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- [00:02]
Joe Rogan
Joe Rogan Podcast.
- [00:03]
Ken Burns
Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. All right, we're up.
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Joe Rogan
Mr. Burns, pleasure to meet you.
- [00:15]
Ken Burns
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
- [00:16]
Joe Rogan
I'm a huge fan. Dude. I've been watching your work for so long, and I've always had so many questions about how a person like you becomes a person like you. How you become the preeminent documentarian of our time. I mean, you have so much work out there. It's really extraordinary. And all of it on pbs, right?
- [00:36]
Ken Burns
Right. All of it. All of it.
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Joe Rogan
Which is also extraordinary.
- [00:38]
Ken Burns
You know, it's the Public Broadcasting Service. It's the Declaration of Independence applied to communications. Just as the national parks, you could say, was the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape, like manifestations of really American things. It may not seem obvious to us, but it seemed obvious to me that that's where I should go. So I had lots of, you know, I headed for the hills out of New York, you know, 46 years ago. Cause I thought I was taking a vow of anonymity and poverty to do this stuff. And I live in the same house that I've lived in since there, in the Same bedroom for 46 years in this tiny little village in New Hampshire. And when the first film was nominated for an Academy Award, that was a film called Brooklyn Bridge, everybody said, oh, you're coming back to New York. You're going to L. A. And I said, you know, I'm staying here as soon as labor intensive. And I can sit here in front of you and tell you that every single one of my films is a director's cut. I'm not gonna sit here and give you an excuse. Well, that one. They wouldn't let me do this, or they didn't give me this amount of time. And so I could, with the reputation I have, go into a streaming service or a premium cable and say, I need $30 million to do a history of the Vietnam War. And they give it to me. But they wouldn't give me the ten and a half years it took me to take. You see what I mean?
- [01:54]
Joe Rogan
It's the time.
- [01:54]
Ken Burns
It's the time and the ab to marinate the ideas, to do the deep dive into the scholarship, to triangulate the various scholarships. As you know better than anybody. There's lots of different viewpoints and perspectives. And you want to find a way in which you can kind of, if not average them out. You can find a way in which you can understand them. And you can have a conversation, a sort of a campfire, around which you can discuss the complexity and the undertow of any subject. You picket the Brooklyn Bridge. The American Revolution most recently.
- [02:26]
Joe Rogan
How early on did you realize that the only way to get this full autonomy was to do with pbs?
- [02:36]
Ken Burns
I'd like to attribute some consciousness to it, and I honestly can't do it. I realized that I was striking out trying to raise funds from folks and the people who were interested in helping me, like the National Endowment for the Humanities or this all required me to give it for free, as I still do to pbs. And we had foundations and that. And so suddenly that dream of being a filmmaker, which I'd had since 12, I wanted to be a filmmaker at 12. Of the communion of strangers in dark rooms, the cinematic experiences. Suddenly I had to go, you know what? It's okay. I'm trading hundreds or maybe thousands of viewers for millions of viewers on a smaller screen. And they're not watching it together, but they're having an experience. And I can do something over time. I can do a Civil War series and it 11 and a half, 12 hours and get deep, deep into that experience. Or Vietnam, which is 18 hours, 10 episodes. Or country music, the national parks, jazz, baseball. I mean, there are like 40 different things.
- [03:37]
Joe Rogan
American Buffalo.
- [03:38]
Ken Burns
American Buffalo most recently. And Leonardo da Vinci, the first non American topic or just finishing the American Revolution is just. It was right for me. It was right for me. And I like the fact that they have bbs. Has one foot in the marketplace and the other out. That foot is tentatively there. And so it also reaches all parts of the country. It's the largest network in the country. It's 330 stations and they really serve rural stations mostly. It's not this Upper west side, Knob Hill, snobby kind of thing. It's Homeland Security and crop reports and weather and continuing education and classroom of the air as well as children's programming and what I think is a pretty damn good prime time schedule, you know, so it works in the context of all of America, not just some of America.
- [04:32]
Joe Rogan
So this is sort of a fortuitous sort of a thing that you came.
- [04:36]
Ken Burns
To be, I think so.
- [04:37]
Joe Rogan
I mean, cooperative with them.
- [04:38]
Ken Burns
The filmmaking thing was born in tragedy. My mom got cancer when I was two years old. There was never a moment when she wasn't dying that I was aware. She died when I was 11, a few months short of my. My 12th birthday. And my dad had a pretty tough curfew for my younger brother and me, but he forgave it. If there was a movie on TV that might go till 1am on a school night. A school night. Or he'd take me out to the cinema and see, like, Old Silence or French New Wave that was happening in the mid-60s. And I saw my dad cry for the first time. He didn't cry when she was dying, didn't cry when she died, didn't cry at this impossibly sad funeral. But we were watching this movie called Odd out by Sir Carol Reid, about the Irish troubles of the nineteen teens and twenties. James Mason, you know, very tragic. And I saw him cry and I got it immediately. I just. That provided him with this safe haven to express himself in a way nothing in his life, for whatever reasons, for his own psychology, his own history, his own traumas, his own whatever it is. And I said, that's what I want to do. And it wasn't about sentimentality or nostalgia. It was about authentic emotional stuff, higher emotional stuff. The way our founders would talk about. We'd be able to create a republic where you'd have higher emotions. Nothing sentimental about it. It's that you would just get closer, be more virtuous. And so I said. And that meant, you know, I was gonna be Albert Hitchcock or John Ford or Howard Hawks, you know, big Hollywood directors. And I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which was a brand new experimental school, came in its second year in 1971. And all of the teachers, social, documentary, still photographers and filmmakers. And they reminded me, correctly, that there is as much drama in what is and what was as anything the human imagination makes up, right? And so fiction's fine, but all of a sudden my molecules are rearranged again. I'm no longer just a filmmaker going to hopefully go to Hollywood. I'm now a documentary filmmaker. And all of that merged with this latent Joe. I don't know how to describe it. Love of my country and its history. I mean, where everybody else growing up was reading novels and stuff like that, I was reading encyclopedias and reading histories and trying to get at some aspect of who we are. And I think every single film that I've made has asked the same question. Who are we? Who are those strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans? And what does an investigation of the past tell us about? Not only where we've been, but where we are and where we may be going, which is the great gift of history. It's the best teacher we have.
- [07:25]
Joe Rogan
As you know, one of the more fascinating things about documentary work, and particularly your work, is it provides this entertainment pathway to education where it's engrossing and gripping and fascinating and it's really well edited and there's music and. And his recreations of these scenes. And it makes. Becoming educated fascinating. Yes, it makes it exciting where instead of the stale, boring classrooms a lot of children face if they could be exposed to something. Like your piece on Vietnam, right? Was it 18 hours?
- [08:05]
Ken Burns
18 hours, 10 episodes.
- [08:07]
Joe Rogan
I mean, that piece on Vietnam is so fascinating. It's so incredible. And to see those. The people that survived it, express. There's this one moment where one of the guys is realizing that they're about. And it's just a very simple statement. He goes, okay, here we go. We're going to war. And you could see it in his face, him recalling that. And you're like. You don't get that from the written word, seeing that man's face, him recounting it.
- [08:37]
Ken Burns
And you don't get it from churning it out either. So I spent five and a half years working on the Civil War, and I really was, like, daunted by it. But the first. All of the first five or six films that I've made. The Brooklyn Bridge wouldn't have been built without this new medal called Steel, which the Civil War helped to promote. The use of the second film on the celibate religious sect, the Shakers, wouldn't have declined so precipitously. Not because they were celibate. Celibate. Celibacy exists in lots of religious traditions, but because a country that had just murdered 650,000 of its own people was not interested after the Civil War in the questions of the soul, survival in the intensity that it had before the Civil War. The next film I made was on the Statue of Liberty, and it was originally a gift from the French to Mrs. Lincoln to commemorate the survival of the Union, despite her husband's ultimate sacrifice. The next film was on Huey Long, the turbulent Southern demagogue. He came from a north Louisiana parish that refused to secede. Secede from the Confederacy, I mean, refused to secede from the Union. They saw the Confederacy, the ownership of slaves, as a rich man's cause. And so they became a hotbed of kind of radicalism and populism and later would spawn this swamp thing called Huey Long. We made a film in the history of the Congress. Obviously, the most important time in the Congress was when there were two Congresses. One in Washington, obviously, one in Montgomery and then later Richmond. And so I began to see the centrality. And after the Civil War was. And it was really just brought to life by those voices of the people that what you're talking about. Well, here we go. We didn't want to do another film on war. The guys both north and south who'd been in it, who said, here we go were. They said they'd seen the elephant. That's how they described it. They said they'd seen the elephant. I assume it was the most exotic thing they could think of. That's what combat was, something that no one else experiences. Seeing the elephant and we just even removed from it. We're just looking at still photographs, still got us to our core. And we just sort of said, we're not gonna do any more war films. And then at the end of the 90s, the Civil War came out. In 1990, the end of the 90s, people were working on lots of things. Baseball and jazz and biographies on Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis and Clark and Mark Twain and all sorts of stuff. Jack Johnson. Later on, I heard that lots of graduating seniors, high school students, walking off the podium with a diploma, think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War. And that 1,000 veterans, American veterans of the Second World War, were dying each day in America. And I was like, fuck, you know, we're losing them. And by the way, that figure today is so small, it's just actuarially true that it's not a thousand anymore. It's maybe five or six today. And pretty soon it will be nobody and there will be no memory. And so I wanted to make a film about that. Before the ink was dry on The World War II film, I said, we're doing Vietnam and before the ink was dry, meaning we locking it and we're mixing it and doing all the stuff we have to do. Ten and a half years on Vietnam. It came out in September of 17, in December of 15. Barack Obama still has 13 months left in his presidency. I said, we're doing the revolution and I am now speaking to you where we are almost done with it. We're still mixing, we're still mastering, we're still onlineing some stuff. But what it allowed us to do in all of the cases of all of the war is get exactly at that thing that you're talking about. What actually takes place in war. What is this thing? Life is vivified to an extent that we can't describe. Our imminent death right now as we speak is not a possibility. But if we're on the front lines, it is at any moment. And life is vivified. We understand why people come home and can't compartmentalize it. We understand why people have problems. We're amazed at the people who don't. It obviously brings out the worst. We're the most dangerous species on this planet, clearly, but it brings out the best and it's worth pursuing. And I think particularly when you take most recently, we've spent so many years studying the American Revolution and we kind of accept the violence of the Civil War, we accept the violence of the 20th century wars, but the American Revolution, they're in breeches and they're in stockings and they have wigs. And the ideas are too important. We don't want to admit that this was as bloody per capita as our Civil War, that it was in fact a civil war in ways that even our Civil War wasn't. Our Civil War was a sectional war, north, south, and that we were forged in violence. And it's okay. Those ideas, those big ideas that we seemingly want to protect by like putting in a bug in amber or you know, guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, it doesn't in any way get diminished. In fact it enlarges, it makes them more inspiring and more exhilarating. The understanding that what happened when our country was formed is one of the most important events in the entire history of humankind. I mean you and I were talking about some of the punctuated equilibriums of comets or meteors or striking this ice ages. I mean Ecclesiastes, the Old Testament says there's nothing new under the sun. And I agree with that. Human nature doesn't change. But for a few minutes right here, we started something that was brand new. Thomas Paine said do it like not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to do this. And so we've just plowed ourselves into hearing not just those top down voices, the bold faced names that we all know, the Washingtons and the Thomas Paines and the Jeffersons and the John Adams, but also the people you've never heard of. Right, 01% of people have a painting made of them or a drawing. Everybody else is visually anonymous. But somewhere they wrote their name down. Somewhere they're in a church record, somewhere they're here. Somewhere they wrote a memoir and it got handed down. And so we could bring to life a 14 year old kid who joins the militia surrounding the British in Cambridge after Lexington Concord, a 15 year old who's from Connecticut, who fights during the war, a 10 year old girl who's, you know, from 10 to 16 from Yorktown, who's a refugee for Most of the time, as her family's well to do circumstances are diminished as she has to be on the road because Yorktown is so vulnerable to attack from British. In addition to all of this. And who are the native players? Who are the black players? Who are the Germans, the high soldiers? They're real people. Who are the Irish and Scottish and Welsh grunts of the British army? Who are the generals? Who are the diplomats? Who are the French? And then if you charge yourself with that, you can't turn that out in a year and a half. You have to spend a decade marinating that stuff, finding out what's too much. You don't want to make an encyclopedia. You started off by talking about entertainment. That you could make something that is technically educational, entertaining. This is a good story. I mean, the word history is mostly made up of the word story plus high, which is a really good way to begin a story. Right. Hi. And then we begin the thing. And so I've tried to treat it as that way. I understand. And PBS is really good. And one of the reasons to stay with them is that they can reach every classroom in the country. So today's a school day in America, and hundreds of classrooms are showing a little bit of the Civil War, a little bit of baseball, a little bit of jam, Lewis and Clark, the Roosevelts, country music, you name it. And I love that idea that it isn't like broadcast television or even just the release of anything, like skywriting the first breeze. And then all of a sudden you can't see the words anymore. I like the fact that a film I made 35 years ago in the Civil War is, like, as durable now as it was then. That's all pbs.
- [16:52]
Joe Rogan
That's amazing. It really is. And it is so cool that they do show these in classrooms. Because I think that same moment where you had. Where you saw your father cry, where it gave him some sort of a vehicle to express emotions that he couldn't show in real life. This will give children a way to be educated, but also entertained. And it will spark this sort of. It gives them a pathway to maybe children that are, like, very bored with school and just can't wait to get out. All of a sudden you have this spark of excitement and a pathway to like, maybe education is cool. Like, maybe there's something about this. It's actually fun.
- [17:35]
Ken Burns
Exactly.
- [17:35]
Joe Rogan
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- [18:56]
Ken Burns
Exactly. And we have Lutheran. But a lot of what is fun about it? We've sort of taken history out, we've taken civics out. We don't know about ethics, we don't know about values. We've placed everything over into one sort of set of educational prerogatives. Forgetting that you want to build as our founders said, these well rounded citizens remember we invented that everybody up until the point of our revolution were subjects. And Jefferson says a few phrases beyond the famous second sentence. He goes all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning the whole history of human beings is like okay, I'm going to be under the boot of an authoritarian. That's my lot. I'm just going to accept it. And he's going no. Central to the success of this new thing you were creating citizens was the responsibility to educate and to be educated and to do that your lifelong. In fact he could have said Jefferson could have said life, liberty and property. He didn't. He said the pursuit of happiness. That was not the chasing of objects, things in a marketplace of objects, but it was lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. It was making the story of how we acquire virtue. And they used that word all the time. They imported it from the classical, went over the dark ages, over the middle ages, over the medieval period and pulled back from classical times this idea of virtue, of temperance, of tolerance and all of that there's a wonderful moment when John Adams, who's the big worrier of the revolution, he's always worrying, he's saying, I just don't know if there's enough virtue to have a republic. Everybody is so ambitious and so greedy and so out to do this. And so for him, if you were going to create this new thing, something new under the sun, you know, the world started over again, as Thomas Paine is suggesting. An asylum for mankind he called it, then maybe you had to figure out how to educate your stuff. And so when you go back and say, what have we lost? Whether we're now just repeating, are we trying to get to the test or are we trying to make a well rounded human being? So if I tell you in 1838, there is this lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, who is just a few days short of his 29th birthday who is addressing the Young Men's Lyceum on an afternoon, and the topic is foreign policy. And he says, whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us with a blow? Then he answered his own question. Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa could not by force take a drink from 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 shall live through all time or die by suicide.
- [22:04]
Joe Rogan
Whoa.
- [22:05]
Ken Burns
You know who said that? That's Abraham Lincoln. He would come the closest to overseeing our near national suicide in the Civil War. But he understood, here you got these two magnificent oceans, big, relatively benign neighbors, north and south. And so what we've been able to do is incubate so many extraordinary things, but we've also been able to incubate lots of less than extraordinary things. And he was saying it's those less than extraordinary things are going to trip us up or we'll live forever. Because if you think about it, the greatest naval invasion in history, you know, June 6, 1944, D Day, Normandy, nobody can do that for us. Nobody's going to land at Montauk, nobody's going to land at St. Augustine, nobody's going to land in Galveston and help us, right? We'll sink or swim by the extent to which we are knowledgeable of and adhere to the blame blessings that we've received from that founding generation. The sacrifice made not by those bold faced names, but by the people that you've never heard of, that we are trying to tell you about. John Greenwood, the 14 year old Pfeiffer. Joseph Plumb Martin, the 15 year old kid from Connecticut, Betsy Ambler. Loyalists too. I mean, we're umpires, Joe. We call balls and strikes. You know what being a loyalist in the revolution is what it'd be like saying, well, you're conservative, right? Well, you think I live under the greatest political system, the British constitutional monarchy. Why would I want to change this great life, this great prosperity I have for this idea that A sounds foolhardy and radical, but also B has zero chance of working out, zero chance of working out. Right at Lexington250 years ago on April 19, the chances of the patriots prevailing are zero. And to tell the story of how it went from 0 to 100% is scary, violent, complicated, lots of undertow and as exhilarating as you could possibly imagine.
- [24:20]
Joe Rogan
There's a great line in the trailer for this piece on the Revolutionary War. We say it's the first war that was fought in history for the unalienable.
- [24:31]
Ken Burns
Rights, proclaiming the unalienable rights of all people. Now let's be honest. Thomas Jefferson meant all white men of property free of debt. But the words are beautiful, the words are vague and the door got open to crack and everybody else put their foot in it. Women put their foot in it. The poor, the not landed people, the folks, the craftsmen who just had a regular job, black people, native. And it has sponsored revolutions all around the world, democratic revolutions, that the greatest thing that we invented was the idea that we could govern ourselves, that we would no longer be under the boot of an authoritarian master who had just set himself up like King George because of hereditary privilege, his grandfather and his grandfather and his father and his uncle and going back and on what basis? Is it talent? Is it showing the things? And so all of these people that we consider the bold faced names of our revolution, the Washingtons and the Jeffersons and the Patrick Henrys and the John Adams, they didn't know they were those people. They didn't know they were. They were a planter and they were a businessman and they were a lawyer and they were this guy and a planter or a scientist and they were just risking their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for something much bigger than, than anything else.
- [25:59]
Joe Rogan
And it's also the incredibly complex system of checks and balances that they divide to prevent tyranny.
- [26:05]
Ken Burns
Oh, it's so unbelievably beautiful. I can't believe you brought that up. So we have a technical problem which I'll share with you or I thought it was a technical problem, which is the climax. If you're making a film called the American Revolution, the climax is the Battle of Yorktown happens in October of 1781. The British don't leave New York for two more years until 1783. They're occupying New York, which they took over in the summer of 76. And our articles of Convention are doing nothing. Our Articles of Confederation are doing nothing. They're toothless. They can't be a government. And so in 1787, we have this constitutional convention that happens in Philadelphia. Four months, they hammer together the shortest Constitution in the world. And it is exactly that. Jefferson's writing in from Paris, representing our interests, going, but what about this? What about. They're trying to check the possibility of somebody being somebody who would try to take advantage of the system and rig it to their own benefit. And so all of those elaborately beautiful checks and balances. Article one is the legislative. Article two is the executive. It delineates Article three, the judicial. It delineates what the responsibilities are and the way in which the system has worked in fits and starts with lots of problems. And, you know, there's something encouraging about seeing how divided Americans were back then, because we're always wringing our hands. Oh, we're so divided. Okay. Human beings are divided. And my feeling is that if you succumb to argument, right, which is what we do. The novelist Richard Powers said, the best argument in the world, and that's all we do is argue. The best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that, that is to say, change somebody's point of view, is a good story, because a good story allows contradiction and undertow. You can have a George Washington who is complex, flawed, rash, makes terrible tactical decisions on the battlefield. And yet without him, historian after historian after historian says, without him, we don't have a country. And you can take that and put that in the bank and at the same time understand the dimensions of, we all have feet of clay. We're all flawed in some way. And to try to design a narrative that isn't filled with that kind of morning and again sanitized Madison Avenue kind of view of American history. Nor is it that unforgiving revisionism that wants to throw out anybody who did something bad back then, then you then permit a world to exist in which they suddenly seem familiar to you. You can argue with other people and see that you get nowhere. But you also know if you're married or you have Kids or you have friends or you're in business, that you actually are more engaged in story and tolerance and understanding and listening. And so part of our job as filmmakers, strangely enough, is not to impose ourselves on the material. As I said before, we're umpires calling balls and strikes. It's to listen to the material. What is it telling us? What is it saying about this circumstances of, say, the resistance in Boston in the early days leading up to the revolution to try to understand nuance? Every school kid knows that when the 60 or 70 people, all white males, both rich and poor, in Boston, dumped the 40 tons of tea. 40 tons of tea in the harbor, they were dressed crudely as Native Americans. And if you ask a kid why were they dressed that way, you know, just a disguise to put the blame on somebody else. It was to say, we're not part of the mother country anymore, really. We're here. We're Aboriginal. We are Americans. We are distinct. We've been having complaints about British citizenship. We're arguing British law, but all the sudden those laws have been broken out into natural laws, and we're telling you that we're not trying to blame it on anyone else. Nobody would for a second have thought that the Native Americans would have dumped the tea. They weren't burdened by the tea tax. What they were doing was saying, we are. And it's so ironic, given the history of our relationship to the dispossession of native lands. They are saying we are aboriginal. This is what the scholar Phil Deloria says. So, yeah, wow.
- [30:41]
Joe Rogan
And then you adopted Aboriginal.
- [30:43]
Ken Burns
Right. We're saying we're not of the mother country. We're in essence, kind of filing divorce papers by dressing as the people who originally inhabited this country dressed. Nobody's fooled. How do you figure that out? It's listening to scholarship. It's thinking, of course, that you're not going to have. No one in their right mind is going to say, oh, the Native Americans did it because they're protesting the tea tax. They're not paying the T tax.
- [31:12]
Joe Rogan
Right, Right.
- [31:14]
Ken Burns
So it's like you then go. And then you talk to a scholar, in this case, Phil Deloria, who's been studying Native stuff, and he goes, just think about it. You're dressed crudely as this. You're making a statement to Britain that we are no longer. We're severing ties. Now, this is well before. This is December of 1773. The guns are going to fire in a about 18 months at Lexington, a little bit less than 18 months at Lexington and Concord on April 19th. But it is all of these little moments that lead up to boycott of British goods. Women take a huge part of the role of the resistance. You've got people like Samuel Adams, who is a failure as a brewer and a tax collector. It's sort of interesting. You can't make this shit up. Who is. His whole job is to keep his fellow colonists alive to their grievances. When things calm down, the Brits sort of retreat. He goes, oh no, no, no, it's just gonna get worse, it's gonna get worse. And so you meet these characters that sound an awful lot like characters that occupy our large media space. And it was occupying the large media space of the colonists from New Hampshire. I live in a tiny village. The Walpole Gazette was read all the way in Georgia. People exchanged ideas and thought about things and were trying to figure out even as late as the. Even after Lexington, Concord, even after the battle of Bunker Hill, which is June of 75, even after the other things that were happening by early 76. Nobody's absolutely not nobody. But there's not a majority will for independence, independency, as they called it. And then Thomas Paine comes in and writes this pamphlet, common Sense. And all of a sudden people are going, oh yeah. And by June there's a committee of the second Continental Congress and Franklin's in charge of it and there's John Adams is on the committee and there's a 32 year old lawyer from Virginia named Thomas Jefferson who's given the first crack at doing this thing. And what does he write? He writes, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. And Franklin, who's the old man, the chairman if you will, of this little committee goes, we hold these truths to be self evident. Joe. There is nothing in the world less self evident than the idea that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But as someone pointed out, it's the old lawyer's dodge. You just tell them that it's self evident, not just sacred and undeniable. Lovely phrasing on Jefferson's spiritual part, but if you say self evident, then we're not arguing about this thing. We're saying that everything that you're about to hear is without argument, which is a really in your face, bold move. And the intimacy, the human intimacy that gets communicated when you spend even a little amount of time trying to parse this, trying to get at the heart of the dynamics of dumping tea and dressed as Indians or writing these words, you know, that mankind are disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning. Yeah, we've taken it all this through human history and guess what? We're not going to take it anymore.
- [34:32]
Joe Rogan
When they first devised this system of government, what were they basing it on? I know part of it was on the Greeks, but how did they make it to the point where even today we marvel at it?
- [34:47]
Ken Burns
Yeah, we.
- [34:48]
Joe Rogan
250 years later, people go back and like, look what they did. This is extraordinary.
- [34:52]
Ken Burns
It's extraordinary. So lots of factors. First of all, it is true what I said. They have experienced at a reserve and at sort of, as somebody said, salutary neglect. People didn't pay attention to the colonists and they had learned suddenly they were more literate than their British compatriots. They paid less taxes and they paid it to local stuff. And they had land. And most folks in England and Wales and Scotland and Ireland were living dependent lives. They'd worked the land of somebody else for a thousand years. So they've got this British constitutional monarchy, which is a really strong thing. And King George is not a bad guy. He really does believe that Parliament has this role to play in the House of Lords and the House of Carmen's. They're kind of the checks and balances that we'd think of, but they're also in the middle of the Enlightenment where they're beginning to say that there are certain rights that are natural. That's the word that I think Jefferson would use. That is to say they're not bestowed by a monarch, they're natural, that all men are created equal. This is big stuff and this is distilling in Jefferson's words in the Declaration, a century of Enlightenment thinking. And the Enlightenment has been a kind of philosophical and human and kind of governmental dynamic that's coming out of the Renaissance. Right. We know what the Renaissance is in art. Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, you know, all of this stuff, some music. But what it's doing on a social scene is in a philosophical scene, it's doing that. And they're reaching back to antiquity, as you say, and they're pulling back some of the best ideas of self discipline, of temperance, of virtue, all of these sorts of things. But then because they've experienced all these years of this misuse and distrust from the mother country 3,000 miles away, takes at least a month for information to get there. The Britain wins with our help, what we call the French and Indian War, which was A global war called the Seven Years War. And they've got now the biggest, most far flung empire on Earth, but they can't protect its own colonists who are trying to pour over the Appalachians to take Native American land, and it's causing uprisings. And so they say, you can't go over 1763, you can't go over that. And, oh, by the way, we're broke, so we need you to help us pay for this stuff. But we don't have any representation there. So native lands, taxation, representation become this thing. And it goes on for so long. They've watched the ineffectiveness of their government while they're prosecuting the Revolution and the ineffectiveness of the Articles of Confederation that emerges from fighting the war and is trying to figure out how to make it work, that they go into that Constitutional Convention and they are determined to figure out every possible angle, to forestall authoritarianism, to balance their relationships between the states, to have the checks and balances between the three forms of government, the judicial, the legislative, and the executive. It is a beautiful thing. And what was so incredible is that it fostered one of the greatest public debates ever in human history, because they had emerged from this bloody, bloody, costly Civil War. Civil War means lots of deaths of civilians. That didn't happen in our Civil War except in Missouri and a little bit of Kansas. You know, six people died at the siege of Vicksburg, less than 20 at Atlanta. Two in Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America. But the American Revolution, lots of their battles in the south in which you might have one British officer leading Loyalist troops. Every person on each side is an American, and they're killing each other. And they're doing it not just in set battles, but in little guerrilla actions, almost like the Viet Cong attacking patrols in South Vietnam. It is really bad stuff. And so they send, we're going to ratify this, but we want a Bill of Rights, too. We want to enshrine these things that we fought for. And so you have no establishment of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to assemble and redress grievances, right to bear arms, free and fair trial, end of cruel and unusual punishment. All these things become the set pieces of. I made a film a couple years ago on the US and the Holocaust. What we knew, when we knew it, what we did, what we didn't do, perhaps what we should have done. And I was at some event and somebody raised their hand and said, is the Holocaust the most important event since the birth of Jesus Christ in world history? And I just immediately said, no, it's the American Revolution. It's the American Revolution. I mean, this is. Is a sea change in the course of human events. And, man, we don't know enough about it. We don't know enough of the interiors of it that are complicated. I have in my editing room a neon sign. I've had it for a decade and a half. In cursive, lowercase cursive. It says, it's complicated, you know, because there's not a filmmaker on earth that if, you know, if the scene's working, you don't touch it. But we. We have spent the last 50 years touching those scenes. Right. You know what I mean? Going in. Maybe it's lesser, but it's truer. And it's got more dynamism and it's got more contours. It feels like it's accurate to what actually happened. Which is more complicated than our sort of simple binary discussions of what history is. It's just.
- [40:37]
Joe Rogan
It's so hard for people to recognize that that was a civil war. Because I think most people think it was the United States colonists against the British, but the separatists and the Loyalists battling out together. I think most people are completely unaware.
- [40:51]
Ken Burns
Completely unaware. We wrote a. For lack of a better word, a topic sentence early in the film is, that might get this slightly wrong. But the American Revolution was not just a dispute between Englishmen over Indian land, taxation and representation, but a bloody struggle that involved more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American, that somehow came still to represent some of the highest aspirations of humankind. So ours is like the fourth global war over the prize of North America. And we're treating Native nations not as them, but as distinct entities. The Shawnee, for example, in the middle of the 18th century, 17th century, 1950. Are as important an entity on the world trading stage with French or British or others as, say, the state of Virginia or the colony of Virginia is at that time, really. And that they're different from the Delawares, they're allies. And they're different from the Haudenosaunee, the iroquois Confederacy, the 6. 5. And then it was six tribes. The Seneca, the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Tuscarora, the Oneida and the Mohawk. And I've just walked from western New York State all the way into New England and up into Canada. And they had formed a union of their own that had operated a democracy that had operated for centuries, that had allowed the independence of each of these separate nations states and yet yielded to the larger thing when their interests were threatened. So essentially with regard to foreign policy. And Franklin looks at this and goes, 1754, he goes, wow, this is a great idea. We should be doing this. He's been the postmaster, he's the only person who's been to New Hampshire and he's been to Georgia and all the places in between. He said we should do this. And he calls a conference in Albany and he's got a picture of a cut up snake above the dire warning join or die. And they pass. Seven of the 13 colonies attend and they pass this thing called the Albany Plan of Union in 1754, and then they go home to try to sell it. And none of the states take it because no one wants to. None of the colonies take it because no one wants to give up their autonomy. So the plan dies. But 20 years later, join or die is the war cry in the most consequential revolution in history. Wow, isn't that great? So you're taking the Native American riffing on that. And then as you're forming this, you're bringing in what you've had and inherited for centuries of British constitutional monarchy. And you're borrowing from the new Enlightenment thing and you've got biblical references and classical references having to do with the conduct of individuals and personal responsibility. All of these just utterly American, but also been out there forever. And we end up with what we have, which is this glorious, wonderful, but also dysfunctional republic.
- [43:59]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's terrible, but it's the best one out there.
- [44:01]
Ken Burns
It's the best one out there. Yeah, that's exactly right.
- [44:06]
Joe Rogan
When you started this project. So you have this idea to start this project. What was your understanding of the Revolutionary War versus what is it like when you really delve into the material and you start to formulate a plan for this documentary series? Like, how much did you know about it when you first started?
- [44:25]
Ken Burns
I'm pretty well versed in American history, but nothing. I mean, like, I've worked on two films where I made the mistake of thinking, ah, I know about this subject, baseball and Vietnam, because I grew up in the 60s and I went through it. I lived on a college campus. I knew all the stuff I thought was at college as the war was winding down. And I loved baseball. Every day of both those productions were daily humiliations of what I didn't know. And so what happens is you come in with a humility that I wish to know. And rather than tell you what I know, the last time I checked, that's called homework. We would rather Share with you our process of discovery. Joe, you cannot believe what we just found out. Can I just say, can I use these mugs to tell you how Daniel Morgan won the Battle of Cowpens against Bannister Tarleton in South Carolina, just below the North Carolina border, and he trusts to his militia, who are unreliable. Please, just fire twice the first line of militia, and then you can retreat, then you can run. But please promise me your file twice. And the second line of militia, my more inexpensive. Please, just fire twice and then run behind the third line, which are these scraggly kids, teenagers, felons, ne' er do wells, second and third sons without the chance of an inheritance. Recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany. And they stop the British. So Tarleton goes, oh, they're doing what all the militias do. They're retreating, they're retreating, they're retreating. And then the third line comes up, and they go after them. And the Americans actually attack, which is very rare, an attacking thing, to drive into the British line. Tarleton gets away. But a huge part of Cornwallis army has been diminished. And they're uttering this war cry that they have adapted from the Cherokee, from Native American tribes, which is a yell that will reverberate in Southern battlefields for decades.
- [46:27]
Joe Rogan
Wow.
- [46:28]
Ken Burns
Wow is right. And, like, I can take. I mean, look, there's Lexington and Concord. And then maybe somebody says Bunker Hill, which is really Breed's Hill. Bunker Hill, too. And then maybe Trenton, he takes over. He surprises them on Christmas night. And then maybe some people know that Saratoga is the surrender of an entire British army. That gives the French the confidence to come in on our side and give us the equivalent of $30 billion plus Navy and soldier. And then it's Yorktown. But there are dozens of battles that we'll tell you about. Like, Germantown is a wonderful thing. The Battle of Brandywine. What's the largest battle in the entire. The largest battle is the Battle of Long Island. George Washington makes a terrible blunder, a tactical blunder. He leaves his left flank exposed, and the British see it, and they completely surround him. And then a year later, at Brandywine, he leaves his right flank, flank exposed, and they go around. He's not the greatest tactician, but he is the man of the time. This leadership, this ability to understand subordinate talent, this reserve, this kind of confidence. I mean, you cannot come away from this without extraordinary admiration for this person without whom we don't have a country. We just literally don't have a country.
- [47:48]
Joe Rogan
Which is so crazy when you think of pivotal figures in Human history. This one person, were they not poor when they're not in that position at that time? Extraordinary circumstances, unusual character.
- [48:00]
Ken Burns
We have a historian. The only time really in the film that any of our talking heads break the fourth wall. You know, we don't have. We don't have first person voices. I mean, we don't have witnesses. We have hundreds of first person voices. But we have some scholars and writers who are on the thing. And there's one Christopher Brown, who just shakes his head and he goes like, I'm not a big fan of the great man theory of history or interpretation of history, but let's put it this way. I don't see how the United States survives without Washington's leadership. And it's this wonderful moment in which you go, right, we don't have to throw out the heroes in order to do that. More often than not, we sort of elevated these people to a supernatural position that they don't really necessarily deserve. He deserves it. And yet he's also deeply flawed. Feats of clay, as I said. And that's, to me, what makes a good story. Like, how is it that he can be tactically so wrong in two extraordinary places? He's also very rash. Joe. He runs out at Kips Bay, which is halfway up Manhattan, after he's lost the Battle of Long Island. He's now abandoning New York. Or he's taking a good number of his men up to Harlem. And at Kips Bay, which is sort of midtown on the east river, there's a battle and we're just being rolled up and he comes charging onto the battlefield and his aides are going crazy and they're grabbing the reins of his horse. He's going to be killed. If he's killed, that's it, right? And then later on at the Battle of Princeton, he does the same thing. And one aide puts his hands over his face, thinking, I cannot watch my commander in chief be killed. And in the battle of Monmouth Courthouse in New Jersey, he rides out and just his very present turns what is a retreat of. Of Continental soldiers and militiamen into steadying their lines and basically holding their own against the prime, the elite of the British army. And it's, where does that come from? Who does that? How did we do? And from the very beginning, everybody knew you needed a Virginian. The New Englanders, where the war start. The war is a symphony in three movements, right? New England is the first movement. Central states and then the Southern states. And there is a sense early on when, after Lexington and Concord, where we've driven the British back into Boston and they've got ways to get in but they can't get out besides by ship that we need a real army. And the army is formed. And it is very obvious from the very start that there could be no other person than George Washington. The New Englanders want a Virginian. It's the most populous, it's the richest state. And they know this person has been around since he's a 22 year old militia officer who probably fires the first shot in the French and Indian war that starts the global conflict that everyone else on earth calls the Seven Years War. That will set the stage for the American Revolution. And then he acts bravely in many other situations and he is denied a commission in the British army. And he's like, F you, you know, and then you go. And he's a speculator in Native American land that he doesn't own. He wants to sell to new colonists. And when the British put the line of demarcation, 1763, that separates, says, you can't go over because we can't afford to protect you. He's now pissed again. And then he's still this voice of reason that arrives in Philadelphia just poised. And people look to him for leadership. He's very good at, at picking out. You know, that guy has got great, he's got great executive function and great ability to pick subordinates without fear of being overshadowed. One of his great generals, Nathaniel Greene, another great general, Benedict Arnold. And we introduced Benedict Arnold in the opening seconds of our first, our second episode. And it isn't until you're a third of the way through the sixth and last episode that you go, uh, oh, you know, but he's a hero at Quebec City. He's a hero at the battle of Saratoga. He's been painted out of most of the paintings because he became Benedict Arnold. Isn't it nice to know that he's that great a general before he becomes Benedict Arnold?
- [52:13]
Joe Rogan
That term. When I was a child, when I was in school, a Benedict Arnold was a traitor.
- [52:18]
Ken Burns
A traitor.
- [52:19]
Joe Rogan
I think that's gone now. I think if I brought that up to my children, I said, do you know what a Benedict Arnold is?
- [52:24]
Ken Burns
Oh, God. They say it was a mixture of.
- [52:26]
Joe Rogan
It's like an Arnold Palmer.
- [52:27]
Ken Burns
It's like an Arnold Palmer. It's a mixture of iced tea and lemonade. Yeah. You know what? That's so terrifying to me.
- [52:32]
Joe Rogan
Weird, right?
- [52:33]
Ken Burns
And I'm. No, it's what happens when you atrophy this interest in American history or you Think that it can be so simplified that you don't have to do anything. That's my job. I mean, I love it and I love the fact that we can bring back these things for people and they can experience. And there isn't a person in the country that's listening to me now or that we're going 35 different cities all around the country, country talking about this. We made it for everybody. This is not made for the 8th grader taking American history. The 11th grader made. It is. It's for you. It's for anybody who cares about where their country came from and is willing to say, I probably don't know the full dimensions of this.
- [53:17]
Joe Rogan
It's probably impossible to teach it in the way that you can at a documentary. I think it's the most effective form of expressing these things. I mean, obviously there's some things that can be documented in books, numbers, dates, history. That would be kind of cumbersome to certain documentaries because it would interfere with the flow of the entertainment aspect of it. But in terms of absorption, in terms of stimulation and absorption, human beings are much more inclined to take it through. One of you, your long pieces like the Vietnam one, the 18 hour piece.
- [53:53]
Ken Burns
That's exactly right. I think what happens is that it's so interesting because we understand, as you're referencing, the power of a book still the greatest mechanical invention there is, that it can go into some depths a documentary do. But a documentary can hold lots of different opposing points of view, not make them arguments, but allow people to have different points of view and sort of collect almost like spokes in the wheel. You want to get to the hub, that. That's whatever it is that you're after. But the wheel is much stronger by all those spokes. And unfortunately, too often in history or in teaching, we subscribe to one particular theory of history, right, that it's gotta be this or it's gotta be that. And what we've done is we found the documentary and the storytelling aspects of it hugely, hugely valuable in communicating the complexity of the subject without, without putting your thumb on the scale and making a political point. We're just, you know, look, I will be totally honest. History doesn't repeat itself. No event has ever happened twice. But Mark Twain is supposed to have said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. If he did say that, he's exactly right, because human nature doesn't change. And so you watch these events and when we finish working on it, I told you we began this when Barack Obama had a Year and a half to go in his presidency, or a year and a month to go in his presidency. Presidency. It's a totally different world. And we know that it rhymes. But we never once have concentrated in saying, oh, we're going to put our thumb on the scale here. We want everybody to watch. We have no axe to grind. We're just, as I'm saying, calling balls and strikes. And when I mean that, it would be like saying, let me tell you about Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson. They struck out a lot. Thanks so much. Right. I mean, and I'm true. I have not told you anything that is not true. Correct.
- [55:47]
Joe Rogan
Right.
- [55:48]
Ken Burns
They also hit a hell of a lot of home ones. And so calling balls and strikes is saying that what happens is the way we teach history is the way ESPN does sports highlights. It's always the home run. It's never the guy turned the double play or he doubled some guy off or there was some other thing. It's always the home run. And so nobody takes a strike in these highlights. And what we're trying to say is, isn't it better to watch the game and see that even Babe Ruth can only come up to bat every nine times? And even Babe Ruth fails seven times out of 10. He's a.300 hitter. A little bit more than.300 hitter. That's the great beauty of it. And so I think that we don't ever now think that he is a failure. We understand that the dynamics of life, the dynamics of this particular game mean that the people who fail seven times out of 10 and do it significantly are in the hall of Fame. I mean, and that's the beauty of these storytelling. See, I'm not taking anything away from George Washington by making it complex. We're making him human. He's not a statue out in the park collecting bird shit. He's a real breathing human being. He's one of the richest people in America. He marries one of the richest people in America, a widow. And like, he's away, he makes one visit home, I think, to Monticello during the whole. I mean, to Mount Vernon during the whole war. He's dedicated to this thing. I mean, he doesn't have to do this, right? He's committed to this project of us. And that's the ultimate point I want to make about not just this film or Vietnam or all the things we've been talking about, is that I've had the great privilege of making films about the US for nearly 50 years, Joe, but I've also made films about us, that is to say, the lowercase two letter plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of us and we and our. And all of the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and even the controversy of the us. And that is a privileged space to be operating in. To be having having been given the permission to do this for nearly 50 years is just great. I think I have the best job in the country, and I'm always happy to meet somebody who's willing to contradict me. But it's only because you have a chance to work hard at telling the story. I mean, we lock the picture back in January. That means you're not gonna do any more work on it. We've unlocked it hundreds of times just to make it better. Some historians said, I'm not sure if you can be that categorical. And then we put in a priority, perhaps. Right. Or you find out that image isn't as stunning as we thought it could be. Could we swap that out? Oh, yeah. That works better than before. Even after we were done. Done. And I like the ability that by the time we're letting it go, it's like your kids are still licking the smudge off their face and making sure that their hair is tied up in a nice bow and have a good day, sweetie.
- [58:59]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Well, I think that gratitude that you have towards your work and this dedication to truth. Because one of the problems with problematic historical figures is we tend to use modern ideological perspectives when we describe these people. And, you know, we try to show that we have a disdain for the way they live their lives and the choices they make in perspective with how we do today. And the problem with that is it comes off political or ideological.
- [59:38]
Ken Burns
Exactly.
- [59:39]
Joe Rogan
And you lose the real understanding of the complexities of history and of these human beings that lived in a very different time. 1776, even though it's only three people ago, is a very. People live to be 103 people ago. It's a very different time.
- [59:55]
Ken Burns
It's a very different time. And you make a really, really good point. When you take the judgments of what we know now, you can apply them. And then you end up with what I called that unforgiving revisionism, where you throw out some significant people with the bathwater revisionism. But let me just tell you, they all knew slavery was wrong. They all knew it was wrong, and they still did it. And there's a historian in it, Annette Gordon Reed, who just says slavery's foundational to Thomas Jefferson and he knew all his life it was wrong and said it. And wrote about it and tried to put in something to end the slave trade and end the Declaration of Independence, which no one would have. And she goes, well, how could somebody do something they knew was wrong? She goes, well, that's a question for all of us. And so Jefferson's neighbor freed all his slaves and urged him to do it, and he didn't. And his cousin freed all his slaves. So there's already that. The question is, if you are just taking the judgments of today to cancel somebody, you've just missed the possibility of getting to know George Washington or getting to know Thomas Jefferson. And if you only do people who are perfect, you're either lying about them or you've got very few characters. Because I don't know about you. I'm not. I presume you're not. I don't think you know anybody who's perfect. I don't know anybody who's perfect. And so then it's like history becomes, honey, how was your day? It doesn't begin. I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb, you know, unless you get T boned, in case that's exactly the way you do it. You edit human experience and you tolerate the vast experiences that human beings are so complex. And it's the interest. It was very interesting. We did an update of our baseball series called the 10th Inning. And being from New England and being a Red Sox fan, the whole thing was just a disguise to be able to do the Red Sox come back in 2004. But we were dealing with the great Atlanta team in the 90s, and the great Joe Torre led Yankees, and then Sosa and McGuire and then Bonds and then steroids and whatever. At the end of it, we're really trying to come to something about steroids and try to figure out how to deal with it. And Thomas Boswell, now retired as a great sports writer for the Washington Post, said, I think it's Keats writing about William Shakespeare, who's a pretty good playwright, said that Shakespeare had negative capability. That means he could hold in tension the positive and negative aspects of a character for as long as you possibly could without making that quick and facile and easy judgment that we make all the time in our lives. When the guy cuts us off, we give him the finger. You know, we yell f you, whatever that is, we make judgments about it. And Shakespeare had that ability. Even with the darkest characters, you know, the Iegos and the Richard III people who are deep and dark, he had negative capabilities that that's what we need to Grow in order to understand the steroid era, in order to understand how to deal with all of that. And I think that in a way, all of us have to kind of grow that negative capability, that ability to distinguish, that nobody's perfect. And that if you superimpose this kind of abstract sets of judgment, nobody passes the test. No one passes the test.
- [63:34]
Joe Rogan
That sort of performative purity test too. I think it's a real problem with our current culture where I think this is sort of a natural progression of an improvement of society. Because we could all agree that society is far more just today than it was in 1776. And we know we're on this path. But it's a very bumbling stumbling fail. Figure out why you failed, kind of succeed, but then also take a few steps back. Yeah, it's consistent. And I think in this process of this, unfortunately, you have performative virtue. That's correct. And this is a lot of people that want to tear down statues and throw paint on paintings and do things where they're trying to show that I am better than the people who came before me. And the problem with doing that in regards to history is we don't learn anything if you're not trying to truthful. If we don't give this sort of like a really objective analysis of all the factors that were taking place with these extraordinary human beings who were experiencing this thing that was wholly unique on this new continent. And with this new idea of forming this experiment in self government that hadn't existed before. And that you're gonna. You have to say you have to do it the way you do it. It's really the only way.
- [64:59]
Ken Burns
I think it's the only way. And it takes time. And I am very. I have to acknowledge that there's no other place on the dial that dates me than PBS where I have the time to do it. It's sort of like an NIH grant. Like here. We'd like you to explore the possible cure to this disease. Can you have it next Thursday? Well, no, you can have it next Thursday. That's what Hollywood says. I need it out because the other Marvel thing is coming out at the same time. What you need is we want to set you up with a certain set of circumstances that are going to permit you to have the best possibility of doing this. And so we've always hit our marks. We've always come. If we haven't been in budget, it's because we've expanded the film. And then I've gone out and raised the money. So no one else was responsible for the fact that we decided Vietnam is not gonna be seven episodes, it's gonna be eight. And, oh, you know what? It's gonna be 10. And that's 18 hours. And that's, you know, the way the Vietnam. And it had to do with listening to the material, understanding how it spoke to us, you know, committing ourselves to recording Vietnamese. Not just South Vietnamese soldiers and South Vietnamese civilians, but Viet Cong guerrillas, North Vietnamese soldiers, North Vietnamese civilians, as well as the range of Americans. And so one of my favorite scenes is a North Vietnamese soldier and a Viet Cong soldier and an American all saying exactly the same thing about the same moment in a battle, early battle, before there were technically boots on the ground. This was an advisor, an American advisor. But they're all talking about a helicopter flying over this one head hedge. And the Viet Cong guy is behind the hedge, the South Vietnamese officer is next to the American guy. And they all have an experience of war that is exactly the same. And I love that. I love that.
- [66:51]
Joe Rogan
What was your first piece?
- [66:52]
Ken Burns
Brooklyn Bridge. I started. What year was this? So it came out. It was first broadcast in 81 or 82. I had been working on it since 77. I look 12 years old. Old. And I was trying to sell people the Brooklyn Bridge. And people were telling me, oh, this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. No. And I used to keep these two big, thick three wing binders on my desk, all filled with rejections for that one film. I mean, literally hundreds of rejections. But I had read David McCullough's the Great Bridge, the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. And I went out to my partners. We just founded our company called Florentine Films. We were starving. We'd like maybe get a date or two days work a month as cinematographers and soundmen and grips. And we were paying the rent. And that was that. And I said, we're gonna do this and I'll raise all the money. And I did. And I moved up to New Hampshire so I could live on nothing in 79 and 80. And both those years I made less than 2,500 bucks and chopped all the wood for my stove. Split it, carried it, kept the stoves going. You wake up in the middle of the night and you know, 4am in February, and you go, I just heard the heater kick on. I gotta go down and feed the stove. But it came out, it got nominated for an Academy Award. And that was the sign to me that, like, I needed to. I'd hit A fork in a road. And like Yogi Berra said, you take it, was to not go back to New York, to not go back to la, but to say, I'm going to be staying here because this is labor intensive, we're gonna have to raise grants to do this stuff. I'm not looking for investors, we're looking for underwriting so that we are liberated from the suits that would come in and give the notes and say, oh, you need to be less sexy or more sexy or longer or shorter or more violent or less violent. I can sit here and tell you with a great deal of pride, and not just for me, but on behalf of the extraordinary people that work with me. And some of them have been for 50 years and some of them for 30 years. Years, and some of them for 40. And, you know, a lot of people that these are director's cuts that we haven't let it go. And they're the way the country has responded to them. Like the Civil war series, still 35 years old, it's still the highest rated program in the history of public television.
- [69:14]
Joe Rogan
That's incredible. How did you have that clarity of vision as a young man to recognize that working in isolation in a small town was the best option? Because I would imagine if you had aspirations to being a filmmaker when you were younger, the call of Hollywood, just the call of being a part of an enormous organization like being respected by your peers in this enormous. That had to be at least somewhat attractive. But how did you have the clarity to realize that that was not the correct path for you?
- [69:49]
Ken Burns
I can't take credit for it. You know, I went to Hampshire College. My teachers were social, documentary, still photographers. I had a mentor named Jerome Liebling. And he was so firmly rooted in a kind of, you know, another word. We've been talking about virtue. Another word is honor or honorable. That is not engaged. And people don't really use it in ordinary conversation. He just instilled in all of us, I believe, all of his students, a sense of. So there was this responsibility to follow it through, to work really hard. I mean, I don't know anybody that works harder than us. You know, we really work seven days a week. We love it. I put my head on the pillow. I want to know that my girls are okay, my daughters and I want to know that I've made a film better, you know, in some way, shape or seven days a week. Seven days a week. And it's not that you can't take a day off and you can't do something but you're always thinking about this stuff and you want to make them better. And it's very funny. We're out on the road and we're showing the clips. And you know, we've seen these clips a gazillion times. And I'm talking to Sarah Botstein, the co director. And we just look at each other simultaneously and say, gotta get rid of that. We have to change that shot. And so suddenly we're working with an editor who happens to be in Paris this semester, and the editor that's in New York and we're changing things. And I love the fact that we did that. You know, I'm actually embarrassed that I'm telling you about it because I feel like in some ways I'm advertising the fact that that's what we do. I'm just trying to say, say that somewhere along the line I have made the opposite of decision of what was sort of career wise, supposed to be what I was supposed to do. In fact, Robert Pen Warren, the poet and novelist, told me that he looked at me once and he just said, careerism is death. And I've never used the word career. I've always said my professional life. Because careerism suggests that, that you're following some sort of rut. And that's not what I wanted to do. And so by what do you mean by rut? By just a carved path that's already well woven. I mean, look, if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, you got to follow some well worn paths. Just by virtue of that. Everybody that I know that's working in documentary, that has been working at it for a long time and makes their living have come from completely unique paths. It's been their own way. And I like the fact that I made this. No, I'm not gonna go back to New York. No, why would I move to la? I'm gonna be here in this little town in New Hampshire where any number of Oscar nominations and Grammys and Emmys means zero to the people that I live with. It's like, did you shovel the lawn? The walk of the lady next door who's not doing so well? Did you do this? Are you a good neighbor? That's the stuff that matters. And it's a good place to raise kids as well. And then the splendid isolation. There's a great tradition, as you know, in American history of the way in which wildness, nature becomes part of the American Catechism, that it's possible Walt Whitman is saying that you can worship God more closely in Nature than in cathedrals made by man. This is the American catechism of being out in nature. And it manifests itself in different people who are aware of the power of nature. Nature reminds you of your insignificance, and that is inspiriting. This is paradoxical. Right? That's inspiriting. Even though you're feeling insignificant, it's inspiriting. Just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self regard. Right, Right. So anybody who says I'm this. It's actually diminished. The person who is humble is humiliated by their atomic insignificance. As one person said about Mount Denali in Alaska in the 1910s. A reporter is actually inspirited by that. And I wish to be inspirited because I think that's the only condition in which we're then able to make the kinds of decisions, the creative decisions, the personnel decisions, the sort of the thoughtfulness, or to have that regard for not necessarily following the well worn path.
- [74:10]
Joe Rogan
It's just amazing.
- [74:11]
Ken Burns
Does that make sense?
- [74:11]
Joe Rogan
It does. It does make sense. It resonates. It resonates completely. The natural art of nature, the true majesty of experiencing the vastness of the mountains and of the woods and of the. It humbles you in a way that nothing else does. And it grounds you in a way of recognizing. I don't want to say your insignificance, your relative insignificance, but it puts like it's not just you. This whole thing is massive.
- [74:47]
Ken Burns
My best friend, you're so fortunate to experience it. Oh, you know, I feel so grateful, Joe, you know, my best friend once said, said to me when we were much, much younger, we'd been friends for more than 50 years. He said, there's only one center of the universe and you're not. Was a great gift. It was a really great gift. And I don't know what I was doing or whether I was even doing anything that was inviting it, but he just wanted me to remember that there's no center of the universe.
- [75:19]
Joe Rogan
Well, you also get to see the stars too.
- [75:21]
Ken Burns
Yeah. Out there. And that's another thing I was thinking, you know, there is that the beauty Emily Dickinson called sunsets and sunrises the far theatricals of day. It's like a perfect description of it. But when you go out and it's 10 below zero in my town, and I'm up a mile and a half out of town, which has five or six streetlights, so there's no glare, and you see the Milky Way and And you are just what can you do but just be humbled by the vastness of the universe and how relatively insignificant our lives are. But that in itself compels you, drives you to try to do something that would have not significance, but just would add something. So I live in a, A state. Politics comes through all the time. Everybody's got a lawn sign, right, Left, right, center. My lawn sign says love multiplies. It's the only functioning theory of the entire universe. It is what it's all about, right? It doesn't matter what religion, what philosophy you might subscribe to or not. Thomas Jefferson says in our film, if my Neighbor believes in 20 gods or no God in at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Right? Like we are so religiously intolerant today. Oh well, I know that if I had been born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, I'd still be a born again Christian. No, you wouldn't. You'd be a Shiite, you know, I mean a Sunni. And you'd be at war with the Shiites across the border in Iran. You know, I'm sorry to break the news to you. And that all of them, all the great religions have the same thing in mind.
- [77:09]
Joe Rogan
And that problem that people have with this rigid perspective that they would be so arrogant as to believe that they would be unique in that environment.
- [77:18]
Ken Burns
Right?
- [77:18]
Joe Rogan
No, I would get it. I would understand it.
- [77:21]
Ken Burns
No, you wouldn't.
- [77:21]
Joe Rogan
That's crazy.
- [77:22]
Ken Burns
And who's to say, I mean, what was essential about the founders, particularly Jefferson, is that they were deists. And while they all had their own particular, mostly Protestant denominations that they had come out of, and I think still to some extent, in some cases practice less so Jefferson is that they believed that there was a supreme being who was disinterested in the affairs of man and did not distinguish between faiths. So that you see the baseball player who hits the home run and crosses home base and looks up and thanks. They never do that when they hit into a game ending double play in the ninth inning, right? Say, oh, thank you God for giving me that. I've only seen that once. Pedro Marcina had given up a fairly significant lead, not the entire lead to the Yankees in one of those great playoffs. And as he walked off and was pulled by the manager, he walked off and looked up and I spoke to him about it. I said, I've never seen anything like that. But this idea that all of our affairs are governed in that way is not what many of the founders believed in, that it is our Obligation to lead, lead that virtuous life don't mean to keep bringing you back there moves you closer up the stairway to heaven, up the ray of creation to God. And that it's your movement, not that supreme being's movement towards you. Oh, let's make sure that's a ground root double. Oh, let's. That's not happening. It is the ongoing chaos of the sequence of events and human nature. And we've got to a be aware of the sort of incredible current, the force of the current of that human nature, but also the way in which my individuality, my will, the discipline, the virtue that I might be able to have could in some ways be singular and do something significant not because of that, but in order to be closer to that higher. And that's where they're all talking about it, that they want the founders higher emotions, as I said, not sentimentality, not nostalgia. Those are the enemies of anything but the higher emotions. Sometimes we say that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. What is the difference between that? If you've added up all the sum of the parts and it comes here, what's that? And what it means is that as much as to build a 10 table, to build a bridge or a highway, 1 and 1 always has to equal 2. The things that matter in our lives are where 1 and 1 equals 3, where we are able to see something that's bigger, that something is produced by the collision of two musical notes, by two images in a documentary, by the conversation between two human beings, whatever in which something is possible. I'm interested in whatever energy that creates and with whom. I mean, you just don't know that that person at the convenience store that you just kind of like don't even look and don't even think about has a life as important as yours. You're driving on the highway. We're coming down from Dallas this morning on 35, you know, and thousands, thousands of cars going other direction. The person in that car is looking and dangerous. Their life is as full as what I'm seeing out of my eyes. And I know sitting here that you're seeing something totally different than what I'm seeing. And that life is as full, I think good history, good friendship, good storytelling, good conversation, all have at its base the respect for the other point of view, the ability to listen and that kind of desire to be better. And in our country we've actually got lots of blueprints for it, we got lots of plans. They're out there, it's in The Declaration. It's in the Constitution. It's in the Bill of Rights. It's here. It's in that speech. It's in the Lincoln speech. We're gonna live forever or die by suicide or. Then he's got two speeches, Lincoln does. One's a message to Congress in 62, what we'd call the State of the Union Address. And he 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. And then a few seconds later, he goes, the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new. Let us think anew. He's both those things, right? Yeah. We cannot escape history. And guess what? The dogmas of the past. He's in his second Inaugural, one of the most famous addresses of all time. He's got Old Testament righteousness. You know, if we have to spend another 500 years drawing with the sword the blood that is drawn with the lash, meaning fighting to end slavery, we'll do it. And then he stops, very Old Testament, he stops on a dime and turns to this New Testament, ending the peroration, which says, with malice towards none, with charity for all. You know. And then it has that kind of unbelievable generosity in it. And this ability to, of sort, say, a second ago, I'm willing to keep this going for however long it takes to end this scourge of slavery. That whatever, drawn by the lash, drawn by the sword, we will do. It's just an amazing ability to understand us. And he took. He's the one who reached back over the Constitution and plucked Jefferson back into significance. And so when he gives The Gettysburg Address four score and seven years after, after the 87 years after the signing of the Declaration, he's creating the 2.0 operating system that we have now, saying we really do mean it, that all men are created equal, and that now, because of the sacrifice, there's not a proper word in that entire address. You know, the guy before him, Edward Evert, noted ord. Or spoke for more than two hours, and he spoke for two minutes. And Everett wrote him, and he said, Mr. President, I should flatter myself if I thought I came to the heart of the matter in two hours as you did in two minutes. Wow. It is. There's so many wows in the work that we have. And people say, well, what'd you learn differently? And you go, oh, my God, are you kidding? Every day is this revelation, this sort of tsunami that breaks over you of New Information. And then it's just, what is it that I can save? You'd assume, you'd presume, completely understandably, that making a documentary film on the American Revolution. Evolution is additive, right? You're building this thing. It's not. I live in New Hampshire. We make maple syrup. It takes 40 gallons of SAP to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. And so it's all reductive. We have 12 hours in this six part series and we've got more than 500 hours of material filming reenactors for years, some of them dressed in French uniforms, some of them dressed in militia, some of them in British, some of them in, you know, Continental, some of them German, Hessian, some of them native, all of that stuff. And then we're using it to help the building blocks of doing it at the same time. We've collected more than 12,000 paintings and drawings. We've taken maps. We got more maps in this than in all the other films we've made combined. Sometimes we're just taking an old archival map and leaving it all alone. Sometimes we're taking an old archival map and just putting red and blue lines showing the movement of British and Continental soldiers. Sometimes we're taking maps and sort of making our own hybrid map that gives us a little bit more control. But all of these things we're just practicing. I mean, I looked at something earlier today which was just a minute change on a map that we highlight where a British admiral wanted to attack, or all these seaport towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and Maine. And the last one is Machias, which is up near the Canadian border. And we weren't seeing it. So we were trying to figure out how to light up Marblehead and Cape Ann and Gloucester and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And Saco, Maine, was then the main department of Massachusetts. And then Falmouth, which is now Portland, Maine, and Machias. And so we'll spend months trying to just get that one thing, thing right. No one, if we hadn't done it, no one would care. Except for us. Right, except for us. Right.
- [86:00]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [86:01]
Ken Burns
It's that little thing, you know, I have friends who are woodworkers and they'd never hide a mistake.
- [86:08]
Joe Rogan
Right, right.
- [86:09]
Ken Burns
They'd never hide a mistake. It always. There's a. There's a kind of craftsmanship to all of that, you know, out in the woods by yourself, just how you relate to nature. A kind of purity, a kind of. Of intention that you have in relationship to it. I know. You know all of that.
- [86:25]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. I think one of the things that's fascinating is that the isolation in which you work and the environment in which you live, which does highlight the majesty of nature and the humility of it all. You. You're in the expression of your work, you're giving this vision to people that a lot of them are living in this world that creates uniquely anxious and disconnected people. Because we're living in these urban environments without nature, because we're of light pollution, we see no stars. I think it's one of the reasons why we're one of the most confused societies ever. And art, and I think documentary film work is clearly art, especially art in providing an understanding of the true events of history. It gives people a sense of what it really means to be a human being in a different way. It illuminates these aspects of humanity in a different way that allows people just this kind of glimpse into, like, what are we made? Like, what is it about us that makes us who we are and why do we do what we do?
- [87:46]
Ken Burns
I can't imagine any human being could say it better than that. Joe. I think that's exactly right. This disconnection that we feel has come from the fact that we have become transactional beings. Nothing is transformational and that we yearn nonetheless for that kind of transformation that takes place in our lives. And as Americans, those of us fortunate enough to be Americans, with all the problems that are attendant to that statement, we have this glorious past that has the ability to take us out of that stupor, that take us out of that rut, to be able to say, and with the exception of a film on Leonardo, the 40 or so films that I've done, some of them are hour long, some of them are 20 hour long. Hours long are all about us. All about us. And the thing that I was describing about the US and us is that I realize there's only us, there's no them. All of our world is about them. Of creating a them. The artificiality that despots or autocrats always have to make a them. There's got to be an enemy out there in order to do that. There's only us. And the important obligation that we have is to tell our stories to everybody. That is to say, I do not wish to preach to the congregation, whatever my congregation does, I do not wish to preach to the choir. I wish to say we have an extraordinary country. I mean, I'm. I'm interested in its voices. I realize I'm interested in its complicated voices. The true, honest, complicated voices of American history that's unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit, and particularly the remarkable role this republic plays in the positive progress of man kind. That's my play. That's my sandbox.
- [89:56]
Joe Rogan
It's a great sandbox.
- [89:58]
Ken Burns
It's a great sandbox. It's great. And there's implied discipline in that. Work with people for decades and decades, and we work really hard and we want to do a good job. And it's sincere in that regard. And because, as I said, it's pbs, with one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out, you can make decisions that don't have to do with whether. With, you know, whether it's going to enrich your bank account. I mean, there are so many ways to measure richness that don't have to do with the bottom line. And, you know, one of the things that Americans have done, we've incubated lots of great ideas because of those two oceans and those two relatively benign. One of the things, and de Tocqueville noticed this when he came through in the 1830s, we're so into money and the almighty dollar, he called it. That was the religion of America. And that has its cost. It obviously has some nice attributes, but it has a spiritual cost that is profound. You know, the Old Testament again said, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to reach the kingdom of heaven.
- [91:09]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [91:10]
Ken Burns
And that's. That's tough for Americans to hear. It is so tough for Americans to hear, particularly since we have so many preachers who are certain that it's okay to be both, you know, and at some point, you have to realize, you know, something is lost. And there is richness in relationships. There's richness in children, there's richness in art and associations, in knowledge. I mean, your curiosity is so palpable. I was listening to you speaking to my friend Eliot west, who's written about the buffalo and native peoples and the sort of prehistory of the American West. And you can just hear there is this preternatural sort of interest in curiosity. And like, how does it work? We're all part of. Given a really short period of time. And the bad news is, maybe it's the bad news, maybe it's also the good news is none of us are getting out of here alive. None of us. And then it comes back to us, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? And it doesn't matter. You don't have to make documentary films. You don't have to have radio shows. You can raise a child. You can tend a garden, you can build a bridge. All of these things are legitimate. It just requires. Requires your full attention and willingness to engage in that. Whatever it might be, whatever it is. I've got a friend in my little town. I've known him for 40 years. I think we probably have opposite political views. I don't know, but I adore this man. He builds stone walls. He's like, if you come to my house and you see the walls that he's built, it's like, you know, you don't need to go to Chartres and Notre Dame. You just say, whoa, Dougie did this really great job here, you know, and you just love him for that dedication to saying, I could just do this in this moment to the best of my ability. People always say, do you ever go back to your earlier films and want to change it? And I go, no, right? It's like a photo album where you go back and you're wearing a paisley shirt with a big collar, and you go, who the hell thought that was a good look? But you don't tear that picture out of the album. You say, that's who I was.
- [93:34]
Joe Rogan
That's the time.
- [93:35]
Ken Burns
That's the time. That's who I was.
- [93:38]
Joe Rogan
What an extraordinary hypocrisy to have a rich preacher. I was thinking that while you were saying that, you know, based upon that biblical quote, what a bizarre, like, blatant, in your face hypocrisy to have a rich preacher.
- [93:57]
Ken Burns
Jesus Christ did not intend to start a religion. Other people who liked what he said started a religion long after he was crucified. So religions themselves, it's so interesting that all of them that have at the root of their philosophy the exact same thing, exact same thing, all of them about doing to others. It's essentially about love. And yet religions seem to be sometimes the cause of most of the pain in there. It means that somewhere along the line from the original message to the expression stuff gets corrupted. And you can convince yourself that having as a Guru in Oregon, 52 Rolls.
- [94:43]
Joe Rogan
Royces or a giant arena, and you have your congregation meet you at every Sunday. It's just such a uniquely American thing. The mega church pastor and uniquely sort of adapted to this bizarre society where the bottom line is numbers. It's ones and zeros on a ledger.
- [95:06]
Ken Burns
It's important, you know, let's not downplay it.
- [95:09]
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah, it's better than not having any money, for sure.
- [95:11]
Ken Burns
It's better than not having any money.
- [95:12]
Joe Rogan
But it shouldn't be as well.
- [95:13]
Ken Burns
Shelby Foote, who was our talking head in the Civil War, said that money, the only thing it could be by you is privacy and service, meaning you can get somebody to mow your lawn if you need that to happen. And you can be a little bit private. But if you think it's going to be doing a lot, lot more than that, you've already begun to atrophy. That awareness of being alive that I think everybody wants to feel, that sense of vivifying oneness, it's also a foolish.
- [95:43]
Joe Rogan
Pursuit to try to be better than people by just having more numbers. It's a really crazy thing.
- [95:50]
Ken Burns
You know, the poor in the United States, the studies have shown, give away, well, more of their disposable income. You know, if you've got a hundred bucks and your friend comes up and says, hey, man, I need a hundred bucks, you give 100 bucks. If you got a thousand bucks and somebody goes up and says, hey, I want a hundred bucks, you go, well, then I will not have a thousand. I will have only 900. And this works all the way up to 100 billion. I know that is. It's so interesting that somehow this is what we think is. Or even the folks who are dedicated to spending, prolonging their lives with these other things. It really is the quality of life is the much more important thing. How generous you are. I always tell my girls when they're in trouble, I say the three things, and one is, this won't last. Get help from others and be kind to yourself. There's no yes buts to those. Which is where. When you're a teenager, anxious, there's always. Or an adult, there's always a kind of a yes, but, you know, just things will change. It always does. There's always change. Maybe it gets worse, maybe it gets better. Probably gets better. And it's no harm in reaching out to other people. And the hardest thing of all is to be kind to yourself.
- [97:15]
Joe Rogan
Yes, I say the same things. And I also say, find something that you love, not that people love you for.
- [97:22]
Ken Burns
That's right.
- [97:23]
Joe Rogan
Find the thing that you, whatever it is like, that you're uniquely drawn to and let that change over time. If you don't want, if you don't love that anymore and there's a new thing that you. You love, pursue that. But find the thing that really calls to you.
- [97:37]
Ken Burns
This is what Robert Pen Warren meant when he said to me, careerism is death. He just was saying you gotta find that thing. And people, when I talk to students, they want to know how you know what the secret is. I go, there's only two secrets. One is to know yourself. And that may be understanding that. I thought I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I don't have anything to say. And. And it's perfectly legitimate to do something else to change that thing if you do it, and the others to persevere. Because there's in every single situation, many more people wanting to be in front of a mic every day than there are the possibility of being in front of the mic every day. So you have to work at it really hard. You can't make assumptions about it. Sometimes you have to do. I sort of felt like moving to New Hampshire. Was in the Godfather, going to the mattresses. You know, it's like, okay, I got handed a job, I needed a job. And I was just so worried, Joe, that I was going to put the film that I had shot for this first film in the Brooklyn Bridge on top of my refrigerator. And I would just wake up, and I'd be 45 years old, and I would have, you know, not finished it. And so I got offered a job which was like, you know, being offered $800,000 a year today. And I said no. And I moved to New Hampshire where I could live nothing and finish the film.
- [98:56]
Joe Rogan
How did you choose New Hampshire?
- [98:57]
Ken Burns
I had a lot of friends. I had gone to school in western Massachusetts and had a lot of friends, sort of hippies and others that sort of after sort of alternative stuff that after they had not. Some had gone to New York and pursued sort of traditional professional lives, but others had become book salesmen or opened a natural food store, were a weaver or whatever it might be. And so a lot of them gravitated in southern Vermont and southern New York. Hampshire. Little kind of nice, little nook. And so I ended up going to this town and have. Literally, I mean, I walked in. I rented the house for the first two years, first few years, and bought it after my daughters were born. And I've been in the same bedroom for 46 years. Wow. And I don't feel cut off or starved. I know every part of the country. My films have covered every part of the country. And part of the shoe leather that we have to do with PBS because they don't have the big budgets to smother the American Revolution coming November 16th over every bus and subway and billboard is, you go out, you talk to people, and that puts you in touch. And at the same time, you have this place to retreat and restore. And every morning I take a three mile walk with my dog into what looks like, like 18th century America. Wow. You know, I mean, talk about rich. That's pretty rich, right?
- [100:23]
Joe Rogan
Right. You can't buy that.
- [100:24]
Ken Burns
You cannot buy that.
- [100:25]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, that's really so important. Really, because it's like, it's the greatest perspective enhancer ever.
- [100:32]
Ken Burns
It is.
- [100:32]
Joe Rogan
I, I always say that about going to the mountains. There's, there's nothing different, there's nothing, there's nothing about it that you can recreate, create artificially. You have to go to the actual source of nature, the true source of nature to really appreciate that. I think it's like a vitamin. I think just like you get vitamin D from the sun, I think you get something from actual pure nature.
- [101:03]
Ken Burns
I agree. Capital nature. I agree completely. Pure nature. I think Americans manifestosity basically says, see that river? Let's dam it. See that forest, let's calculate the board feet. See that canyon? What minerals can be extracted and that's okay. And we've done that with 98% of the continental United States. But we also, in the midst of all of that, set aside these places that were so spectacularly beautiful like Yosemite or Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon or Zion or Bryce or Canyones or the Everglades or Acadia or Smokies and just said, I want my children and my children's children's children to be able to see these.
- [101:46]
Joe Rogan
That's one of the most extraordinary things about this country, is what Teddy Roosevelt did with national lands.
- [101:52]
Ken Burns
That's why I said it's the declaration applied to the land. No other countries. We invented national parks. Every other country has, every other country has followed suit because, because we were saying land does not belong to a monarch or to the nobleman or to the very rich and just reverse engineer that for a second and say, okay, we don't have national parks. So Yosemite and Zion are gated communities. You maybe have one little observational place along the Grand Canyon to look. The Everglades was long ago drained in his golf courses and strip malls and apartments. It's one of the most diverse, diverse ecological environments on earth. As flat as it is, it's just spectacularly diverse.
- [102:35]
Joe Rogan
It's kind of a mess now.
- [102:38]
Ken Burns
And Yellowstone would be a down on its luck heyday in the 1950s amusement place called Geyser World. But it's not that you and I and everyone within the sound of my voice owner the most beautiful spots on the continent. And I would argue in Many cases, the most beautiful spots on the earth. Yeah, it's pretty great. And it gives us that unfettered ability to go into nature to get off the trail, which 90%, we can admit it, there's nothing wrong with that. 90% of the people stay within 100 yards of any trail. But to get off the trail and go out and see the magnificence of this planet. You know the Colorado River. Yeah. You stand and. You know, the thing I like about the parks is that it isn't just what you see, it's who you see it with. Like, you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado river exposes pre Cambrian Vishnu schist that is 1.7 billion years old. That's almost half the age of the planet itself. But the Grand Canyon was works if you also are holding somebody's hand. Right. It's like who you see it with becomes central to the experience of it. Murrac Alta de Grande. Geological library. All of the strata. It was like a library of telling stories of what was going on. It's why I love American sports. I really love them. But I focus on baseball because. Because in football, the description is, oh, you know, Joe Montana threw to Jerry Rice with a few seconds left and we scored a touchdown and we won. Or Michael Jordan hit the three pointer at the buzzer, tongue wagging, and we won. But the baseball story always begins. My mom or my dad took me to this game and I remember walking out and seeing the green of the thing and then babe, RH hit a home run, or Hank Aaron hit a home run, or somebody pitched a perfect game. It's all gauged with who you see it with as well as what the thing is. Wow.
- [104:48]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Baseball is a unique American pastime. Cause it's boring, you know, it's exciting.
- [104:57]
Ken Burns
It's not for those of us. It's not for those of us who love it. And it was always the national pastime. It's had competition. I think one of the reasons why we see sort of relegate it to this thing is that most of the other forms of entertainment, particularly in sports, are a little bit more fast moving. George Will said to me, though, who's a big football fan, he says football has two of the worst features of American life. Violence punctuated by frequent committee meetings. Right.
- [105:28]
Joe Rogan
What a great quote.
- [105:29]
Ken Burns
Isn't that fantastic?
- [105:30]
Joe Rogan
What a great quote.
- [105:31]
Ken Burns
Yeah. No, but baseball has this thing. It's the only sport in which the defense has the ball. Right. The person scores, not the ball. And where do you go home.
- [105:41]
Joe Rogan
Home.
- [105:42]
Ken Burns
Yeah. And statistics matter. Like maybe you know how many yards Tom Brady has? The greatest of all time. Probably you don't. But you know how many home runs Babe Ruth hit and how many home runs Hank Aaron hit. And, you know, these are things that matter. And if you look up the 1919 World Series series, it says that the Cincinnati Redstockings won the 1919 World Series. There's no asterisk. But then those numbers require you to tell a story about the Chicago White Sox, known to us forever as the Black Sox, who took money from Arnold Rothstein and other gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series and give it to the much lesser team, the Cincinnati Redstockings. It is great that the statistics matter. A.300 hitter means the same thing to my dad as it does to my grandfather and my great, great grandfather and my great, great, great, great grandfather. But you still have to tell stories.
- [106:42]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's. I mean, the stories are so important to people, too. I mean, it's something that is a part of their life that they tune into to give their life more meaning. And that's something that I never understood about team sports when I was younger because I never liked them, because I was always in. I always felt like I don't like team sports because I don't want to lose, because Billy drops the ball in the back in the outfield. Like, I don't want to be a loser because somebody else fucked up. I want it to be entirely dependent upon me. Then after a while, I started realizing, like, no, this. There's a richness to being a fan. There's a quality of life that comes. There's an experience that comes from everyone being united in this thing, like wanting the team to win. That doesn't exist in individual sports.
- [107:35]
Ken Burns
It doesn't. I agree with you completely. There's something wonderful. I was just talking to my best friend about this the other day that my daughter was at school and she was the co captain, my oldest daughter, of her softball game. And 25, 30 years ago, we went to some misty Saturday morning game, and it was like they were winning 3 to 2 in the bottom of whatever the last inning was. And the other team had the bases loaded and no outs, and we got three force outs. And it was like the girls just immediately burst into tears. But it was just an amazing thing. Or just you're driving in a. In a, you know, a suburban or a city area, and there's a ball game going on and you're kind of slow. You lift your foot off the accelerator as the. As the pitch goes, you know, as it goes, there's something suspended as the pitch is heading from the pitcher to the bat or something, Everything stops and possibility is suddenly there in front of you. That's why I love the game so much.
- [108:34]
Joe Rogan
It's just a game that if you try to introduce it today, it would be very difficult to sell.
- [108:38]
Ken Burns
You know, it's so funny. I get to more often than not and haven't been in a while because I'm such a dull boy and working so much to Fenway park. And it's always just filled with people, and it's always got lots of kids, and they're always there because they want to be. My screensaver of my phone are my two daughters at a Red. My two youngest daughters at a Red Sox game, you know, 10 or 15 years ago. I haven't been taking it off the thing, you know, this one's now a sophomore at Georgetown University, and this one is going into ninth. Ninth grade. But they were like 8 and 13 then. And look at the expressions on their face. It's just pure joy.
- [109:22]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. I mean, it really is uniquely American.
- [109:26]
Ken Burns
And it's accompanied nearly every decade of our national narrative, even into the 17th century. There are bits of pieces in which there seems to be some stick and ball game and. And then after. Before the Civil War, in the decades before the Civil War, they began to combine rounders, sort of a British schoolyard game with cricket, and do something that's a lot better than both called baseball. And you know what? There was a guy in 1858 named Pete O' Brien. He said, you know, they don't play baseball the way they used to when I was a kid. This is 1858. I don't mean they don't play it with the same. With the same rules or the same amount of. They just lost the spirit of it. So we've always been saying, something's wrong, something's gone out of the game. It's not quite right. And there's always not true and just it continues on.
- [110:20]
Joe Rogan
The steroid era, to me, was really fascinating because one of the things about baseball being so uniquely American is the. That the idea of someone cheating at this uniquely American thing was particularly offensive, whereas at the same time, people were 100% taking steroids for football.
- [110:42]
Ken Burns
Oh, yeah. And Bill Romanowski was, you know, there was bottom of the fold of the New York Times, but as soon as the baseball player was implicated, it was the top of the fold. And that told you, even though the NFL had long overtaken baseball as kind of the national pastime, or football had done that. And I think it has to do with the sense that it. I mean, it does allow stealing of bases. But you're absolutely right. There is.
- [111:06]
Joe Rogan
Well, that's a strategy.
- [111:08]
Ken Burns
There is that wonderful thing about baseball that it seems kind of pure. It seems American.
- [111:15]
Joe Rogan
And to cheat at that is offensive.
- [111:16]
Ken Burns
And to cheat at that. And that's why, you know, I used to say out of some. I'm embarrassed by the kind of arrogance of it. I used to say, well, they should let Pete Rose in after hall of Fame, after he dies. Now he's died, and I'm still. I sort of feel like, who am I to say that? Certainly the hall of Fame isn't like a list of angels, but I also still am not sure he should go in. Or Shoeless Joe Jackson. As much as you want to resurrect the great story of the most promising of the Chicago whitestockings in 1919 that threw the World Series, the Black Stockings, I don't know. I mean, it's very complicated. Will Roger Clemens. Will some of these other people that we know were juicing Barry Bonds, where Barry Bonds doing interviews, is clearly arguably the greatest player that's ever played baseball. And you could even say to the moment he decides, he looks at McGuire and Sosa, he knows he's got tons more talent than them and they're getting all the attention. And he says, I can do this. He's still got. He's right. Then he's a first ballad hall of Famer and would arguably, if he just stopped right then and just quit and said whatever. But decisions are made, and then it becomes back to Shakespeare and negative capability. And can you hold in tension the great prodigious gifts and the. In this case, the sort of shortcut of the way in which these gifts were corrupted.
- [112:56]
Joe Rogan
Well, it was so uniquely American that there was congressional hearings on steroid use in a sport.
- [113:01]
Ken Burns
Yeah.
- [113:01]
Joe Rogan
Which was very strange. And again, while simultaneously it's ubiquitously used in football.
- [113:08]
Ken Burns
And you also live in a society in which you take a pill to deal with erections. You take a pill for this. You take a pill, go to sleep. You take a pill to sleep, to wake up. We are all drugged. And one person made in our 10th inning, the update to the series on baseball that came out in 94. 10th inning came out in 2010. They said, look, what if you're a scraping middle, infielder, second baseman, shortstop, and everybody's taking steroids in the clubhouse, everybody knows about it. The baseball has no rules against it right now. And it's the difference between you getting that four year, $28 million contract in which your family is set for life, you're from the Dominican Republic, you're from wherever you're from, and maybe ending up in aaa, and that's it. And then you realize and you're being told by every signal of society, take something to be better. This then complicates the entire dynamic of our. Of our judgments, of the facility of saying, oh, I'm really absolutist. I know this. And I realize the more I go, the more disappointed I am in the arrogance of my certainty. Before I think one of the big things is we think that the opposite of faith is doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty, which destroys the mystery of the unknown. And so I'm always taken aback, sometimes more often in retrospect than in the moment when I could possibly do something about it, that I have been more certain about something and less trying to see it from another person's point of view or from the other side of the coin or whatever it might be. Or maybe there's many different facets to these things as we were talking about with regard to the revelation and slavery and what responsibility of imposing the morality of this moment on the previous moment. How much did that previous moment already understand the morality of it, which they did. What's the right answer? And I think staying open to the questions I know in filmmaking has made us better filmmakers. And it's not a royal we. I don't do this alone. There are a lot of people that I work with. They're handmade. It's a small little nucleus of people, but they deserve credits. Writers and co directors and co producers and people who are digging in the archives. Cinematographer I've worked with for 52 years.
- [115:45]
Joe Rogan
I think this is so important for people to hear because I think this very unique and noble perspective that you have is why your work resonates so much with people.
- [115:56]
Ken Burns
I agree. I think what it is is that whatever. Whatever. I don't want to say sacrifices, but whatever discipline has been imposed on the process of whatever it is we do, people recognize that and they know that they can see something. They may not like all the aspects of it because it is complicated. And you do see not just the intimacy of the us, but you also see the complexity and the contradiction and the controversy along with the majesty of the us. It's all there. But I do think that they know that we have earned their attention. That's the biggest thing we have. You know this. You're asking an extraordinary amount of people right this second. You're asking them to devote their attention. I mean, the longest episode I've ever done is like 2 hours and 20 minutes. 2 hours and 30 minutes. That required every skill I had to be able to make that over 10 years, an episode. The fourth episode of World War II, a film called the War. But mostly it's two hours. And it is a supreme compliment if somebody will give me their attention for that amount of time, and then maybe for 10 episodes or nine episodes, or in the case of the American revelation, to six, for a total of 12 hours. That is a huge, huge responsibility of trying to earn someone's attention. And that's our job, is really just making sure that that person who does not know, who's ignorant but curious, which is, of course, perfectly fine. If you're willfully ignorant, I really can't help you. But if you're curious and ignorant, then we want to make sure that if you've given us your attention for this two hours of the first episode of the Revolution, and then stay for all 12 hours, that we want to make sure that we've earned it in the simplest way, that the equation is not at all above. There's no communication in this world. You already know this, except among equals. If I look up or down already, I've dislocated the possibility. And the only communication is among equals. And that's. You treat your audience like they know something. Not that they're familiar with the subject, but they're not stupid. And they don't have to be added some sort of pablum. You don't have to simplify it. It can be complex because if it is, they'll recognize either themselves or they'll recognize somebody that they know that's very close to them. And that's the essence of good story, is it's human beings telling stories about other human beings and what they do that has a resonance that accrues like the layers of a pearl. Imperceptibly, you can't identify, but you know. And of course, a pearl is based on an irritant, a grain of sand that's bothering the hell out of that, you know, oyster. Right. You've created this gem out of the friction and irritation and resilience, resistance and perseverance of having to do something.
- [119:11]
Joe Rogan
I think one of the most uniquely American stories that you've told, the story of Jack Johnson.
- [119:16]
Ken Burns
Yeah, it's you know, it's interesting because one of the great themes in American history is race. I mean, it's obvious because we were founded on the ideal that all men are created equal. And the guy who wrote that sentence owned hundreds of human beings and didn't see he fed in his lifetime to free them. But you also have individuality. And what is with Jack Johnson, like a good back boxing match? You have a black man who also just wants to be a man, wants to be fully himself. Now, the society doesn't really want him to do that. And they're going to put lots of constraints, and he's going to overcome those constraints. And then when he does, they're going to find another way to box him in. But James Earl Jones was really great on this. He. He was almost saying, do not just be constantly distracted by the question of race. This is somebody who wanted to be a man, his own person. And that a great deal of Jack Johnson and all the travails and all the things that he went through and all the great, great, great, great skill. I mean, Muhammad Ali, we made a film on Ali, too, which I'm really, really proud of. But he's clearly studied Jack Johnson. He knew they would watch those films. Rope a dope is Jack Johnson. A lot of that making, wearing your opponent out is Jack Johnson from, you know, an earlier century. And this is a time, I mean, his heyday is between 1905 and 1915, when more African Americans were lynched for looking sideways at somebody. And he's openly defeating every great white hope that came at him. And dating white women, dating white women and marrying white women. And so, you know, we called the film. Mostly we like to have kind of boring things like the American Revolution, Brooklyn Bridge, the Vietnam War. But we call that film Unforgivable Blackness, the Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. And I did that because the great black scholar W.E.B. du Bois at the turn of the 20th century said, Boxing is in great disfavor. Jack Johnson seems to be the cause. But Jack Dunson did nothing that no other boxer or sportsman or even senator has done. Why then has it come to him? It all comes down then to his unforgivable blackness, that by taking the crown, by defeating all comers, it was an unacceptable situation when in those days, being the heavyweight champion was. There was a sense of this was the supreme masculinity of the world and that everyone went out of their way, from John Sullivan to others, to avoid fighting a black man. And finally somebody paid Tommy Burns, guaranteed $30,000 to fight Jack Johnson on Boxing Day, the day of.
- [122:07]
Joe Rogan
What was that worth today?
- [122:09]
Ken Burns
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Millions and millions of dollars. Jack only got $5,000, but he was happy to do it. He's been going after Tommy Burns, no relation. And Tommy Burns was a pseudonym, a guy, I can't remember his name, a Canadian. Anyway, in Australia, they fight on the day after Christmas 1908. And Jack Johnson's just toyed. He probably could have taken care of him in the first inning, and he just keeps it going. They finally cut the newsreels off. They actually stop the fight because they do not want the public to see this. And when after. After having digested, I think is a good word, all of the white hopes that were thrown at him in the intervening year and a half, they finally convinced Jim Jefferies, the guy who'd retired undefeated, the previous champion before Tommy Burns, to come out. And In Reno on July 4, 1910, the fight of the century. Jack Johnson defeated. No one thought it would happen. Jim Jeffries. And there were riots all across the country. All across the country. White on black riots. The Los Angeles Times wrote their lead editorial was a word to the black man. Do not lift your chest up too high. Do not put your face up to the sun. Do not. You are still the same lowly person you were yesterday. Just because Jack Johnson. And I mean, the idea that it goes back to this issue. Washington knew it was wrong. Jefferson knew it was wrong. They made so much money, it was really hard to do this. I mean, Jefferson himself said slavery is like holding a wolf by the ears. You don't like it, but you don't dare let it go. Go. And so what happens is that somebody like an Abraham Lincoln is born anti slavery. Right. But they're also a developing abolitionist movement. So now they want to abolish slavery. They're not just against it and understand that it's a moral God. Never. Nowhere does God say that black people are inferior to white people. But what happens is, even though most of the slavers know that it's wrong, but there's so many good profits to make, what happens when the abolitionists come along that they begin to make arguments that slavery is actually good and that black people are in fact inferior. And so one of the reasons why the Civil War happens is this sense of threat to their economic power, which are the 4 million people in the 9 million populated south that are owned by. By other human beings. And it's an extraordinary dynamic. We face it today. The reverberations. And Jack Johnson I think is one of those magnificent cases where he defies your ability to put it in a neat cubbyhole. It defies your ability to make it binary. We live in this media culture, right. We live in a computer world. Everything's a one or a zero. Everything's a red state or blue state. Everything's younger, old, gay or straight. It's not that way. And so to tell a complex story of history, particularly like of Jack Johnson, is just to have your molecules rearranged. You know, it really is exhilarating. I probably said that word too many times. It's exhilarating.
- [125:34]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. I think he's also one of the rare cultural figures that. Where a sports figure defines a time much like Muhammad Ali defined the Vietnam era. Like Muhammad Ali. When I was a child, my parents were hippies and they never cared about sports at all. Except when Muhammad Ali lost to Leon Spinks and then had the rematch we all watched. I remember this being a child, thinking how strange it was that my parents were so invested in Muhammad Ali. But what they were invested in is this man that risked his entire career and livelihood. They took his livelihood for three years for protesting the Vietnam War and refusing to go fight. And it was a big thing because he was a cultural hero.
- [126:23]
Ken Burns
That's right.
- [126:23]
Joe Rogan
It wasn't just that he was the best boxer ever. He was also this guy that said, I'm not doing this. The Vietnamese people didn't do anything to me. I'm not participating in this. I'm not going to go kill anybody. I'm not doing this. And we were all like, yes. And then they took his livelihood away and he became a martyr. He became a hero and spoke out against the war. And then it was three solid years in his prime before he came back.
- [126:50]
Ken Burns
Yeah, it's an amazing story. And we told it just a few years ago in a four part eight hour series. I agree with you 100%. I'm a little bit older. I remember when Sonny Liston and Ben Cassius Clay fought in my. And he was such a new commodity. He was rocking the boat with this verbal onslaught that we were for a nanosecond, sorry that Sonny Liston lost because he was the person that we were familiar with. We knew this kind of black man and we did not know this other scarier verbal person. And almost instantly. And my dad was an anthropologist. I mean this, this was boxing. He was not doing the thing. But from then on we became just loyal. We watched all the stuff through the 60s and then saw his opposition into the War. And then he said, you could come and mow me down with a machine gun. I'm not going to go. And the ABC did some interviews with black soldiers in Vietnam and they all to a person said, this is why I'm fighting. This is why I'm here. I'm fighting. For him to say I don't to want to be here.
- [128:02]
Joe Rogan
Wow.
- [128:03]
Ken Burns
And I just thought it was great. And I also wanted to do this because nobody, people had done certain fights, people had done his fight with the government. I wanted to do soup the nuts. We wanted to do soup the nuts. My daughter, oldest daughter Sarah, and my son in law David McMahon, we made the film From Birth to the Death. This guy is in the late 60s, the most hated man in America for that stance that you were describing about the drum. And he did dies the most beloved person on the planet. And I really loved the idea. I loved the opportunity of being able to show how that happened in the midst of, you know, they call it the sweet science. But there are some fights. The three fights with Frazier are like as brutal as anything you could ever possibly imagine. And what they went through and what he ultimately clearly enriched, retrospect, lost as a result of winning two of the three of the fights is one of those miraculous stories. And I agree, like Jack Johnson is defining an age. And so interesting that it's in a marginalized activity even back then, like heavyweight boxing.
- [129:15]
Joe Rogan
Well, marginalized, but still elevated. The heavyweight champion of the world was still the baddest man on the planet and people still wanted to watch it. But it was thought to be a backroom, sort of darkly lit, dingy pursuit. You learned it in the dangerous gyms. It's not something that you learn on a college campus with educated professors and analysts that have reviewed proper technique, which is how they teach in Russia. You know, Russia has a very like technical version of. And what they do in America as well too now, but not back then. Back then it was the dark dingy gyms, mob run basics, the sporting world.
- [130:01]
Ken Burns
And you were there. There were gamblers, there were women of the night. It was, you know, money was being used, lots of mob stuff, lots of throne fights. And it was in the interest. It was so interesting that that emerged this person who was so resolutely himself, just as Muhammad Ali would be decades later. It's why I'm drawn to it. I'm not a big fan of boxing, but it's irresistible. You can't take your eyes away from these two men when they're fighting. They're first of all, spectacular specimens. And they are amazing fighters. They change the whole dynamic. And as you said, there's no greater boxer than Muhammad Ali.
- [130:39]
Joe Rogan
Well, the really terrible thing is, is Muhammad Ali's best years were taken from him.
- [130:44]
Ken Burns
Yeah.
- [130:44]
Joe Rogan
Because if you go to 1967, I. I've talked about this numerous times on the podcast. When he fought Cleveland. Big, Big Cat Williams.
- [130:50]
Ken Burns
Yeah.
- [130:51]
Joe Rogan
That fight was one of the most extraordinary performances of any heavyweight ever. It was. Cleveland was a dangerous guy, like, vicious knockout puncher. He was a real specimen himself.
- [131:02]
Ken Burns
Yes, he was.
- [131:03]
Joe Rogan
And Ali toyed with him. I mean, toy just boxed his face off, knocked him out, moving backwards, just picked him apart, popped him and showed movement and speed and agility and technique that we had never seen from a heavyweight ever.
- [131:20]
Ken Burns
He was the greatest.
- [131:21]
Joe Rogan
The greatest, the greatest. And then three solid years of creativity.
- [131:26]
Ken Burns
Yeah. I think this is what makes him so great. This is like Ted Williams, only much bigger. Because Ted Williams loses a lot of time to World War II and to cart Korea and comes back and still hits 350 or whatever it is he hits for the Red Sox, having lost what you'd consider the prime of his career in his early days in World War II. And as a fighter, this is not like the goodwill ambassador. He's flying fighter bombing runs. I mean, he's like really, it's every time he can not come back. And he's a magnificent stuff. But it's not denial, as they did in both Jack Johnson. They took away his title and he was fallow from 1912 to 1915. And then finally they put him in the ring in Havana with Jess Willard, who's a younger guy, he's 105 degrees, 110 degrees on the canvas. They're gonna go 40 rounds after the 26. This guy who's got 10 years on Jess Willard, he's 37, Willard's 27. You know, Willard finally gets in a thing and it's like, oh, thank you. And they would not let another black man fight for a heavyweight champion until he was not Jack Johnson. That is to say, until he was Joe Louis light skinned, couldn't be seen with a white woman, couldn't smile at his victories. And Lewis agreed to all of this. It was the unspoken unwritten rule that you couldn't be an in your face black man. And that sort of obtained for a couple of decades. And then Ali came and he said, broke the mold, bolt the mold. And essentially, basically, they used to say when he was training, Ali was training, there'd be ghost in the house. Ghost in the house. And that meant that Jack Johnson was there and that Ali had to be that much better. Wow. Ghost in the house. Wow.
- [133:15]
Joe Rogan
The Ali of three years later was a completely different fighter. Unfortunately, physically, he didn't look the same because he didn't train for three years. He didn't do anything, and he lost everything. I mean, he still was one of the greatest. I mean, still was able to beat Joe Lewis, still was able to beat George Foreman, but he is a different fighter. He didn't move the same way. He didn't have the same physical build. He didn't look as good. He lost three solid years in his prime of training.
- [133:42]
Ken Burns
And it makes those post Vietnam years even more spectacular. The fact that he could prevail over Frazier and over. I mean, that the Rumble in the Jungle is just crazy, crazy, crazy. What he did.
- [133:59]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [134:00]
Ken Burns
What he did.
- [134:00]
Joe Rogan
Well, nobody thought he was going to win.
- [134:02]
Ken Burns
No one thought he was.
- [134:03]
Joe Rogan
Including Hunter S. Thompson, who famously sabotaged his career by not covering the fight. He was sent over there to cover the fight and instead decided to just swim in the pool and drink.
- [134:12]
Ken Burns
Yeah.
- [134:12]
Joe Rogan
Because he didn't want to watch Ali get destroyed.
- [134:14]
Ken Burns
Yep. Meanwhile, he missed one of the greatest fights of all. I remember I was in college still, and we got soundless black and white footage of the fight, some of it in slow motion. And my film teacher showed it to us, and none of us were interested. I was like, whoa, this is stuff I did with my dad 10 years before. And it was him delivering a blow to Foreman and seeing in slow motion this halo of sweat coming off the Afro of George Foreman. I mean, I will never forget just the spectacular, almost the beauty of this incredibly brutal sport.
- [135:03]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Incredibly brutal. But in those moments, it elevated. Everybody who watched watched it. That's the crazy irony of it all. It's like in this brutality, this beat down of another man, everybody who watched it was elevated.
- [135:17]
Ken Burns
It's.
- [135:18]
Joe Rogan
It's because someone did something that we thought was impossible.
- [135:21]
Ken Burns
Exactly.
- [135:22]
Joe Rogan
And it was that person who did it, this guy who stood up against the Vietnam War. And, you know, at the time, we didn't realize how bad the Vietnam War would look retrospectively.
- [135:33]
Ken Burns
Yeah, no, he. He did enjoy any benefit of the doubt in this. It was really another time of division and people exploiting division and making them. He was the worst them that there possibly could be. And I think the fact that he was able to stick to his guns, I mean, he could have said, okay, I will go and do Goodwill stuff, and it would have been all over. He said, no, I'm not going to. Famously, no Vietnamese ever called me the N word.
- [136:04]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And just the fact that at the time we didn't understand, we were still locked into this perception of military conflict being like World War II, where it was imperative to save the world from communism and that there was a real problem, there's a real threat to the American way of life and America as a whole that was going on in Vietnam, which. Which now seems absurd.
- [136:28]
Ken Burns
It seems absurd. There's a wonderful parallel. I mean, when I said that Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. We have a failed invasion of Canada in the American Revolution. There's a big debate over inoculation, there's an eclipse that takes place, all of this sort of stuff. And there's always an interesting thing, is that particularly in New Jersey and South Carolina, the British are always talking about, we have now passed pacified New Jersey, the province of New Jersey. We have now pacified the province of South Carolina. And then all of a sudden they have to admit that it's unpacified because the patriots have taken over and done all this guerrilla warfare that has made it unpacified. And at one point, George III and many others within the British government are worried about what we would call the domino theory. If we lose them, then we're gonna lose Ireland, and if we lose Ireland, we're gonna lose Gibraltar and we're gonna lose the subcontinent of India, and we're gonna lose. And. And so you go, there's nothing new under the sun. Nothing new under the sun.
- [137:26]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. The Vietnam war. And your 18 hour piece on the Vietnam War is one of the more confusing aspects of the United States history. Because looking at it today, it doesn't make any sense how we sold this.
- [137:43]
Ken Burns
No. And every president from Truman, Eisenhower, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, even Ford never told us the complete truth about it and did stuff that got Americans killed and lots of other people killed over what would have been. There's a Geneva Convention in 54 that basically said we could separate into two places. And in two years we had an election which everyone knew Ho Chi Minh would win. If he left it at that, we'd be talking about 3 million people still walking the earth, at least.
- [138:17]
Joe Rogan
Crazy.
- [138:18]
Ken Burns
Crazy. And the communist Chinese and the Soviets were very suspicious of Ho Chi Minh. They thought, he's not a communist, he's just a nationalist. And he knew. I'll tell you, the day that the Japanese surrendered in Tokyo bay officially was September 2, 1944. That same day in Badin square in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence. And he quoted Thomas Jefferson, Whoa. And standing next to him were OSS guys. By the end of September, the State Department having realized, oh, this World War II is over, but we're going to be in a new. They didn't call it Cold War yet, but we're going to be in an epic struggle all around the world world with communism. And this guy has been to Moscow and whatever, so he must be a communist. And so all of a sudden, the State Department, the OSS had saved his life, had parachuted into northern Vietnam looking for people that could mobilize in their help against the Japanese, and found a sick and dying Ho Chi Minh. We don't know what is malaria, whatever treated him and brought him back. And he didn't see us as the enemy. And yet we, in those two years, in 56, when they should have held an election, we had already decided to place our bets with Ngo Dingh Diem, who was a corrupt South Vietnamese politician who would eventually be assassinated by a general who would be a one in a series of generals until we got Chu and Key. And those were the people who took us out of it or were on their watch when the North Vietnamese Vietnamese finally united their country. It's just. And the lying. We have the tapes of Johnson and of Nixon and it just. There's an arrogance to record yourself for posterity and you be careful what you say. Some of the things that not all of them have been listened to, they haven't all been transcribed. And we were fortunate to spend a lot of time just listening and listening and finding just some stuff that, you know, if Nixon and Kissinger had walked into the peace talks that were already started in January of 69 and taken the terms that the North Vietnamese were offering, they would have had better terms than what they had in 73, and there would be fewer Americans, a lot more Americans alive, 25,000 more Americans alive, something like that. And hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. But they didn't want to be the first, first president to lose a war. In fact, they'd already soured the South Vietnamese. They said as Humphrey was coming up in the polls, he only lost by 0.7 points of a percentage in the election. He'd been way behind and was making a lot of speed and a lot of it had to do with what people perceived as progress in Paris and the Nixon administration or not administration, the Republican Party, the Nixon's election thing reached out through an intermediary to the South Vietnamese government and said, boycott the talks in Paris. And if you'd had another week or two to the election, you would have had Hubert Humphrey as president. Or if they hadn't reached out to the South Vietnamese. And Johnson got it on tape. They were taping the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington and the palace in South. Gone. And he knew it. And he called up Nixon. There's a tape. And he goes, oh, I would never do anything like that. And Johnson either pissed off at Humphrey because he's not as much a hawk as Johnson had become, or more than likely unwilling to admit to your allies that you had been taping them in their own embassy in Washington and their own palace in Saigon, did not tell the truth of what he knew, that Richard Nixon had essentially reached out to a foreign power at the time of a national election to try to influence that election. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's just endless.
- [142:25]
Joe Rogan
And the reverberations. Like, the one thing that it did that I think is, like, so pivotal is it destroyed the faith that the United States citizens had in its government telling them the truth and in engaging in military activities. Because we had always thought we were a just government, we were a just society. And that if we got into World War II, it was to save the world. If we got into Vietnam, it was to save the world. Oh, no, it wasn't. Not only that we got in on a lie, we literally got into the war on a false flag.
- [142:55]
Ken Burns
That's exactly.
- [142:56]
Joe Rogan
So it was entirely engineered. And then there was also the heroin production, which was a big part of the whole thing. The heroin trade. There was money that was being allocated to various individuals through the heroin trade that was facilitating a lot of it. It's very confusing stuff. When you look at it over time and you look back at it, you're like, what would the United States look like had clear heads prevailed? What would we look like today?
- [143:25]
Ken Burns
The counterfactual? Well, I think we'd be less divided. I think a good deal of the divisions now are sort of born in there. The French positions that people take now, I think there's also a sense the PENTAGON PAPERS Were McNamara going to a gentleman that we interviewed, Robert Garden, and saying, I need to find out all the decisions. And he learned not only was he lying at times, going and getting battlefield reports and then coming back and saying it's all rosy, but everybody had been lying back to the Truman administration about what was going on, and it was just a series of lies. And that's what. When they asked the Rand Corporation to Sort of analyze some of the data. That's when Daniel Ellsberg, who worked for the RAND corporation, surreptitiously illegally copied them and then released them to various newspapers. And they became what we call the Pentagon papers, but they were always the Pentagon papers and they detail exactly what you just described. Just a complete presence of both parties. A military industrial. When Eisenhower leaves, just before he leaves, he warns of the military industrial complex. He's not saying this is something that happened last Thursday. He's saying this happened the second World War II was over.
- [144:46]
Joe Rogan
Well, even before that. Smedley Butler talked about it. In 33 people.
- [144:50]
Ken Burns
There was so much money to be made that nobody wanted to ramp down down the armaments. And so you end up having these proxy wars. You end up having these places where you're going to not have a hot war because that means the end of the world in a world of nuclear weapons, but you're going to fight these proxy wars in different places. And in Kennedy, it's a doctrine that Eisenhower and Kennedy and they all sort of embrace and figure out that they can do it. And then of course, Johnson, who Kennedy inherits 700 advisors from Eisenhower Hour. Johnson inherits 17,000 advisors now in quotes when he comes in. And he still has to wait until he wins reelection overwhelmingly a year later. And it's only into the following March of 65 that he commits ground forces. First Marines and then army to Vietnam. And then we have the boots on the ground. Even though we'd had boots on the ground for a long time and engaged in combat, these advisors were very much engaged in that sort of stuff. And then it just escalates. You know, at the peak, it's well over 550,000 soldiers and American soldiers in country.
- [146:05]
Joe Rogan
Insane, insane. It's also, you know, the coming to fruition of Eisenhower's warnings. And then this inspires this counterculture of the 1960s that sort of reshapes art, reshapes culture, reshapes rock and roll. Politics, politics, politics. Everything, everything changes. And then, you know, Nixon comes along to stop the anti war movement, to stop the civil rights movement, puts These sweeping Schedule 1 drug acts on all these different, you know, psilocybin, all these different lsd, all these different things that they believe these people were involved in so that they could start arresting people and sort of throw water on the entire movement. And it's effective.
- [146:51]
Ken Burns
It is so interesting to look. And I've got in my office this wonderful two framed maps, if you will. And they're the intertwining of the various two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, over time. So the Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party of emancipation, of whatever, and the party that invented progressivism in the first part of the 20th century. Democrats had been. Been not that place. But in the 60s, it began to change thanks to Lyndon Johnson of Austin, Texas, who understood that it was the right thing to do to put in those civil rights and voting rights acts and other things that we call part of his Great Society. A film, by the way, that we're working on now will be out in a few years. But he knew that the bargain would be to give up the solid South. I mean, you woke up on election day if you're a Democrat, and you had every one of the states of the former Confederacy, all of them, all of them in your tally, and that's flipped. And now you wake up on election day and you more or less have had all the states of the former Confederacy on the Republican side who abandoned what they were about. And it's interesting to see in which for self interest, interest for whatever. I mean, Nixon begins it. Jackie Robinson is a Lincoln Republican. Didn't go over as many black people did to FDR during the New Deal. He was supporting Nixon for president, but Nixon wouldn't come to Carla in campaign.
- [148:23]
Joe Rogan
Wow.
- [148:24]
Ken Burns
So he ended up voting for Kennedy. And Goldwater fully understood that we're just going to now switch the Republican Party and go up after just white voters who are disaffected with changes in civil rights. And so it's an interesting story of the way in which parties can change places and be the very opposite of the thing they were just a few years before.
- [148:50]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Because they're all gross.
- [148:54]
Ken Burns
Well, I just find the thing is, the bad word is progressive today. And this is the Republican Party invented progressivism, and they joined forces with some more liberal Democrats in the big cities. But the opposition to the Civil Rights bill is coming from Southern Democrats. And it's Lyndon Johnson knowing that he will have to use every bit of his powers of persuasion to get it over, and he will require lots of Republican votes. And he does. So you do have something positive happening in American history where the two parties are coming together and not just lockstep, where every single Republican votes for something and every single Democrat votes against it. And you just feel like somebody's. They're from two different planets.
- [149:43]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Another thing about the Vietnam War that's so crazy is like we've kind of accepted the fact that the United States military does things overseas that we don't want them to do because after that war, it sort of set the stage for Afghanistan, Iraq, especially Afghanistan, like this prolonged 20 year complete failure, especially in how we withdrew from it. It's like we've lost a lot of faith in the decisions that are made.
- [150:18]
Ken Burns
I actually think you have, you young officers like Colin Powell who are learning the lessons of Vietnam. And so what you find is extraordinary reticence in the late 70s and the 80s and the early 90s. So the first Gulf War is very much a reflection of Vietnam. Chastened by the excesses of Vietnam. We're going to do it with a coalition. We're going to do it with one arm tied behind our back. We're going to stop a little bit sooner. We're not going to have the full destruction of this. All these sorts of things are Vietnam inherited. But then real politic comes in and then all of a sudden you realize we're in Afghanistan because of 9, 11, we're pursuing this person. We had a chance to get him, we missed him. It was not our fault. And we then switched the focus to Iraq and then ended up in both places in a kind of terrific stalemate that, as you say, just was, I think back to being Vietnam. I mean, I always say this, that if we, we made our film on Vietnam, it came out in 2017. If I had done the film 10 years, and this is why history requires perspective. If I had done it 10 years after the fall of Saigon in 1985, there's a recession going on in the United States. 19 big. But we talk about the Pacific Rim. Japan is ascendant. We think Japan is going to be the best thing. Vietnam would be this ball and chain that we would be dragging around us forever. If I'd waited 20 years to 1995, we're the sole superpower. We're in the middle of the largest, to that point, largest peacetime economic expansion in the history of our country. And Vietnam would always be important, but it wouldn't be this symbol of our decline. Right. If I'd waited 30 years to 2005, when we are bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq and people are beginning to use the language of the Vietnam and getting stuck in these unwanted, perpetual, never ending wars, you'd have another view. And so to do good history is to actually get some distance and perspective. So you can look at the Vietnam War from the mountaintop of 85 and 95 and 2005 and then realize I've still got other experiences. New scholarship has come, classified material has been released. More of those tapes have been listened to. There's been a mellowing among the veterans and a willingness to speak. Gold Star mothers realize they can't hide their grief. We have one in the film. She knows that by telling her story, she. She will help thousands of other people who have lost their children. You can interview soldiers from other sides of the conflict that seem to speak exactly like our soldiers. And that you begin to develop a way to see it more holistically than in just a kind of journalistic and almost political response. So that was bad. We did that badly. We did this poorly. You can see it for this hugely, hugely complex, complex machine that it was that just ate up human beings and ate up credibility, as you're saying that the United States had built up as the greatest power on Earth and certainly the good guy in what we euphemistically call the good war. That good war is the worst war ever. More 60 million people's lives were extinguished in World War II. But as we said it in our film about World War II culture, the war, one of our pilots said it was a necessary war. And that's what we should be thinking about, fighting necessary ones, not the ones that are going to have all these ulterior things that you described.
- [154:07]
Joe Rogan
And it's also like unwinding all that bad and sort of reshaping America's perspective. And the way the world perceives us takes so much time. And I think we lost so much of that post 9 11. I think 911 and had the entire world in our sympathies.
- [154:26]
Ken Burns
I agree.
- [154:28]
Joe Rogan
We had been attacked. The whole world thought of us as being like this shining light, like, wow, we have to stand against this. Then we go and invade Iraq and everyone's like, what are you doing? What is this? There's really no weapons of mass destruction. It's all a lie.
- [154:44]
Ken Burns
The thing that the Depression did is it got used to Americans doing with. And it made it very easy for Americans to segue into the Second World War because it was about shared sacrifice, something they'd learned on a domestic level. They could now learn it on an international level, and they did that. We had an opportunity at 9 11, it seems to me, and I haven't made a film about it. And I imagine once we get enough years out, it might be interesting to sort of look at. At that we had an opportunity to collectively turn the energy that we had, the grief and the sense of purpose, even anger of that moment, as well as the world's unabashed sympathy for what we'd done and turn it into something productive. And yet we didn't. We then, as you were saying, we moved into sort of rationales and justifications, vacations for Iraq that were, as we know, in retrospect, completely fraudulent.
- [155:49]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. From the outside, like me looking at your work, I get anxiety just thinking about the daunting task of taking on these subjects. And I know you have 10 years for some of them to really ruminate and really figure it out, but what is your process? Like, how do you begin? Like you said, you're gonna do something on Lyndon Johnson or if you're going to do something in Vietnam. What does day one look like?
- [156:15]
Ken Burns
Day one is making sure that you're looking yourself in the mirror and you're going to commit to that. Because I'm now off like a congressman trying to raise money from foundations and corporations and individuals of wealth and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and things like that. But you're immediately reading. You're immediately talking to scholars who've spent their life maybe on this aspect or that aspect of Vietnam. We had, I think it was 23 scholars, all who knew one aspect. And I knew we were onto something when we'd have these screenings and a scholar would comment and all the other 22 would whip over like they hadn't heard that. And so the film would do that. It's daunting. I asked Shelby Foote about U.S. grant, and he said Grant had what they call 4 o' clock in the morning courage. That meant you could wake him at 4 o' clock in the morning and tell him the enemy had turned his left flank and he'd be as cool as a cucumber. And so what you do develop is 4 o' clock in the morning courage. You wake up and go, and we're still doing it. I'm still waking up. I didn't like the way that sounded. Why didn't we trail that stuff? So you just put one foot in the other. You trust a process. Process is a really important thing. We're all impatient, and impatience kills process, just like comparison is the thief of joy. If you're impatient, then process is squandered. And process teaches you really important things of how to relate to a subject, how to collect the material, and then how to figure out how to digest that material into something that's a cohesive story that I can give to you, who may be ignorant of that story. But it's daunting, it's terrifying, and I wouldn't have it any other way. And I think I'M speaking for the people who work with me. Because there's something. Everybody responds at 3 in the morning. Everybody says, yeah, what do we do that we can fix this? We'll find an alternative to that to make it better. And sometimes it's the niggling tiny things or sometimes it's really big. To have the courage to take out an entire scene that really is working really well but destabilizes the film a half an hour later. And I did that in our Mark Twain film. I took out this beautiful prose thing from life on the Mississippi called White Town, drowsing about Hannibal, this disguised Hannibal sort of waking up from its slumbers as it sees the puff of snow smoke north as the steamboat's coming down and the whole town is industry and activity and loading and unloading and whatever. And then by the time the puff of smoke is around the bend south, everybody's back asleep again. It was just fantastic and written, it was so beautifully. Mark Twain never wrote a bad word. And I just realized we weren't getting out of the early biographical stuff soon enough. And. And I said to my partner on the film, the co producer and the writer who'd found that quote from Life on the Mississippi, I said, we're taking it out. And he looked so hurt and so pained. I said, look, I'll put it back in if you want it. So we left it out. And I thought it worked. Brian, he came to me, looked sad. I said, I'll put it back in. And for about six months we went back and forth. And then finally he came to me and he said, you were right. And I said, you can put it in the book, we'll put it in the DVD extras. We'll do all the things that you need to do. But. But that's the kind of 4 o' clock in the morning courage you need to do is take out something that, like Joe, it worked so well. And yet you remember the movie Amadeus. Too many notes, too many notes, you know, and you just go, you gotta do that. I'd rather. The reason why we have the. It's complicated is because there's not a filmmaker on earth that doesn't want to change a scene that's working. But we have spent our entire profession changing scenes that were working when we found out new, compromising, sort of contradictory information. And maybe it made the scene less, maybe the scene disappeared, but it actually serves the honor and the virtue of whatever that story requires. And this is true. So many things in the American Revolution that are close to me because we're just coming off the months and months of these unbelievable sacrifices of having to take out one phrase of a scene sentence or changing one little thing just to help fine tune it. Nobody would notice if I left it in and you looked at it twice and then I took it out the second time. I don't think you'd notice it, but I'd notice it. So I'd wanted to be. And that's the beauty of public broadcasting too, is that it gives you that chance to do that. There's not a single.
- [160:45]
Joe Rogan
That's the only platform that would allow you to do it that way.
- [160:47]
Ken Burns
I don't think there is another platform. I assume that a list directors in Hollywood who have have the final say. Enjoy that. As Steven Spielberg, who is one of the great directors of all times, I'm sure. But there's still suits that are coming in. There's still people who are giving him notes. We get notes from scholars, we get notes that are sort of like this. You've got lots of voices of loyalists in there and that's really good because people tend to ignore the loyalists. They're just a de facto based bad people. And you don't make them bad people. But you don't have a loyalist who goes through several episodes that you follow throughout the film. So we had this loyalist quote in our fourth episode in the Battle of Bennington where this guy named John Peters, who's been in Vermont, been driven out by the patriots. He's gone to Canada, he's formed a revolution. The family, his wife and small infant kids are driven out. They find a British patrol boat somehow on Lake Champlain. They reunite. He starts a regiment, a loyalist regiment, his 15 year old son. They find themselves with Burgoyne's army around Bennington where they've been told there's great loyalist sympathies and not that many patriots. It's the opposite. There's no loyalist sympathies or none that anybody is speaking up for. And there are lots of patriots and they're defeated. But at one moment this man, John Peters, is on a parapet of a quickly made redoubt of a fort that put up to try to repel the attacking Americans. And he hears the voice of a man named Jeremiah Post who is saying Peters, you damn Tory. Which is the other insult that you would give to a loyalist. And he recognizes the voice of his best friend growing up and cousin of his sister. And at that moment Jeremiah Posts, the. The rebel, the patriot stabs him with the bayonet into his bone, but it's deflected by the bone of the rib cage at that moment, as Peter said, I was obliged to destroy him. And he kills him with his pistol. Wow. That's the American Revolution. So we had that quote, and it was like, wa. But why don't we go and put Jon Peters in episode one and episode two and episode three and episode four and then episode six when he's leaving and moving to Nova Scotia permanently and not going to be a part of this new deal. But you want to know what the American Revolution about it? Killing your best friend on a hill west of Bennington, Vermont. Right. You know what I mean? I mean, we say kind of without thinking about the Civil War, brother against brother. And I guess it's true a few times, but the Revolution is like that. Henry Knox, who's this sort of big, amiable bookseller who Washington somehow figures out, picks out of a crowd, and he said, oh, go to Ticonderoga and get those cannon we captured earlier in the year and bring him back here. I got to drive the British out of Boston. And Knox does sleds impossible. Hundreds of miles over land and over Lake George, and, you know, terrible. And he gets it there, but he's married to this young woman named Lucy, whose parents are Loyalists. And so she loses in the Revolution her father, her mother, her brother, and her sisters. That's the choice she made by marrying Henry Knox, this sweetheart of a bookseller who learned most of his stuff about artillery and gun emplacements from the books in his bookstore and from serving as, you know, in the local militia. And he puts the guns. He gets the guns up top, and the British wake up and go, oh, we're out of here. And they go up to Nova Scotia to regroup. Massachusetts thinks the war's over. They thank General Washington for his service and enjoy his retirement. He goes, are you kidding me? I'm going to New York. Which is exactly right, because that's where the British will attack next. And the largest battle of the American Revolution is the Battle of Long Island Island. And I won't spoil it for you. What happens.
- [164:53]
Joe Rogan
Please don't. Ken Burns, your national treasure. Thank you so much.
- [164:57]
Ken Burns
Thank you, Joe.
- [164:58]
Joe Rogan
Really appreciate you being here. I really enjoyed it. And like I said, I've been a giant fan of your work for a long time. So this is a huge treat for me.
- [165:06]
Ken Burns
Thank you.
- [165:06]
Joe Rogan
Thank you, thank you. All right, bye, everybody. It.