← Not Dead Yet
Not Dead Yet
Ken Burns
01:15:49
History, storytelling, and America, baby! Ken Burns joins the guys to talk about the work he’s done to translate the American experience to a wide audience. What makes a good documentary? What’s the deal with professional historians? Is “The Ashokan...
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- [00:08]
A
Hi, I'm Ben Sasse.
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B
And I'm Chris Stirewalt.
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A
And this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but only some of us have been brought face to face with that reality.
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B
However long each of us have to do it, though, we all want to
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A
live a good life, one with meaning, love and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that.
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B
I feel like Ben's asked that we should be beginning this with the strains of Ashoka and Farewell playing in the background. And that I. I would. I would say, you know, my darling Margaret, as I look out across the smoky streets of Washington, D.C. i wonder, when will we ever have a podcast as fine as this one?
- [00:52]
A
I was so smitten by the letter from Sullivan Ballou for a handful of years that when I was Senate, I used to do a lot of troop sendoff. I mean, I always did all the troop sendoffs, but early on, I would sometimes read that letter at events. And when you're like, you got a lot of 19 to 24 year old kid enlisted kids going off to Afghanistan or Iraq, silver blue might be a little bit heavy, but it's great civic catechetical poetry for America. Part of the junior high boy in the back of my head also drifted to the Saturday Night Live Colonel Angus a lot. And so that was dangerous as well.
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B
Hey now, hey now, hey now, hey now. My. My pastor listens to this. You can't. You can't do that.
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A
I didn't refer to what it means.
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B
Yes, I. We. We stipulate. We stipulate. He. In the Sullivan Ballou letter, he writes, but, oh, Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, always be near you in the gladst days and in the darkest nights. Always, always. And if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath. As the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah, do not mourn the dead think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again. I mean, come on, brother.
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A
More. More belief in the afterlife, more marriage as great friendship. It's big stuff. Oh, and then there's also causes of war, too.
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B
The. The. The song, the Ashokan Farewell. Ken Burns, do you know the story of Ashokan Farewell?
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A
Teach it.
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B
So, it was a folk musician from upstate New York. Ashokin is a place in New York. And it was written in 1980 or whatever. And the song, which sounds like it's got to be contemporaneous to the Civil war, was a 1980s folk tribute written in New York and it became like a smash hit. You can find Ashokan Farewell on your Apple music or wherever you listen to music and it became a smash hit. It was written by a guy named Jay Unger. That's what you should know about that surprising song. Why do you want to talk? Everybody wants to talk to Ken Burns. Why do you want to talk to Ken Burns?
- [03:32]
A
A, I love lots of the movies, lots of the stories. B, even if I didn't love them because they're as popular as they are, I would want to take advantage of and benefit from with my neighbors, some shared stories. I Stan Stanford was one of the last places to throw away a meaningful core curriculum. It been, you know, attrited for, for decades. And after Jesse Jackson's 198889 march through campus, hey, hey, ho ho, Western Civs, gotta go. Stanford tossed their core curriculum right away. And a lot of people who didn't really care about their core curriculum nonetheless, 10 and 15 years later would admit that it was a terrible mistake because it meant that undergrads didn't have any common readings. And so at a time when academic historiography is just a crap, craptacular show of overly narrow race, class, gender, culture, war fighting interests, the 10 bestselling historians in America, zero of the 10 are in history departments in academia, right? So we got to come up with cultural entrepreneurs to do our storytelling outside of academia. And I don't know that there's anybody more important than Ken Burns just because of the density of his views and listens.
- [04:44]
B
I want to get right to it and I'm sure that I will. I'm sure people will hear me in my admiration for the work he did and the importance to my life. And we will do all of that and probably talk a little bit about the personal and political of being a person who is a custodian of America's self identity. Ken Burns is a New Yorker by birth. He suffered the grievous loss of his mother as a young, as a young person, which had a deep effect on his work. He went to Hampshire College. He started making movies while he was still in College. It was 1981 when he had his first hit, which was the Brooklyn Bridge, which is still holds up fantastically good. 1990 was the Civil War on PBS. 40 million viewers. Amazing is a lot of viewers for a PBS documentary. And it was definitely a cultural moment. Baseball, jazz, prohibition, we could go through the list he's made.
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A
Country music, Vietnam, it's endless.
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B
It's it's endless, utterly breathtaking. Has courted controversy places like the viet with his 10 parter on the Vietnam War, which is hard to watch, but worth watching. Most recently of course, the six part 12 hour series on the American Revolution.
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A
He calls it a short at 12 hours.
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B
A short. A scant. A scant 12 hours. It focuses on the war, not so much the founding. It's, it's fairly concise. He's working with Peter Coyote, Meryl Streep, Josh Brolin, Tom Hanks, Claire Danes, and of course, who did he get to portray John Adams?
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C
You.
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B
If only Paul Giamatti, who was, who played John Adams in the HBO's famous biopic series about John Adams. And it kicked off a whole another conversation. So let's have our conversation with Ken Burns.
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A
You look good, my man. Thank you for making time for us, of course.
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C
For you, anything, Senator. Happy to be with you.
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A
Please don't insult me with a title like that, friend. We need to open a bottle and break some bread together. We obviously it's July, 250 years after 1776. So we, we need to. The American moment. But before we go there, having been a student of yours long before you and I were friends, it has to be weird. You're young, so I'm not going to pretend this is a benedictory or a eulogy, but it has to be weird to look back over how many years, how many decades you've produced the most interesting documentary of that decade. So for a minute, just set aside anything that touches on the American founding and just tell us in your heart of hearts what are you most excited about when somebody comes up to you and interrupts your meal in a restaurant and says they loved X. What, what, what are you proudest of now?
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C
Well, I like our, like our children that we're not going to, you know, hurt by picking out a favorite. What's so amazing is that I know somebody who thinks I've met somebody who thinks every one of my films is my best film. And that just makes me happy. Meaning it may not mean that there's not a clunker in the lot, but that somebody, you know, there's these old radio guys, we made a film in the early days of ra, the control room. Guys who still know Morse code. We put some Morse code saying baseball next at the end of this film called Empire of the Air and you know, they said we heard that. Or I had a middle school guy, a guy came up to me and he said I was in a sort of pre MBA in college. Civil War series came out and I switched to history. And while I'm not making as much money as I'm sure I was, I feel so rich. I'm teaching middle school American history. And I never thought I'd get a chance to thank the person responsible for it. It's those sorts of, you know, I remember typing out even before a Selectric. So I had Correcto tape and whiteout the letters trying to raise money for our first film, Brooklyn Bridge, that PBS
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A
showed Remind us of the year, Windless Brooklyn Bridge.
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C
It came out in 82. I started working on it in 77. I looked 12 years old, just four years out of school.
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A
You still look 12.
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C
I'm going to turn 73 in a couple weeks. The people would delight in saying, this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. And I started describing, what we're doing is not just the collection of dry dates and facts and events, but what we were engaged in was an emotional archeology. I don't mean sentimentality and nostalgia. They're the enemies of anything good. But there is a higher emotion that our founders actually hoped that would be released when we. When we've governed ourselves. And that's what I've tried in every film. And I think each one comes to some, has somewhere, has a reservoir that collects or connects to people's these higher emotions. Adams was articulate about that, not me.
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B
I am not familiar. You may have. I guess I watched with great interest your da Vinci, which was dynamite. I highly. I highly recommend. My wife really enjoyed your recent Leonardo da Vinci, but other than that, I can't think. They're all American.
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A
Yeah.
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C
In fact, Walter Isaacson was trying to. At dinner, trying to promote Leonardo. And I said, walter, I just do American stuff. And finally came out. And my oldest daughter Sarah, and her husband, David McMahon and I have been making films together on the Central park, on Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali. And I said, but Walter was trying to push Leonardo. And they said, why can't we do Leonardo? And I went, oh yeah, why can't we do Leonardo? But it's the only non American topic we've done.
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B
Okay, so why. Why you. You start in the 19, early 1980s. We've been through many periods of American history being unfashionable and sometimes more fashionable. But why, why just America?
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C
Well, first of all, I guess maybe I'm parochial or provincial or something. I love my country. I always have. Everybody of my friends were reading novels and I the encyclopedia or nonfiction. Growing up, I didn't think I was gonna Be a historian. I Knew from age 12 when I watched my dad cry, who didn't cry at all during my mother's eight year battle with cancer that succumbed when I was 11 and a few months short of my 12th birthday. But sometime after that we were watching TV and my dad was watching. We were watching Odd Man Out. He let me stay up late on a school night, one o'. Clock. And it's about the Irish troubles and James Mason and Sir Carol Reed, good director, did the th. And my dad started crying and he had never seen him cry. Not when my mom was sick, not when she died, not at her impossibly sad funeral. So we just, I just said right then and there, I'll be a filmmaker. So that's what I wanted to be. But somewhere along the line at Hampshire College, it merged and I was able to express what I wanted to do in film through American history. And so I, I mean I'm Guam or Samoa, to answer your question. I'm an American possession.
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A
Why is history so important to self government? Like when you, when you said Adam saw this as a release of a certain kind of emotion. Unpack it for us.
- [12:31]
C
Yeah, well, I think it's really important. They're, they're, they're creating something new. This is a really revolutionary moment in all of human history. I've, I've actually gone out and in our film it says the most consequential revolution in history. That's, I can defend that to the hilt, but I found myself promoting it and saying, I think this is the most important event since the birth of Christ. Not to provoke an argument. They have interesting conversations which I've had. So there's a moment a little bit past the pursuit of happiness, the end of the second sentence, where Jefferson says all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Means we've all been under the boot of authoritarians. That's all the human experience. And now we're creating something new and it's going to take new responsibility. Pursuit of happiness is not the pursuit of objects in a marketplace of things. It's lifelong learning to become more virtuous. They, they reach back over the Middle Ages to the classical period and bring back all these things. Adams, the big worrier, says then I think there's too much ambition, too much avarice, too much lust for profit, not enough virtue to sustain a republic. He's just super worried that we're not going to get our act together and figure out how to be virtuous people and it aligns with the deism that many of the founders find. So it's not just a political catechism, it's also a spiritual one and a new release of spiritual energy. You're not going to favor any particular religion. In fact, the deism that Jefferson and many of the others subscribed to was that, yes, there was a Supreme Being or Supreme Architect or Divine Providence, whatever the name was, but that being or entity or energy or light was disinterested in the affairs of men and therefore made no distinction between faiths. And it became a human obligation, both at the political level that we are willing and more comfortable to talk about, about the Declaration, to engage in self government, but that we also had a kind of a spiritual obligation. The very first phrase of the very First Amendment is, congress shall establish no religion. So to liberate us from the sectarian coarseness and crudeness that had always beset humankind and to ask us to be our finer selves, our best selves, our Lincoln would say, four score and a seven or five years later, better angels.
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B
You was doing the American Revolution looming sort of over your shoulder. No, you. It wasn't like the macbeth. It wasn't the white whale.
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C
No, no, no. There have been a lot of not. I wouldn't say white whales as much as stuff that I let incubate for 30 years. The buffalo. American Buffalo film. Really glad I waited. Scholarship and the Native American scholarship. So you have people who are academically equal to the best scholars on it, but have 600 generations of experience with this animal rather than six. Right. Who do you want to talk to? Well, you want to talk to everybody. Everybody's got something to say, but you're really listening hard to that sort of thing. Same with a few other films I'm working on. I've worked all day today on one on Reconstruction. I wanted to do reconstruction from the moment the Civil War series was over. It's the most misunderstood period in American history. And like everything, we want to turn it into a binary thing. An on and off switch, you know. And so of course, human nature and stories are able to contain the variety of human natures. I have in the editing room a neon sign. It's been there for years and years and years. And it says it's complicated. And it just defies your media culture. Desire to make a red state or a blue state defies your computer thing of having a one or a zero. It's neither and it's both. And that you have to rejoice, you know, It's Whitman, you know, Do I contradict myself? Yeah, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes. And if we're able to build a system and stories do this really well, narrative does this really well to contain that, then we get it. Shakespeare, Keats said, had negative capability. He could take someone and the moralist in us wants to decide right away good or bad, good or bad. And he could hold in tension their strengths and their weaknesses until the longest period of time to make us sit in the uncomfortable position of, uh, you're not going to be able to decide it one thing or the other so easily or so facilely until I tell you when, right? And there's a. There's an incredible dimension to Shakespearean tragedy. Not as opposed to, but in concert with the classical tragedies that we think about, which are more binary. Achilles has his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths. But they're all lessons. Nobody's perfect, right? Nature tells us, walk out the door, you go, oh, I know about my atomic insignificance, right? And that has a paradoxical thing. It inspirits you. It makes you bigger. Just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self
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A
regard in philosophy of science, there's the tension between correspondence theories and coherence theories of truth. You want your map to fit together, that the US is a little wider than it is tall, but what you really want is correspondence to truth. You'd rather be right more often than have a. A perfectly coherent story. And when you said I contain multitudes, I think about your Vietnam project, right? How many different stories are inside that same film? And probably a lot of people came to it wanting story A or story B. Your binary point. And you're like, bullshit, I'm going to do A, B, C, D and E and half anti A and half Auntie B at the same time. Talk to us about how you get to simplicity, to complexity. When, like when I. When I' teaching my kids something. Now they're 15 to 25, but if they were 5 to 15, you want to start with a simple theory of what we're doing and then you layer in complexity. Is the unfolding of a film similar or is starting simple?
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C
I think so. It's not a conscious thing about layering complexity. You just know it's there. So you would presume that what we do is additive, that you're like constructing a house or raising a child, Right? It's actually subtractive. We're collecting 400 hours of material in the revolution and finding in it the 12 hours that we're going to be able to show. So I love it when people come up and tell me what I've left out. First of all, they're not saying it's boring. They're telling me, why didn't you do that thing in New Hampshire? I live in New Hampshire. The thing about that, I go, yeah, well, we did it. But we felt this other thing about the trees and taking the big trees for the mass of his Majesty's Navy was better than that one.
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A
What?
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C
That's great. And you, you love it because you're not an encyclopedia. So in Vietnam, it's really just collecting all of this material and finding a way. There's an interesting thing, Ben, in the opening moments of the tenth and last episode of Vietnam, where two people use the word rectitude and we're very graphically inclined in that film, we're printing the transcripts of Nixon and Johnson and Kissinger and the people, you know what they're saying, we're translating Vietnamese. So we got a lot of type going on. And so when someone says rectitude in an anti Vietnam War thing is like the mistake of all mistakes. We put up the word rectitude and the next person is defending the whole project using the word rectitude. And I just said, look, this is the wormhole. This is what connects us. So Richard Powers, the novelist, said, the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. And of course, I think we'd all acknowledge all we do is argue, right? The best arguments won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.
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A
Yes.
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C
It means that within the territory, the landscape, the ground of a story, you have all of these different perspectives and you can't kind of select what you want to do. You just have to actually tolerate the contradiction. In our jazz series, Wynton Marsalis, the great jazz trumpeter and composer, said, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. Like, everybody knows this if you're talking about kids, Ben, you know, everybody understands that. But we don't understand it in our politics. We don't understand it in our so called civil discourse. We don't understand it in so many aspects. And it's somehow we've got to figure out a way to bring the inner to the outer and maybe to some extent the outer to the inner in a disciplinary fashion to help Us sort of overcome these sort of clear. You know, it's so obvious that division makes money for some people, and, you know, it. It doesn't have any lasting value. There's no nutrition to it. All right.
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B
I want to. I want to get into how to be a creative person and how to effectively marshal our resources as creative people to be productive but still have full and balanced lives. I wonder, though, thanks for doing this.
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A
Stay all day.
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B
You'll see the chart behind me. I wonder a lot about doing what you want to do versus doing what you think the audience will want. And those two talk about two things that are intentional, that you have to hold them both, right? You have to be producing something that people want, but you also have to produce something that you feel passionate about.
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C
First of all, what people want is the fool's errand. What you want to do is say, do a good story, because everybody wants a good story. So then you're no longer in a focus group. You're no longer anticipating a market. You're just saying, this is a good story. But then please go on, because you are describing quite correctly a tension.
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B
So this is the. Where I tell people to be a David Bowie and. And not a Mick Jagger. Don't, don't. Don't do what the. What they tell you to do. Nobody knows what's going to work. So just make something that you love. If you're going to be a creative person, make something that you love, and maybe somebody else will like it, too. So I want to start with a specific question. I watched people on the right in America when American Revolution came out. And by the way, congratulations for an amazing. Another amazing accomplishment. Your Civil War changed my life. Definitely altered the trajectory of who I am, what I studied, what I do for a living. Very much so. So I watched when that series came out. There was a bristling. The porcupine quills went up on the right that people said, oh, he's got the Indians in there. He's got the Indians. There they are. He's diminishing the dead white males, and he's lifting up the Indians. And then it faded. And I noticed that what I expected to be sort of a cultural backlash moment kind of didn't happen.
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C
Didn't happen.
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B
It was there for 30 hot seconds, and then it sort of melted away. Talk about what you meant to do and what your experience was like.
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C
Well, I don't intend people to do anything. What do you want people to take away? I said, whatever they take away. Right. We're just trying to tell a good story. And that, by the way, that it's complicated means that if we learn something new and destabilizing about a scene that's working and there's not a filmmaker alive, that when the scene is working, you don't want to touch it, you gotta touch it, and the art will come in some other place. To answer the beginning part of your question. So, you know, what I hoped was, Mark Twain said, if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. So I spent a year and a half promoting this film. And I said the same thing to Joe Rogan as I said to the New York Times editorial board, as I said to inner city school kids in Charleston and Detroit and suburban kids in Chicagoland and 40 cities and 80 screenings and 150 podcasts and, you know, 400, 400, 400.
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A
I feel a hell of a lot less special all of a sudden.
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B
You're down to us.
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C
Yeah, I'm sure there were times when it was just the. The two of us or the three of us that were the audience. Anyway. I just assumed that if I could get in this polarized time, if I could get to mid October of 25, a month before the thing, before the proverbial, you know what hit the fan, just of this dialect that you're talking about, nothing happened. We get the broadcast. Nothing happened. Two days into the broadcast, there are three. What you would, I think you call, I think you described it conservative or right things. Two of the three admitted they didn't watch more than 20 minutes, but could easily declare the entire thing woke and impossible. And the other one was a little bit more informed, but it was agitated, not by the film, but by the stuff. And I go, oh, geez, here it goes. Because that means every subsequent interview I'll do, I'll have to wade through that. This is the first time, and that was November, mid November. This is the first time that someone has brought up that there was any kind of opposition to it. And as you said, it just evaporated, like skywriting. Because let's just go back and examine some of these cliches. What's a conservative television series? Yellowstone. Everybody on the right likes Yellowstone. Let's look at Yellowstone. Yellowstone has as its main character George Washington, who is John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner. He has three kids, one of whom is a daughter who is cut from the same mold. And oh, by the way, he's a great man, but if people piss him off, he kills them and he dumps their body across the Border in Wyoming into a cavern where presumably the body's
- [26:23]
A
never found and West Virginia values forever.
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C
And just exactly what the complicated. So it's complicated. Always the three children, the daughter's cut in the same mold. Get back to her in a second. One of the son is anguished by. He's married to a Native American. Native American woke, wait a second, he's married and he's troubled by this. And so he's got a complicated relationship to his father, the other son, Benedict Arnold. The daughter, Carrie sue, she's with the head foreman. Her man is the head foreman who oversees a crew of black and white, young and old, gay and straight, male and female. Surrounding this entire drama is this sense of Native American sovereignty that the other son has tried to carry in his relationship. And his father is very appreciative of the story of the buffalo and all of that sort of stuff. And beyond that is the impending doom of development that is the conservative darling. It's a great series. Everybody loves it because it's a good story. And what makes it a good story, it's complicated. So if you want to pull out all this stuff and make it just this, then George Washington is perfect. He's not only unassailable, he's unapproachable. You can't be like him. But if you humanize those, you know, the bold face names and understand that they have human dimensions and flaws, then they're accessible. Maybe I too could do something like that. And if you introduce then states evidence B of the scores of other people, so called ordinary people that yes, happen to be teenagers, yes, happen to be women, yes, happen to be free and enslaved black people, yes, happen to be Native American or loyalists, for God's sakes, who are not enemies. You know, everybody presumes in America they'd be a patriot. This is just not true. Just not true. The British constitutional monarchy is a good system of government, perhaps the best in what we might call now the Western world. You don't know what you choose.
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B
My son told me something very depressing the other day. He said, well, I of course would, speaking for himself, that he of course would have been a loyalist.
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C
At least, at least you're raising him right, because at least he's honest, right? I mean, most everybody says I'm a patriot for sure.
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B
I said, come on, man. Like come on. And he said, no, we subject to the authorities. And he's, he's a very devout young man. And he said, subject to the authorities of rightful government. And I was like, I gotta get some, like, squirrel meat in you. I gotta get you back to the Appalachian part of you that's out there. That. That would have your ancestors. Yeah.
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C
Bath county in western Virginia.
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B
Your ancestors who came down out of the mountains who were going to sit this one out, but decided that the British were too harsh.
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C
They were mountain men. Yeah.
- [29:15]
B
Yep. Those were our boys. So we got to get them back out there, Ken. Yeah.
- [29:20]
C
Yeah. All right. Send them to me. I'll talk to him. Yeah. No, no, no. This is. This is why it's so funny that when we surrender this birthright to the folks who want to make some sort of political hay with it from whatever side, you just. You've already surrendered your birthright. So the complication of these stories becomes, in and of itself, the guide to liberation. And goes back to your question, like Ben, which is why any of this is important. You know, Harry Truman once said, the only thing that's really new is the history you don't know, which is a really wonderful thing because we're all, you know, we're Americans. We burn our past behind us like rocket fuel. We're going this way. But you can't possibly know where you are or where you're going if you don't know where you've been.
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A
I want to use that jump off to go to CS Lewis on chronological snobbery. But first, while we're still at the revolution, how stunning is it to you when you're making this film, that they're so dang young it just kept jumping off your screen to me? Hamilton's 21, Jefferson's 33, Adams is a
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C
super old man at 40, and Franklin's 60 and 65. No, he's the only person that's out of the league. I mean, Franklin's son is older than Jefferson and all of this stuff. The amazing thing that we'll add to that is some of the characters is there's a guy named John Greenwood who watches the British land in Boston as a little kid of seven or eight, and they've got these Afro Caribbean bands with them, and they're playing the fife. And he wants to become a fifer, which he becomes. And then he's sent to an apprenticeship in Falmouth, Maine, what is now Portsmouth. I mean, now Portland, Maine. And the revolution starts, and he comes back and he joins a regiment at 15. I mean, at 14, excuse me. Down in Connecticut, Joseph Plumb Martin, who scholars of the revolution have known about for years, is the Epitome Grunt. He signs up just after the Declaration is Signed and is blooded at the biggest battle of the revolution. A horrible patriot lost due entirely to the misjudgments of George Washington at Long Island. And he's blooded here at 15 years old, and he is over the redoubt number 10 at Yorktown five and a half years later at 19 or 20. And he's like a grizzled soldier and he's writing back. It sounds exactly like the North Vietnamese and American GIs and Marines that we interviewed for the Vietnam. Sounds exactly like the guys that, you know, the GIs in, in the World War II film, the war that we made in 2007. Sounds exactly like, you know, Sam Watkins of Company H of Tennessee, the Confederate, and Elisha Hunt Rhodes of the Second Rhode island that we would focus in the Civil War. They're just the experiences of war, the same. And you can go back and read Ajax and it's the same commentary about how, you know, the famous people do all this and orders into battle, and we do it. And he says, I climbed up to the top of the parapet and the man next to me was shot and cried out bitterly, but there was no stopping us. And there's a great painting of that moment of Redoubt Number 10. Many of the British and Hessians, and I'm sure some Americans were crying to be killed from their wounds. I mean, it's not the sort of sanitized Madison Avenue version of the revolution that we want to hear about, because I think that we're worried that if we really tell it what it was really like, the big ideas will be diminished. The big ideas are made even more impressive and inspirational because it was a revolution and a civil war and the fifth global war over the prize of North America.
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B
How do you. So you are almost Mr. Franklin's age, and as Ben says, there is no sign of it.
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A
Right.
- [33:24]
B
You are obviously inspired, animated, over brimming, youthful. Yeah. You're over brimming with enthusiasm about your work and very passionate. And there's no way that you could have done all that you've done, made every movie, starting when you were a very young person to do all that you've done if you were not deeply passionate. Probably a little crazy, Right? You have to be a little crazy to throw yourself into these huge projects. Part of the point of this podcast, the thrust of this podcast is to help people live a good life. A consuming, vocational passion is not always the best recipe.
- [34:10]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:10]
B
It's not always a recipe for a good life. It can be a recipe for good work. But not for a good life. Talk about what you learned about doing something as consuming as making films and being the kind of dad, person, human, neighbor, spouse that you want to be.
- [34:30]
C
Yeah, that's the question, isn't it? You know, I remember when I decided finished reading this novel of the battle of Gettysburg called the Killer Angels by Michael Chapel on Christmas Day 1984. My now collaborator, 44 year old, oldest daughter was 2. And I said to my dad, I know what I'm doing next. He goes, what? I said, the Civil War. And he goes, what part? And I said, all of it. And he looked at me and walked out of the room shaking his head like my idiot son. Right. So there is an element of that I keep in every place that I wake up. A framed New Yorker cartoon that shows three guys standing in hell, the flames licking up around them. And one guy says to the other two, apparently my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing. And of course they don't. We are animated by five questions. Doesn't matter whether you dig ditches, write plays, serve in the United States Senate, you know, whatever it is. Who am I? What am I made of? What am I here for? Where did I come from? Where am I going?
- [35:35]
B
Can you say that again?
- [35:37]
C
Yeah. Who am I? Socratic. Right. What am I made of? That's the real ultimate thing. What am I here for? What's my purpose? Where did I come from and where am I going to? Right. You don't answer these questions, you sound them deeply and you continue to ask them. And so if you do that. So the work has some very punishing aspects for me because I am so consumed about it. And I've been a single dad, I'm sorry to say, a failure as a husband. But I've had therefore, the opportunity of being a single dad for two sets of two girls who are my most important productions. And that's, you know, that's number one on the gravestone, right? It's like father and then filmmaker second. And they're spectacular. Spectacular. I mean, Ben and I have talked about our love for our children, what they represent, or as Seinfeld said, they're here to replace us. So I just think that's the biggest responsibility. And I feel fortunate that the circumstances very different in each case that delivered me into single fatherhood actually made me a better human being because I was going home and cooking dinner and washing the dishes and washing underwear and buying dresses and dealing with stuff that my station should not have forced me into. And it has been People presumed, like, I had a child at 57 years old, she's 15 and a half right now. She's like a wonder. She's great. I mean, you wonder why you do Leonardo. Because he'd look at the 22 year old wife of a rich Florentine silk merchant named Lisa Gianconda. And he said, oh yeah, I'll paint her. And it will represent the entire accumulation of understanding of Western art, which is the most famous painting in the world. And you just, you know the guy. One critic was rhapsodizing about how he'd use the charios goro or whatever it is on their face. And he drops down, he said, but I'm absolutely certain that I can see the blood in her vein pulsing. It's a painting, it's two dimensional, it's on a piece of poplar, you know, I mean, come on. And that makes him a painter. God. So this animating thing about how we, this responsibility to our children is the overwhelming dominant feature of my life. And it saves me again and again and again from all of the, you know, the real pitfalls of, of doing the kind of work that I do. And I live in rural, I live in rural New Hampshire too.
- [38:19]
A
And I was gonna, I was gonna
- [38:20]
C
say 47 years next month there.
- [38:23]
B
And so there must have been concrete manifestations of a change in priority. Right, so you must have figured out how to do your work, where to do your work and when to do your work in a way that would allow you to be the father you needed to be.
- [38:38]
C
Yeah, that's right. And I mean, I moved up here before I had kids because I couldn't survive in New York. I needed to get a real job. And if I got a real job, I'd put the footage of the Brooklyn Bridge that I'd shot 60% of it on a shelf and I'd wake up and I'd be 40 and hadn't done it. So I moved to a place where I knew it could live for nothing.
- [38:54]
A
Let's stay at work, all of them, for a minute.
- [38:56]
C
I'm sleeping in for you.
- [38:59]
A
We've all got plural vocations, but something weird happens and for you it happened decades ago where there was no need to work, to put bread on the table. You had a storehouse that was big enough from the past, and so you have, you know, kind of medieval, aristocratic leisure in that you could choose to do something different. And yet you're compelled to work this hard. What a blessing that you have a 44 year old daughter who's now a collaborator. But have you passed on to her the downsides of workaholism? And do you have a different theory with the second batch of daughters about how to guide them against that all consuming grit and grind?
- [39:49]
C
They saw it firsthand, Ben. They know it. My oldest daughter's so much smarter than me, so much so that I. She did an interview yesterday morning here with a scholar, and then we had Ed Ayers, a scholar of reconstruction and many, many other things. And I did yesterday afternoon's thing and then I made this executive decision that I would like not go in and I wouldn't sit in there while she was interviewing. I let Sarah do it. I wasn't going to kibitz the way she did on me because that's a different dynamic. I just said Ed, and he already could see that. She's remarkable from a year and a half. She's just a spectacular person. So she already knows that and has got incredibly balanced work, like. And she's got two of my four grandchildren who are just a great blessing. And the other little girls, I mean, my second daughter majored in film and history at Columbia and is making Emily in Paris and doing all these very successful on the commercial side. My number three daughter is a rising senior at Georgetown University majoring in American Studies, who was our intern all summer and set up this whole production and made sure it ran smoothly and people were fed. And my little one, who's 15 and a half, is away at her first year at boarding school and her favorite subjects are English and history. And I've never once put my thumb on the scale. So they're actually, you know, child is father to the man. They, they've actually, they pick up the lessons. They're a lot smarter. There's no kind of didactic, you know, thing they, they see where I've, you know, sacrificed things and they're determined to have well rounded lives, all of them. I think even Willa, my youngest, if she were here, she would just say, you know, you don't have to, Data. She will say that all the time. You don't have to do that. Right? You chose to do that. And she's reminding me very clearly, yes, I did choose to be that.
- [41:51]
B
If you had. If you could go back and tell yourself something, right? So if you could go back to before the Civil War and you could impart one message from time to time, right. That you would come back and say from 50 years in the future, here's the one thing I wish you would know and I wish that you would hold on to. What, what would it be? Because the young you would. If you said to the young you treasure your family, it's like, yeah, I do. I am. I got it. I'm good. Is there something that you would try to impart to the you of 50 years ago?
- [42:28]
C
Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I don't want to avoid the suffering I've had. You know, the immediate impulse was to say, don't worry, be happy. I'm very anxious person. I watched my mother die for nine straight years. It was not pleasant. I didn't have a childhood. Look what I do for a living. My late father in law, who was an eminent psychologist, said, he said, you wake the dead, you make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you really want to wake up? My oldest daughter, by the way, named her first child after a woman she never met. Her grandmother Lila met named, you know, that name was draped in black crepe. Nobody said it. We said mommy. I still say mommy to my brother. We're in our 70s, but Lila now. Birds sing, flowers bloom. It's really great. I don't want to, I mean, I think that sense of I so worried about stuff and I know, you know, it's clear you guys already know where it came from, but it, it. I'm not sure I wanted to give that up. I don't think there's an advice. I think you're going to have to go through the walls that you go through. You don't want to. There's not a shortcut to this. I mean I carry around for many years, I carried around a little post it, this is 40 years ago that said the three things and they are, this won't last. Get help from others, be kind to yourself.
- [43:54]
B
That's pretty tricky.
- [43:55]
C
I've given that away. I've given that away to people and helped them through a lot of stuff. And all my daughter, not all my daughter, my first daughter, needed it, but this third, the three younger ones did it various times and friends and people come up and pull a post it that I'd written for them out of their wallet 30 years ago. So that's. I think if I'd learned that a little bit earlier, maybe it would have helped. But sometimes when you say there's no yes buts to any of those three things and yet we can always say it is going to last forever, you know, or this is pain is too much, or I don't know how to ask for help or the hardest of all be kind to yourself is a really. That takes a great deal of power and observation, wisdom, kind of spiritual triangulation to be able to do that. But all of it is like the pursuit of happiness. The key word isn't happiness and lifelong learning or more money than anybody else has. Whatever it is, it's really about the pursuit. This is my process.
- [44:57]
B
I'm going to put in one more here before Ben winds us up with whatever his magnificent, thoughtful 12 part question is.
- [45:04]
C
I want to hear about the snobbery of chronology.
- [45:08]
A
Let's do it.
- [45:10]
B
But my final question for you before Ben takes us out. I'm sitting in a room where Abraham Lincoln is looking at me from no fewer than three vantage points, including a life size cut out of him behind me. My father was born in Springfield, Illinois. I had to memorize Rachel Lindsay's Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight. He was this huge figure in my life and still is
- [45:44]
A
that.
- [45:45]
B
Who is the person that as you have gone through all of these. Is it Lincoln? I want it to be Lincoln because I like you so much. I want it to be Abraham Lincoln. Is he the person that you believe you see yourself in? Think about the most of all of the people that you. Of all the ghosts that you've raised, is Lincoln the one?
- [46:04]
C
Yes. We don't have a country without George Washington. We don't have a country without him. That's an exhilarating, wonderful thing to say from a person who is very much promoting a bottom up as well as top down narrative to find out that there's one person without whom Franklin second. But once we got started, there's nobody else. He's the person who helped resurrect among a group of people the Declaration and Jefferson had fallen into disuse. Right? So he's not saying four score and seven years ago back to the Constitution or the beginning of the government 1789. He's going to 1776 to take the poetry of the founding of the Declaration and to say in the Gettysburg that this is, you know, Declaration 2.0. We really do mean this. But the thing that he's the thing, the reason why he's the bee's knees, you know, if that's what you want me to say.
- [46:57]
B
I do, I do.
- [46:58]
C
He is the bee's knees, is that he gets us. It's not just the last sentence of the first inaugural. Mystic chords of memory to better angels of our nature. It's the second message to Congress. Right. He has it both ways. Or the second Inaugural. Right. There's old Testament, fury. In that penultimate sentence about, you know, okay from, you know, the drop of blood drawn by the lash will be met by one drawn by the sword. So, you know, this is like furious. And then he pivots and goes with malice towards none, with charity for all. But the second message to Congress, 1262. It's what we call the state of the Union. But it's written and delivered. And he's got it. He's having it both ways in the most important thing. So the ingredient in a good story is that one plus one equals three. That's what we want in our lives. We don't want it in our buildings or our things. Bridges. It has to be 1 and 1 equals 2. But in our faith, in our art, in our relationships and our love, whatever it is, you want one and one to be three. That the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And what's that? That's what we're after. That's what we're examining. So he says, fellow citizens, the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, we must think anew, we must act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves. Can't be slaves. Disenthrall ourselves and then we can save our country. We'll go on last. Best hopeful work. But he also says, fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. I mean, which is it, Abe? And then he can go both, right? The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. And fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. You got a problem with that? He doesn't. And I don't have it anymore. Which is why he's the bee's knees now. In another way, I can make an argument about Louis Armstrong too.
- [48:57]
B
A great American in that same way.
- [49:00]
C
Same way that's he just in different things. He's not writing the Gettysburg Address. He's not writing the second inaugural or the first, or the message to Congress, or even the best, maybe arguably the best speech is the one he wrote as a not even 29 year old lawyer at Springfield, Illinois. When shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa could not by force take a drink in the Ohio river or make a track in the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live through all time or die by suicide.
- [49:46]
B
How many times a week do I quote the speech at the Young Men's Lyceum?
- [49:50]
C
Lyceum.
- [49:51]
B
More than one. More than one is the answer.
- [49:54]
A
I am sad that time is winding down because I want to ask some Jackie Robinson questions and I want to make a pitch for you to do a project on the Hundred Days in Philadelphia, summer of 1787. Still great. I got a. I got a lot that I wish we could cover, but I've been teed up on by Chris on chronological snobbery. Lewis has that great line that we're all guilty of it. And it's really dangerous to not be aware of how you need to pierce our chronological snobbery, because humans, we want us to be 9010 rational beings or 9010 emotional beings. And so if you're not going to be persuaded by argument, one thing that's true is you have to get out of your own head, and you have to get out of your own moment. You have to be able to see your assumptions. A fish can't describe water because he's never not been in water. And so we need to get away from our moment and we don't have the luxury of going to the future. So going to the past is essential because it's the only way to look at our moment from outside of ourselves. And so I think Lewis's chronological snobbery is a really useful insight, Right. For everybody anthropologically, but it's definitely true for Americans, where we really believe we're always one generation away from the extinction of freedom. It doesn't get passed on in the bloodstream. Americans need to do self discipline, self control, self restraint, self governance. And so I love your work, but I'm also worried that you have been able to be a big part of the canon. You're going to be doing this for a lot more decades. But I'm supposedly trained as a historian, but that spent very little time laboring in the fields of an academic history department. But I think of a friend of mine who was dissuaded from becoming a professional historian by David McCullough, who said that professional historians in academia have all forgotten how to tell stories and they're not going to be able to relearn it. So you're one of America's most important historians, and you're definitely outside of academia. So I don't expect that history is going to be revived by academic storytellers. So what do you think the next generation of those American synthetic civic storytellers, whether documentary filmmakers or not, what do they look like and where do they come from?
- [52:11]
C
Well, I think a lot of them will come from the academy. And you know, what we do, Ben, is so interesting. We had for the American Revolution, say also true of Vietnam, we had like 23, 24 scholars. Some of them were writers, historians, like a David McCullough type in the case of the revolution, Rick Atkinson, Nathaniel Philbrick, people who are outside of the academy. And then lots of academicians who've spent their life studying the British economic stuff. And so what you take from them is their information, and what you don't take from them is if they have it. And I'm pleased to say that the academy has begun to sort of escape the specific gravity of the tyranny of a particular historiography after World War II. Clearly evident when you kill 60 million people and drop an atomic bomb. Something's wrong with the old narrative. That old top down version doesn't work, but it gets replaced with a Freudian interpretation or a Marxist economic deter. Determinism of some kind or semiotics or queer studies or Afrocentrism or whatever it might be. And that's supposedly the only way to seize things. And of course the wagon wheel has structural integrity because there are many spokesmen. So we get to borrow from the expertise without being borrowing from their particular historiography. And that liberates us. And I think people, the academy is also doing it. It's so interesting how many of those people who come into our editing not once, not twice, maybe a dozen times, and who are struck by our process like not only just. Well, most people just pay lip service and don't listen to us. You not only listen to us, you incorporated and you did it in a way I never thought was possible. And you did it this way. So there's a nice symbiotic thing. So I think what's happening is the academy's growing up, it's getting a little bit better. It's escaping the specific gravity of some of these imprisoning kind of modalities, but they're still there. And we have all these other ways of doing it. I mean, Henry Adams and Francis Parkman, these were public historians in the 19th century and they were the most popular. And I think until we adopted the Germanic academic model at the end of the 19th century, that imprisoned a little bit of the scholarship that made it super hard to sort of let go of the Lost cause stuff. That was pernicious. That's What I was taught, I'm making a film on the Reconstruction. And what I was taught was that, you know, there were all these carpetbaggers who came down and local union sympathizers named scalawags and of course, marauding, raping, black primitives who had no business governing their own selves, let alone their bodies. And, you know, it was, you know, the failure was Reconstruction itself, whereas for many people, the failure was the failure of Reconstruction and what is it? And it's much more complicated than both of those dualities. And to be able to hold that is what you want to do. That's a good story. And so getting back to the chronological snobbery, which I hadn't heard, which is a wonderful thing, is I remember struggling just in a simple, mechanical way to tell the story of Chancellorsville and then Vicksburg and getting Gettysburg and Vicksburg. So Vicksburg falls on the 4th of July, 63. Gettysburg is 1, 2, and 3. And how do you do it? And Shelby Foote happened to call me. He said, how's it going? And I said, shelby, I can't do it like everybody either. Front end loads, all of Vicksburg. And then you have to jump ahead to the Fourth of July. Or then they did. He said, well, God's the greatest dramatist, right? I just said, which is. And then. And then. And then. So we did the part of Vicksburg, Vicksburg, that's before Gettysburg. And then we do Gettysburg and then we go back to Vicksburg, and then Gettysburg becomes a battle for second, third, the Union wins. And then they find out the coup de grace, which is the Mississippi is liberated now from north to south. And Vicksburg falls on the 4th of July. Nice present. It's just you kind of went. It's so obvious. It's sitting there right in front of you. And then, you know. And God is the greatest dramatist applies to the fact that Robert E. Lee can surrender on April 9th. And on April 14th, the president thinks he's finally, after four years of war, has got enough free time to go to the theater.
- [56:28]
B
Ouch, man. Ken Burns, I'm very excited to watch this Reconstruction movie. And I'm very excited to have gotten a chance to talk to you today and thank you for all the work that you have done in all of the young bosoms in which you have seeded love of American history. It's really, really important for us to be self governing, to know where we came from. So I'm really, really appreciative.
- [56:56]
C
Thank you. Chris, that's a nice thing to say.
- [56:59]
A
America is a beautiful idea and a beautiful place, and ideas and places are shared best with stories. So thank you for your poetry, brother. Thanks for the incredible short stories you share to bring us together.
- [57:13]
C
Thank you, my friend. Love you. Take care of yourself.
- [57:15]
A
Love you, too.
- [57:16]
C
Thank you, gentlemen.
- [57:17]
A
Thanks, K. Thank you, Ken.
- [57:19]
B
Well, professor, what did we learn today?
- [57:21]
A
Man, I love the guy and I love how he views history as storytelling. I have a good bit more skepticism than he does about professional academic historians. I mean, I am supposedly one, but not practicing, partly because you don't get the community of people who believe in big stories right now. But he definitely gets right what so many in the profession gets wrong, which is get wrong, which is tell the story and let the story tell itself and let people fall in love with the story. And though there'll be controversy at the edges of it, those are sub points to the idea that capital S story matters and we need more of them.
- [58:06]
B
I think I. I want to be careful here and not inject politics into this. But as we talked with him and I listened to him, I thought, oh, this is a missing character in our national discourse. And the missing character. And there are many people we could probably think of who fit the bill, but who is a. Well, not a classical liberal, but a traditional American liberal who is deeply patriotic.
- [58:42]
A
Yep.
- [58:43]
B
And the, the Lincoln as, as the intersection where liberals and conservatives meet. They come together under the gaze of Abraham Lincoln to love the country. I'd forget who said it, but the conservatives love America for what it was. Liberals love America for what it could be. Both loving America and the, the. Do you, do you know the story of John Chaffee?
- [59:18]
A
A little bit. But bring us all to speed together.
- [59:22]
B
He'd be. I'm. I'm sure an earlier generation would have called him a Rockefeller Republican. He was a New England in Rhode island, super squishy on. He was no Reaganite. Right, right. He was certainly of the George H.W. no, he. He was of the Prescott Bush mold. And John Chaffee, who served as a senator from Rhoda. I think he was also Governor John Chaffee volunteer. He fought in the Second World War and volunteered and got an exemption to go back and fight in Korea. He was a Marine. And I feel like America is short on people who are left of center, who are fiercely, proudly, intensely patriotic and who understand. I had that conversation. We talked about where Cornell West. I asked Cornell west. The question about is, was the American Revolution worth it? And man, he laid it on Me brother, he laid it, he g, he, he took the wood to me for even suggesting that it wasn't. And I think a lot of conservatives complain. I don't know whether those people are conservative. A lot of people on the right complained about Ken Burns American Revolution series, but boy, I hope a lot of people on the left watched it and got a good antidote to the 1619 project.
- [60:59]
A
Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons history is important is because self government requires us to be self reflective and self critical, to love the country enough to be grateful enough for what we've inherited. That you can look at it and say this is, wasn't Wart free, but man am I grateful. We've inherited this tradition. But you can look at it with some scrutiny. So I, I think what Ken does so well is he just shouts, where did we come from? So there's, there's a we, there's a shared sense of inheritance and where are we going? Because those questions are at the heart of what it means to be human. Political community, power based community is not the most important thing. But it's pretty great to have a public square that's largely free from violence. And it's free from violence because we've inherited a shared polity. And so we can be skeptical and we can scrutinize what we got and where we're going, but they should be questions that have a we when you talk about the history. And Ken just always does that.
- [62:03]
B
Okay, what about the question and this. I was thinking of you when I posed the question to him about a person of consuming passions, a person of big energy and a person with vision living a good life. And he was very frank and I appreciated how frank he was about how hard it is to do. Right. The, the, what's the phrase you use? Vocational balance or you have many, many, many buzz phrases around proposals? No, no, because you, you think about this and wrestle with this and for me, the, the consuming nature of the work. Work like that is not my, I've written two books and am starting on a third and I don't like that kind of work. Right. I like, I like, I like journalism because you do it and you're done. To quote the, the great Fred Barnes quote. How did your piece turn out? Well, it had the unique quality of doneness and I love starting. I'm going to write a column this afternoon. I'll have three. I will leave myself. I've been thinking about it. I'll leave myself three hours to write it. I hopefully won't need all three hours and I'll be done. Talk about if you are willing, how to deal with big projects, long term passions in life.
- [63:29]
A
Well, first of all, your point about doneness. I think I make the mistake regularly of not understanding the virtue of of project selection around that as one of the core virtues. I think when we had Mike Rowe on, he just did a heck of a good job of talking about having some knowledge work and some brawn manual work and how his brawn work is always done when it's done and his knowledge work is still sitting there on the side of his bed or his desk and it's just always hanging over you Sisyphus style. And so I am a way less good somewhere there's grammar columnist than you are. But I write for the Wall Street Journal some and I'm supposed to submit at 750 words and I almost always submit at 8.99 and then trust that their editing is going to help clean me up. But I never started 899. I started pushing 2000 and I edit down, edit down, edit down, edit down the ice sculpture. And I'm frustrated by not being better at that. And I appreciated Ken. This is closer to the heart of I appreciated Ken admitting that same ache when he said, you know, 600 shots per hour and if I'm going to do a six hour thing, a short as he jokingly calls it, that's over 3,600 shots and I'll start with 100,000 and then have to edit down to 3,600. And so I don't know the answer of how to do it well, but I know one way to screw it up. Joanne Freeman, a historian at Yale who used to be a documentary filmmaker before that, says one of the reasons documentary filmmakers are better storytellers than academic historians is if A is assertion and B is qualification. Most academic historians go bba. A filmmaker goes aba assert something, then qualify and refine it, and then assert it again. But his academic historians often qualify, qualify and maybe assert something at the end. And so I think I'm, I'm weak at this. But the thing that gets me a little better at it is when I embrace, fall in love with different parts of the grammar logic dialectic sequence, which is think about all the building blocks of the argument, then refine down to the ones that need to be there for the through line to work. And then you go back to an audience question of how will this be compelling and meaningful and moving and persuasive and understandable to people. And then I can start to like all those subsets, sets of a large project like that. But if I just start with the large project, I'll write something three times too long and then edit forever and then come to hate it.
- [66:05]
B
When you're writing something short, write the single strongest declarative sentence that you can and staple it right there, put it right there at the top and then see if you can defend it it and then see if you, if you get, if you can, if you can build underneath it a structure that will uphold that one sentence. I very often end up throwing out the sentence itself because I think of another way to get the lead in, but as a, as a barrier for my brain, putting that like, here is one sentence that makes a bold assertion. What is the boldest thing that I can say? And sometimes you have to go back and change that sentence because you're like, well, actually, now that, now that I've done in Kruger myself, I'm really, I shouldn't be as bold in that assertion as I was. But that sentence for me is the, the tether that keeps me close to the planet, or roughly close to the planet.
- [67:10]
A
That's really good.
- [67:10]
C
Is.
- [67:11]
A
Does Whole Hog Politics come out on Friday and how long is it usually?
- [67:14]
B
Well, I write a column that comes out On Tuesdays that's 975 words because much to my delight, it still is published in the print vers of the Hill, which comes out, which I like very much. And then Whole Hog Politics. I can do whatever I want for however long I want and it comes out on Fridays. But I try to keep the top under a thousand words. I all. Because I just don't think back to our conversation about the virtues of an hour and 15 minute church service. I just don't think that people are going to absorb much more than that. I just, I just, I think like, maybe it's just because I have poor attention, but I just don't think people can if, if you have multiple ideas, put it in a longer essay, put it in a book, but in a column, I think you gotta, you gotta keep it under a thousand words if you expect to have a conversation with somebody's brain.
- [68:07]
A
So when you use the word lead a minute ago, you mean it, I assume, in the precise journalistic way. But when you have your big bold declaratory sentence, do you have rules for yourself about how soon in the piece that has to appear does it have to be in graph one?
- [68:22]
B
Or ultimately it doesn't have to appear. You could excise it. You can throw it away because now you don't need it because you've built a structure underneath it that makes it that you've figured out a more charming, interesting, engaging way. So the lead. Yes. L, E, D, E is the hook. It's what you're saying. Like, like, hey, look at this. And this can be a joke, it can be a quote, it can be whatever it is that you're trying to snag somebody's attention as they're galloping by. What you're talking about is the nut graph. The nut graph should be in the
- [68:58]
C
first
- [69:01]
B
four paragraphs of your piece. And the nut graph is. Some people just call it the billboard. It is why you should have. You should say to your audience within the first four or five paragraphs. This is why I want you to read this. So you have a lead, which is a hook that is supposed to catch the fish on the line. And then the nut graph is. Okay, here's why we're really doing this. So you don't have to keep your sentence. I don't have to keep. And no, everybody ought to do whatever works for them. But I don't have to keep my declarative sentence. But the declarative sentence is probably going to be best reflected in that nut graph. That is like, here it is. Here's the essence of what we're doing here.
- [69:47]
A
When I was in grad school, I had a really great advisor who said, put an 8 by 10 framed picture of one of your farming ants next to your aunts and uncles, one of your farming ants next to your keyboard board. And is it true, Ben? Because it was. But it's a line I'd used before that you think she's smarter than you are, but knows nothing about the topic you're writing about today and said, absolutely true. He said, okay, she's your audience always. You're writing for her. Assume your audience is smart, but they don't know anything about this topic. Making things interesting for your audience. And assume they're smarter than you are. Don't condescend to the them, but put lots of building blocks into it. Do you have an idealized audience in your head?
- [70:35]
B
My imaginary audience have. Have we never talked about ACE hardware?
- [70:39]
A
I know, I wasn't meaning to tee you up lazily, but I like you to talk about it.
- [70:43]
B
Well, I assume we've must have. We've done enough episodes. There's no way I haven't talked about this on the podcast yet. But yes, my audience is the imaginary owner of an Ace True Value hardware store. Do it best or true value? I don't know. In Terre Haute, Indiana. He is an educated man. He is a very busy man. Because they're doing well now. They've added on a tool, an equipment rental business that his son has, has taken over and it's making good money and the store is expanding and they, they, the, they, they have positions open and they're paying better than minimum wage. It's, it's going great. So he's very busy with that and keeping enough red polo shirts in supply to, to wear. And he's active in his church as much as he, as much as he can be. And he wants to be a good citizen. He wants to be the kind of American who's able to engage in self governance. He is not interested in being addicted to politics. And I write for him. I write for this imaginary person who I always want to say, I only want about 20 minutes of your time. 15, 20 minutes of your time. And if you, I won't insult your intelligence, I won't tell you that I know all the answers, but I am a specialist in this in the same way that you are a specialist in what the hardware needs of Metro Terre Haute are. And give me a little bit of your time and I'll make it worth it.
- [72:20]
A
You know, this is, I know we gotta close, but this is one of the deep riddles it seems to me about collapsing community. And against the backdrop of, I think we both defined ourselves previously in some of our tech episodes as reluctant optimists. So the tools are amazing. But we people, human souls, American, we don't know how to use the tools well yet. And so when your consciousness can escape the time and place that you live, it means you get lots more distant communities. But on average you're going to get less local community. And when you just said, I don't presume that I'm going to consume more than 15 or 20 minutes of your time, you're saying explicitly that your model isn't clickbait. You're not doing engagement farming and trying to hope somebody will start to doom scroll and just stick around on your site or page forever. And why that's a problem is the business model doesn't work unless we had lots more subscription right now. Right? An ad, an ad based model for treating people with dignity and saying get on with the rest of your life, turn off your devices and go touch some grass and go figure out how to get the hydraulic machines to look right. From a marketing standpoint about the rental equipment business, you gotta go deeper with local community, and local community is thinner. I think it's one of the core challenges we face around the. The. The ache and loneliness. I mean, we are. We're a nation of ace hardwares. And to tie it back to Ken, that's why his work connects with so many of us, because he takes his topic seriously and he takes his audience seriously, and he tries to get the balance of Pluribus and Unum about right.
- [74:01]
B
Who am I? What am I made of? What am I here for? What is my purpose? Where did I come from? Where am I going? And talking about the history of our people, talking about the history of our nation is a really good way to do that. That's a really good way to do it. His Post it note. I want a Ken Burns post it note. So next time you see him, see if you can score a Ken Burns post it note for me. Do you remember what the three things are?
- [74:32]
A
Yeah, I mean, summarize them.
- [74:35]
B
The post it note says, this won't last. Get help from others and be kind.
- [74:44]
C
Pretty good.
- [74:46]
A
That's a wrap.
- [74:47]
B
That's a wrap. I dig it. All right. That is, in fact, a wrap. That's it for this week's episode. We hope you'll like review and subscribe and tell a friend. Feel free to email us with your thoughts, corrections, questions, or whatever else is on your mind. Write us@sassinstirewallmail.com this podcast was produced by Scott Emerget with the help of our colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute. The music is from Drew Holcomb and the neighbors. Thanks for listening and keep living the good life.
- [75:25]
C
Sam.