the outcome of a very dramatic thing. And so
55:06
Speaker 3: what we've tried to do is always keep that in mind.
55:09
Speaker 3: Do you scrimp on your biography of Babe Ruth, No,
55:12
Speaker 3: you tell a complete one. In this case, the Babe
55:14
Speaker 3: Ruth is George Washington. We don't have a country without him.
55:17
Speaker 3: But then you also introduce people to scores of other
55:20
Speaker 3: characters that are bottom up, probably for the most part,
55:24
Speaker 3: but they also are central to what happened. They're the
55:28
Speaker 3: calling of balls and strikes. And I think there's something
55:31
Speaker 3: exhilarating in that complexity and this notion that, certainly among
55:35
Speaker 3: authoritarians that you want to reduce it to some simplistic
55:39
Speaker 3: slogans is ridiculous, ridiculous, How.
55:43
Speaker 1: Do you deal with you know, one of my one
55:47
Speaker 1: of the things that obviously the more you read up
55:49
Speaker 1: on an historical event. I'm obsessed right now with the
55:51
Speaker 1: period between eighteen sixty five and nineteen twenty eight.
55:56
Speaker 3: We're making a film on it called Emancipation to Excess,
55:59
Speaker 3: about reconstruction.
56:00
Speaker 1: And period, and you know it's it's you know, Garfield's
56:05
Speaker 1: the you know, I view Garfield as of all of
56:09
Speaker 1: our assassinated presidents. You know what the modern myth making
56:15
Speaker 1: around Kennedy was, actually that could have been Garfield, and
56:18
Speaker 1: Garfield absolutely, you know, Garfield could have signed the Civil
56:21
Speaker 1: Rights Act.
56:23
Speaker 3: Has a great book on this.
56:24
Speaker 1: Right, and there's a couple of them that I've read now.
56:28
Speaker 1: But in order to understand eighteen eighty, you got to
56:30
Speaker 1: understand eighteen seventy six. And this is my long winding
56:34
Speaker 1: road to get to the eighteen seventy six. A lot
56:36
Speaker 1: of people have written the book about the eighteen seventy
56:38
Speaker 1: six election. There's all sorts of scholarship on it. And
56:41
Speaker 1: what I've noticed is that the author's politics matter a
56:46
Speaker 1: lot when you read, when you consume these books and
56:50
Speaker 1: it's become to the point where I am get frustrated
56:55
Speaker 1: sometimes by history books when you realize, no, the author
56:59
Speaker 1: has their own point of view and they start with
57:02
Speaker 1: it and then and then it's sort of I don't
57:04
Speaker 1: want to say it poisons it, because if you know
57:06
Speaker 1: it in advance, you know it.
57:08
Speaker 3: Does poison it, Chuck, because you're smart and discerning and
57:12
Speaker 3: have read enough. But for the people who are picking
57:14
Speaker 3: it up, they then become what.
57:17
Speaker 1: If it's the only thing they read about it, only
57:19
Speaker 1: that's what I always worried about it, Then that that's
57:21
Speaker 1: what I worry about too, And that's why I can't
57:24
Speaker 1: do that.
57:24
Speaker 3: I can't ignore that George Washington owned hundreds of human beings.
57:28
Speaker 3: You can't, as the writer Rick Atkinson said, and you
57:32
Speaker 3: know he's now two thirds the way through his marvelous trilogy.
57:35
Speaker 3: You can't square that circle that he makes, you know,
57:37
Speaker 3: tactical mistakes that he's rash on the battlefield. But all
57:41
Speaker 3: the other things add up to something. And you don't
57:43
Speaker 3: need to throw the baby out with the unforgiving revisionist bathwater,
57:47
Speaker 3: nor do you have to subscribe to the Parson weems Treakily,
57:51
Speaker 3: you know, never tell a lie, chop down a Jerry dreamy,
57:54
Speaker 3: throw a coin across the doll. You can you can
57:56
Speaker 3: unsubscribe from both of these tyrannies and come to a
58:01
Speaker 3: much more complex thing. And that's where you bother people
58:05
Speaker 3: because they want things to fit in. They just want
58:08
Speaker 3: it to be white, or they wanted to be male,
58:10
Speaker 3: or they wanted to be simple, or they wanted to
58:12
Speaker 3: be still entrusted with the barnacles. But we don't even
58:15
Speaker 3: have to look at the big ideas that we're supposed
58:17
Speaker 3: to be protecting, because if you look at those big ideas,
58:19
Speaker 3: you begin to understand even further the complexity and the beauty.
58:24
Speaker 3: You have to go into fiction. You have to go
58:25
Speaker 3: into William Shakespeare to see all that.
58:27
Speaker 1: So what I'm curious about is when you're dealing with
58:30
Speaker 1: source material, maybe it is Abigail Adams letters, right, maybe
58:35
Speaker 1: it's Ben Franklin letters, and you really have to understand
58:40
Speaker 1: the language of that day to get certain nuances. You've
58:44
Speaker 1: got to understand that a turn of phrase that may
58:46
Speaker 1: be meaningless to somebody reading it two hundred years later
58:49
Speaker 1: actually was incredibly important. And I often find that sort
58:53
Speaker 1: of what I would call the amateur historian and I
58:56
Speaker 1: would put myself in that where I could misinterpret reading
58:58
Speaker 1: something because I'm reading it through the prism of today's
59:01
Speaker 1: America English language, and I just think about those issues. So,
59:06
Speaker 1: you know, when did you realize as you went through
59:10
Speaker 1: this over decades that you've done this. I assume over
59:14
Speaker 1: time you've now you're now almost an expert at seeing this.
59:18
Speaker 1: But when you first ran into this challenge, you know,
59:21
Speaker 1: what were the what are the different ways to deal
59:23
Speaker 1: with it?
59:24
Speaker 3: Yeah? You know what? It manifested. I think I'm quite
59:27
Speaker 3: lucky it manifested less as a challenge. It is always
59:30
Speaker 3: a challenge than an exhilaration. The idea that that information
59:34
Speaker 3: could be delivered in a way that I wouldn't or
59:37
Speaker 3: you wouldn't speak it suddenly becomes I mean, Lincoln didn't
59:42
Speaker 3: go around saying forescore in seven years ago. He was
59:44
Speaker 3: just trying to ask you to think about eighty seven
59:47
Speaker 3: years in a different way, that's all. And it was
59:50
Speaker 3: a great rhetorical device, like for score and seven. So
59:53
Speaker 3: you have to do the math yourself. He's got you
59:55
Speaker 3: as you're doing the math in some attention, you're paying attention.
1:00:00
Speaker 3: You've been sucked in, and you begin to understand. And
1:00:03
Speaker 3: so what you find in all of these parsing the
1:00:06
Speaker 3: last sentence of the first inaugural taking the Declaration of Independence,
1:00:10
Speaker 3: A few phrases past the pursuit of happiness, we can
1:00:13
Speaker 3: get to that which is really loaded and wonderful, particularly
1:00:16
Speaker 3: for today. He says, all experience has shown that mankind
1:00:21
Speaker 3: are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Maybe
1:00:24
Speaker 3: you've read it at the picnic before on the fourth
1:00:27
Speaker 3: of July, and just let it go over think about
1:00:29
Speaker 3: what he's saying. He says, all experience has shown that
1:00:32
Speaker 3: mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.
1:00:36
Speaker 3: Not hard to parse means Heretofore everybody, he has been
1:00:39
Speaker 3: under an authoritarian's boot and have been willing to suffer
1:00:43
Speaker 3: for that for a thousand years working someone else's land,
1:00:46
Speaker 3: you know, for a thousand years being a slave without
1:00:49
Speaker 3: even earning a farthing. Right. But this is going to
1:00:53
Speaker 3: be a new era. This is going to be a
1:00:56
Speaker 3: place where we're going to replace your subject hood with
1:00:58
Speaker 3: something much more responsible, cold citizenship. So let's go back
1:01:02
Speaker 3: to pursuit of happiness. So we've always assumed this is
1:01:05
Speaker 3: the American license for freedom. He didn't follow John Locke
1:01:08
Speaker 3: and said life, liberty, and property. He said pursuit of happiness.
1:01:12
Speaker 3: And so happiness was not the acquisition of things in
1:01:15
Speaker 3: a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace
1:01:18
Speaker 3: of ideas. If you did that, you would become more virtuous.
1:01:21
Speaker 3: That was the free electron word throughout every episode of
1:01:25
Speaker 3: the Revolution. As we began to gather stuff, John Adams
1:01:28
Speaker 3: is worrying about virtue. Abigail's worrying about that. George Washington, everybody,
1:01:34
Speaker 3: even the folks at the so called bottom, are thinking
1:01:37
Speaker 3: about it. And so virtue becomes a thing reaching back
1:01:40
Speaker 3: across the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, back to antiquity,
1:01:44
Speaker 3: the virtue that was going to make you able to
1:01:49
Speaker 3: assume the mantle of this. And Adams at one point,
1:01:52
Speaker 3: the great worrier says, you know, there's too much avarice
1:01:55
Speaker 3: and ambition, too much lust for profit, not enough virtue
1:01:58
Speaker 3: that I wonder whether we have the to create a republic.
1:02:01
Speaker 3: So what happens is by isolating these words, by getting
1:02:05
Speaker 3: great actors. I have the best cast I think for
1:02:07
Speaker 3: any ever made, bringing them to life in a way
1:02:11
Speaker 3: that you say, oh, I now know what that means
1:02:14
Speaker 3: I get it, and you begin to see that those
1:02:17
Speaker 3: differences which have held these people. They're wearing hoes and
1:02:20
Speaker 3: breeches and they've got powdered wigs. They're not me. There's
1:02:24
Speaker 3: no photograph of anybody, so they can't be like me.
1:02:27
Speaker 3: And they are exactly like us, and they are. One
1:02:31
Speaker 3: of the more moving things, Chuck to me, is that
1:02:34
Speaker 3: they're speaking to us like all the time Washington and
1:02:38
Speaker 3: Jefferson Adams two says about the millions yet unborn. They
1:02:42
Speaker 3: are taking an idea that's never been tried. The chances
1:02:45
Speaker 3: of success that, like Sington Green, are zero, and yet
1:02:48
Speaker 3: they're thinking about you and me. And so the extraordinary
1:02:52
Speaker 3: story of our founding is the fact that, as the
1:02:55
Speaker 3: Old Testament says, there's nothing new under the sun, guess what,
1:02:58
Speaker 3: on July fourth, seventeen seventy six, there was something new
1:03:01
Speaker 3: under the sun. Now does that mean that there's not
1:03:04
Speaker 3: the same quantities of virtue and venality and generosity and greed. Nope,
1:03:09
Speaker 3: that's the same thing. And you can find him in
1:03:11
Speaker 3: our story then and it will echo or, as Mark
1:03:14
Speaker 3: Twain said, rhyme with the present moment. But you have
1:03:18
Speaker 3: to be disciplined as a storyteller, not to date your
1:03:21
Speaker 3: film by pointing arrows at isn't this so much like today?
1:03:24
Speaker 3: I began this film when Barack Obama had thirteen months
1:03:27
Speaker 3: to go in his presidency, right, lots of water under
1:03:31
Speaker 3: the brid No one was talking to fifty no one
1:03:33
Speaker 3: was celebrating. Now people are saying, oh, you're so smart,
1:03:35
Speaker 3: you figured this out. You came out exactly the right time.
1:03:38
Speaker 3: I went the total total luck of the draw.
1:03:41
Speaker 1: History is always the right time.
1:03:43
Speaker 3: History is always the right time. There is no clearer
1:03:47
Speaker 3: statement than that. And then when you do that. And
1:03:50
Speaker 3: Mark Twain is right if he said he says history
1:03:52
Speaker 3: doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, you are aware. I mean,
1:03:56
Speaker 3: I'll tell you there's a if our film is just
1:03:59
Speaker 3: like by chance, come out a year earlier than it
1:04:01
Speaker 3: did in the Fall of twenty four. You knew what
1:04:03
Speaker 3: was going on in the Fall of twenty four. What
1:04:05
Speaker 3: we follow among dozens of characters one hundred and fifty
1:04:08
Speaker 3: different characters in the film, the wife of a German
1:04:11
Speaker 3: general who's heading to join Burgoyne's army and her husband
1:04:16
Speaker 3: for their triumphant victory at Saratoga doesn't happen the French
1:04:19
Speaker 3: come in blah blah blah. I'll give away the punchline. However,
1:04:23
Speaker 3: she's doing the perilous Atlantic crossing a little bit nervous
1:04:26
Speaker 3: because she hears that Americans eat cats. Now, nobody said
1:04:32
Speaker 3: anything this fall, but if it had come out, they'd
1:04:34
Speaker 3: go burns. You know what he's trying to do, you know?
1:04:37
Speaker 3: I mean there was a letter that didn't make it
1:04:38
Speaker 3: into the film. But Jefferson's trapped during the Constitutional Convention
1:04:42
Speaker 3: in Paris, and he writes a Madison, who's writing the code.
1:04:46
Speaker 3: The Constitution is not pros except for the preamble written
1:04:49
Speaker 3: by Gouvenor Morris in New York. But he says, what
1:04:53
Speaker 3: if someone should lose an election and pretend false votes
1:04:57
Speaker 3: and reap the whirlwind? Right? I mean they were trying
1:05:02
Speaker 3: to reverse engineer for all the things. So the founders
1:05:04
Speaker 3: are no.
1:05:05
Speaker 1: I mean, I look, the Constitution is such a brilliant document.
1:05:08
Speaker 3: Oh my god, four pieces they are still.
1:05:11
Speaker 1: It, and it anticipated all of these issues we're dealing
1:05:16
Speaker 1: with today. The thing that the Constitution that those that
1:05:20
Speaker 1: wrote this Constitution didn't anticipate was that they were going
1:05:23
Speaker 1: to be these five hundred and thirty five individuals who
1:05:25
Speaker 1: didn't bother to read Article one.
1:05:27
Speaker 3: That's exactly what I was just going to say. Uve
1:05:29
Speaker 3: El eleven, the conservative scholar told me the Scott the
1:05:32
Speaker 3: Founders would not be surprised that someone who was seeking
1:05:34
Speaker 3: monarchical powers. Is that Article one the first article that
1:05:39
Speaker 3: the Article two is the executive that's the manager of
1:05:42
Speaker 3: what Article one did, and the third article is the
1:05:45
Speaker 3: judicial that is going to judge this and pass on
1:05:48
Speaker 3: it is that they had abdicated their power. That would
1:05:51
Speaker 3: be the great overwhelming disappointment on the part of the founders.
1:05:55
Speaker 3: If they look, they'd be happy that we'd survived, surprised
1:05:58
Speaker 3: and so many of the change, and not surprise that
1:06:01
Speaker 3: there could be, you know, power grabs.
1:06:04
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny. I keep going backwards about like
1:06:06
Speaker 1: when did Congress start to abdicate? And you know, you
1:06:10
Speaker 1: can keep going back. I've taken it all the way
1:06:13
Speaker 1: back to nineteen twenty and the decision no longer to
1:06:16
Speaker 1: expand the size of the House of Representatives. That moment
1:06:21
Speaker 1: in that decade when they chose to stop expanding the House,
1:06:25
Speaker 1: they actually stopped, they stopped implementing the Founder's.
1:06:30
Speaker 3: Vision, and you had a complex modern world, the twentieth
1:06:33
Speaker 3: century that is going to be within ten or fifteen years,
1:06:38
Speaker 3: working at a kind of lightning speed. That always makes
1:06:41
Speaker 3: the argument of authoritarians that I need to decide this
1:06:45
Speaker 3: in advance of your cumbersome democratic process.
1:06:49
Speaker 1: Trust me, I would argue, we basically one hundred years
1:07:08
Speaker 1: of Congress eroding away its own authority, and they did
1:07:12
Speaker 1: it to themselves. They did it to themselves.
1:07:15
Speaker 3: But I would say it's been most noticeable in the
1:07:18
Speaker 3: last few years where you've o the century just all
1:07:22
Speaker 3: all of this, you know, undeclared war stuff all.
1:07:25
Speaker 1: It goes back to nine to eleven. I mean, you know,
1:07:27
Speaker 1: and and fear does that right? Fear?
1:07:29
Speaker 3: That's exactly right, And whether it's real or not, the
1:07:34
Speaker 3: manufacturer of fear in a populace allows them to say, okay, please, Mussolini,
1:07:39
Speaker 3: make the trains run on time for me, please.
1:07:41
Speaker 1: All right. Let me ask a few questions, because missus
1:07:44
Speaker 1: Todd wanted one, which is, does does your Ben and
1:07:47
Speaker 1: Franklin doc change if this had come out first, if
1:07:52
Speaker 1: American Revolution had come out before Ben Franklin.
1:07:54
Speaker 3: Well, it's funny that it's a really that's a very
1:07:57
Speaker 3: smart question. First, of all, we'd already been well underway
1:08:01
Speaker 3: on the American Revolution before we even said yes to
1:08:05
Speaker 3: Franklin and began working on it.
1:08:06
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, So you were how simultaneous was this?
1:08:10
Speaker 3: Well, I you know, when I say this took ten years,
1:08:14
Speaker 3: nine years and eleven months to do, it's true. But
1:08:16
Speaker 3: I also released ten films during that time. So I've
1:08:19
Speaker 3: got different production teams and we're working on stuff, and
1:08:22
Speaker 3: it's very symbiotic. When you leave to work on Leonardo
1:08:25
Speaker 3: da Vinci or Muhammad Ali, it helps you come back
1:08:27
Speaker 3: to the Revolution. It helps you come back. Well, what
1:08:31
Speaker 3: Ben Franklin represented was an opportunity to practice on the
1:08:34
Speaker 3: absence of photographs and newsreels. And we could, because it
1:08:39
Speaker 3: was only two episodes, do it without doing any recreations
1:08:42
Speaker 3: with except for the print shot stuff. But here, as
1:08:46
Speaker 3: soon as I said it, I knew we were fully invested.
1:08:48
Speaker 3: So rather than get people to have them reenact a
1:08:51
Speaker 3: specific thing, not crazy about, why not make a feature film?
1:08:55
Speaker 3: We just spent seven years collecting a critical mass of
1:08:59
Speaker 3: people doing reenactments in an impressionistic way, sometimes way up
1:09:03
Speaker 3: above from a drone, sometimes intimately where the musket, the
1:09:08
Speaker 3: hammer hits the flint and the gunpowder explodes, or the
1:09:12
Speaker 3: cannon goes off, or you see women tending to a
1:09:15
Speaker 3: burned hand or slashing blood off a tile floor, and
1:09:20
Speaker 3: then what you have is yet another resource. You've got paintings,
1:09:24
Speaker 3: you've got drawings, you have lithographs, you have print you
1:09:26
Speaker 3: have maps, maps, maps, you have live cinematography devoided people
1:09:31
Speaker 3: of the real star of our film, the magnificent country
1:09:34
Speaker 3: that we have the prize that had animated this fifth
1:09:39
Speaker 3: Global War over it the land, and so then it
1:09:43
Speaker 3: could work in and you'd find a volley sort of
1:09:46
Speaker 3: out of focus and muzzy of red coats firing, and
1:09:49
Speaker 3: all of a sudden you're panning across a painting in
1:09:51
Speaker 3: which on the left side of the painting are a
1:09:54
Speaker 3: bunch of red coats firing. And then all of a sudden,
1:09:57
Speaker 3: you treat the paintings like they're live, and you treat
1:09:59
Speaker 3: the live of like their paintings, and you've got a
1:10:01
Speaker 3: wonderful dynamic. We didn't have that in Ben Franklin because
1:10:06
Speaker 3: you could always return to a portrait of him. And
1:10:08
Speaker 3: it's over two episodes. This is six with as I said,
1:10:12
Speaker 3: one hundred and fifty different characters.
1:10:14
Speaker 1: It's six feature length movies. It makes you know, I
1:10:17
Speaker 1: mean it is you know it was not. This is
1:10:20
Speaker 1: not six episodes of six.
1:10:21
Speaker 3: So I have a friend who's a noted a director
1:10:25
Speaker 3: in Hollywood who wrote me after I think I'd send
1:10:28
Speaker 3: him a link, and he wrote back how much he
1:10:31
Speaker 3: had loved it, And then after Christmas he said, I
1:10:33
Speaker 3: looked at it again, this time to look at characters.
1:10:36
Speaker 3: And so you realize there's a there's a lot that
1:10:39
Speaker 3: goes into it, and it rewards sometimes second, third, fourth.
1:10:43
Speaker 1: You need one hundred percent, And it's sometimes easier to
1:10:46
Speaker 1: watch you a second time than read the book a
1:10:48
Speaker 1: second time. Yes, that sort of historical event, right like yeah, yeah, yeah,
1:10:52
Speaker 1: you know that you that you.
1:10:53
Speaker 3: That's I could spend an hour on that paragraph and
1:10:56
Speaker 3: really get it. But in a film, I'm controlling how
1:10:59
Speaker 3: long you see something, and I've got lots of things going.
1:11:02
Speaker 3: There's lots, and it's not we're trying to do it
1:11:04
Speaker 3: to be confusing. It's just that it is complicated. As
1:11:07
Speaker 3: my neon sign says.
1:11:09
Speaker 1: I want to throw another one at you. Prohibition. So
1:11:16
Speaker 1: I now understand prohibition better after COVID than I did
1:11:20
Speaker 1: before COVID and right, you just sort of I get it,
1:11:26
Speaker 1: You're like, and frankly, I look at the current anti
1:11:29
Speaker 1: VAXX movement and I sort of see it as sort
1:11:33
Speaker 1: of familiar to how we ended up with prohibition and
1:11:37
Speaker 1: then how within a decade we realized, well, this is crazy.
1:11:40
Speaker 3: Well it is different in some ways in that using
1:11:44
Speaker 3: government as an instrumentality of social change is different from
1:11:50
Speaker 3: suspecting government and therefore not doing what the government says
1:11:56
Speaker 3: might be efficacious with regard to measles or COVID.
1:12:01
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, I get that. But I guess what
1:12:03
Speaker 1: I'm saying is that sort of I looked at it,
1:12:07
Speaker 1: not in the specific, but sort of in this respect
1:12:12
Speaker 1: after the pandemic in nineteen seventeen and eighteen, you know,
1:12:16
Speaker 1: and what we all learn is everybody loses our minds
1:12:18
Speaker 1: a little bit, like we all go a little because
1:12:22
Speaker 1: of the different and so something that seems so radical
1:12:26
Speaker 1: like prohibition or you know, or you know, or calling
1:12:31
Speaker 1: it the temperance movement, right, which was had We've been
1:12:36
Speaker 1: there a long time, but it had never really gotten
1:12:39
Speaker 1: huge traction until we had this perceived moral decay, you know,
1:12:45
Speaker 1: in the whole what happened with the pandemic, and that's
1:12:49
Speaker 1: where you sort of like, okay, we can sort of
1:12:51
Speaker 1: you see how we can go down sort of rabbit
1:12:53
Speaker 1: holes almost as a collective society when you go through
1:12:58
Speaker 1: a shared trauma like a pandemic. Is right in a
1:13:02
Speaker 1: fairly organized society, I think, I guess, I ask, I'm curious,
1:13:06
Speaker 1: do you think you would have Do you think you
1:13:08
Speaker 1: end up spending more time in the pandemic in nineteen
1:13:10
Speaker 1: seventeen and eighteen if you're doing prohibition today post well.
1:13:14
Speaker 3: I think prohibition was already about to happen before the
1:13:17
Speaker 3: pandemic hit. It may have sped it along. I don't
1:13:19
Speaker 3: think it's that a determinant. I understand, and it's a
1:13:22
Speaker 3: really really good argument. This.
1:13:24
Speaker 1: It's something that i've like, I've and I totally accept
1:13:27
Speaker 1: the premise. It's my own interpretation, but I know it's
1:13:31
Speaker 1: sort of like, Okay, I think I understand how.
1:13:34
Speaker 3: We talked a lot about it with scholars. I think
1:13:36
Speaker 3: what happens is that you have a rare sort of
1:13:40
Speaker 3: eclips like situation where you have a conservative movement that
1:13:44
Speaker 3: is starting first with temperance, which means moderation, that all
1:13:48
Speaker 3: of a sudden becomes absolute. The Anti Saloonty League takes over,
1:13:53
Speaker 3: and it's all about no, and it's a conservative thing,
1:13:57
Speaker 3: and a lot of it's based on immigration. Catholics are
1:14:00
Speaker 3: coming in and so you want to take away the sacrament,
1:14:03
Speaker 3: Blacks have the vote, you want to take away the bottle.
1:14:05
Speaker 3: You know, you've got these other ulterior, sort of darker motives.
1:14:09
Speaker 3: And it's a conservative movement. And then you have the
1:14:11
Speaker 3: progressive movement, which you can say is liberal or not.
1:14:15
Speaker 3: It doesn't really fit quite great, but they're going along
1:14:18
Speaker 3: saying that government, as I said, could be an instrumentality
1:14:21
Speaker 3: of social change. So if you reverse engineer it. We
1:14:25
Speaker 3: have an amendment to the Constitution, the only one that's
1:14:27
Speaker 3: been repealed, the only one that limited human freedom, that
1:14:32
Speaker 3: was prohibition. And you had people on both sides of
1:14:36
Speaker 3: the aisle buying into it for different reasons. I'd say
1:14:39
Speaker 3: a much more determinate part. And again it's based chuck
1:14:42
Speaker 3: on fear. So your pandemic of the influenced Spanish influenza
1:14:48
Speaker 3: thing is not is the First World War. So Germans
1:14:52
Speaker 3: were brewers, and it became very easy to say they
1:14:56
Speaker 3: had been equating all the nineteenth century that it's great,
1:15:01
Speaker 3: beer equals bread, it's the milk of human kindness, and
1:15:06
Speaker 3: suddenly they're the enemy, and so it becomes possible to
1:15:10
Speaker 3: begin to rev up your population in that sort of
1:15:15
Speaker 3: the thing that happens when people react by fear. And
1:15:17
Speaker 3: I would think it's more the anti German sentiment. Most
1:15:20
Speaker 3: of the brewers, if not all the brewers were Germans.
1:15:23
Speaker 3: And then this sense of social change combining with the
1:15:26
Speaker 3: anti immigrant, anti black, anti Catholic sort of sentiments, and
1:15:30
Speaker 3: the idea too but very legitimate idea that as our
1:15:33
Speaker 3: first episode of three was called, we were a nation
1:15:36
Speaker 3: of drunkards. Alcohol was a big, huge problem. What we
1:15:40
Speaker 3: learned is that we couldn't address it by you know,
1:15:43
Speaker 3: as Twain said again never wrote a bad sent in
1:15:45
Speaker 3: his life, the prohibition of anything makes it worthwhile, you know.
1:15:50
Speaker 3: Or as he also said, nothing so needs reforming as
1:15:54
Speaker 3: other people's habits, you know, And that's what prohibition is,
1:15:58
Speaker 3: reforming other people's habits.
1:16:01
Speaker 1: So you know, when I look at your your overall
1:16:07
Speaker 1: and you say that you want to hit reconstruction, I mean,
1:16:09
Speaker 1: in some ways there are still more stories to tell.
1:16:12
Speaker 1: On other ways, you've hit a lot of the big
1:16:15
Speaker 1: stories but there are different slices. You could always go
1:16:18
Speaker 1: at that's different. You have religion, you always historically note,
1:16:25
Speaker 1: but you've you've never I say never you did. I'm
1:16:29
Speaker 1: not going to say never you did the early on
1:16:31
Speaker 1: the Shakers. But you know, I think so I go
1:16:37
Speaker 1: in political science curriculum, you're never And I think it's
1:16:41
Speaker 1: a huge mistake by universities. If you're trying to study
1:16:43
Speaker 1: the politics of any society and you don't understand the
1:16:47
Speaker 1: following three things. It's religious history, it's sort of economic
1:16:51
Speaker 1: engine and its demography demographic history, then you're not going
1:16:54
Speaker 1: to understand. These are, by the way, three classes that
1:16:56
Speaker 1: no political science community makes requirements. It's one of these.
1:17:00
Speaker 1: I find the whole. You know, political theory is fine
1:17:04
Speaker 1: to know, but you need to know other things. I agree,
1:17:07
Speaker 1: and you know, I believe and I always I I uh,
1:17:12
Speaker 1: when I got to college, I didn't know who Ponnscious
1:17:13
Speaker 1: Pilot was really and I just didn't. I grew up
1:17:18
Speaker 1: I was basically I say, basically, I'm Jewish, but I
1:17:22
Speaker 1: didn't really I had no knowledge of the New Testament.
1:17:26
Speaker 1: And you know, I think of myself as incredibly well read.
1:17:30
Speaker 1: My parents were well read, and yet I remember, and
1:17:33
Speaker 1: I got shamed about it. It happened. I was a
1:17:36
Speaker 1: music composition major for a brief period and I was
1:17:39
Speaker 1: having to write write in the style of Bach, and
1:17:43
Speaker 1: my teacher got my professor got mad. He said this
1:17:46
Speaker 1: is too upbeat for conscious pilot. And I went like, Okay,
1:17:49
Speaker 1: who's ponscious pilot? And he goes, well, I'm not telling you,
1:17:52
Speaker 1: and that's sort of I literally went and read read
1:17:55
Speaker 1: the New Testament. I just sort of like realized, Okay,
1:17:58
Speaker 1: I lacking education. And then I got upset. I'm like,
1:18:00
Speaker 1: you know, we don't teach the history of religion because
1:18:04
Speaker 1: we're so afraid. I know why we don't, right, I know,
1:18:07
Speaker 1: in the public school system we can have huge fights
1:18:09
Speaker 1: over it, right, and so our fear of it. Sometimes
1:18:12
Speaker 1: we just leave it out too much because those that
1:18:18
Speaker 1: are devoted don't like when people deal with it as scholarship,
1:18:21
Speaker 1: and those that aren't devoted don't, you know, in some ways,
1:18:25
Speaker 1: are like, you're giving it too much attention.
1:18:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, and no that Yeah, well I'll tell you, Chuck.
1:18:32
Speaker 3: I'm so glad you brought that up because I said
1:18:34
Speaker 3: something the other day in some conversation.
1:18:36
Speaker 1: I confess like that conscious pilot story, but I always
1:18:39
Speaker 1: want it. I get it, but I also want it
1:18:42
Speaker 1: as a Look, we all, no matter who you are,
1:18:45
Speaker 1: there's certain things you don't know that you're embarrassed to say.
1:18:47
Speaker 1: And it's like you got to learn to say it.
1:18:49
Speaker 3: This is what I agree with you one, And there's
1:18:52
Speaker 3: always a spiritual dimension to the films that we've made.
1:18:58
Speaker 1: You always do doing it.
1:19:00
Speaker 3: Look, let's just take Article one. I mean, you know,
1:19:04
Speaker 3: Amendment one of the Constitution, the first Amendment. Does it?
1:19:09
Speaker 3: You ask anybody on the street, you take your camera
1:19:11
Speaker 3: out there and you stick the mic, and they say
1:19:13
Speaker 3: it's freedom of speech, right, And then maybe you get
1:19:15
Speaker 3: somebody who says freedom to redress your grievances, you know,
1:19:19
Speaker 3: protest whatever it might be. And then those are the
1:19:23
Speaker 3: second and third parts of a three part thing, the
1:19:26
Speaker 3: first of which is that the Congress will make no
1:19:30
Speaker 3: establishment of any religion. And so one of my favorite
1:19:34
Speaker 3: sections in all of the Revolution film is one on deism,
1:19:38
Speaker 3: which becomes this sort of aggregate not default, but kind
1:19:43
Speaker 3: of aggregate conscious choice of many of the mostly Protestant founders,
1:19:50
Speaker 3: you know, capital ab founders, and the whole idea and
1:19:53
Speaker 3: Our scene begins with Thomas Jefferson saying, if my neighbor
1:19:58
Speaker 3: believes in twenty guys God or no God at all,
1:20:01
Speaker 3: it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. So
1:20:06
Speaker 3: we've all Religion has heretofore, the Founders understood, always been
1:20:09
Speaker 3: the cultural. Every country has had an established faith, and
1:20:12
Speaker 3: that has been the source of a great deal of
1:20:14
Speaker 3: the problems. But in fact, as we begun.
1:20:17
Speaker 1: To enlightened to understand that back then, actually it is.
1:20:20
Speaker 3: We are an enlightenment and.
1:20:23
Speaker 1: Invent This is what it is, is.
1:20:26
Speaker 3: That God we always you know, you hit a home
1:20:28
Speaker 3: run and you thank God. You know when you hit
1:20:30
Speaker 3: into a game ending doubles play, you don't thank God, right,
1:20:34
Speaker 3: And that's and somehow God is always responsible for this
1:20:38
Speaker 3: and the anthropomorphosizing and the narcissism that's involved. The Founders
1:20:42
Speaker 3: came to some very incredibly amazing enlightened idea that they
1:20:48
Speaker 3: they believe, almost all of them, believe in a supreme being,
1:20:52
Speaker 3: supreme architect, divine providence. You hear those words, right, And
1:20:57
Speaker 3: they believe that that God has takes no interest in
1:21:01
Speaker 3: the daily affairs of mankind and makes obviously therefore no
1:21:06
Speaker 3: distinctions between religions. So it then becomes in pursuit of
1:21:10
Speaker 3: happiness back to that our obligation to make ourselves better
1:21:16
Speaker 3: and then closer to whatever that being is, because if
1:21:20
Speaker 3: you're worse, you're cruder and you're devolving, and you're closer
1:21:23
Speaker 3: to the animals. And many might say Satan, but there
1:21:27
Speaker 3: is such an I've spent a lot of time looking
1:21:29
Speaker 3: at deism and I find it such an interesting thing,
1:21:33
Speaker 3: and nobody wants to do. I mean, I'm traveling around
1:21:35
Speaker 3: the country and people say, well, this is a Protestant
1:21:37
Speaker 3: a Christian nation, and you go, well, you know, they're
1:21:40
Speaker 3: Jews and they're Catholics, and there's you know, all the
1:21:43
Speaker 3: animals religions that are brought over in the slave ships,
1:21:47
Speaker 3: including Muslim relationship, and then Native Americans have their own stuff.
1:21:52
Speaker 3: This is really polyglot, and people are in different parts
1:21:55
Speaker 3: of the country susceptible. One of the things that they
1:21:58
Speaker 3: resented in the back country of the Carolina and Georgia
1:22:01
Speaker 3: was that if it was the Anglican Church or the
1:22:05
Speaker 3: Presbyterian Church, or not Presbyterian, but some other church that
1:22:09
Speaker 3: was the favored of the governor, then you had to
1:22:12
Speaker 3: pay for the minister's salaries, and you didn't like that
1:22:15
Speaker 3: if you were a Methodist or a Baptist or a Presbyterian,
1:22:17
Speaker 3: and so you have this sense of being suspicious of
1:22:21
Speaker 3: somebody trying to tell you their way is the only way,
1:22:24
Speaker 3: and that the government should in any way favor anyone
1:22:30
Speaker 3: flavor faith, whatever you want to talk. And if you
1:22:33
Speaker 3: go to Deism and understand, it's just you're and my
1:22:36
Speaker 3: responsibility to move closer to God. However we see that
1:22:41
Speaker 3: to divine providence, to the miracle of this snowfall out
1:22:45
Speaker 3: my window or the sunset that will come in a
1:22:47
Speaker 3: little bit.
1:22:59
Speaker 1: I mean, it's honestly, it's quite surprising that the founders
1:23:02
Speaker 1: were this enlightened, considering how important you know that the place,
1:23:05
Speaker 1: in some ways, the reason many of their their found
1:23:10
Speaker 1: their parents came here was for freedom to worship.
1:23:14
Speaker 3: That's correct, and I think that what they realized.
1:23:18
Speaker 4: I mean that you have to say that that that
1:23:22
Speaker 4: we are the manifestation of the Enlightenment in the form
1:23:28
Speaker 4: of a country.
1:23:28
Speaker 3: The first ever I've said it on the road. I
1:23:30
Speaker 3: didn't say it in the film per se. I mean,
1:23:32
Speaker 3: I said it's consequential revolution in the history, but I
1:23:35
Speaker 3: said it's the most consequence, it's the most important event
1:23:37
Speaker 3: since the birth of Christ in world history because it's
1:23:41
Speaker 3: set in motion revolutions for two centuries, but in set
1:23:44
Speaker 3: in motion, which for two hundred and fifty years is produced,
1:23:47
Speaker 3: you know, one of the greatest countries. Now, have there
1:23:49
Speaker 3: been series of mistakes, Yes, indeed, and I've spent most
1:23:53
Speaker 3: of my professional life not ignoring them.
1:23:56
Speaker 1: In the chronicling them in some ways, chronicling them in
1:23:59
Speaker 1: some ways.
1:23:59
Speaker 3: But you know, but it's not all dark either. It's
1:24:03
Speaker 3: it's an incredibly positive story. And if you listed all
1:24:06
Speaker 3: the good things, I don't know any other country on
1:24:09
Speaker 3: Earth that could put up, you know, starting with the
1:24:11
Speaker 3: Declaration and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and
1:24:13
Speaker 3: then you just go on, whether it's land grant colleges
1:24:16
Speaker 3: or National Parks or Homestead Act or you know, child
1:24:20
Speaker 3: labor laws or anti trust or you know, the GI Bill,
1:24:23
Speaker 3: or Social Security, labor's right to organize, interstate highway, Man
1:24:27
Speaker 3: on the Moon, affordable care, Medicaid, medicare you know voting.
1:24:32
Speaker 3: I mean, this is like an amazing stuff and it
1:24:35
Speaker 3: has tangible things. William Luckdeberg the latest story and died
1:24:38
Speaker 3: recently at A. One hundred and two was an advisor
1:24:41
Speaker 3: for almost all the films that we worked on, but
1:24:43
Speaker 3: he was in our Roosevelt thing. He said, you land
1:24:45
Speaker 3: at LaGuardia, FDR New Deal, you go across the bridge,
1:24:49
Speaker 3: FDR New Deal, you go through the Lincoln Tunnel, FDR,
1:24:52
Speaker 3: you go down the Skyline Drive and the you know,
1:24:54
Speaker 3: Blue Ridge Parkway. The thing if you do the Lincoln Highway,
1:24:57
Speaker 3: if you do this damn ten thousand strips, you begin
1:25:01
Speaker 3: to understand all of the ways in which just that
1:25:04
Speaker 3: one presidential administration transformed the country.
1:25:09
Speaker 1: How long? What is?
1:25:12
Speaker 3: You know?
1:25:12
Speaker 1: I've been I was looking to see what's the shortest
1:25:15
Speaker 1: amount of time between an historical event or era that
1:25:21
Speaker 1: you would then feel comfortable making it talk about it.
1:25:27
Speaker 1: I guess the Central Park five is the shortest.
1:25:30
Speaker 3: Is that? Yeah? I think I think that's the correct
1:25:32
Speaker 3: All that we've had things like the Shakers and baseball
1:25:34
Speaker 3: and jazz country music, the present comes up to the press,
1:25:38
Speaker 3: we unlock the narrative and are more impressionistic for the
1:25:42
Speaker 3: last twenty five thirty years. That's what I've said. So
1:25:44
Speaker 3: the actual event of the Central Bark Jogger, that's a
1:25:47
Speaker 3: film that came out in twenty twelve. Twenty thirteen was
1:25:51
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty nine, so that's.
1:25:52
Speaker 1: Still twenty five years.
1:25:53
Speaker 3: Still under twenty five years, but it's enough. Things are collapsing.
1:25:57
Speaker 3: You know what's interesting is I've had the great privilege
1:26:00
Speaker 3: of interviewing Barack Obama for eight two hour interviews. I've
1:26:04
Speaker 3: got a couple more to go, but there's no rush
1:26:06
Speaker 3: because what's happened in the recent political administrations is that
1:26:11
Speaker 3: it's constipated the scholarship. So by this time there'd normally
1:26:14
Speaker 3: be twenty five books of scholarship on Barack Obama's presidency.
1:26:18
Speaker 3: But it hasn't happened, and so there's no urge to
1:26:21
Speaker 3: go and do it till you can get to that
1:26:23
Speaker 3: point of triangulation, that is to say, the perspective that
1:26:27
Speaker 3: comes from new scholarship and new things in which you
1:26:30
Speaker 3: are not solely dependent on.
1:26:33
Speaker 1: Well, I'll give you a perfect example of how my
1:26:36
Speaker 1: view has changed about the century and how my view
1:26:38
Speaker 1: is or frankly, the Cold War. You know, I'm now
1:26:41
Speaker 1: more comfortable understanding that the Cold War was an outlier.
1:26:44
Speaker 1: It's an outlier in American history, It's an outlier in
1:26:47
Speaker 1: the history of the media. It's an outlier in all
1:26:49
Speaker 1: sorts of it's an outlier in our streamism in politics,
1:26:54
Speaker 1: but you don't fully appreciate it until you get farther
1:26:58
Speaker 1: away from it. That's great Barack Obama's election. You're gonna
1:27:03
Speaker 1: have one interpretation based on it when you look at
1:27:06
Speaker 1: it through the prism of starting at say twenty fifteen.
1:27:09
Speaker 1: Now I look back now from a perch of twenty
1:27:13
Speaker 1: twenty six, and you now see that Obama and Trump
1:27:17
Speaker 1: are more intertwined, and they're going to be more intertwined
1:27:20
Speaker 1: in American history fifty years from now than I think
1:27:23
Speaker 1: either gentleman wants to what a wants to admit would be.
1:27:27
Speaker 1: That's sort of you know your successor whoever that person
1:27:32
Speaker 1: is in fifty years. You can't explain Trump without Obama.
1:27:37
Speaker 1: You're not gonna be able to explain Obama without Trump,
1:27:39
Speaker 1: like you're going to be intertwined. Yet you couldn't tell
1:27:43
Speaker 1: the Obama story in twenty seventeen completely. No, I don't know,
1:27:47
Speaker 1: And maybe that you can't tell this story completely and
1:27:50
Speaker 1: maybe it's twenty thirty eight, maybe it's twenty three, don't so,
1:27:54
Speaker 1: I guess, Mike, when do you feel comfortable. They're like, Okay,
1:27:58
Speaker 1: I can tackle a I could tackle an era now
1:28:02
Speaker 1: where new information isn't going to change.
1:28:04
Speaker 3: I used to stay twenty five thirty. I still believe it.
1:28:07
Speaker 3: I do believe it because of the rate of information.
1:28:10
Speaker 3: I wish there was more scholarship, and I will wait
1:28:12
Speaker 3: for that before I really begin to try to structure
1:28:15
Speaker 3: and put together the Obama thing. It's really just unbelievable stuff.
1:28:18
Speaker 3: But I'll give you an example that's close to tell you. So,
1:28:22
Speaker 3: we did a film that came out in twenty seventeen
1:28:24
Speaker 3: on the Vietnam War. It was ten episodes, eighteen hours.
1:28:28
Speaker 3: If I had done it ten years after the fall
1:28:32
Speaker 3: of Saigon in nineteen eighty five, America was in a recession.
1:28:36
Speaker 3: There's a Pacific rim but we're not talking about us.
1:28:38
Speaker 3: We're talking about Japan is a sentant, and we would
1:28:42
Speaker 3: see Vietnam as this ball and chain, this sort of
1:28:45
Speaker 3: like perpetual rain cloud.
1:28:47
Speaker 1: Over a scar on our car, as was a scar.
1:28:51
Speaker 3: So if you wait, if I waited twenty years, so
1:28:53
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety five, we are the sole superpower. We're in
1:28:56
Speaker 3: the middle of the largest peacetime economic expansion. We have
1:28:59
Speaker 3: just fought at Gulf War with all all of the
1:29:03
Speaker 3: you know, assembly of people. We would say Vietnam is important,
1:29:06
Speaker 3: but it's you know, we've liberated, we've escaped the specific gravity.
1:29:10
Speaker 3: If I've waited thirty years and it's twenty two thousand
1:29:13
Speaker 3: and five, we're bogged down in both Iraq and Afghanistan,
1:29:18
Speaker 3: and people are using Vietnam analogies to talk about that.
1:29:22
Speaker 3: And then you know, the film comes out essentially ten
1:29:24
Speaker 3: years after that, forty years, forty two years after that,
1:29:28
Speaker 3: and you begin to realize that your job is to
1:29:30
Speaker 3: use the passage of time as triangulation, to use the
1:29:34
Speaker 3: scholarship as triangulation, to figure out how to more firmly
1:29:38
Speaker 3: understand an event by by what you've done, and sort
1:29:42
Speaker 3: of average out those things. Disaster not a disaster, disaster again,
1:29:47
Speaker 3: And so Vietnam undergoes lots of things, and of course
1:29:49
Speaker 3: it's none of those things. It's never history doesn't repeat itself.
1:29:54
Speaker 3: No event has ever happened twice, never has, never will,
1:29:59
Speaker 3: and so the trope of that becomes a kind of
1:30:02
Speaker 3: prison for us to get in. And so what you
1:30:05
Speaker 3: have to do is be dispassionate. You have to sort
1:30:07
Speaker 3: of like a disease. Tie yourself to the mass so
1:30:11
Speaker 3: that you can hear seriously sound, but you don't want
1:30:13
Speaker 3: to point arrows. Isn't this so much like today? Because
1:30:17
Speaker 3: as I said, you're dated instantly by that, and you've
1:30:20
Speaker 3: become you know, the historical profession has gone through many
1:30:24
Speaker 3: fashions of historiography. Right, So after World War Two, narratives bad,
1:30:29
Speaker 3: it's bankrupt. So we're going to replace it with a
1:30:31
Speaker 3: Freudian interpretation, psychosexual and it's going to be Marxist economic determinism.
1:30:37
Speaker 3: Somewhere along the line. It's symbolism, it's semiotics, it's deconstruction,
1:30:41
Speaker 3: it's queer studies, it's afrocentrism, it's whatever it is. None
1:30:46
Speaker 3: of those give you what all of those give you,
1:30:50
Speaker 3: which is a multitude modes of inquiry, multitude of perspectives,
1:30:54
Speaker 3: like the spokes on a wheel that make the wheel
1:30:58
Speaker 3: engineered to great strength, to able to bear a great load.
1:31:02
Speaker 3: So we draw in scholars on Vietnam or the Revolution
1:31:05
Speaker 3: that represent all sorts of different areas of scholarship, and
1:31:09
Speaker 3: we take in what their knowledge is, but not necessarily
1:31:12
Speaker 3: their total interpretation. So scholars of Native Americans, one of
1:31:17
Speaker 3: the scholars. Christopher Brown is a student of eighteenth and
1:31:22
Speaker 3: nineteenth century British economy. He's a black man to go no, no, no,
1:31:27
Speaker 3: he must want to talk about slavery, and does, but
1:31:29
Speaker 3: only in the context of economic So you get a
1:31:32
Speaker 3: wonderful dynamic without having to subscribe to anybody's theory of
1:31:40
Speaker 3: how to understand American history. That's why, you know, and
1:31:44
Speaker 3: we're constantly being bombarded with what is the correct way
1:31:48
Speaker 3: to see this? You know, it's seventeen seventy six, or
1:31:50
Speaker 3: it's sixteen nineteen, or it's no, it's from eighteen seventy
1:31:55
Speaker 3: it's from seventeen seventy five to seventeen eighty one or
1:31:58
Speaker 3: seventeen eighty three, depending on whether it's Yorktown or the
1:32:01
Speaker 3: British leaving Ward.
1:32:03
Speaker 1: So well, let me ask about the Cold War. That
1:32:07
Speaker 1: feels like a Ken Burns project.
1:32:08
Speaker 3: It is we do you know what we've been talking about?
1:32:10
Speaker 3: The Cold War. I can't believe you brought that up.
1:32:12
Speaker 3: Check it's so we're on the same wavelength. So we've
1:32:15
Speaker 3: been talking for probably two decades about the Cold War,
1:32:19
Speaker 3: and about a year ago I said I want to
1:32:22
Speaker 3: make it the CIA. So we're doing a big we're
1:32:25
Speaker 3: just beginning to sort of unload and create the space.
1:32:29
Speaker 3: I like took all the books and stuff like that
1:32:31
Speaker 3: and put it in the corner of my house and
1:32:33
Speaker 3: I put a sign up over and said, Langley, you know,
1:32:36
Speaker 3: because that's where we're going to collect all the CIA
1:32:39
Speaker 3: notes and papers.
1:32:40
Speaker 1: We talked to something.
1:32:41
Speaker 3: We know how we're going to do it because you'll
1:32:43
Speaker 3: get the Cold War, which you also get all the
1:32:46
Speaker 3: intimacies of the stories, you know, Like I was just
1:32:48
Speaker 3: talking to Rick Atkinson the history and he described a
1:32:51
Speaker 3: friend that he knew, a Russian who disappeared because Alder
1:32:55
Speaker 3: James betrayed him. He was an asset for the United
1:32:58
Speaker 3: States working at the Soviet imbas in Washington. Poof gone.
1:33:01
Speaker 3: So all of a sudden, the abstractions of talking about
1:33:05
Speaker 3: Cold wars and stuff like that goes down to the
1:33:07
Speaker 3: minutia of somebody in Geneva doing this to somebody else.
1:33:11
Speaker 1: So my obsession with Cold War, with the Cold War
1:33:13
Speaker 1: has come from when people lament to me, I wish
1:33:18
Speaker 1: we were like this, you know, whatever it is. I
1:33:21
Speaker 1: wish our politics were this way. I wish our media
1:33:23
Speaker 1: were this way, and I wish and I go back,
1:33:24
Speaker 1: and I'm like, you're a child of the Cold War
1:33:27
Speaker 1: era and you don't realize you live in an outlier.
1:33:31
Speaker 1: And then I'll go through, you know, and say, you know,
1:33:34
Speaker 1: we're actually we're reverting. Today's America is no different from
1:33:38
Speaker 1: nineteenth century America. There's a lot of differences and as
1:33:41
Speaker 1: far as people's freedoms and not but in some ways
1:33:43
Speaker 1: our politics is not this similar. We're still fighting about
1:33:46
Speaker 1: who gets to be an American and who isn't. We're
1:33:48
Speaker 1: still fighting about you know, shares of the pie and
1:33:52
Speaker 1: things like that. And oh, by the way, the nineteenth
1:33:55
Speaker 1: century was superpartisan, our media was superpartisan. And where are
1:34:00
Speaker 1: we today, you know? And then it has made me
1:34:03
Speaker 1: look at the Cold War as an outlier as far
1:34:05
Speaker 1: as in political history, right, we had I love to
1:34:09
Speaker 1: remind people are closest. We've had six of the last
1:34:12
Speaker 1: seven presidential elections been decided by five points or less
1:34:15
Speaker 1: in the entire twentieth century, when we had five, and
1:34:18
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, why and yet the nineteenth century, my gosh,
1:34:21
Speaker 1: we had twenty. I'm obsessed with the seven presidents between
1:34:25
Speaker 1: Jackson and Lincoln in twenty eight years, Like you want
1:34:27
Speaker 1: to talk about instability. There's instability.
1:34:30
Speaker 3: You know, the popular vote. In seventy six, eighteen seventy six,
1:34:34
Speaker 3: Tilden wins the popular vote, and we had three elections
1:34:37
Speaker 3: with Grover Cleveland. He all won the popular vote three
1:34:41
Speaker 3: times and lost the middle one.
1:34:45
Speaker 1: And what I love to also remind folks is that
1:34:48
Speaker 1: we've had three straight one term presidents. We never had
1:34:51
Speaker 1: that once in the twentieth century, but we had it
1:34:54
Speaker 1: two different times. We went five straight one term presidents
1:34:57
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century. So it is is I think
1:35:01
Speaker 1: we haven't fully appreciated. And this is where obviously it's
1:35:04
Speaker 1: sort of like why does experience matter? Because you have
1:35:06
Speaker 1: to sort of live to see it. You have to
1:35:09
Speaker 1: be able to look backwards and the world I grew
1:35:12
Speaker 1: up and I always think now that I grew up
1:35:14
Speaker 1: in the wrong I always think I grew up in
1:35:16
Speaker 1: the right era of the way the media worked, and
1:35:19
Speaker 1: it's like, no, in some ways, I grew up in
1:35:20
Speaker 1: the wrong era because it was a false premise.
1:35:25
Speaker 3: So you could make an argument therefore, with regard to
1:35:28
Speaker 3: I think your excellent theories about the Cold War is
1:35:33
Speaker 3: that when the Soviet Empire collapsed, the total destabilizing of
1:35:38
Speaker 3: American politics was assured, that is to say, destabilize from
1:35:43
Speaker 3: what you're calling the outlier of a kind of general
1:35:46
Speaker 3: consensus that had been built not since just forty five,
1:35:50
Speaker 3: but I would say back to the progressive era, where
1:35:52
Speaker 3: you had people in both parties wishing to use government
1:35:55
Speaker 3: as an instrumentality of progress, or at least, as tr
1:35:58
Speaker 3: would say, a countervailing force between labor and capital.
1:36:03
Speaker 1: And instead we basically were a period of just security.
1:36:06
Speaker 3: So what happens, yes, just surviving the thing, and so
1:36:10
Speaker 3: that when you take this away, you don't have an
1:36:12
Speaker 3: enemy anymore. And so who do you make the enemy?
1:36:16
Speaker 1: Each other? No? Right, well, well I love to remind
1:36:20
Speaker 1: people the Berlin Wall falls in eighty nine, and within
1:36:23
Speaker 1: three years the isolationist wing of the Republican Party sprouts
1:36:27
Speaker 1: up again, and Donald Trump's first campaign is launched. It's
1:36:32
Speaker 1: called Pat Buchanan's Campaign for President, and so and it's
1:36:37
Speaker 1: and I you know, and in fact, two of our
1:36:39
Speaker 1: closest presidential elections were followed by two of our biggest blowouts.
1:36:45
Speaker 1: So seventy two and sixty four were blowouts because each
1:36:48
Speaker 1: party went off the reservation, but sixty and seventy six
1:36:52
Speaker 1: were two of our closest presidential elections because both parties
1:36:55
Speaker 1: went back on the reservation and it was anyway. It's
1:37:00
Speaker 1: just one of those where I feel like you have
1:37:05
Speaker 1: to capture this.
1:37:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I'm trying. I'm trying. Give me time, I'm
1:37:09
Speaker 3: taking vitamins, I'm walking, I'm doing my exercises. It's I've
1:37:12
Speaker 3: got that look, Chuck. I have the best job in
1:37:14
Speaker 3: the country. I do well.
1:37:15
Speaker 1: You're you are, you are this guy for us. When
1:37:20
Speaker 1: do you suspect you'll do your first twenty first century
1:37:24
Speaker 1: you know, an event in an era which the most
1:37:27
Speaker 1: obvious would be nine to eleven. But when do you
1:37:30
Speaker 1: feel like you'll tackle your first twenty first century event era?
1:37:34
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I think that part of the Central
1:37:42
Speaker 3: Park five begins in the early is resolved in the
1:37:45
Speaker 3: twenty first century. The update of baseball called the Tenth
1:37:49
Speaker 3: Inning ends in two thousand and nine. We've done some
1:37:53
Speaker 3: stuff on housing. I was executive producer. My daughter Sarah,
1:37:58
Speaker 3: who's one of our main directors, and her husband David
1:38:01
Speaker 3: McMahon have done things on public housing. I think the
1:38:06
Speaker 3: Obama one will be fully that'll be the perotentially. I mean,
1:38:11
Speaker 3: my first question to him is, of course where were
1:38:13
Speaker 3: you born? But you know, you should see the way
1:38:17
Speaker 3: I said it.
1:38:18
Speaker 1: It's a log cabin in Kentucky, right, that had been funny?
1:38:22
Speaker 3: You mean him Madras in Pakistan or Indonesia.
1:38:26
Speaker 1: Well, I've always said, you know, if he were this
1:38:28
Speaker 1: sort of counter this secret you know, idea of like,
1:38:31
Speaker 1: you know, to take over America, right with that was
1:38:33
Speaker 1: what a brilliant move, right to incubate him through Hawaii
1:38:36
Speaker 1: and all this stuff. Why would you name him Barack Husain?
1:38:38
Speaker 1: Why wouldn't you call him Thomas Jefferson Obama?
1:38:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, So the log cabin is to your point, Yeah,
1:38:46
Speaker 3: it's it's a pretty great story. I've I've dealt with
1:38:49
Speaker 3: race Chuck forty plus films that have been out. I
1:38:53
Speaker 3: can count on the fingers of one hand.
1:38:55
Speaker 1: When is race not a part of it?
1:38:57
Speaker 3: And I say this because it's always a part or
1:39:02
Speaker 3: fingers of one hand and self enough time to snap
1:39:05
Speaker 3: my fingers. And I've gotten a lot of criticism over
1:39:08
Speaker 3: the years about it, from people, from critics, from even historians, friends,
1:39:12
Speaker 3: other colleagues, and they said, what are you going to stop?
1:39:16
Speaker 3: And when Barack Obama was inaugurated on December twenty, two
1:39:19
Speaker 3: thousand and nine. They said, now are you going to stop?
1:39:22
Speaker 3: And I held up the Onion magazine and it said
1:39:24
Speaker 3: black man given worst job in nation. And I just said,
1:39:28
Speaker 3: watch what happens. And at least to their credit, most
1:39:31
Speaker 3: people have come back and apologized that you're right. Race
1:39:34
Speaker 3: is central, it's the story. How can you say that
1:39:37
Speaker 3: we know exactly when we were founded, and we know
1:39:40
Speaker 3: what's our catechism, and it begins, we hold these schoos
1:39:43
Speaker 3: to be self evident, that all men are created equal,
1:39:45
Speaker 3: and the guy who wrote it owned other human beings.
1:39:48
Speaker 3: And so how are we not constantly both ennobled and
1:39:52
Speaker 3: also stricken by this, by that contradiction, in that hypocrisy?
1:39:57
Speaker 1: All right, let me let you play critic on historical fiction.
1:40:01
Speaker 1: What's your favorite historical fiction out there?
1:40:03
Speaker 3: Oh? To me, it's Michael Shara's Killer Angels. I read
1:40:07
Speaker 3: it and finished it on Christmas Day nineteen eighty four.
1:40:09
Speaker 3: Is visiting my dad, Michigan, and I said, I now
1:40:12
Speaker 3: know what I'm going to do for my next subject.
1:40:14
Speaker 3: And he said what's that. I said, the Civil War?
1:40:16
Speaker 3: And he said what part? I said, all of it.
1:40:18
Speaker 3: He just shook his hand and walked out of the
1:40:20
Speaker 3: room like, my idiot son, what's my son doing?
1:40:23
Speaker 1: But yeah, he's never going to succeed in this career.
1:40:27
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, there's no way people are going
1:40:29
Speaker 1: to watch nine no series.
1:40:31
Speaker 3: In the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. May they rest in peace.
1:40:34
Speaker 3: The first time three didn't turn this down. They said, look,
1:40:36
Speaker 3: you know, people watch an hour an hour and a
1:40:38
Speaker 3: half can yeah, are you really that we do a
1:40:40
Speaker 3: proposal five one hours. It only became because the editing
1:40:44
Speaker 3: was going well, the nine episodes in the eleven and
1:40:47
Speaker 3: a half twelve hours that it is, and so even
1:40:49
Speaker 3: at five one hours, my biggest source of our funding
1:40:54
Speaker 3: over the years wasn't sure that it would work well.
1:40:59
Speaker 1: Have you ever wanted to and either dramatized?
1:41:02
Speaker 3: First, wanted to be a filmmaker. My mom died when
1:41:05
Speaker 3: I was eleven. When I was twelve, my dad, who
1:41:07
Speaker 3: never cried during her sickness or death or funeral, cried
1:41:11
Speaker 3: at an old movie. Let me stay up and watch
1:41:12
Speaker 3: with him. And I thought, right then and there, I
1:41:14
Speaker 3: get it. I want to be a feature filmmaker. That
1:41:16
Speaker 3: means I'm David Lean, it means I'm Howard Hawks, I'm
1:41:19
Speaker 3: john Ford. I'm Alfred Hitchcock. And then I went to
1:41:22
Speaker 3: Hampshire College where they were doing nothing but social documentary
1:41:26
Speaker 3: is still photography. So I realized, truthfully that there is
1:41:29
Speaker 3: as much drama, if not more, in what was and
1:41:32
Speaker 3: what is than anything that human imagination dreams up. But
1:41:35
Speaker 3: I think about it all the time. But I don't
1:41:37
Speaker 3: have to, you know, Shelby called me up in the
1:41:39
Speaker 3: middle where editing had this huge problem. I called him
1:41:42
Speaker 3: up and I just I can't figure out how to
1:41:45
Speaker 3: do Vicksburg and Gettysburg. And he said, God's the greatest dramatist.
1:41:50
Speaker 3: I said, he said, I said, what goes God, It's
1:41:53
Speaker 3: the greatest dramatist. So I hung up, and I realized,
1:41:55
Speaker 3: just tell it the way it happened. So everybody either
1:41:57
Speaker 3: puts Vicksburg after Gettysburg or Vicksburg before, but actually Vicksburg
1:42:01
Speaker 3: happens before and during and after after Yettysburg. And that's
1:42:06
Speaker 3: exactly the way. And then he called me up and
1:42:08
Speaker 3: he said it again. He said, maybe a couple of
1:42:10
Speaker 3: years later, he goes, God's the greatest dramatis. Who would
1:42:12
Speaker 3: have thought that Lee would surrender the grant? And a
1:42:14
Speaker 3: few days later Lincoln would have enough free time after
1:42:16
Speaker 3: eighteen hours of days prosecuting the war to go to
1:42:19
Speaker 3: the theater. God is the greatest dramatist.
1:42:23
Speaker 1: No, it just tell the story.
1:42:26
Speaker 3: Just tell the story. And then and people say, what's
1:42:28
Speaker 3: your structure? I go and then and then and then
1:42:30
Speaker 3: if you look at our World War two drama, we
1:42:32
Speaker 3: land d day, go back to the reaction, and then
1:42:35
Speaker 3: go to Saipan, because that's what the front page of
1:42:38
Speaker 3: the paper is looking at. Everybody does, Oh, we'll do
1:42:40
Speaker 3: the European. Then we'll go to do the Pacific. And
1:42:42
Speaker 3: then you have no idea of their continuity, and so
1:42:45
Speaker 3: we then go back and they're having trouble breaking out
1:42:47
Speaker 3: of the hedgerows. And then you go back to the
1:42:49
Speaker 3: middle of the Battle of Sipark.
1:42:50
Speaker 1: I wish you were put in charge of the World
1:42:52
Speaker 1: War two memorial here. I'm not going to make you
1:42:54
Speaker 1: criticize it. It frustrates me to all end. How it is,
1:42:58
Speaker 1: how it just barely scratches the surface. I get it.
1:43:02
Speaker 1: It's what happens when you have a committee. Whenever you
1:43:05
Speaker 1: put a committee in charge of something.
1:43:06
Speaker 3: The greatest gotaclausm in human history. We can do better.
1:43:10
Speaker 1: We can do so much better than that. So America
1:43:13
Speaker 1: two fifty, How do you celebrate? How do you tell
1:43:17
Speaker 1: how do you tell somebody to celebrate? How would you
1:43:19
Speaker 1: reckon with?
1:43:20
Speaker 3: Well, it's all individual and independent, right, We're all citizens.
1:43:24
Speaker 3: We've got that great special privilege. What I've done every
1:43:27
Speaker 3: year is, with maybe one or two exceptions over the
1:43:30
Speaker 3: last forty years, is at our late cottage, I get
1:43:33
Speaker 3: out on the front porch and before I let anybody eat,
1:43:36
Speaker 3: I read them the Declaration of Independence. And it ends
1:43:39
Speaker 3: with we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes,
1:43:43
Speaker 3: and our sacred honor. And you know who, George Washington
1:43:48
Speaker 3: was probably the richest person in America, or one of
1:43:50
Speaker 3: the richest at the time of the revolution, certainly before
1:43:53
Speaker 3: he was, and he risked everything, his life and his
1:43:56
Speaker 3: fortune and his sacred honor. You know, you make we
1:43:58
Speaker 3: make a joke now of Washington's left here, But he
1:44:01
Speaker 3: spent between when he was named the head of the
1:44:05
Speaker 3: Continental Army, not the East Coast Army, but Continental. We
1:44:07
Speaker 3: knew where we were going. By the Continental Congress, we
1:44:10
Speaker 3: knew where we were going. In the early summer of
1:44:15
Speaker 3: seventy five, he gets back to Mount Vernon for four nights. Right.
1:44:21
Speaker 3: He comes back to Mount Vernon in December of seventeen
1:44:24
Speaker 3: eighty three. So who would And this is an idea
1:44:30
Speaker 3: that's never been tested. Now we've tested it for two
1:44:32
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty years. And could you imagine somebody in
1:44:35
Speaker 3: the top one hundred risking their lives, their fortunes, and
1:44:40
Speaker 3: their sacred honor for something as important as our founding.
1:44:44
Speaker 3: And so that's what the celebration of two fifteen. Nobody
1:44:48
Speaker 3: can tell you what it isn't nobody can tell you
1:44:50
Speaker 3: what it is. It's always complex, that's the nature of
1:44:54
Speaker 3: human beings, and we should be reveling in that complexity.
1:44:58
Speaker 3: Let me give you one slight example. The bell cow
1:45:02
Speaker 3: of the conservative movement at this time is the television
1:45:06
Speaker 3: series Yellowstone Right.
1:45:08
Speaker 1: Right, This is.
1:45:09
Speaker 3: Finally they've made liberal. Hollywood made a story for us, right.
1:45:15
Speaker 3: And what is at the heart of that story a
1:45:17
Speaker 3: patriarch who is the George Washington of the series, who
1:45:21
Speaker 3: also kills people who piss him off, just as his
1:45:24
Speaker 3: father and grandfather have done, dumping their bodies wherever they want.
1:45:27
Speaker 3: He's got a daughter cut from his same cloth, as
1:45:30
Speaker 3: ruthless as he is he's got two sons. One is
1:45:33
Speaker 3: tortured by the relationship to the land and the Native
1:45:37
Speaker 3: American story that has been superimposed without any questions over that.
1:45:41
Speaker 3: And he's married a Native American woman, right. The other
1:45:44
Speaker 3: son is Benedict Arnold, right. And then the daughter is
1:45:50
Speaker 3: in love with the chief foreman of this thing, who's
1:45:52
Speaker 3: in charge of a group of ranchers who are young
1:45:55
Speaker 3: and old, white and black, gay and straight, and over
1:46:00
Speaker 3: and surrounding them is this larger Native American issue and
1:46:03
Speaker 3: over that this idea of development. If that isn't as
1:46:06
Speaker 3: complex a storyline as anything I've said in which it's
1:46:10
Speaker 3: got undertow and all of the American experience. We made
1:46:13
Speaker 3: a film on the American Buffalo, and I remember looking
1:46:16
Speaker 3: at one scene where Kevin Costner plays the lead. John
1:46:20
Speaker 3: Dutton is explaining to somebody just about it, and in
1:46:23
Speaker 3: three seconds I just turned to my daughter and I said,
1:46:26
Speaker 3: that was our four hours on the Buffalo, you know,
1:46:29
Speaker 3: And he did it in like three sentences.
1:46:32
Speaker 1: Have you ever spent do you know? Taylor Sheridan?
1:46:34
Speaker 3: I know Kevin and he's one of the great guys.
1:46:38
Speaker 3: So anyway, yeah, it's it. Anybody trying to tell you
1:46:43
Speaker 3: how it was, or to simplify it, or to take
1:46:45
Speaker 3: down a plaque is scared and only authoritarians. And by
1:46:49
Speaker 3: the way, we follow in our film, and maybe this
1:46:52
Speaker 3: is a way to rem this out. We follow, among
1:46:56
Speaker 3: the one hundred and fifty different characters, we follow a
1:46:58
Speaker 3: German Hessian soldier named Johann Evold. He's openly contemptuous of
1:47:02
Speaker 3: these rebels. And he arrives in episode three at Staten
1:47:06
Speaker 3: Island when we send the first big batch there, but
1:47:08
Speaker 3: he's there in three, four or five and six, but
1:47:11
Speaker 3: he's part of the surrending army at Yorktown. And he says,
1:47:15
Speaker 3: after Yorktown, who would have thought one hundred years ago
1:47:20
Speaker 3: that out of this multitude of rabble could rise of
1:47:23
Speaker 3: people who could defy kings? These German soldiers who didn't
1:47:29
Speaker 3: get killed, who escaped and blended into the German communities,
1:47:33
Speaker 3: those who stayed and then got shipped back home. A
1:47:36
Speaker 3: lot of them came back with their families because they
1:47:39
Speaker 3: had seen the promised land. Who would have thought one
1:47:43
Speaker 3: hundred years ago, out of this multitude of rabble could
1:47:47
Speaker 3: a rise of people who could defy kings?
1:47:50
Speaker 1: Johann Evold, you didn't have to make up the script. Nope,
1:47:54
Speaker 1: it was right there.
1:47:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, God's the greatest dramatist, right.
1:47:58
Speaker 1: There, you go. Thank you, chev Ken. It's always a
1:48:02
Speaker 1: pleasure to talk with you. Like I said, you've got
1:48:05
Speaker 1: you've got the job that many of us political journalists
1:48:10
Speaker 1: wish we could. We wish we could be you for
1:48:13
Speaker 1: a day.
1:48:13
Speaker 3: Come on over. It's all fine where you know, it's
1:48:16
Speaker 3: it's it's we're up in rural.
1:48:18
Speaker 1: New I'm going to stay in my lane of campaign history,
1:48:21
Speaker 1: so I'm messing around in that world. I think, you know,
1:48:24
Speaker 1: I think people you know, don't don't try to do
1:48:27
Speaker 1: something you're not capable of.
1:48:28
Speaker 3: No, agree that that's the thing. I'm so lucky because,
1:48:31
Speaker 3: as I said, at twelve, I knew that, eighteen I
1:48:34
Speaker 3: knew what kind, and at twenty two it was history.
1:48:36
Speaker 1: So well it is, you know, and you never half asset.
1:48:41
Speaker 1: Sorry for the colorful language.
1:48:43
Speaker 3: No, no, no, this is there's a lot.
1:48:46
Speaker 1: There's a lot of people in your space. You could start,
1:48:49
Speaker 1: you know, Ken Burns presents somebody else's version of history,
1:48:54
Speaker 1: and you could license your name and make a whole
1:48:56
Speaker 1: bunch of money and not have to work anymore. Yeah,
1:48:59
Speaker 1: but I don't I get the sense that you wouldn't
1:49:01
Speaker 1: be proud of that.
1:49:02
Speaker 3: No, no, no, And and the work's the thing, you know,
1:49:05
Speaker 3: why would you take a shortcut? If if? I mean,
1:49:07
Speaker 3: every film is a million, no exaggeration, a million problems.
1:49:11
Speaker 3: But we don't see the problems as pejorita. We see
1:49:14
Speaker 3: them as inevitable friction that every marathon runner knows. I
1:49:17
Speaker 3: don't want to pick up my foot this next time
1:49:19
Speaker 3: I've picked up my foot. I don't want to pick
1:49:21
Speaker 3: up the night I pick up my foot. And you
1:49:23
Speaker 3: just you figure this out? How do you tell this story?
1:49:25
Speaker 3: How do you do Vicksburg? And Getty's all right?
1:49:28
Speaker 1: There you go. Look, I think the more remarkable thing
1:49:31
Speaker 1: is not how many you start, it's how many you finish.
1:49:33
Speaker 3: That's right. And we've been so lushing is the hard part.
1:49:35
Speaker 3: We have finished. We have not abandoned a project once
1:49:39
Speaker 3: we started shooting. Been very lucky, lucky, so lucky.
1:49:44
Speaker 1: Well we're the lucky ones. Ken. Always a pleasure.
1:49:46
Speaker 3: Thank you, Check see you next time.
1:49:48
Speaker 1: Happy birthday, America.
1:49:49
Speaker 3: Thanks yeah, happy birthday. Let's let's have a real celebration.
1:49:52
Speaker 1: Absolutely, thank you. I could have gone another hour with Ken, Burns.
1:50:08
Speaker 1: I'm sure most of you would have stuck right with me,
1:50:11
Speaker 1: and we did. But better to preserve that relationship with him,
1:50:15
Speaker 1: So maybe I can get him back almost once a year.
1:50:17
Speaker 1: That would be the real treat if I could get
1:50:19
Speaker 1: if I could guarantee Ken Burns once a year on
1:50:21
Speaker 1: the podcast, I think I would, I'd feel pretty good
1:50:25
Speaker 1: about myself on that one. I'm looking forward to America
1:50:31
Speaker 1: two fifty. I know that there's you know, it's a
1:50:33
Speaker 1: fraught time politically. Guess what the bi centennial in nineteen
1:50:36
Speaker 1: seventy six, which I'm not going to pretend I had
1:50:38
Speaker 1: any memory of I was four, also was happening at
1:50:41
Speaker 1: a time all right questioning. You know, we a lot
1:50:46
Speaker 1: of weakness in the American presidency, a lot of concern, there,
1:50:49
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of you know, is America.
1:50:53
Speaker 1: Our economy was weak, and you know, it was a
1:50:54
Speaker 1: moment of weakness. And yet and yeah, there was still
1:51:02
Speaker 1: unity because the hope for a more perfect union was
1:51:05
Speaker 1: still out there. And I think we should still take
1:51:07
Speaker 1: a look at America two fifty as I hope for
1:51:09
Speaker 1: a more perfect union. And what I really hope people
1:51:12
Speaker 1: use America to fifty to do is to start thinking
1:51:14
Speaker 1: about ways we can update the democracy. It needs updating.
1:51:17
Speaker 1: We've talked about it. I'm not going to run my
1:51:19
Speaker 1: list now. I've done it before, I will do it again,
1:51:25
Speaker 1: but I'm looking forward to it. I got to I
1:51:28
Speaker 1: went to New York for the one hundredth anniversary of
1:51:31
Speaker 1: New York of New York of the Statue of Liberty.
1:51:35
Speaker 1: Easily it's it is the second greatest fireworks display I've
1:51:38
Speaker 1: ever seen, because the greatest fireworks display that I ever
1:51:42
Speaker 1: see happens every single year in the nation's capital. And
1:51:46
Speaker 1: I promise you, once you see that fireworks display, you
1:51:50
Speaker 1: will never want to see another Fourth of July fireworks
1:51:52
Speaker 1: display because every single one pales in comparison. The only
1:51:56
Speaker 1: one that came close was that New York was when
1:51:59
Speaker 1: they were all those works display for the Statue of
1:52:01
Speaker 1: Liberty when it turned one hundred, and you had I
1:52:04
Speaker 1: think twelve different ships launching identical fireworks displays, and it
1:52:09
Speaker 1: was pretty cool. So I've uh and I still have
1:52:16
Speaker 1: a hole. My father was a coin collector because you
1:52:20
Speaker 1: know a lot of there were a lot of the
1:52:24
Speaker 1: and he I have all these bi centennial mint coins
1:52:27
Speaker 1: from the mint, you know, first off the line, those
1:52:30
Speaker 1: little things. My father was obsessed with collecting bisentennial quarters.
1:52:36
Speaker 1: I think I still have a pile of bisentennial quarters.
1:52:40
Speaker 1: That's something. Man. If you find a bisentennial quarter in
1:52:43
Speaker 1: in real life these days, you've really found something. It's
1:52:48
Speaker 1: like finding that or an old weedy penny where it
1:52:52
Speaker 1: was not the Lincoln memorial on the back, but but
1:52:54
Speaker 1: but two grains, two pieces of two grains of wheat.
1:53:00
Speaker 1: I wonder what is less common to fine? I mean
1:53:02
Speaker 1: these days with change, right, who's paying in cash, let
1:53:08
Speaker 1: alone getting much change? All right, speaking of the past,
1:53:13
Speaker 1: let's jump into the toodcast time machine. So this is
1:53:22
Speaker 1: an interesting week in history coming up because there's two
1:53:25
Speaker 1: anniversaries that I decided to merge into one and to
1:53:30
Speaker 1: talk about how communication technology changed leadership, not just in America,
1:53:35
Speaker 1: but leadership in general. So there are certain inventions that
1:53:42
Speaker 1: quietly rearrange power. The printing press, the telegraph, the internet.
1:53:46
Speaker 1: Sometimes the shift doesn't happen when the technology is invented.
1:53:51
Speaker 1: It happens when someone figures out how to use it.
1:53:55
Speaker 1: So take this week in history. Imagine March twelfth, nineteen
1:54:01
Speaker 1: thirty three, across the United States, families are gathering in
1:54:05
Speaker 1: their living rooms around wooden radio cabinets. Banks have been
1:54:10
Speaker 1: closed for a week. At this point, the financial system
1:54:14
Speaker 1: has essentially frozen. People aren't sure whether the money in
1:54:19
Speaker 1: their bank accounts is even still there. And then the
1:54:23
Speaker 1: President of the United States begins speaking, not delivering a speech,
1:54:29
Speaker 1: talking my friends, I want to talk for a few
1:54:33
Speaker 1: minutes with the people of the United States about banking. FRANKN.
1:54:39
Speaker 1: Roosevelt's voice is calm that night, even conversational in tone.
1:54:44
Speaker 1: For tens of millions of Americans listening that night, it
1:54:47
Speaker 1: felt like the president had stepped into their living room.
1:54:51
Speaker 1: Now rewind two days on the calendar and fifty seven
1:54:54
Speaker 1: years earlier in history, to March tenth, eighteen seventy six.
1:55:00
Speaker 1: A scientist named Alexander Graham Bell leans over an experimental device,
1:55:05
Speaker 1: and he says, as he later recorded in his lab notebook,
1:55:10
Speaker 1: mister Watson, come here. I want to see you the
1:55:15
Speaker 1: very first successful telephone call. So Bell created instant voice
1:55:19
Speaker 1: communication between two people. Roosevelt would use the next communication revolution,
1:55:25
Speaker 1: radio to speak to an entire nation at once, and
1:55:31
Speaker 1: once that became possible, the presidency itself would be changed
1:55:38
Speaker 1: forever because communication technology doesn't just change how we talked,
1:55:43
Speaker 1: it changes how leaders lead. Now the story actually begins
1:55:50
Speaker 1: before Bell. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln spent hours
1:55:53
Speaker 1: in the War Department's telegraph office in Washington. Telegraph wires
1:55:58
Speaker 1: connected the president to directly to generals in the field
1:56:02
Speaker 1: in real time. The commander in chief could actually send
1:56:06
Speaker 1: his commands in real time. Right for the first time
1:56:10
Speaker 1: in history, the actual commander in chief could influence battlefield decisions.
1:56:18
Speaker 1: Before the telegraph, military orders might take days or even
1:56:20
Speaker 1: weeks to reach the commanders in the field. With the telegraph,
1:56:26
Speaker 1: Lincoln could read updates within minutes, and then it respond
1:56:31
Speaker 1: almost as quickly. It didn't just accelerate communication, it expanded
1:56:35
Speaker 1: presidential reach. But telegraph communication still required intermediaries right You
1:56:40
Speaker 1: needed operators sending coded signals. The telephone removed all of
1:56:46
Speaker 1: those barriers. Probably put some people out of work. It's
1:56:50
Speaker 1: a reminder new technologies always put people out of work,
1:56:54
Speaker 1: but they always create jobs we never thought of. Bell's
1:56:58
Speaker 1: telephone allowed people to speak directly across distance voice instead
1:57:02
Speaker 1: of code, conversation instead of telegrams. The immediate effects were
1:57:06
Speaker 1: economic and diplomatic. Businesses coordinated across cities instantly. Financial markets
1:57:13
Speaker 1: responded faster, political leaders could negotiate in real time, but
1:57:19
Speaker 1: the telephone still operated one conversation at a time. It
1:57:24
Speaker 1: connected an individual to another individual. It did not yet
1:57:28
Speaker 1: connect leaders to entire populations. That required broadcast technology. Enter radio,
1:57:37
Speaker 1: radio multiplied the voice. One speaker could suddenly reach millions. Now,
1:57:41
Speaker 1: Roosevelt wasn't the first president to appear on radio. Warren G.
1:57:45
Speaker 1: Harding broadcast was the first president to broadcast on radio
1:57:48
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty two. Calvin Coolidge actually used radio fairly regularly.
1:57:53
Speaker 1: Herbert Hoover did as well. But it's like dealing with television.
1:58:00
Speaker 1: Kennedy wasn't first, he just was the first one to
1:58:02
Speaker 1: get it. Roosevelt understood something as predecessors did not fully
1:58:08
Speaker 1: grasp when it came to radio. Radio wasn't simply awaited
1:58:11
Speaker 1: to just deliver speeches. It's actually a way to build trust.
1:58:18
Speaker 1: The first fireside chat, right, he just takes office, right,
1:58:23
Speaker 1: we're talking, you know. He got inaugurated first week of March.
1:58:28
Speaker 1: That was the last one. We ended up moving it
1:58:29
Speaker 1: to January after that, but we were still inaugure in
1:58:32
Speaker 1: our presidents in March. So literally this is part of
1:58:35
Speaker 1: his first hundred days, the honeymoon period first week right,
1:58:41
Speaker 1: and when he took office, the US was facing an
1:58:45
Speaker 1: economic catastrophe. Banks were failing. Confidence in the financial system
1:58:49
Speaker 1: that evaporated. Roosevelt declared a national bank holiday, but restoring
1:58:54
Speaker 1: confidence required more than legislation. It required explanation. So that's
1:58:58
Speaker 1: why on March twelfth, just days after he took the
1:59:00
Speaker 1: oath of office, Roosevelt spoke directly to the country on radio.
1:59:04
Speaker 1: Roughly sixty million Americans, nearly half the nation tuned in,
1:59:08
Speaker 1: and he simply explained how banks worked. He explained why
1:59:12
Speaker 1: they were closing temporarily. His speech was part information, part education,
1:59:19
Speaker 1: and he reassured listeners was plain language. Remember this is
1:59:23
Speaker 1: you got to meet people where they're at. You can't
1:59:25
Speaker 1: expect them to speak your elitism. At one point, he said,
1:59:30
Speaker 1: I can assure you that it is safer to keep
1:59:32
Speaker 1: your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress.
1:59:37
Speaker 1: The tone was not presidential in the traditional sense at
1:59:39
Speaker 1: the time. It was something they'd never heard from a president.
1:59:43
Speaker 1: It was like hearing from their father or grandfather. It
1:59:45
Speaker 1: was conversational. President sounded less like some distant authority figure
1:59:53
Speaker 1: and more like the well informed, nice gentleman next door,
1:59:58
Speaker 1: and that intimacy changed xations. The presidency had already been
2:00:04
Speaker 1: evolving towards a more personal role. Andrew Jackson built direct
2:00:08
Speaker 1: political loyalty through newspapers. Teddy Roosevelt dominated press coverage and
2:00:12
Speaker 1: described the presidency as a bully pulpit, a phrase we
2:00:16
Speaker 1: still use today. Woodrow Wilson pioneered presidential press conferences and
2:00:20
Speaker 1: personal appeals to the public, but he always needed he
2:00:24
Speaker 1: was always having to. Both he and Roosevelt, while they
2:00:27
Speaker 1: understood trying to talk over the press, still needed the
2:00:31
Speaker 1: press to let the public know what they were saying.
2:00:35
Speaker 1: Radio changed all of that. Radio changed the scale. For
2:00:39
Speaker 1: the first time, a president could speak directly to the
2:00:41
Speaker 1: entire nation simultaneously without any filter, without newspapers filtering it,
2:00:47
Speaker 1: without intermediaries trying to interpret the words, and that scale
2:00:52
Speaker 1: transformed the office itself, for good and for bad. After Roosevelt,
2:00:58
Speaker 1: Americans expected their press not just to govern, but to
2:01:02
Speaker 1: communicate constantly. Ever since then, Right, the tallest guy wins,
2:01:09
Speaker 1: the one who looks best on TV wins. Suddenly the
2:01:14
Speaker 1: ability to communicate and what we believe gives people the
2:01:18
Speaker 1: ability to communicate mattered more than anything else when it
2:01:22
Speaker 1: came to electing our presidents. Now here's a truism. Every
2:01:27
Speaker 1: technology resets leadership, and once that relationship existed, each new
2:01:35
Speaker 1: communication technology reshaped leadership again. Television created visual the visual presidency.
2:01:42
Speaker 1: I think John F. Kennedy in the first televised debates.
2:01:46
Speaker 1: Cable news created the permanent media cycle. The fact that
2:01:49
Speaker 1: this is we don't just check in on a president
2:01:51
Speaker 1: once a week anymore. Later, presidents had to navigate the
2:01:55
Speaker 1: environment constantly. Digital technology reshaped campaign George Bush used digital
2:02:01
Speaker 1: tools for sophisticated voter targeting. Barack Obama used the Internet
2:02:05
Speaker 1: to build organizing networks, then game social media. Donald Trump
2:02:10
Speaker 1: became the first president to use social media as a
2:02:12
Speaker 1: primary channel for communicating directly with the public. Each technological
2:02:18
Speaker 1: shift removed more intermediaries. Each shift strengthened direct connection between
2:02:23
Speaker 1: leader and audience. And this didn't just change politics. This
2:02:29
Speaker 1: same transformation has happened in the corporate boardrooms took a
2:02:33
Speaker 1: little longer. For much of the twentieth century, CEOs were
2:02:36
Speaker 1: largely invisible figures. They managed companies, They spoke mainly to
2:02:41
Speaker 1: boards and investors. Public communication was seen as secondary. Today
2:02:45
Speaker 1: that expectation is completely flipped. If you don't have a
2:02:50
Speaker 1: CEO that can go on CNBC and be charming, interesting,
2:02:57
Speaker 1: you're going to be considered a bad CEO, no matter
2:02:59
Speaker 1: how well you manage people. And now the modern CEO
2:03:04
Speaker 1: is expected to appear everywhere, communicate constantly, earnings calls, interviews,
2:03:08
Speaker 1: investor conferences, social media. Leadership itself has become partly a
2:03:14
Speaker 1: communications profession. The communication revolution didn't just reshape the presidency,
2:03:20
Speaker 1: it has reshaped what we how we even define what
2:03:23
Speaker 1: leadership means. If you can't communicate, you're no longer considered
2:03:28
Speaker 1: a great leader. And most of our great leaders could communicate,
2:03:32
Speaker 1: but not all great communicators can lead. And that's where
2:03:36
Speaker 1: you've got to be careful, just assuming every great communicator
2:03:39
Speaker 1: is also a great leader. So what's consequence of all this?
2:03:47
Speaker 1: Once communication becomes centralized in a single leader, power follows
2:03:50
Speaker 1: Congress debates collectively. This is why Congress has become I
2:03:54
Speaker 1: think the acceleration of the weakness of Congress has almost
2:03:58
Speaker 1: is you know, it is coincided with the increase of
2:04:02
Speaker 1: personalized communications between the presidency and the public. Right the Congress,
2:04:08
Speaker 1: the House was supposed to be the people's house, and
2:04:10
Speaker 1: yet the president is the one that seems more connected
2:04:13
Speaker 1: to the public, even though the public doesn't elect them.
2:04:16
Speaker 1: The public actually elects intermediaries that elect them and call
2:04:19
Speaker 1: them electors. But this is the power of communications. Congress
2:04:24
Speaker 1: speaks collectively, a president speaks alone. Congress moves slowly. A
2:04:27
Speaker 1: president communicates instantly. Technology didn't change the constitution, but it
2:04:32
Speaker 1: did change the political gravity of our system, and we
2:04:36
Speaker 1: haven't fully figured out. Congress hasn't fully figured out how
2:04:41
Speaker 1: to reassert itself in this era of a new communications age.
2:04:46
Speaker 1: And we've now arguably had four iterations of this era
2:04:50
Speaker 1: of the communications tape. So what's the lesson. Well, between
2:04:54
Speaker 1: March tenth, eighteen seventy six and March twelfth, nineteen thirty three,
2:04:57
Speaker 1: communication evolved from private conversation to national conversation. Bell made
2:05:02
Speaker 1: voice communication immediate. Roosevelt made mass political communication necessary. Every
2:05:10
Speaker 1: communication revolution sence has pushed that relationship further. And if
2:05:13
Speaker 1: you look at our politics today, where presidential social media
2:05:16
Speaker 1: posts can move markets or announce policy before agencies or
2:05:20
Speaker 1: even briefed, you can see that the transformation Roosevelt began
2:05:25
Speaker 1: is still accelerating. I mean, I don't I fear the
2:05:31
Speaker 1: idea of direct democracy, immediacy President going out, I'm going
2:05:35
Speaker 1: to pull everybody. You tell me what decision you want
2:05:37
Speaker 1: me to make, and within five minutes the public responds,
2:05:42
Speaker 1: Does that politician then do what they say? The fact
2:05:46
Speaker 1: is we're getting awfully close to doing those kind of
2:05:49
Speaker 1: performative tricks. Bell made communication immediate, Roosevelt made it political,
2:05:57
Speaker 1: and we're still living inside that transformation. So there you go.
2:06:01
Speaker 1: I took two fascinating historic anniversaries this week, March tenth
2:06:07
Speaker 1: and March twelfth, the Bell phone call and the first
2:06:10
Speaker 1: fireside chat, and we decided to make two stops in
2:06:16
Speaker 1: the podcast time mission. Let's get to some letters.
2:06:20
Speaker 3: Ask Chuck, Ask Chuck, Ask Chuck.
2:06:30
Speaker 1: What have we got here today? Let's take a look.
2:06:32
Speaker 1: Let's get started here. First question comes from Tom Hurr. No,
2:06:37
Speaker 1: not that Tom Hurr. If you're a Cardinals fan and
2:06:40
Speaker 1: wondering if you're at work talking about the form of
2:06:42
Speaker 1: your former second basement, we are not. Here's Tom's question,
2:06:46
Speaker 1: how many similarities can you find between the Admiral Yamamado
2:06:50
Speaker 1: lead attack on Pearl Harbor and the Trump led attack
2:06:52
Speaker 1: on Iran surprise attack while diplomatic negotiations were ongoing, no
2:06:56
Speaker 1: declaration of war, the deaths of thousands, including many civilians,
2:06:59
Speaker 1: and initial tactical success that led to a strategic disaster
2:07:02
Speaker 1: to be determined. When did a despictable act of treachery
2:07:05
Speaker 1: on a date that lives in infamy become a model
2:07:07
Speaker 1: for US military strategy? Would he like to be remembered
2:07:11
Speaker 1: as Donald Trump? Obono Trump motto, that's a tough I
2:07:16
Speaker 1: see what you're doing there. This is tough for for
2:07:19
Speaker 1: a guy like me to spend to spit out. Thanks
2:07:22
Speaker 1: for the great podcast. Uh wow, that's uh, that's quite
2:07:28
Speaker 1: the comparison. I I think I don't know if I'm
2:07:36
Speaker 1: gonna go with Pearl Harbor as the as the comparison,
2:07:40
Speaker 1: but it is if you when you look at it's,
2:07:47
Speaker 1: I guess it's you know, when you try to compare
2:07:50
Speaker 1: how he's started a war with Iran to how either
2:07:54
Speaker 1: of the Bush presidency started wars with the Rock and
2:07:58
Speaker 1: you're right, Pearl Harbor is actually a better a better
2:08:03
Speaker 1: comparison than and than either of the previous Iraq wars
2:08:06
Speaker 1: because the previous Iraq wars, the Bush presidencies did weird
2:08:10
Speaker 1: things like a galvanize the American public, make their case
2:08:16
Speaker 1: to the public, make the case to the UN, make
2:08:19
Speaker 1: the case to Congress, allow Congress to vote, And he
2:08:24
Speaker 1: did none of those things. So anyway, I it's an
2:08:30
Speaker 1: interesting comparison. You did a pretty good job of noting
2:08:35
Speaker 1: it is around America here, right, That's where That's where
2:08:42
Speaker 1: I think we all run out of That's where you
2:08:44
Speaker 1: run out of it. But I understand the point you're
2:08:46
Speaker 1: making here, and I think it frankly coincides with what
2:08:50
Speaker 1: I'm the point I was making up top. It's easy
2:08:54
Speaker 1: to start one of these things, it is hard to
2:08:56
Speaker 1: get out of from under it, and I think he
2:08:58
Speaker 1: is stuck in some presidential Quicksan next question comes from
2:09:04
Speaker 1: Chase Carmichael, Little Rock, Arkansas. Chase writes, did anything actually
2:09:07
Speaker 1: substantive come out of Trump's college sports roundtable last week?
2:09:10
Speaker 1: Been trying to track down the highlights, but I think
2:09:12
Speaker 1: the coverage got slightly buried under the World War three headlines. Yes,
2:09:15
Speaker 1: it did s hary to focus on nil reforms and
2:09:17
Speaker 1: eligibility brackets when the twenty four hour news cycle feels
2:09:20
Speaker 1: like a trailer for a fall up shelter. I don't
2:09:24
Speaker 1: mean the laugh chase, but that's pretty funny. Look, I
2:09:28
Speaker 1: was gonna wait until after questions to do this, but yeah,
2:09:32
Speaker 1: I mean it was. It's a joke. Right. He didn't
2:09:34
Speaker 1: have a single current athlete there, didn't have any current
2:09:37
Speaker 1: And if you weren't going to put current athletes there,
2:09:39
Speaker 1: how about current agents? He had former athletes there. I
2:09:41
Speaker 1: think Charlie Ward was invited. Like I said, Marco Rubios,
2:09:45
Speaker 1: the father of a college athlete. His son played for
2:09:47
Speaker 1: the Florida Gators scored a touchdown in a bowl game
2:09:50
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago. But you know, this was
2:09:55
Speaker 1: a classic case where Donald Trump remind you all the
2:09:58
Speaker 1: time he's an elitist. He surrounded himself with the old
2:10:01
Speaker 1: guard powers of college football, not the reality. Like you know,
2:10:05
Speaker 1: you should have Charles Abandon there, the guy who launched
2:10:08
Speaker 1: the lawsuit that got that legalized payments for name, image
2:10:13
Speaker 1: and likeness. So no, right, and Trump wasn't there to listen,
2:10:18
Speaker 1: and he came across almost half belligerent. Well, I'm just
2:10:21
Speaker 1: gonna sign an order put everything back the way it
2:10:23
Speaker 1: used to be, and then I'll get sued. And you're
2:10:26
Speaker 1: just sort of shaking your head. You're not gonna get
2:10:28
Speaker 1: sued because no one's going to take the order seriously
2:10:30
Speaker 1: at all. Look, it was a waste of time completely.
2:10:34
Speaker 1: I understand why everybody that showed up did show up,
2:10:37
Speaker 1: because you know there's you know he will he could
2:10:41
Speaker 1: lash out. I gotta think that there was one There
2:10:46
Speaker 1: was one picture of Nick Saban's face at one point.
2:10:49
Speaker 1: He looks really annoyed, and you know I I got
2:10:52
Speaker 1: to see that face up close. I went to a
2:10:54
Speaker 1: National Football Foundation Hall of Fame dinner one year. It
2:10:59
Speaker 1: was the year Jimmy Johnson was inaugurated. In fact, uh nope,
2:11:04
Speaker 1: not in this. My Florida studio has a my signed
2:11:08
Speaker 1: Jimmy Johnson helmet that I won in an auction that
2:11:12
Speaker 1: night there signed Miami Hurricane helmet. Of course, I I
2:11:20
Speaker 1: don't know what I would do if somebody gave me
2:11:22
Speaker 1: signed Jimmy Johnson Dallas Cowboy paraphernalia. I probably just sell it.
2:11:29
Speaker 1: I would not keep it. As much as I love Jimmy,
2:11:33
Speaker 1: that any hurricane stuff coll me in. And I probably
2:11:36
Speaker 1: keep some of the dolphin stuff just for the little
2:11:39
Speaker 1: Miami Miami history sake. But I am going I'm rambling
2:11:46
Speaker 1: on here, But the point was at this dinner, which
2:11:51
Speaker 1: also was honoring some some players from that year, and
2:11:54
Speaker 1: there was an Alabama player being honored, center Barrett somebody
2:11:59
Speaker 1: or other. I can't remember last name or first name.
2:12:02
Speaker 1: Barrett was either his last name and the first name,
2:12:04
Speaker 1: I believe, so you bam my fans will know who
2:12:06
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. And the running gag of the entire
2:12:10
Speaker 1: dinner was how miserable Nick Saban was at the dinner,
2:12:15
Speaker 1: that there was nothing he hated more than just like
2:12:17
Speaker 1: being somewhere that wasn't going to accomplish anything, you know,
2:12:21
Speaker 1: and they had just won this as one of the
2:12:23
Speaker 1: years they had just won the national title or they
2:12:25
Speaker 1: had just qualified to be in the National title. This
2:12:28
Speaker 1: was a December dinner, so they, you know, it was
2:12:30
Speaker 1: sort of that dark period right after the season. They
2:12:33
Speaker 1: were getting ready to play in the national title game.
2:12:37
Speaker 1: I think this is pre fourteen playoff even we're probably
2:12:39
Speaker 1: at the two team playoff. And it was the joke
2:12:45
Speaker 1: the whole time, you know, and you'd look at him
2:12:48
Speaker 1: and he really was he was just sort of hem
2:12:50
Speaker 1: and and han and anyway, when I saw that face
2:12:53
Speaker 1: at the at the White House, roundtable that they held
2:12:56
Speaker 1: last week. I was like, I've seen that Saban face.
2:12:59
Speaker 1: That's the I can't believe I'm stuck at this stupid
2:13:02
Speaker 1: effing thing face. But I'm sure you know you don't
2:13:09
Speaker 1: you don't know. The president has the power to convene.
2:13:12
Speaker 1: In theory, he could play a great role here. But
2:13:17
Speaker 1: when you only talk to one side of the fence
2:13:19
Speaker 1: and everybody in that room doesn't want to pay the players,
2:13:26
Speaker 1: they pay lip service to it, but none of them
2:13:28
Speaker 1: want to be paying the players, So you're just not
2:13:32
Speaker 1: dealing in the in reality of the situation itself. So
2:13:37
Speaker 1: it was a complete and utter waste of time. The
2:13:42
Speaker 1: only way this gets solved is Congress. Congress. You know,
2:13:45
Speaker 1: I'm I do think Cody Campbell the big he's one
2:13:50
Speaker 1: of the big funders of Texas text football program. But
2:13:52
Speaker 1: he's the guy that's been underwriting this television campaign about
2:13:56
Speaker 1: lobbying Congress to change the Broadcasting the Sports Broadcasting Act
2:14:00
Speaker 1: that essentially would allow all the college football schools to
2:14:05
Speaker 1: negotiate their media rights collectively, more like how the NFL
2:14:09
Speaker 1: does it, rather than conference by conference. And my old
2:14:13
Speaker 1: friend con Carol tweeted this the other day and I
2:14:16
Speaker 1: was like, he just put it so succinctly. When somebody
2:14:22
Speaker 1: was making the argument about collective versus each conference negotiating
2:14:27
Speaker 1: its media rights. He goes, imagine in the NFL, if
2:14:29
Speaker 1: each division were negotiating its own media rights, right, the
2:14:34
Speaker 1: nfcas so the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants
2:14:37
Speaker 1: versus the AFC South with the Jacksonville Jaguars Indianapolis Colts. Right, Like,
2:14:43
Speaker 1: who's media rights? Right? Who's going to get the bigger deal? Right?
2:14:47
Speaker 1: That'd be stupid to be bad business. Well for college athletics.
2:14:51
Speaker 1: It is bad business to do this by conference, And
2:14:54
Speaker 1: the only entities that benefit from doing this are the
2:14:58
Speaker 1: media companies who don't want to pay fair market value
2:15:01
Speaker 1: for these sports media rights. And right now, the two
2:15:05
Speaker 1: biggest media entities have the two biggest conferences as they're
2:15:10
Speaker 1: essentially they're surrogates. They're bought off, right, you know, the
2:15:18
Speaker 1: Big Ten and the SEC get to be the tallest
2:15:20
Speaker 1: little people because of this system. They'd still be probably
2:15:28
Speaker 1: on the merits B have a majority of the power
2:15:31
Speaker 1: teams if they all pulled their TV rights together. But
2:15:38
Speaker 1: the SEC and the Big ten like creating this velvet
2:15:40
Speaker 1: rope where fewer teams have an opportunity to be involved
2:15:44
Speaker 1: in the elite level of college football. All I would
2:15:49
Speaker 1: say is is, if you believe in a fairly free market,
2:15:54
Speaker 1: the current system of college football is not a free
2:15:56
Speaker 1: market at all. And yes, I know the NFL is
2:15:58
Speaker 1: not a free market as far as how that structure
2:16:02
Speaker 1: is concerned. But how the NFL takes its media rights
2:16:06
Speaker 1: to market is maximizing its value and its leverage. And
2:16:11
Speaker 1: college sports does not do that at the moment. So
2:16:15
Speaker 1: no chase. And like I said, the boy, the timing
2:16:20
Speaker 1: of it right, it was already awkward, It was already
2:16:22
Speaker 1: unlikely to be anything other than an attempt by Trump
2:16:26
Speaker 1: to insert himself. I mean, you know, I don't mean
2:16:29
Speaker 1: I'm going to continue to go off on a tangent
2:16:30
Speaker 1: here on this, but real quick, you know, I've whenever
2:16:35
Speaker 1: I get a chance with these presidents, I do. I
2:16:38
Speaker 1: do this with all politicians. I want to find out
2:16:42
Speaker 1: if they claim to be a sportsman, if they're really
2:16:43
Speaker 1: a sports fan. And for me, it's a little bit
2:16:46
Speaker 1: of its way I find out if somebody's a bullshit
2:16:48
Speaker 1: or not. I've done this with politicians. I've done this
2:16:51
Speaker 1: with multiple presidents where you know, you just want to
2:16:55
Speaker 1: find out what's the level of their fandom. Right with Obama,
2:17:01
Speaker 1: I've had both fascinating experience talking to him about basketball
2:17:04
Speaker 1: and college basketball where he goes real deep. Right, it
2:17:08
Speaker 1: is clear he is watching more games than I'm watching.
2:17:11
Speaker 1: This was even when he was president. This was what
2:17:13
Speaker 1: he was doing at night, you know, in between I
2:17:15
Speaker 1: think reading policy papers. But ask him about baseball. I
2:17:19
Speaker 1: remember one time asking him about a Key White Sox trade.
2:17:22
Speaker 1: This was evolving his favorite team. He didn't know, he
2:17:25
Speaker 1: didn't paid attention to the trade. I don't think he
2:17:27
Speaker 1: was a huge baseball fan. George W. Bush, he really
2:17:32
Speaker 1: knew his baseball. I never got a chance to quiz
2:17:35
Speaker 1: him on other sports, and he's never never heard him
2:17:38
Speaker 1: talk too much about other sports. He goes to a
2:17:39
Speaker 1: lot of SMU basketball games, so we do see him.
2:17:43
Speaker 1: We do see him there from Afar, But boy does
2:17:47
Speaker 1: he go deep on baseball. He knows who the top prospect.
2:17:49
Speaker 1: He doesn't just know major league teams. He knows, he's
2:17:52
Speaker 1: paid attention to that, the top ten prospects, he always knows,
2:17:57
Speaker 1: not just with the Rangers. It was very so the
2:18:00
Speaker 1: way Obama k new basketball, college and pro the way
2:18:04
Speaker 1: Bush new baseball, Bill Clinton voracious sports appetite. Basketball for sure,
2:18:13
Speaker 1: Football very much college oriented because of Arkansas, there's no
2:18:18
Speaker 1: pro teams there. With Donald Trump and any of you
2:18:24
Speaker 1: that have ever spent time with him, if you've done
2:18:25
Speaker 1: the same, you've probably had the same experience. It's shocking
2:18:28
Speaker 1: how little he actually understands the game itself. He knows
2:18:32
Speaker 1: the celebrities, the players that have hit celebrity status, right,
2:18:37
Speaker 1: Tom Brady. He knows the owners because he wanted to
2:18:40
Speaker 1: be an owner. There's that great line during his first
2:18:43
Speaker 1: campaign for the presidency when he said he was asked
2:18:46
Speaker 1: about what he knew about NASCAR, and he didn't really
2:18:48
Speaker 1: know anything about Nascar, But he goes, but I know
2:18:50
Speaker 1: the owners. I know some of the owners. And even now,
2:18:54
Speaker 1: you see, it's very rudimentary, there's no right the level
2:19:00
Speaker 1: of knowledge about the game itself, and it really you know,
2:19:03
Speaker 1: he really exposed his ignorance about football when he's been
2:19:07
Speaker 1: complaining about the kickoff rule and you're like, have you
2:19:11
Speaker 1: not paid attention that we hadn't actually had any active
2:19:13
Speaker 1: kickoffs for about ten years? Ever since everybody, everybody figured
2:19:18
Speaker 1: out it was just easier to kick it out of
2:19:19
Speaker 1: bounds and don't risk a run back, don't risk giving
2:19:24
Speaker 1: up good field position. And now we have this new
2:19:30
Speaker 1: rule that actually encourages kickoff returns, and he complains about
2:19:33
Speaker 1: it like it's somehow weak or woke. I mean, it
2:19:36
Speaker 1: really was a he was. You know, sometimes you're like, dude,
2:19:40
Speaker 1: you have no clothes on. You are literally making a
2:19:43
Speaker 1: point that is the exact opposite of the point you
2:19:46
Speaker 1: think you're making. So I know some of you think,
2:19:52
Speaker 1: oh I do is pile on Trump? But man, I'm
2:19:54
Speaker 1: telling you, the guy didn't know anything about actual sports.
2:19:57
Speaker 1: He knows about sports the way he knows about Hollywood.
2:20:00
Speaker 1: Those names, all right, but he's not really a fan.
2:20:05
Speaker 1: He doesn't really know these games. And anybody who knows
2:20:08
Speaker 1: him and who's had these conversations with him, you know
2:20:11
Speaker 1: I'm right about this. You just can't say it, Yeah, kiddy.
2:20:28
Speaker 1: Next question comes from Matt from Arlington, Texas. All right,
2:20:31
Speaker 1: how about them Cowboys? Yeah? How about them? Chuck, huge
2:20:35
Speaker 1: fan of the podcast. In your analysis, I've noticed some
2:20:36
Speaker 1: parallels between John Fetterman's trajectory in the Senate and Kirsten Cinemas.
2:20:40
Speaker 1: Both sometimes seem willing to buck their party space in
2:20:42
Speaker 1: ways that complicate reelection check. Am I off base? Nope?
2:20:46
Speaker 1: Or have the parties become so polarized that even occasional
2:20:49
Speaker 1: breaks from the base carry real political risk. Keep up
2:20:52
Speaker 1: with good work back from Marlington, Texas? Yeah, I think
2:20:55
Speaker 1: those are that's a terra. In fact, it goes deeper.
2:20:57
Speaker 1: I mean both Fetterman and Cinema were We're not just
2:21:01
Speaker 1: seen as as sort of natural Democrats, they were progressive Christian.
2:21:06
Speaker 1: Cinema was a member of the Green Party I think
2:21:08
Speaker 1: before she became a member of the Democratic Party.
2:21:11
Speaker 3: Uh.
2:21:12
Speaker 1: And Fetterman was seen as a Bernie Sanders guy, not
2:21:14
Speaker 1: just any any just conventional Democrat, Pennsylvania Democrat. Look, I
2:21:19
Speaker 1: think this is a real problem for both parties at
2:21:22
Speaker 1: this point. I mean, I think this is why you've
2:21:24
Speaker 1: got a guy like you know, it's a lot it's
2:21:28
Speaker 1: a lot easier to if to say what you want
2:21:33
Speaker 1: to say, that you think voters, that you think things
2:21:36
Speaker 1: that would resonate with voters, that doesn't alienate the groups,
2:21:40
Speaker 1: and it's not you know, the you know, it's interesting,
2:21:44
Speaker 1: there was there's a there's a brand new NBC News
2:21:46
Speaker 1: pull out and I'm gonna I'm going to go into
2:21:49
Speaker 1: it deeper with you later in the week because I
2:21:52
Speaker 1: like to dig into the cross tabs, and I haven't
2:21:54
Speaker 1: seen the cross tab yet. But they do ask an
2:21:56
Speaker 1: interesting question among Republicans and Democrats about their vote for
2:22:02
Speaker 1: Congress this year, if they're going to participate in the primaries,
2:22:05
Speaker 1: and are they looking for candidates who agree with them
2:22:07
Speaker 1: more in issues or candidates that can win in the
2:22:10
Speaker 1: general election. And while a majority of both parties say
2:22:14
Speaker 1: they're always looking for people that are close to their issues,
2:22:17
Speaker 1: it was like twenty three percent of Republicans said they
2:22:19
Speaker 1: were looking for the most electable, seventy plus percent looking
2:22:22
Speaker 1: for people that agree with them on issues. But among
2:22:25
Speaker 1: Democrats it was like fifty four percent saying they were
2:22:28
Speaker 1: looking for people that agree on issues. But over it
2:22:30
Speaker 1: was about forty one or forty two that said they
2:22:32
Speaker 1: were looking for the most electable. So you do have
2:22:35
Speaker 1: and this is where I think that Democratic Party leaders
2:22:39
Speaker 1: and the leaders of the interest groups on the left
2:22:42
Speaker 1: couldn't be more out of sync with their own primary voters.
2:22:45
Speaker 1: Right you have a large chunk of primary voters that
2:22:48
Speaker 1: are looking for essentially friendlier politicians who don't necessarily agree
2:22:54
Speaker 1: with them on anything everything. They're not putting them to
2:22:58
Speaker 1: purity tests. But you see how much these candidates and
2:23:03
Speaker 1: these interest groups force purity tests. So I you know,
2:23:09
Speaker 1: Fetterman is an economic populist, he's going to be to
2:23:12
Speaker 1: the left of you know, this is why he's going
2:23:13
Speaker 1: to stay a Democrat, but perhaps he ends up running
2:23:16
Speaker 1: as an independent. And look, you know, I think both
2:23:19
Speaker 1: parties in order to sober up, they've stopped being ideological
2:23:24
Speaker 1: accepting ideological diversity. Right, Trump punishes it severely, and essentially
2:23:33
Speaker 1: Democratic Party leadership does not reward it. They don't necessarily
2:23:38
Speaker 1: punish it, but they just they refuse to defend their
2:23:42
Speaker 1: anybody that ends up going off the reservation because they're
2:23:45
Speaker 1: afraid of the ire of left wing interest groups. So
2:23:50
Speaker 1: we already have this problem on the right. And I
2:23:53
Speaker 1: think that you know, the aien look the alienation right
2:23:56
Speaker 1: if it is, you know, and I think the Democratic
2:24:01
Speaker 1: Party has to ask itself, just like the Republican Party
2:24:04
Speaker 1: has to ask its self, what does it want to be?
2:24:09
Speaker 1: Is somebody who's sixty percent your friend forty minut Let's say,
2:24:14
Speaker 1: let's put it in this seventy percent, because that's really
2:24:16
Speaker 1: where we're looking at with betterment and with cinema. Is
2:24:20
Speaker 1: somebody that's with you seventy percent, but they're against you
2:24:22
Speaker 1: thirty percent on some things. Would you rather than be
2:24:25
Speaker 1: a Republican? Would you rather than be an independent? Or
2:24:29
Speaker 1: do you want them a part of your coalition? Because
2:24:32
Speaker 1: I go back to reminding democrats on the left in
2:24:35
Speaker 1: particular of something very there's a specific reason why that
2:24:40
Speaker 1: Democrats have to be more pragmatic in reaching out to
2:24:44
Speaker 1: the middle than the Republicans do. Right now, self described
2:24:48
Speaker 1: liberal voters are twenty nine percent of the electorate in
2:24:51
Speaker 1: the latest semi Seniors Wall Street ternable, and self described
2:24:54
Speaker 1: conservative voters are about thirty eight percent of the electorate
2:24:56
Speaker 1: thirty seven percent of the electorate. So that's about an
2:24:58
Speaker 1: eight to nine point gap, which means to get to
2:25:02
Speaker 1: fifty percent plus one, Democrats need more moderates than Republicans need.
2:25:10
Speaker 1: And when you need more, then yes, your base is
2:25:14
Speaker 1: going is going to get less of everything they want.
2:25:17
Speaker 1: Then the base of the right is going to get
2:25:20
Speaker 1: and I know that frustrates the left. So maybe make
2:25:23
Speaker 1: your policies more appetizing for the mettle. If you're hoping
2:25:30
Speaker 1: to expande your coalition. But right now, while it is
2:25:34
Speaker 1: growing slightly the base of the left, it is still
2:25:39
Speaker 1: about ten points lower than the base on the right.
2:25:42
Speaker 1: And that difference is why the Republican agenda lean's right
2:25:47
Speaker 1: and usually a successful Democratic agenda agenda leans center left.
2:25:53
Speaker 1: It's simple math, folks. Next question comes from them and Tulsa. Hey, Chuck,
2:25:58
Speaker 1: just finished listening to the Crystalism episode, and I thought
2:26:00
Speaker 1: you guys nailed it. The content as great as always,
2:26:02
Speaker 1: But love the dynamic between you two because you both
2:26:04
Speaker 1: speak the same political language, so you can build off
2:26:06
Speaker 1: each other in a satisfying way. Well, thank you and Chris,
2:26:09
Speaker 1: thanks you. Love to see you. Maybe a monthly or
2:26:11
Speaker 1: even a monthly series with you guys. I'm sure there
2:26:13
Speaker 1: will be more than enough major events to warrant a
2:26:15
Speaker 1: recurring meeting either way. La cheese, ree and keep up
2:26:17
Speaker 1: the good work. M In Tulsa. I love that you're in.
2:26:20
Speaker 1: Do you have any fun gadgets for us to use?
2:26:22
Speaker 1: I'm thinking James Bond here in in all seriousness, you
2:26:27
Speaker 1: may not realize this, and maybe I do a weekly
2:26:29
Speaker 1: podcast on Chris Silissa's substack. It's behind a paywall. It's
2:26:34
Speaker 1: part of his independent news organization. So we do do
2:26:38
Speaker 1: a weekly together every Monday. It goes up Monday afternoons.
2:26:43
Speaker 1: I do think that Chris is going to come back
2:26:45
Speaker 1: here pretty much after every one of our joint primary nights.
2:26:49
Speaker 1: That's what we've decided to do. So we're going to
2:26:51
Speaker 1: do Illinois. So we're going to try to get him
2:26:53
Speaker 1: back here at least once a month after one of
2:26:56
Speaker 1: our big primary nights for this calendar year. But yeah,
2:27:00
Speaker 1: when you've known somebody as long as Chris and I
2:27:02
Speaker 1: have known each other, and you know, this goes back
2:27:05
Speaker 1: to the advice that Tony Kornheiser gave me, the advice
2:27:10
Speaker 1: that I don't know if Tony gave I think Tony
2:27:13
Speaker 1: gave this advice to Bill Simmons, or maybe Bill Simmons
2:27:18
Speaker 1: gave it to Tony. I don't know which right. Who's
2:27:20
Speaker 1: the Who's the Who's the true Podfather? I feel like
2:27:22
Speaker 1: Tony is sort of the the the guy that that
2:27:25
Speaker 1: sort of over is sort of over everybody. But it
2:27:28
Speaker 1: really is is talk to your friends because it's the
2:27:32
Speaker 1: best way to convey what you know. You know, sometimes
2:27:35
Speaker 1: when you talk to people, you don't know all the time. No,
2:27:37
Speaker 1: not me. I like to get to know new people,
2:27:39
Speaker 1: new ideas. So I like a mix, which is why
2:27:42
Speaker 1: I like to have people I've not had on before.
2:27:44
Speaker 1: I want, I want to be challenged, But I also
2:27:50
Speaker 1: believe when, especially when trying to convey what I believe
2:27:53
Speaker 1: I understand about sort of politics in America, doing so
2:27:57
Speaker 1: with somebody that ticks knows your the good and the
2:28:03
Speaker 1: bad of your ability to go down rabbit holes is
2:28:05
Speaker 1: always a good thing. And I think Solis and I
2:28:08
Speaker 1: are pretty good about that. And here's another one for
2:28:12
Speaker 1: salism Man. I wonder if his ears are burning. I'll
2:28:15
Speaker 1: tell him about this in our Monday episode. Hey, thanks
2:28:17
Speaker 1: for introducing me to Crystaliz's work fascinating the country. The
2:28:20
Speaker 1: county unit of measure got me thinking, what if the
2:28:22
Speaker 1: federal Statute required US House districts to become either contiguous
2:28:26
Speaker 1: counties or a subdivided county. I think it would be
2:28:29
Speaker 1: better to have multiple representatives per big county, but I
2:28:32
Speaker 1: think we would need a constitutional amendment for that. Changing
2:28:34
Speaker 1: county borders is harder than district gerrymandering would reduce the
2:28:38
Speaker 1: arbitraranness of districts and create a more obvious pipeline of
2:28:41
Speaker 1: county political leadership towards the federal Congress. Cheers jud Montreal. Well, look,
2:28:46
Speaker 1: I just wouldn't change county lines, right, I understand what
2:28:49
Speaker 1: you're saying, and I think we do view county lines.
2:28:51
Speaker 1: That's sort of more in penn and obviously congressional district
2:28:55
Speaker 1: lines are in pencil. But if you yes, it would
2:29:04
Speaker 1: take a constitutional amendment if you wanted to have some
2:29:06
Speaker 1: restrictions like no congressional seat. You know, I will tell
2:29:12
Speaker 1: you this. I go back to I think there needs
2:29:17
Speaker 1: to be a population standard. So point oh three percent
2:29:20
Speaker 1: of the population right now would put it to I
2:29:22
Speaker 1: think about one three hundred and fifty thousand. So no
2:29:25
Speaker 1: congressional district could be bigger than larger than point oh
2:29:28
Speaker 1: three percent of the population, so that it always was
2:29:31
Speaker 1: that ratio, right, and so that the ratio is the same.
2:29:36
Speaker 1: You know, you could do some sort of contiguous law
2:29:40
Speaker 1: by miles. You could do a contiguous law by acreage,
2:29:44
Speaker 1: you know. But I think if you started with the
2:29:47
Speaker 1: population size point oh three, I think by you couldn't
2:29:54
Speaker 1: draw a district that wasn't at least somewhat more contiguous
2:29:58
Speaker 1: and at least a community of interests of some sort.
2:30:04
Speaker 1: All right, this is the last question. Is at six
2:30:05
Speaker 1: to one of the night, We'll go here. Do you
2:30:08
Speaker 1: think Democrats in tall Rico will try to define the
2:30:10
Speaker 1: Usenate election once there is a winner in the Republican
2:30:12
Speaker 1: Party runoff, assuming the Democrats do not have their own runoff.
2:30:15
Speaker 1: This was obviously sent before we had before we knew
2:30:18
Speaker 1: the results twenty twelve Obama vers Romeny. This happened on
2:30:21
Speaker 1: a presidential level with a media ad blitz. Sincerely, Avery
2:30:23
Speaker 1: and in Superior Wisconsin. Well, look, I'm very curious to
2:30:26
Speaker 1: see what tall Rico does during this runoff. I think
2:30:30
Speaker 1: there are I think, look, it does appear there's at
2:30:34
Speaker 1: least some effort, although I think Trump's kind of distracted,
2:30:39
Speaker 1: but there appears to be some effort to endorse Corning
2:30:43
Speaker 1: and see if they can work somehow push packed to Now.
2:30:51
Speaker 1: I think that if I were Talla Rico and there's
2:30:55
Speaker 1: a runoff, I play in the runoff. And I think
2:30:57
Speaker 1: it's a mistake not to play in the runoff, whether
2:30:59
Speaker 1: it's Talarrie Go, whether it's the Democratic super PACs, because
2:31:03
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, it's a much different race.
2:31:06
Speaker 1: It's a much it's a cleaner campaign to run if
2:31:09
Speaker 1: you're running against Paksman. I'm not one of those who
2:31:11
Speaker 1: thinks Cornin is unbeatable. This political environment is deteriorating by
2:31:15
Speaker 1: the hour for Republicans. But it's certainly a different race
2:31:22
Speaker 1: against Cornin, and it's a more costly race because corn
2:31:26
Speaker 1: is going to have a ton more money than Paxton's
2:31:28
Speaker 1: going to have. So it is I do think they
2:31:33
Speaker 1: can't just sit quietly and raise money. They need to
2:31:36
Speaker 1: try to influence the political weather while they have a
2:31:41
Speaker 1: freehand to do so. Put it this way, if the
2:31:44
Speaker 1: roles were reversed, the Republicans would be doing everything they
2:31:47
Speaker 1: could in their minds to elect Jasmine Crockett in the runoff.
2:31:50
Speaker 1: So if you're Talla Rico, you should do everything you
2:31:52
Speaker 1: can to nominate and to help Ken Paxton in the runoff.
2:31:57
Speaker 1: And if you're not doing that, then you're not playing
2:31:59
Speaker 1: to win. All right. I'm gonna pause there. I ended
2:32:05
Speaker 1: up doing my little sports thing with that. I will
2:32:10
Speaker 1: say this, I really I love the World Baseball Classic.
2:32:15
Speaker 1: I really feel sorry for these you know, you realize,
2:32:18
Speaker 1: I mean it is sort of the World Baseball Classic
2:32:21
Speaker 1: is these days, it's kind of like it's kind of
2:32:25
Speaker 1: like the way Olympics basketball works now, both in men
2:32:29
Speaker 1: and women. There are really only two or three countries
2:32:31
Speaker 1: that have the ability to beat anybody, and the US
2:32:34
Speaker 1: only has to worry about two or three countries. And
2:32:37
Speaker 1: in this case, the US only has to worry about
2:32:39
Speaker 1: two or three countries. You know, did a Dominican and
2:32:42
Speaker 1: Japan And the real difference you see here is pitching, right.
2:32:46
Speaker 1: You saw it with against Brazil. Those guys could not
2:32:50
Speaker 1: find the strike zone. I think they actually could find
2:32:52
Speaker 1: the strike zone. I think they were afraid to find
2:32:54
Speaker 1: the strike zone, right because the second that ball goes
2:32:57
Speaker 1: into the strike zone, even the number nine hit terrang Man,
2:33:00
Speaker 1: it's going to crutch that sucker to the wall.
2:33:04
Speaker 4: It is.
2:33:06
Speaker 1: That's where you see this massive gap right now. It's
2:33:10
Speaker 1: closing a lot, right. It's interesting to see how competitive
2:33:14
Speaker 1: Panama is with Puerto Rico because Puerto Rico a little
2:33:16
Speaker 1: weaker team this year. I think they don't have enough
2:33:18
Speaker 1: pitching to be to sort of get closer to the
2:33:21
Speaker 1: big three countries, right the dr the US and Japan.
2:33:25
Speaker 1: But you know, Puerto Rico and Venezuela are like the
2:33:28
Speaker 1: next two, right with maybe with Canada there though they
2:33:32
Speaker 1: also have Most of these countries have pitching issues, right.
2:33:36
Speaker 1: It's pitching depth, and that seems to be the biggest difference.
2:33:41
Speaker 1: It is really only the Japanese, the Dominicans, and the
2:33:44
Speaker 1: Americans that have the pitching depth to handle everything. But
2:33:48
Speaker 1: I have to say I enjoy all of these games.
2:33:50
Speaker 1: I like seeing the former major leaguers. It was a
2:33:53
Speaker 1: real treat to see Trace Thompson, brother of Klay Thompson.
2:33:58
Speaker 1: I think I sold a rookie autograph of his for
2:34:00
Speaker 1: like three dollars, like five years ago. By the way,
2:34:04
Speaker 1: I thought it would do better than that. But this
2:34:05
Speaker 1: is Michael Thompson's son. Michael Thompson was a center for
2:34:08
Speaker 1: the Lakers, the first center after Kareem. He won a
2:34:11
Speaker 1: title with the Lakers. He had two sons that made
2:34:13
Speaker 1: the major that made the pro made pro sports leagues.
2:34:17
Speaker 1: Trace Thompson Major League Baseball, Klay Thompson the NBA, and
2:34:21
Speaker 1: boy that height it was man, It was just it
2:34:23
Speaker 1: was a great defensive play. But that was the thing
2:34:25
Speaker 1: with Trace Thompson. There were plenty. It's a reminder great
2:34:29
Speaker 1: defense does not guarantee a major league career, You've got
2:34:32
Speaker 1: to be able to hit the ball, and that was
2:34:34
Speaker 1: always the challenge there for Trace. But it's really fun
2:34:37
Speaker 1: to see to see these these players. I think he
2:34:42
Speaker 1: was on a part of Great Great Britain. If you're
2:34:46
Speaker 1: in the Commonwealth, right, You're why Jazz Chisholm is on
2:34:48
Speaker 1: Great Britain because he's a Bahamian and they're part of
2:34:51
Speaker 1: the Commonwealth. I guess if if if the Bahamas gets
2:34:56
Speaker 1: gets more major league players that can feel the team,
2:35:00
Speaker 1: and I guess if Canada couldn't field a team, they'd
2:35:02
Speaker 1: also be part of Great Britain's team. Like if Canada
2:35:06
Speaker 1: and Great Britain, which apparently is grabbing half the Caribbean,
2:35:08
Speaker 1: and the Netherlands grabs the other half of the Caribbean,
2:35:12
Speaker 1: I guess you could put together in the three countries, Canada,
2:35:16
Speaker 1: Great Britain and the Netherlands collectively probably could be a
2:35:22
Speaker 1: top A, top four contestant here. Anyway, I'm also caring
2:35:27
Speaker 1: about the WBC because my son and I played a
2:35:29
Speaker 1: go to a game when it's in Miami, and I'm
2:35:33
Speaker 1: looking forward to it going to a semi final. I'm
2:35:37
Speaker 1: certainly hoping. I know I'm going to get one of
2:35:39
Speaker 1: three teams, right, the DR Japan or Team USA. I'm
2:35:42
Speaker 1: hoping I've picked the right semi final game and I
2:35:46
Speaker 1: get the one that is that is either Team D
2:35:50
Speaker 1: I hope it's the DR versus Japan, and you Team
2:35:53
Speaker 1: USA has already made the final. But either way, I
2:35:58
Speaker 1: think I want to say I always want to see Otani.
2:36:01
Speaker 1: I think he's the I think he is the He
2:36:05
Speaker 1: is the biggest guarant He and Judge are close to
2:36:07
Speaker 1: being the biggest guarantees of a show in sport, in
2:36:09
Speaker 1: baseball right where you feel like if you go to
2:36:11
Speaker 1: a game of one of those two guys, there's a
2:36:13
Speaker 1: chance you're going to see something special, you know. I
2:36:18
Speaker 1: got to see Mike Trott his rookie year was a
2:36:21
Speaker 1: White Sox game doing some interviews for my old Obama book.
2:36:25
Speaker 1: It was Mike Trott and his rookie year, first game
2:36:28
Speaker 1: I ever seen him play. Hits a home run and
2:36:32
Speaker 1: he took one away in center field, and I thought,
2:36:35
Speaker 1: I've had the full Mike Trout experience. That's I think
2:36:38
Speaker 1: how it feels with Oughtani these days. I mean, imagine
2:36:41
Speaker 1: being a Japanese member of that crowd, first night, of
2:36:47
Speaker 1: course he hits a grand Slam. I mean, you can
2:36:51
Speaker 1: take Otani the bank or Aaron Judge. First game, of
2:36:53
Speaker 1: course he hits a home run. Some of these guys, man,
2:36:56
Speaker 1: they just they're that good. Right now, baseball's lucky, So
2:37:00
Speaker 1: this is such a great time for baseball to have
2:37:02
Speaker 1: a work stoppage. Anyway, but I digress. Next week it's
2:37:10
Speaker 1: gonna be a lot of college basketball. I'm gonna warn
2:37:11
Speaker 1: you now. I'm a big fan of the tournament. My
2:37:14
Speaker 1: favorite bets to make are these unders teams. They don't
2:37:18
Speaker 1: know how to shoot in these new arenas. That's what
2:37:22
Speaker 1: those that make money gambling do. Those that throw money
2:37:26
Speaker 1: away chase the great teams and do stupid parlays. So
2:37:31
Speaker 1: there's your bad gambling tip of the day. And with that,
2:37:34
Speaker 1: I'll see you in forty eight hours. Enjoy the next
2:37:36
Speaker 1: two days.