← This is Gavin Newsom
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A
We live in a place right now where it actually pays to promote division. I do not think somebody should enrich themselves in office. Let's go back to arguing about the things that matter without demonizing.
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This is Gavin Newsom.
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And this is Ken Burns.
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This is an iHeart podcast.
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Guaranteed Human.
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Your bill, ladies.
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I got it.
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No, I got it. Seriously, I insist.
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I insisted first.
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Oh, don't be silly. You don't be silly.
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Rock, paper, scissors.
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Shoot. No.
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a
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A
Hi, Governor.
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B
Hey, Ken, how are you?
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A
Nice to meet you.
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B
Pre. I know that background well.
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A
Yes, I'm sorry to say I think that there are. As you know, there are 342 million podcasts and I've done half of them. And I'm absolutely certain, not in this case, that I'm speaking to myself and into the person I'm talking to. At least now I know that there's at least a few other people listening.
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B
God bless you, man. I. Yeah, no, I. I imagine that's gotta be the biggest change for you since you started this, right? 20 years ago had been a, you know, the broadcast work or in person. Now it's, you know, ubiquity.
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A
Oh, yeah, well, we. We're still doing all of the old stuff. I mean, I've been doing it for. It's. It's almost 50 years. And, you know, we started off in film and analog, you know, with razor blades cutting film and taping them together and drawing grease pen on the film. And then, you know, digital editing and then. And videotape and then. And we, we were always 10 years behind, intentionally so that the technological tail didn't wag the dog. And. And so we're just, you know, perpetually Luddites catching up with everything. But we're doing the old broadcast stuff too. I went to 40 cities, had 80 screenings, you know, but also did 75 podcasts from Joe Rogan to, you know, the. Whatever the comparable is on the other side. Mark Twain said, if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. So I said the same thing to Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn, as I said the New York Times to inner city kids in Charleston and Detroit and suburban kids and Chicagoland and all the other places. And it worked out okay because the story's so compelling that a lot of these divisions which we think are completely clogging our arteries fall away. Because if you tell, if you tell a good story, then you tell a good story and everybody's got a. Got an interest in a good story.
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B
When you were talking to Theo and Joe and guys like that, that may be, you know, perceived on a number of issues a little bit more to the right. Were they surprised by the fact that we are so surprised by this division that we have in this country? And you're able to contextualize that and say, you know, give me a break. And you know, particularly with this film, which is as much about the Civil War, not just the World War, right?
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A
No, no, no. And I think one of the things about the revolution is that it is a civil war. It's a revolution, and we've sort of made it gallant and bloodless because I think, you know, accepting the violence of the Civil war and the 20th century wars, we don't want to have anything take away from the big ideas in Philadelphia in 76 and then in 1787. But in fact, if you tell the correct story, those ideas aren't diminished in any way. They' made even more impressive that we were born in violence. So I think that the divisions that we experience now are part of the narcissism. It's always the best time or the worst time that we're living in. So I think everybody's less aware of the way in which they might contribute to those divisions than they want to just sort of repeat the same thing over and over again. And I'd suggest that, yeah, we're really divided, but not as bad as the Revolution, not as bad as the Civil War, not as bad as the period of reconstruction right after the Civil War, which I'm working on a film on right now called Emancipation to Exodus. Not during the depression, like the second Vietnam. You remember Vietnam 69 to 75. Hundreds of bombings, Hundreds of bombings. And so I think the good thing about the study of history is it gives you a little bit of perspective and a little bit of even optimism, if you accept a priori that optimism is not a pejorative or a naive position, but in fact a legitimate stake, which is, we'll get through this.
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B
I love it. And as we get through, I want to get back to more deeply the current project and not just the ones you're working on, but the one we're here to really celebrate and at least reflect upon as we reflect on the 250th anniversary. But I'm curious, you know, just going back to how we began casually the conversation. It's interesting. You talked about. I love this. No, sort of a razor blade, editing back in the day, et cetera. And now as you're out on podcasts and you're sort of battling traditional media people in person and then of course, online and so many different podcasts. But when you were doing those first films, what was. I mean, what did Ken Burns, what was. How did you go out there and promote these things? Was it primarily through the platform at PBS or, you know, what was finding your way onto Oprah as a sort of monumental moment and achievement?
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A
Yeah, so that's exactly right. And it still remains the same. It's still PBS is the broadcast platform is great. Only this time, the American revolution, you know, six parts, 12 hours, comes out in mid November last year, and by the end of the year, we've accumulated 18 million viewers in traditional broadcast, which is pretty damn good. But we've hit, for the first time in PBS's history, the top 10 of streaming. And for me, this Luddite, they've got a metric which is at that moment, at the end of November, 565 million minutes of streaming. So you go, you know, my kids can do the divide by 720 minutes. That 12 hours is. But now it's well over 4 billion. And that's a big deal. And it was a big deal that we broke the top 10. But it's an even bigger deal that we now have something in which we're told that, you know, conservatives only like Yellowstone, as if that's a simplistic story and it's not. And that, you know, liberals only like this, and it's. It's not true. The novelist Richard Powers said something that I've been quoting for years now. He said, the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do is argue, won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. Because in a computer world where everything's a one or a zero, in a media culture where everything's red state or blue state, young or old, black or white, gay or straight, rich or poor, north or south, east or west, all the dialectics that we are preoccupied with, which don't actually exist, there's no room for the complexity that we extend to the people we love, to the friends that we have, to the colleagues that we work with, to the understanding that the struggles are within us that, you know, we say there are no. We lament that there are no heroes today. Governor, you know, and if you go back and say, well, where does the notion of heroism come from? It comes from the Greeks, and they endowed their gods with these examples for us mortals to study. And are those gods perfect? No. Achilles has his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths. So heroism is really a negotiation, sometimes a war within a person over their great strength. So if you leave George Washington out on his marble statue collecting pigeon shit, he seems perfect, you know, never tells a lie. Cut down a cherry tree coin across the Potomac. But if you examine him and understand that he's a very human character, he owns 577 human beings in his lifetime. As the writer Rick Atkinson said, you can't square that circle. He's right. He's rash on the battlefield, risking the entire cause by rushing out into the field. If he's killed or captured, it's all over. He makes some tactical mistakes that are in some ways inexcusable, and yet he's able to convince people to fight in the dead of night. He defers to Congress. He has great humility. He picks subordinate talent, generals that are better than him, like Benedict Arnold and Nathaniel Greene. And he twice gives up power, military at the height of his military power and the presidency at the height of his political power. And that has set us in motion. So you can have, in a story that we tell, which is as much bottom up as it is top down, you can have the almost exhilarating off brand thing that we don't have a country without him. And yet in order to tell the story correctly, you have to do all the other things. We live in a highlight world, right? Babe Ruth comes up, he hits a home run. But Babe Ruth struck out many more times than he hit home runs.
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And.
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And Babe Ruth only comes up once every nine times at bat. So sometimes, as any inhabitant of Los Angeles can tell you, sometimes it's the middle infielder, sometimes it's the second baseman that is the deciding factor in any given moment. So we're obligated to tell a complicated history. There's no other word. It's almost redundant, complicated history or complicated human being. And that any attempt to simplify it is really just the work of an authoritarian. That is to say, we're going to make this simple. We're going to keep you uninformed. We're going to keep you subscribing to superstitions and conspiracy theories that distract you from the fact that I have my boot on the back of your neck.
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B
Did. Was that. I mean, was that omnipresent? You know, 200 years ago, this. This notion of censoring historic facts, rewriting history was, you know, was. Was that constantly present?
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A
Yeah, I think that disinformation's always been. I'm sure the first conversation between two human beings ever was a lie, you know, or at least a lie was part of that. And I think that we do a disservice and say, oh, our time is worse. You know, the Chicken Littles, the sky's falling. I remember when, you know, when new technologies come along, like, oh, say the Telegraph in the 1850s, people are wringing their hands. This is the end of letter writing. It's the end of this. And so I think, yeah, there's a lot. In fact, Sam Adams, who we think of as a beer, he was a failure as a brewer and a tax collector, but he was really good propagandists. And he said something that reminded me of our current media landscape. He said there were times when the British would acquiesce. Okay, the Stamp act, we're done. With it, we're not going to impose it. And so everybody, the Sons of Liberty disband and it's all over. And Sam Adams is going, no, they're just going to do something bad. And he said, my job was to keep my fellow countrymen alive to their grievances. Right, Sound familiar? In which you only have a politics that has to do with them and us. And my whole thing is that I've been making films about the U.S. but I've also been making 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, complexity, contradiction and even controversy of the US. But the one thing I've learned, if I've learned anything, is that there's no them. There's no them, there's only us. And that whenever anyone creates a them, it is for an agenda that is not one that is in sync with what a pluralistic democracy is. I mean, we're now, we. We now have been. Over the last 50 years, I've watched the word liberal fall, shot dead, you know, at a firing squad. I've watched all these sor of things. And we just witnessed the end of dei, but, you know, isn't E pluribus unum D E I. You know, that's our Latin motto that we're going to figure out how to come together. Jefferson says a couple sentences after the second one, the great. The great one. He says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. It's not hard to parse. It just means the heretofore in the history of human beings, people have been subjects and we're creating something new called citizens. And it's going to take an extra amount of energy to do that. And human beings will naturally devolve to the camps, to the tribal stuff. But we're actually going to experiment. We're going to put the enlightenment into practice and we're going to call it the United States of America. And we're going to be in pursuit of happiness, not things, but knowledge and virtue. And we're going to be after. A more perfect union is going to require a lot of coming together. But we live in a place right now where it's. So it actually pays to promote division.
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B
Pays to promote division. I couldn't agree more with that. This interest, you know, it's interesting you, Provost Luna, but this notion, you know, in Bible teaches many parts, one body, one part suffers, we all suffer. This, this you know, Dr. King talked so evocatively about that we're all bound together by that web of mutuality. And. But I think about this, and I think about in the context of what you're, you know, so much of the work you're doing and so much of the notion of myth and this sort of chiseled notion of a monument, et cetera, and how we sanitize so much of that. But the importance of myth at the same time, this notion of the things that bind us together, not just celebrating our interesting differences, but how we can be bound together. What. I mean, how do you. Where's that tension between, you know, when I, you know, I talk about California and was born into genocide. The first Governor in California, 1851. Burnet literally talked about the war and extermination. It was his first state of the state speech. But I use that language and people are immediately offended, find it shameful. And I'm not providing context. He was, in the vast majority. He was truly representative of the time. And so what's that? You know, this notion of myth and the importance of myth, the importance of things that we can unite around. How do you find that tension? Or you just try to go straight to the facts?
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A
Well, you know, we were interested, Governor, in calling balls and strikes, so I'm interested in the facts, however messy. I have in my editing room a neon sign that's been there for years and years and years, the main editing room. And it says it's complicated in lowercase cursive, neon. And that's what you want to do. The mythologies grow up around a desire to simplify and control that history. Yeah. So say with the revolution, you inherit something that is really just about white men when half the population, women, are deeply involved. The revolution doesn't happen without the resistance that leads up to it, the nearly decade of resistance. And women are at the heart of that. They're the buyers in each homestead. There are among the two and a half to three million Americans in the time of resistance. And at the beginning of the revolution, two and a half to 3 million Americans, 500,000 of whom are free or enslaved. Black people. There are within those 13 colonies becoming states, native peoples whose land has already been acquired and they have either assimilated or they're trying to figure out how to coexist. And on the western border, there are dozens of. Of nations that are as individual and as important on a global stage, economically, diplomatically, militarily, as, say, France and Prussia are. And we don't extend to Them, we just say them. And we also remember, we don't call ourselves the Eastern Seaboard Congress who appoints George Washington the head of the Eastern Seaboard Army. They know what's out there. They've heard of California, they know what's there and they are Continental army and they're planning to get it. So all of a sudden you have really interesting dynamics of black Americans deciding to fight with the British or fight with the patriots or Native Americans doing the same things that are sometimes dividing their old alliances and confederacies and destroying them. There's one woman, a Mohegan woman from I assume Connecticut, north central Connecticut, named Rebecca Tanner, who loses five sons. Five sons fighting for the patriot cause. And so we have a much more interesting. It's a very of an enormous variety of people. People in my state of New Hampshire, where I've lived for the last 47 years and Georgia feel like they're from different countries. They're like totally different. The idea that someone like Washington or Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or others that we don't know that much about Mercy Otis Warren is the first historian of the American Revolution, friend of Abigail Adams. It's nice when you have Meryl Streep reading off camera and bringing Mercy Otis Warren alive, but they're talking about how it might be that we could not be an individual thing, but a one thing. And that, you know, it's the first idea that Washington's really great as he's trying to inspire men to fight in the dead of night. And often they're teenagers, children. It's not all the militiamen. They're going back to plant their crops or to reap their crops. And what happens is the Continental army becomes filled with nerdy wells and teenagers and recent immigrants. And so democracy becomes not the intention of the revolution, it becomes a byproduct. Because all of a sudden you can't just win against the greatest power on earth without foreign help, the French. But you also can't win unless you say we're going to give you something for the sacrifices that you've made. And so what happens is that you emerge with a of fledgling democracy out of what was going to be a republic. A kind of aristocracy, the right would say the elites who control everything. But those elites are the guys that we're supposed to all agree that we like are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and Patrick Henry and James Mason and James Monroe and all of the so called founding fathers. And they are, they're a remarkable group of people. But you can't tell a complete story without the balls and strikes and everybody else who gets to come to bat.
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B
And when you, when you endeavor, I mean, what's this? You said it was 10 year process from.
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A
So I, I released them a year. Yeah. I looked up from a map that we were doing well. We were finishing our Vietnam series in, in, in. In December of 2015. Barack Obama, remember him, used to had 13 months to go in his presidency. And I said, we're doing the American Revolution. And I knew it would take that. No one was talking semi quincentennial. No one was talking two 50th about, about halfway through I thought, man, if we accelerate we could be at the 250th of Lexington and Concord. And my co director Sarah Botstein correctly corrected me and said we'll still be mixing and online and you'll be out on the road promoting it. It'll be in the fall. I said, okay. And then I realized, oh well, there's going to be a celebration at least we might be offering something a little bit more substantive than what I worried would be kind of fife and drum treacle, you know, that you would just devolve to the lowest common denominator of an unexamined patriotism. And then of course, we're in the circumstances that we're in where we really have an opportunity in crisis to look back at our founding just as an individual would do. You'd go to a pastor or a professional and the first thing they'd ask you is where'd you come from? Who are your parents? What are your early life like? So if you go back to your origin story as a way to reset, recommit to those ideals that were brand new on, on July 4th, 1776, we are. There's some folks called citizens and there's the only place is the eastern seaboard of the United States, white men of property mostly, but it's going to grow. And the second you break out this argument between Englishmen into natural rights saying, oh no, we hold these truths to be self evident. Jefferson wrote it, Governor. He wrote, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, which would be a really good enlightenment. And I want to make an argument to you, this is what we believe, right? Franklin gets it and says, no, no, no self evident. There's nothing self evident about these ideas. But as someone said in a film we made about Franklin a few years ago that it's the old lawyer's dodge. You just say it's self evident and Then you make it so these are people on the outer edge of human thought saying, oh, yeah, isn't this obvious? And once you break that out, as hypocritical as the tolerance of slavery of the founders is, slavery's done. It may take too long, obviously, because one minute more in slavery is bad. Women will get the vote, even though It's a shameful 144 years from that day before they will have it. Gay marriage is going to. I mean, all of these things get unlocked when you take, no pun intended, John Locke's Life, Liberty, property. We change it to pursuit of happiness. Not objects, but lifelong learning to be more virtuous. When you unlock that human energy, you look what we created the greatest country on earth for all the flaws. And I'm more than happy to spend the rest of our time together enumerating those things or to understand that they come together and they're not mutually exclusive. They are actually kind of lawfully bound to each other just as we make advances. In the mid 18th century, Franklin was disturbed by German immigration to Pennsylvania. And he said, I like the lovely white and red, meaning the white English settlers and the Native Americans. And he thought the Germans, this will come as a shock to everybody, were thwarty and they were, you know, they were not befitting the character. Then all of a sudden, we're letting everybody. German immigrants, Irish immigrants, whatever. Then the doors are completely. In the early 19th century. People are trying to shut it down. No, no, Catholics can come. No, keep the Irish out. Let's not do that. And then from 1870 till 1920, it's wide open, except for, as you know, the Chinese Exclusion act, attempting to regulate the inflow of Asian peoples to the United States. And then in the 1920s, the door slammed shut. The Johnson Reed Immigration act in 24 sets quotas. So it's going to it impossible for us to respond to the Holocaust with only the. Even though we let in more people than any other sovereign nation. I have to say sovereign because of the number of people who emigrated to Palestine. But we could have saved so many more human beings if we weren't imprisoned, locked into this straitjacket of Johnson Reed. And then you'd be making a dent in the 6 million number that we throw out without thinking. There are 9 million Jews in Europe in 1933, and by 1945, two out of three are dead. That's another way of saying 6 million. But if we knock that down by a million or 2 million or 3 million, which we could have easily done Think where we'd be in terms of our own greatness and our own thing. But those impulses towards antisemitism, the impulses to make a them of somebody who's Catholic or black or female or different, are always going to be part of the complexion or. And as difficult as it is to. And I don't need to tell you, to manage a modern democracy, there's no other, you know, and the temptation is to regulate it, you know, and say, oh, it's got to be this one way. We can only have this superficial history. There's no better, better form of government as chaotic as it is, as uncertain. The great jurist Learned Hand, I mean, governor, could there ever be a better name for a judge than learning? Hand said, liberty is never being too sure you're right. And there's a sort of sense now, as we try to impose our will on chaotic events, that the opposite of faith must be doubt. No doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty that kills faith. And yet we see the damage that is done in the name of faith. That my faith is the only faith. You know, that's why many of the founders sort of gravitated toward what's called deism, particularly Thomas Jefferson. And that is this idea that there is a supreme being, a supreme architect, divine providence, however you do it, but disinterested in the affairs of men and obviously making no distinction between faiths. So Jefferson has this wonderful line, if my Neighbor believes in 20 gods or no God at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. I mean, just think about how much we're governed by the intolerance of the people who want to make distinctions between their correct right set of facts and someone else's.
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B
Does it? I mean, in contemporary terms, we're talking on a day where the Supreme Court is hearing arguments on sort of a core construct. When you talk about the Chinese Exclusion act, its origin stories in the San Francisco Bay Area, Oakland. The original, forgive me, Donald Trump, I think, was Dennis Kearney, who began and ended every speech. The working men's party with the Chinese must go. And I go down to Chinatown and the museums there and you'll see the virtual walls being built to keep the Chinese out led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. And obviously part of the oral arguments today in the Supreme Court around the Wong decision in the late 1880s. What do you make of. I mean, it just. It sounds like. I mean, none of this, again, nothing is surprising. It's very consistent with that threat of history.
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A
Well, you know, everybody likes to say in a kind of lazy fashion that history repeats itself. It doesn't.
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B
Right.
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A
No event has ever happened twice. Ecclesiastes, which governors. The Old Testament says, what has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. It means that human nature doesn't change. And it superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events. And we see echoes, patterns, themes, motifs, or as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, rhymes. You know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. So all these things are there and they're lazy ways to approach this subject. To be a. I mean, America at its best, you know, has always been pluralistic and like an alloy benefiting from all the ingredients that went into it. When it's at its worst is when it's nativist and saying, oh, there's really only one us. And you're definitely not part of that. And this attempt at. I mean, look, my. You know, one of my favorite amendments is the 14th. And, you know, the first really trumps it. But people say, oh, First Amendment, free speech or freedom to assemble. Those are number two and three. The first is Congress will make no establishment of a religion. We're the first country on earth that didn't have an official religion. And it made all the difference. The energy it gave us by being able to draw in from the people who don't believe, believe in any God or believe in 20 gods has been a phenomenal achievement in the course of human history. And maybe we should just remember, starting with the Declaration and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and, you know, the Land Grant College act and the Homestead act and national parks and child labor and antitrust and, you know, the Social Security, labor's right to organize, the GI Bill, the interstate highway system, a man on the moon, Medicare, Medicaid, I've said Social Security up to the Affordable Care act. So many things that we have done which have been transforming not only for our own people but for the world. And then you find inevitably, the retrenchment that takes place. The people, the oligarchs, the former slave owners who are still unhappy of the way the Civil War took out and want to just, you know, get back what they had before. And you can't go back. You have to go forward.
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B
You gotta go forward.
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A
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- [32:16]
D
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C
Wasn't that delicious? So good.
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B
Your bill, ladies.
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C
I got it.
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A
No, I got it. Seriously, it's
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C
you. Don't be silly.
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D
People with the Wells Fargo active cash
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B
credit card prefer to pay because they
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D
earn unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases. Okay.
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C
Rock, paper, scissors for it.
- [33:36]
A
Rock, paper, scissors.
- [33:37]
C
Shoot.
- [33:38]
B
No. The Wells Fargo ActiveCash credit card.
- [33:42]
D
Visit Wells Fargo.comActiveCash terms apply.
- [33:46]
B
You speak of, you know, patriotism. We talk of nationalism, but what does patriotism mean to you? How do you. What's the sort of core essence of
- [33:55]
A
patriotism if you deal with American patriotism first? Because I'm not that, you know, there's complicated relationships to British patriotism. We called ourselves patriots, and the British called us rebels. Never once said patriot because patriot meant something, you know, something different in Britain. And they weren't going to ascribe us any other motives. Even when they were surrendering, the British soldiers and the German soldiers were forbidden to look at the Americans. Only the French were worthy of their attention.
- [34:27]
D
Right.
- [34:27]
A
We were still just a rabble. And they were so humiliated at having the greatest military power on earth in the most far flung empire on earth, had to admit that they had just lost to this ragtag. But who would have thought a German Hessian, Johann Ewald said, who would have thought 100 years ago that out of this multitude of rabble would arise a people who could defy kings? So if you accept an American form of patriotism, just as a way for us to have a conversation for a few seconds, then embedded in is a sense of our own exceptionalism, which is reasonable. Lincoln says in his address to Congress in what we'd call the State of the union in 62, in the middle of the Civil War, just given the Emancipation Proclamation, it won't go into effect for a few weeks. But he said we're the last best hope of Earth. Right? He saw that. And I think Americans imbibe that and have a feeling in the list of accomplishments that I made across time and missing half of them are spectacular. But if you are the best, if you are the goat of countries. Do you think Tom Brady said after he won the first, well, now I can just rest on my lawns. There is a kind of almost furious self involvement, that is to say, self reflection, Socratic, know yourself. There's an incredible criticism. Even more discipline is a. And I think what happens is that patriotism sort of splits off down the road and one way is a kind of lazy thing fills of slogans and it's basically used to exclude people. And the other patriotism which I think you subscribe to is one which is energetic, it is engaged in process, it is in pursuit of happiness. It is after a more perfect union and it involves self reflection. This is what, what our founders when they said pursuit of happiness was lifelong learning. If you learned all your life you were then could earn this extraordinary gift and responsibility of citizenship. You wanted to become more virtuous. This is reaching back over the dark ages into antiquity and pulling out these virtues. The most important is to be virtuous and that if you did that, this constant self awareness and improvement then you'd be, I mean in the middle of the deliberations about the articles of Convention while Washington's fighting in New York City against the British and about to lose because of a bad decision, strategic tactical decision. John Adams is going, is there enough, there's so much ambition and avarice, so much lust for profit. Is there enough virtue enough to create a republic? Those are the questions we should be asking ourselves. Not, not is this group bad? Is this, is it blood and soil? I mean if you, if you're making a blood and soil argument to me you're just, you're going to say this is the Native American story, right? Because if anybody has six or seven hundred generations of experience to our nine or ten, it's native peoples. And California as you correctly pointed out has an unbelievably shameful period where you have essentially state sponsored genocide. People were given a bounty. But you know, we have this, this responsibility to be self critical, to be self improving to. If we're going to say we're the greatest, then we have to live up to that. And that requires an incredible amount of self examination which you find autocrats do not want to participate in. To do that would be to admit a mistake. To do that would be to say there's room for me to improve. To do that is to apologize. To do that is to sympathetic. To do that is to walk a mile in someone else's shoes. And that's what, what, what people are doing, you know, as they are now. There's a kind of muscular patriotism that I'm beginning to sense coming and it's not, it's not a Democrat or Republican thing. It's go, wait a second, I did not sign up for this. I signed up for something. Yes, yes. I don't agree with you about this taxes or, or that or whatever it might be, but I Do believe in these founding documents. I do not think that somebody should enrich themselves in office. I do not think. I mean, the founders, if they came as the scholar Yuval Levin told me back in November, he said they wouldn't be surprised that someone was seeking monarchical power, but they'd be so surprised and so disappointed in that. Their first article of the Constitution after the beautiful poetic preamble written by Gouverneur Morris of New York. The rest of it is code. It's just sort of the operating manual. It's like ikea. Well, how the hell am I going to put this thing together? And the first article is the legislative co.
- [39:22]
B
Equal.
- [39:22]
A
And they would be so shocked that the legislative had yielded so much out of fear of some kind of retribution that they'd ceded the ability to tax. It's terrible. That's the province of Congress. The idea that you could change what the White House looked like or build a ballroom or slap your name on, that's the province of Congress. The second article, the executive would be the managers to carry out what Congress had said. And oh, no, we're in too modern an age. Things happen too fast. So you can have wars of choice. And inevitably the chaos that's created, if you get back to where you were before, somehow that's an overwhelming victory. You know, you go, okay, what Orwellian world are you living in, Ken, when
- [40:08]
B
you so much to unpack there? I mean, that was. And he was a, he's a conservative historian that you were just referencing.
- [40:14]
A
Oh, Yuval Levin, a conservative scholar of the Constitution. But this is where I'm saying we're all. If you look at Judd Ludig, you know, these are people who are stunned at the kind of liberties that have been taken and the presumption that this is, you know, that the original founders intended a Christian nation. They wanted a God fearing nation, but they were saying, no, look what's happened in the whole history of humanity when a government, you know, a kingdom has said that we have one way, my way or the highway, you know, Protestant Henry VIII or a Catholic Louis xiv, you know, and if you, you know, presume that it's, it's one thing, you violated the entire spirit of the United States.
- [41:02]
B
Did you, I mean, talk about presumption. When you went through this project, I mean, was how revelatory was all of this to you over the last 10 years? I mean, for someone that knows his stuff, you must have come in with all kinds. You were like, I got this.
- [41:16]
A
Yes, right, exactly. You know, that. Well, I actually, Governor, I learned years ago to drop that arrogance because, you know, when I got my seventh or eighth film was a big hit history on. On baseball. And I go, well, I have no baseball now. And each day was a daily humiliation of what I didn't know. And so now I just presume that I've got a kind of working man's person. I'll do all right on Jeopardy. It's, I'm the guy you wanted Trivial Pursuits at your party, but I know nothing. And so rather than think about it, rather than tell you what you should know about the revolution, why don't I share with you what I just discovered. What we just discovered. It's very much a we over the course of the last 10 years, and we've got two dozen scholars and writers. And we're not. We're taking what they've learned, not what their political, not what their particular philosophy, not political, but their political. Their philosophy, what the historians call historiography. We don't have to buy into that. And so you can be strengthened. And like the spokes on a wheel that give the great dynamic strength to a wheel, because you've got lots of different perspectives, it isn't just one. You're not seeing it through one lens. You're able to. And this is where story, narrative, which was understandably out of fashion by the middle of the 20th century, is actually still the only way to tell a story. Honey, how was your day? Does not begin. I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb, unless somebody t bones you. And that's exactly the way you do it. What you do is you edit human experience. And to do that, you're going to have to know what that was. And so we studied scholars who knew the Native American countries, knew the difference between the Delaware and the Shawnee, who were actually partners or the Creek, the Muscogee Creeks or the Cheyenne or, you know, whatever the. I mean, the Cherokee or the Anishinaabe or the Haudenosaunee, the. The Cayuga, Seneca, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida and Mohawk that made up the Iroquois Confederacy, this democracy, in a way, this Union, this Confederacy that Franklin, 20 years before the Revolution, said, whoa, this is pretty good. We should try it ourselves. And everybody said, really good idea. And every colony said, nope, we don't want to give up one ounce of authority to anything bigger than ourselves. And so 20 years later, this will come to a head and we'll be able to figure out on our own that. But it just tells you how much we're bound to each other, how much we're dependent on each other. We know what the social compact is. And unfortunately, we live in a world today in computers where it's 1 and 0, or the media culture, where it's one thing or the other and we forget to select for the things, things that we hold in common. I mean, I say this to my daughter, I have four daughters, 43 to 15. I just say social media isn't Right.
- [44:17]
B
Right.
- [44:17]
A
It's not social. You've been in a room where people are all on their stuff. You know, how is that connecting?
- [44:23]
C
It's not.
- [44:24]
A
I live in a little village in New Hampshire. We get together, we have a town meeting, we decide whether we're going to buy a new bumper. It's a big deal, you know, for the. For the fire department. And that's what civics has gone out of our lives. And so too, I think, that artificial intelligence isn't as long as we always, I mean, is. Artificial intelligence is artificial. So as long as you keep that in mind, that the glory is. What our founders understood was the primacy of the individual. Right? This holds primacy. It's at the heart, the value of each human life is at the heart of all religious practices, all of them, and particularly the children of Abraham, which would include Christians and Jews and Muslims, where that is there. But it's not to slight any other religion, which all has this sense of the primacy of the individual. And when we get away with it, we say, well, you know, an animal farm, Orwell's animal Farm, which is why we have invoked the word Orwellian, the adjective Orwellian so much lately is that, well, some animals are more equal than others, right? And then that's the slippery slope in which you just go back and you suddenly wake up to do that. You know, I think our. Our next chapter, which I think has already begun to being written, is repair and restoration. Like, yeah, look, we'll go back to our. Let's. Let's go back to arguing about the things that matter without demonizing us. You know, you just wondered, you know, for a long time, the Republican Party admirably and nobly held to this notion of the thread of communism, sometimes to great expense, if you think about the McCarthyism of the 50s, but also just sort of the willingness to say no, that's what it is. But when that system collapsed, unfortunately, there was an absence, a surface of ideas. And so what did you do? You made Bill Clinton and then by extension, all Democrats, the enemies and then all of a sudden we have. Have people that I meet in the course of my life who believe we're pedophiles. I mean, actually the stuff is coming out that it may not be limited to Democrats or even any political party, but just bad actors. And we need to get to the bottom of it and figure out that we don't need to keep wagging the dog here by capturing South American leaders or threatening Greenland or starting another war just to distract from information that I believe was supposed to come out in December, mid December, by law, by congressional law. And not all of the information has come out. And I just want to know who's being protected.
- [47:13]
B
God bless. Too much there to unpack. I want to go back.
- [47:16]
A
I'm sorry.
- [47:17]
B
No, I appreciate all. And this notion of being repairs of the. The breach. I love that. I want to. And I need. We all, I think all of us need to get back a little bit to that. But I'm curious as you went back in over the course and I appreciate how you sort of unpacked this journey that you went on with your team. Trying to understand our origin story. What were they? I mean, begs the question, what was most revelatory to you? What did you come in and just stop? You stopped. Sort of stopped you in your tracks? Like, how did I miss this? How did I not understand more fully that.
- [47:54]
A
Well, one of it is the centrality of Washington. I mean, I just was like not willing to accept that notion that he's the father of our country. But there's a German language newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the spring after the first, the Valley Forge, the horrible Valley Forge, who calls him Des Landeswas, the country's father. And you begin to realize that invested in this person is the future of this place. If it had been captured, it had been all over. But I think it's more the grassroots of this, how much it meant to people. Remember, if you were. This is a civil war. And that means it's not just the British 3,000 miles away. We're just trying to throw them off. It's our neighbors. This is a civil war. We're born in violence, at least 20% overall. But in any given place, it might be a hotbed of loyalism. They're against it, they believe, and we don't make them enemies. They believe quite correctly that the British constitutional monarchy is a hell of a good form of government. And it is their prosperity, the land they have, their literacy, their life expectancy, their good fortune is based on. And you're asking me to give this all up to support an idea that has never been tried before. Are you out of your mind? The thing that blows my mind, Governor, is that how many people said yes to this completely new idea. And that it was not just the Declaration and the list of injuries and usurpations. 18 of them. That the King, not Parliament, was now guilty of. It wasn't just common sense. It wasn't just later on the American crisis. These are the times that dry men. So the summer soldier and the Sunshine Patriot already then they know there's a distinction between the people who love to wave the flag and then aren't there. And at the end of the Declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. It means something. You know, George Washington may have been the richest person in the country. Certainly was for a time. He risked his life and his fortune and his sacred honor in support of this thing. And that's unbelievable. And so did a 14 year old kid named John Greenwood from Boston. So did a 15 year old named Joseph Plumb Martin from Connecticut. So did a lot of people that we don't know their stories who just said, yeah, I'm throwing in with this lot. It behooved most Native Americans to side with the British because they think at least they could forestall the onslaught into their territory at the Ohio Valley Valley. It was a short term arrangement. And then many times the British, whose empire depended entirely on the wealth that was generated from slavery, particularly in the Caribbean, they had 13 colonies there that were huge profit centers. Only South Carolina and Virginia, for the reasons you can assume are profit centers, the rest of the colonies aren't. But we're populated and we make things so we're good trading partners. And they want to keep us from taking Indian land because they can't afford to protect us. And we want to take Indian land. So it's not just taxes and representation. So you begin to see this like dropping a stone in the water and you follow the ripples out and it becomes so amazing that we see Lexington Green, April 19, 1775. The chances of success are zero. And six and a half years later, on the 17th of October at Yorktown, they're 100%. Don't you want to know how that happened? And does Washington win every battle? No, he loses most of his battles. The big victory at Saratoga is, is away from him. He sent Daniel Morgan and most importantly, Benedict Arnold, who becomes the hero of Saratoga for the Patriots. We can get into Benedict Arnold later. It's so interesting that for us, it means one thing and it, it, it's actually a much more, more dynamic, complicated thing that teaches an essential lesson about humanity and the conflicts not only between people but within them. Just as George Washington is wrestling, Thomas Jefferson is wrestling, they know slavery is wrong. They know it's wrong. And the great Harvard scholar Annette Gordon Reed says, how can you do something if you know it's wrong? And she comes on camera and says, well, that's the human question for all of us. Meaning she's not taking Thomas Jefferson off the hook and forgiving him, she's leaving him on the hook and putting the rest of us for our sanctimonious idea of our ability to judge another when we ourselves are walking contradictions and flaws. So the fact that we had a success, that something was born out of here that turned out to be the greatest country ever, right, is just spectacular to me and is a wonderful one. If you just think that it's only spectacular, then you missed a point. We had some compromises in the Constitution that were incredibly genius and some that were unbelievably tragic that perpetuated the institution of slavery. Even when they knew, I mean, they were saying, George Washington said, you know, they're treating us like slaves. They're treating us in the same way that we treat the Negroes over which we have arbitrary sway. So they know, they're using the language of slavery and they're going, you know, wait a second. And you have find the British going, how is it that this driver of Negroes, George Washington, is having success against us? I mean, not that they're opposed to slavery, they're for it, but every once in a while they'll offer freedom to those enslaved people of rebels. As a scholar pointed out in the film, not sure how you tell if you're, if you're an enslaved person of a loyalist and you hear there's freedom promised, I would say, oh yeah, my master's this. And you know, and so people would just. We think of it as big ideas. And they are, they're really important and they're. And we're going to sponsor revolutions for the next 200 plus years. When Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnamese independence, independence in 1945, he's quoting Thomas Jefferson. But the decisions that people make are incredibly local. Where is the daylight that I can get to? For me, not only me, but my children and my children's children's children, like, that's the important thing. If you're enslaved, this is the last thing anybody on earth wants to be and you're going to make the decision which you think is a fest sometimes that's going to the British. There's painful, painful moments in New York City, which doesn't evacuate. The British don't leave there until two years and a month after Yorktown. And what they're doing in those last months is they're adjudicating which of the black people that have been with the British get to go and who have to stay. So a mother gets to go because she can prove employment with an officer or a loyalist, but the daughter can't. It's the reverse of the birthright citizenship. Right? Right. So the daughter goes back to Virginia and is enslaved and the mother goes to Nova Scotia going, what happened? And there's two lists, they're called lists of Negroes. And every week or so they meet at Faunce's Tavern in lower Manhattan. Still there, table's still there. And four Brits and three Americans determine who gets to go and who doesn't get to go. And they're horse trading with human lives in a country that had just proclaimed to the world less than 10 years before.
- [55:37]
C
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- [56:46]
D
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C
Wasn't that delicious? So good.
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B
Your bill, ladies.
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D
I got it.
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A
No, I got it. Seriously, I insist. I assisted first.
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Don't be silly.
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A
You don't be silly.
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People with the Wells Fargo active cash
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Rock, paper, scissors for it.
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Rock, paper, scissors.
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C
Shoot.
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D
No.
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B
The Wells Fargo ActiveCash Credit Card.
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- [58:47]
A
That all human beings, all men, are created equal. It's a pretty good story.
- [58:53]
B
So, so much. I mean, I, and I. And I love your language about, you know, this notion of a finished monument versus, you know, this notion of unfinished responsibility. And I. You keep coming back. This notion of citizenship, active, not inert citizenship. That we have agency, we can shape the future. We're not bystanders. I think it was Brandeis who said, in a democracy, the most important office is office of citizens. Citizen.
- [59:15]
A
So this is what Washington knew, right? When he resigns, I think he was tacitly saying, even when he resigned the military commission, I am a citizen. And then at the presidency, I'm a citizen. Adams wanted him to take a kind of royal or princely title. He goes, no present. It's okay for me, right? And so I'm sorry I interrupted you, but I think that's really at the heart of it, that. That this building block is not the top, it's the bottom or the bottom is the top. The individual agency of each human being. And the story of us has been the expansion of what was a very limited phrase. All men are created equal. All white men of property free of debt. We don't mean that anymore. And the more we grow and the more we expand it, the richer we become. And that's the story of us. No them involved, but of us.
- [60:10]
B
The no kings rallies the sense. I mean, I'm starting to feel more optimistic listening to you about this moment. This sort of. This energy, this percolation, this notion that the top is the bottom. This notion that we. This foundational principles that have allowed us to endure and endure these moments. And the fact that these moments are hardly unique in our history and the fact that we've been able to. To persevere. I mean, are you feeling more or less optimistic in that context? I know it's the rogue question. You get every interview. So in the context of this moment in particular, and I mean quite literally, perhaps this moment.
- [60:50]
A
Yes, Governor, I believe in that. I do think that the three great crises that we could identify after our founding, the Civil War, the Depression and World War II, were the great crises. I think we're in a fourth. I think the existential threats are unprecedented. In those first three crises, there were free and fair elections, there was a peaceful transfer of power, there was an independence of the judiciary. All of which seems in play. And yet I think part of the sort of arrogance of the present is you think that because you're alive, that you must know more than those who came before us, that somehow, because we've survived, our situation is so much more bad or worse or great. And I think that we have to. Lincoln says it in that same address to Congress. He says the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new. We must think anew, we must act anew, we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we can save our country. Country that leads to the last best hope of earth. It means that you've got to just sort of say, yes, it's unprecedented, but also have faith in the American people, which is something that autocrats don't have. They can use them, they can play groups off one another, but they have zero faith in. In the actual stuff of what it is to struggle to be human and to just, you know, in economies and families, get by you know, with, with opioid addictions, with hard work, with illness, unexpected illnesses, all of the things not, you know, the, the disparity of wages. I mean, I made a film on baseball, and in the 70s, you know, it was the same thing with, with corporate CEOs, that, you know, the CEO of a company made it best like eight, eight, nine times what the line guy made. And now we're talking about 800 times as much. And so the proportionality of things and it permits. We have great articulators of that disparity. And we sort of think as politics, as a line, it's a circle. Like, a third of Bernie's supporters voted for Hillary, a third stayed home, and a third voted for Trump. So you know that somewhere in this, you have to just be able to articulate that you understand what is the stuff of life. How do you get through? How do you put food on the table for your families? How do you do that? But incumbent in an American dynamic is that you have to exercise citizenship. It is no longer convenient to stay home or to say it doesn't count because it does count and it does matter. And you can stay home and it doesn't mean you have to be involved. You don't have to go to march marches. You don't have to do this, but you can vote. You can be engaged in civics taken out of our curriculum. It's been a dirty word for three or four decades. They don't teach history anymore either. They just want the automatons of STEM to just go forward. There's something missing. I remember an executive when I was working on my first film on the Brooklyn Bridge. Executive AT, AT&T. Very senior. He was just lamenting. He said, said, I just wish you would come to work for me. I can teach you what I know. I have all these newly minted MBAs, but they can't write a letter. They don't know about ethics, they don't know about history, they don't know about comparative religion. And so they're absent something, and I can't teach them that. You have that, and I can teach you whatever things. And you don't want to do this. I said, no, I do not. I want to go off and make documentary films. And thank you very much for introducing me to people who would help us do it. But it really stuck with me. It was a lament that somehow in our rush for the bottom line, we've forgotten to serve the basic instincts of a democracy, which is a mechanical question. How does it work? Who are we? What's the ingredients? You know, people talk about Machiavelli. The prince says this Machiavellian is a pejorative adjective, but it really is the study of how you get things done, how you get along with your neighbors, how, how do you make something, how do you compromise? How do you say, okay, you want this? I remember in my film about Thomas Jefferson, 20 plus years ago, George Will said, democracy is the politics of the half loaf. You don't get everything. Half loaf, half loaf, you don't get everything. You know, be so suspicious of the 99 to 1 vote and B, rejoice at the 51 to 40 vote. You know, that's okay, that's okay. And what you're, you know, people argue, oh, we're just trying to address this, you know, those 2 percentage points of independence or soccer moms or whatever the new thing is.
- [65:48]
D
It's.
- [65:48]
A
No, it's not about that. You're in trying to engage everybody in this process. And that's where I think you can have a sense of optimism, you can have a sense of, of purpose. You can say, no, this doesn't sit right. I don't like, like it. Somebody celebrating the death of somebody else that I, that I, that they didn't agree with or demonizing somebody else that they disagree with. Disagreement is human right. You know, even within ourselves, Whitman said, do I contradict myself? I contradict myself. And it's, it's about as American a catechism as I know.
- [66:25]
B
So as we march forward, candidate to July 4th, and you know, here we are just a few months out. I mean, what, you know, look, if you could, you can write the next, the chapters of the next few months. What, I mean, at our best, what would you expect? What do you expect of the States? And what do you, I mean, obviously you've got the saccharine version, as you describe it, that, you know, is likely to be portrayed top down. And, you know, we can anticipate, I mean, you know, everything dyed in purple and, you know, pictures on the side of walls and, you know, arches and coins, that version. But what, you know, what's, what's. Give me. Write that story. What should we be doing? What can I be doing in the next few months? What should we be doing?
- [67:07]
A
In many of our religious traditions, there's a phrase as above, so below. And you could say, if you want to translate to something more rational, that there is a startling and profound similarity between the architecture of an atmosphere atom and the architecture of the solar system. Right. So just hold that and say, I need to be two things. I need to be individual. I read at the lake, on the porch, the Declaration of Independence every single Fourth of July, you know, and my poor kids. And now grandkids can't start eating the hamburgers and hot dogs until granddaddy gets through with this reading. And whatever you do that makes you happy. My favorite holiday, without a doubt, before this film, before any conversation, has always been the Fourth of July followed by Thanksgiving because of the way we come together. So let's have what we always do, that individual thing, but then let's try to imagine it as a larger thing. So if there's an atomic moment on that porch at the lake, what's this? What's the solar system of this? And it has to be a kind of righteous re. Engagement with the principles of our founding. Let's go back and say this is what we meant. And, you know, I. I had screenings of the film before it was done. We're working on it. We're trying to get better. And. And I go, geez, there's a lot of red meat for maga. And then I went and said, great, great. You know, this is it. You know, there's these over mountain men in the Carolinas that are. Have defied the British proclamation that you can't cross the Appalachians. And they just said, f you and went over there and started it. And then when the British said, unless you do this, this and this, we will come over and make your lives unpleasant. They go, oh, yeah, we're coming over and making your life unpleasant. So, you know, where you did not want to be in the revolution was New Jersey, because it's guerrilla warfare and it's patriots killing loyalists and loyalists killing patriots. Or South Carolina particularly, where it's just fettered slaughter. But there's some battles in which big battles, Kings Mountain, over the border in North Carolina, in which there's only one British officer, he's leading the loyalists, and everybody else is an American killing an American. And so I think we have to just disenthrall ourselves, as Lincoln said of this obsession with the other, and understand how if you want to get things done, you know, you're not making America great again, you're making America great going forward. It's always been great. It has not been diminished except by those moments when we have pretended that our future is in our past. Our future is up ahead. You know, big headline, Stop. You know, documentary filmmaker says future is ahead of us.
- [70:08]
B
It's also inside of us, decisions, not conditions.
- [70:11]
A
Inside of us.
- [70:12]
B
We gotta manifest it.
- [70:14]
A
You have to manifest it. And I think that there's a way to do it at an individual level. I mean, obviously our biggest responsibility is how we raise our kids and who we are to our neighbors. You know, the content of our character, Dr. King would say. But then there's a kind of civic responsibility that we have that says, however small the orbit of the solar system is, we have to be engaged in something bigger than ourselves.
- [70:43]
B
I love that. And Ken, before we leave, I'd be remiss. A adjacent topic, though, connected to all things Ken Burns and the Ken Burns Effect. Today is the 50th anniversary of the founding of Apple. And I know you've talked in the past, and just very briefly, I'm curious, just sort of reflecting on. You've said some very generous things about Steve Jobs, though you weren't generous enough to give in to his request that you commercialize or support.
- [71:16]
A
Well, it was the opposite thing. He called me up in November of 2002 and said, will you come and see me? First of all, I didn't believe it was Steve Jobs. So I went out there and I met him and he led me into this room with a couple of engineers and he showed me this thing, and I'm still a Luddite. And it was how you could download your photographs or upload your photographs and pan and zoom, kind of like that. I said, oh, great. And he said, and next month, January of 2003, all Mac computers will have this all on it. And I said, wow, that's great. Basically going, I have no idea really what he's talking about. And he says, and so we'd like to keep the working title. And I said, oh, okay, what's that? And he goes, the Ken Burns Effect. And I go, I don't do commercial endorsements. And he goes, what? Go back to his office. We spent about an hour in which we became friends. And whenever I was in Silicon Valley, I would stay at his house and sleep in his guest bedroom. And we eventually took his famous daughter Lisa as an intern and got to know his wife and his smaller kids. And, you know, it was wonderful. Walk, endlessly walking to dinner, even when he was sick, into Palo Alto from his. His. His home. But I walked out of the room an hour later, not just with that friendship, but with a commitment that Apple continued to honor, of giving software and hardware to nonprofits, which was the only way I could sort of handle it. And he just couldn't conceive of it. And it's so funny, because that when I tell this story, people said, oh, you should have asked him for like, you know, a tenth of a penny every time we use. I said, you don't know Steve Jobs. He would have said, we'll call it the pan and zoom effect. Goodbye.
- [72:54]
C
Right?
- [72:54]
A
And I. But, but what he respected was somebody who was just outside him saying. At one point, he came to me and he says, he calls me up and he goes, you don't, you're not, you're not doing this right? You're, you're being taken advantage of. And he said, I want your lawyer to talk to my lawyer about your, your PBS deals, because I'm in pbs. And, and they're outside the marketplace, right? And, and then he came back, he said, oh, it looks like you're doing, like, you've got the right thing. And I said, look, all I want is to be independent. I want to be able to talk to you or the governor of California and say, all of these films are director's cuts. There's not a layer of suits above me that are saying, longer, shorter, sexier, less sexy. Are you more violent? Violent, Less violent. But that another way, let me just put it this way. If you don't like any of those films, it's all my fault. And that's what I want it to be. You know, I love it.
- [73:47]
B
Hey, Ken, just, just very briefly, just previewing you, you mentioned a couple of the films you're working on. I mean, I think there's an LBJ film as well.
- [73:54]
A
I mean, yeah, yeah, we're, we're doing LBJ and the Great Society. You know, we've done the Vietnam thing, and LBJ's like Nixon, one of these great tragic figures. But his domestic agenda, he was trying to be the next coming of fdr. In fact, he chooses the initials because the first person who ever had initials in a big way to the population was fdr. And so here's lbj. And that, that was an interesting thing. And I, it's. We take care of his domestic agenda in one sentence in an 18 hour film, 10 episodes on Vietnam. So we wanted to reverse engineer to pull the sweater inside out and be inside the White House. Watch the guns of Vietnam get louder and louder. But see this extraordinary domestic achievement. He's able to pass a civil rights bill that John F. Kennedy, who's very late to civil rights, probably couldn't get passed, and voting rights. And he knew as a Southerner what the cost would be. And I think to be able to shed from waking up on election day. And knowing you had every former state of the Confederacy on your pocket is not necessarily the best thing you want to be in because you're dealing with people who are continuing to perpetuate the lost cause. And then he does all this other stuff, Medicare and Medicaid, public broadcasting, all these things that are sort of under assault. But it's an amazing story, so we're just doing that. We're also doing history of Reconstruction called Emancipation to Exodus. I've had the privilege of interviewing Barack Obama eight times eight, two hour, hour and a half, two hour interviews. No rush. We want to wait until there's scholarship and whatever. And we also are saving a couple of interviews to sort of think about what happened after his presidency. And until the dust settles a bit, it's going to be hard to talk about it. We've also been filming people who knew Dr. King in the service of a big biography on King. So those are very much active. And we've just begun work on a big history. We originally thought for years we'd do something on the Cold War. And I just switched it about a year ago or six months ago in my mind to doing a history of the CIA. And it just, just think about it. You'll get the Cold War, but you'll get all the intimacies of the stories and you'll, you'll be in every President's Oval Office and you'll be, you know, in, in exotic places all around the world with people who are putting their life on their lines and, and big mistakes, huge mistakes and heroic unsung successes. And, you know, that's the essence of a good story, right?
- [76:25]
B
In an essence of a hell of a life. Ken, look at you. I mean, decades of work. I mean, so you are hardly slowing down.
- [76:33]
A
No, no, no. So I'm 72 and I'm like an idiot. I've got more on my plate than I've ever had because, you know, if I were given a thousand years to live, which I will not be given given, I would not run out of topics in American history. So there's this kind of sense of urgency of like having to, to get it to done. There's so many great stories still to be told.
- [76:54]
B
Well, thank you for being such a great storyteller. Thank you for reminding me. It's not just arguments that win the day. It is storytelling that can move people
- [77:03]
A
and, and, well, you know, it's a benign Trojan horse. You let the story in and it doesn't come out in the middle of the night. And slay the populace and burn the city down. It comes out and it has the possibility of offering people, not the binary that doesn't exist in the real world, only in computers, a one and a zero and only an immediate thing. Red state or blue state. Right. So if you've got a complicated story, then you have to begin to understand, like, oh, I have these two, and I can't be convinced that it's only black or white. From what the TV tells me, it's not one thing or the other. I have inside me these contradictions, these flaws and these weaknesses. And it makes me a better citizen, makes me a better parent, makes me a better husband or wife. It makes me a better politician. It makes me a better American. And that's all we want.
- [77:57]
B
I love it. Ken, thanks for joining us. Thank you.
- [78:01]
A
Thank you, sir.
- [78:07]
D
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C
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