#615 - Ken Burns

Summary

This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von

Episode #615 - Ken Burns

Release Date: October 7, 2025
Guest: Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker
Main Theme: Exploring the process and meaning behind Ken Burns’ documentaries—particularly his new “The American Revolution” series—and discussing the deeper purpose of U.S. history, the responsibilities of citizenship, and how the past continually “rhymes” with the present.

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Episode Overview

In this engaging, wide-ranging conversation, Theo Von hosts legendary filmmaker Ken Burns to discuss his upcoming epic, "The American Revolution," as well as the meaning of documenting American history, the importance of self-examination as citizens, and the lessons that the past offers for our present era. The episode is rich in stories—personal, historical, even technical—illuminating not just U.S. history but also the role of grief, virtue, and storytelling in our lives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Ken Burns Effect: Origin and Storytelling Philosophy

• [03:04-08:05]
  • Ken shares the backstory of how the famous “Ken Burns Effect” (pan/zoom photo technique) came to be named, including Steve Jobs’ personal outreach and their subsequent friendship.
  • “Our idea was to energetically explore the landscape of a painting and treat old photograph like it was a feature filmmaker's master shot...to wake up the image, to wake the dead.” (Ken Burns, 04:13)
  • Ken emphasizes he doesn’t do endorsements, but allowed the naming as it represented a philosophy of image manipulation, not a product push.

2. Personal History & The Power of Grief

• [08:05-11:38]
  • Ken recounts losing his mother to cancer at age 11, his father's mental illness, and how seeing his father cry at a movie inspired his career.
  • “I seem to be keeping my mom alive...and my late father-in-law said, 'Look what you do for a living. You wake the dead...Who do you think you're really trying to wake up?'” (Ken Burns, 09:59)
  • Discussion dives into how love and grief fuel creative work and lifelong quests to “wake the dead” through storytelling.

3. Documentary as National Self-Examination

• [11:39-15:53]
  • Ken talks about U.S. history as both the U.S. and “us”—intimate and grand—and the responsibility of diving into big topics like the Civil War or the American Revolution.
  • Conversation shifts to Huey Long, power, corruption, and how documentary holds space for empathy and warning.

4. The Roots and Relevance of the American Revolution

• [16:08-24:09]
  • Ken details how his new series covers not only the events, but the philosophy behind the Revolution, explaining why he ranks it “the most important event since the birth of Christ” (17:09) due to the invention of citizenship and equality.
  • Discussion of the “pursuit of happiness” as process, not acquisition, and how the Founders’ fears about virtue and self-improvement still echo.

5. Modern Resonance and Civic Responsibility

• [24:10-32:18]
  • The Revolution is explored as a civil war—with communities and families split—and as the origin point for self-government and democratic ideals.
  • “It is in the interest of an authoritarian to have everybody be a kind of superstitious peasant. Right. Uneducated, not improving, not in pursuit of happiness and lifelong learning...” (Ken Burns, 22:59)

6. Process of Becoming & Continuing the Experiment

• [39:00-50:28]
  • Lincoln's warnings about self-destruction (“...if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher” (39:00)) brings the discussion current: The only way America can fall is by suicide—internal division, loss of virtue, or abandonment of the civic project.
  • Theo and Ken repeatedly return to the theme of self-examination, the necessity of dialogue, and the idea that democracy is never “done” but always a work in progress.

7. Storytelling: Myth, Fact, and Everyday People

• [52:06-77:44]
  • Ken debunks common myths (“Paul Revere did NOT say ‘the British are coming’...” (52:06)), underlines the inclusive, collective reality of historical events, and explains the logic behind significant casting choices for narration.
  • The idea that documentary storytelling is “sharing the process of discovery” rather than rote teaching is emphasized.
  • Notable: Many A-list actors read voices in the Revolution series, but all for SAG minimum—emphasizing collaboration, not commerce. (70:40-72:29)

8. Reflecting on Colonialism, Modern Media & Public Trust

• [77:44-99:59]
  • The conversation tackles the persistence of colonialism, the dangers of media “noise,” and the crisis of trust in institutions versus people.
  • “We are being told things that aren't true...the greatest danger is that we are being told things that aren't true. And...there's not anybody saying, 'Well, actually, that's not true.'” (Ken Burns, 83:07)
  • Public Broadcasting’s virtues and Ken’s painstaking process for ensuring factual accuracy are discussed in depth.

9. The Importance of History, National Parks, and Ongoing Experiments

• [99:59-104:32]
  • Connection drawn between the Declaration of Independence, the creation of National Parks, and America's unique “civic compact.”
  • “That gives you access to all time, which then gives you a perspective...” (Ken Burns, 102:29)

10. Information, Algorithms, and Civic Health

• [104:32-108:28]
  • Discussion about algorithmic poisoning and the lack of an “Internet Bill of Rights” for social media—comparing digital dangers to public health concerns.
  • Both agree on the need for “an overarching sense of discipline” in information and a recommitment to shared facts and values.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Grief and Creativity:
  “Grief is only love that's got no place to go.” —Stephen Wilson Jr., quoted by Theo (10:38)
  “I'm waking the dead... Everything is a conversation with this woman that has not been around for 60 years.” —Ken Burns (09:59)

• On the Radicalism of the Revolution:
  “There was nothing self evident about what Jefferson was about to say, that all men are created equal. No one on earth had made that proposition.” —Ken Burns (17:10)

• On the ‘Us’ in U.S.:
  “If there's one thing I learned about making films about the us and us is that there's only us, there's no them.” —Ken Burns (21:51)

• On Leadership:
  “Washington understood that the actual highest office is citizen, and he was determined to go back to that and to not claim for himself.” —Ken Burns (74:24)

• On Division Today:
  “We are a nation of free men who will live forever or die by suicide.” —Lincoln (quoted by Ken Burns, 38:59)
  “Turn off your social media, go out into nature, hug somebody you know...” —Ken Burns, relaying advice by Governor Spencer Cox (87:23)

• On Fact-Checking and Trust:
  “We don't even want to slander the past because the past, our greatest teacher...” —Ken Burns (93:00)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:30] – Ken Burns shares the Steve Jobs/Ken Burns Effect story
• [08:05] – Ken’s childhood, loss, and inspiration to become a filmmaker
• [16:08] – The “American Revolution” series, origin story, and relevance
• [17:10] – “The most important event since the birth of Christ”
• [21:51] – The U.S. as “only us,” not “them”
• [39:00] – Lincoln: “die by suicide”—internal threats to democracy
• [52:06] – Debunking Paul Revere myths
• [70:40] – Celebrities reading for documentary, humility of contributors
• [99:57] – PBS as applied Declaration of Independence
• [104:32] – Algorithmic poisoning and the need for a digital “health department”
• [110:23] – Ken’s story about his mother, and the “pilot light” rekindled

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Tone and Style

The conversation is warm, contemplative, and often humorous, consistently returning to questions of meaning, identity, and responsibility—never shying away from complexity or contradiction. Ken’s erudition and firsthand anecdotes are matched by Theo’s candor and “everyman” wonder.

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Summary for New Listeners

Whether you love American history, wonder about the nature of citizenship, or just want to hear extraordinary storytelling and philosophical reflection, this episode is a masterclass. Ken Burns not only demystifies the process of making world-class documentaries but also argues—through story and example—that understanding our past is key to navigating our present. The American Revolution, like all of Ken’s work, is an invitation: to question, to empathize, to take up the civic work of “the pursuit of happiness,” and most of all to remember there is only us—never them.

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For more, watch "The American Revolution" premiering November 16th, and revisit Ken Burns’ many other explorations into the American soul.

Transcript

[Ken Burns]

Was even bad in America.

[Theo]

You know, I'm not home a lot. You know, I can't keep a plant alive at the moment, but when I am home, my bedroom is. It's like my sanctuary. You know, it's. It's a sacred spot for sleep. Thankfully, I have a Helix Sleep mattress. God, I like it. I mean, I get on that thing and Who? Baby girl, before I know it, it's morning and I'm feeling good. In fact, I like mine so much, I got two of them. I put one of them in the guest room over there in case mom wants to come and just launch some of her dirty dreams into that thing. Because, honestly, sleep matters more to me than ever, especially when I'm on the go, if I'm home, you know it. Days are long when you shut it down. It's time to shut it down. Getting real sleep on my Helix Sleep mattress makes all the difference. If your old mattress has you just launched in, locked in a trench over there, you need a ladder to get out that thing. It may be time for you to give Helix Sleep a try. You can sleep great, too. Just go to helixsleep.comtheo to get 25% off site wide for our audience only. That's helixsleep.comt h e o make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know that we sent you. If you're running a business. Today's guest is a filmmaker. He's a historian. He's a writer. He is a cartographer of time, if you will. His name is ubiquitous with documentaries. He's covered some of the biggest events in US History, and his new film, the American Revolution, premieres in November. I had a great chat with the one and only Mr. Ken Burns.

[Ken Burns]

Home.

[Theo]

Yeah. And if you like to sit back, whatever you feel like, and if you start to feel uncomfortable, just let us know and we'll get you.

[Ken Burns]

I'm kind of in a edge of the seat guy.

[Theo]

You are?

[Ken Burns]

Yeah. Wow. Excited.

[Theo]

That's an. I've never heard somebody say, like, I'm an edge of the seat guy.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah.

[Theo]

Like you're edging or whatever. And that's like.

[Ken Burns]

It's just. I'm excited, like, you know. Oh, yeah. If I were an animal, I'd be a puppy.

[Theo]

Oh, yeah.

[Ken Burns]

You know, kind of by the door. Yeah. Come on, come on, come on.

[Theo]

Yeah. What are we doing? It must be horrible that an animal, they don't even give it a key on its wrist or anything that's right for it to think it could have any it's just sitting by the door.

[Ken Burns]

Yes, exactly. Waiting.

[Theo]

Yeah. Like, if your wife or husband were like that and they're just sitting by.

[Ken Burns]

The door, you'd get them help.

[Theo]

Yeah.

[Ken Burns]

Or you at least give them, like, a right hug.

[Theo]

Yeah. Or a spare key. So they could at least have a chance.

[Ken Burns]

Right.

[Theo]

You get them a little button they could hit.

[Ken Burns]

Yes. Right. Just to. To walk out.

[Theo]

Yeah. That. We good. Zach, Ken Burns, thank you so much for hanging out, man.

[Ken Burns]

Pleasure. My pleasure. Good to be with you.

[Theo]

And thank you for all your. Your examination of humanity, I guess, through documentaries. I. I was like, I know about you, as most people did, you know, kind of when you burst onto the scene with the Ken Burns effect, I think that's when. That's when it kind of hit a lot of my culture. You know, you're like, instead of hiring actors and everything, we're just going to slightly.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah. Want to hear the story of how that happened?

[Theo]

Yeah.

[Ken Burns]

It's really pretty cool. So, you know, I've been trying to make films about American history since, like, the mid-70s, and I'd had some success, a couple Academy Award nominations. But I hit the jackpot when this big series in 1990 came out on the Civil War series, which, you know, use the photographs and stuff like that. And. And our idea was to energetically explore the landscape of a painting and treat old photograph like it was a feature filmmaker's master shot, having a wide, a medium, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, an insert of detail. So we were just sort of very energetically exploring the landscape of each image. And so I got a call in 2002, November, and it said it was Steve Jobs. I went, really? And he goes, yeah. He said, will you come out and visit me? And I said, yeah, that's me knocking at the door. So a few weeks later, In December of 2002, I'm in a room with him, we're talking, and he brings in a couple of pretty nervous engineers.

[Theo]

Yeah.

[Ken Burns]

And they're. And I'm a Luddite. And particularly.

[Theo]

You're a Luddite.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah. Meaning I'm not a big computer person. It represents a group in England in the 19th century who are opposed to technological changes. And so.

[Theo]

Okay, so Mennonite, Luddite, Amish. Similar.

[Ken Burns]

Well, not quite. It wasn't religious as much as a. Kind of a social. Anyway.

[Theo]

Okay, so Amish without the dairy kind of.

[Ken Burns]

That's right, exactly. So it's. It's basically folks who are opposed to it. I'm not. I'm just Inept. So my children and my grandchildren help me with all of that. Anyway, Steve is saying, look, we've been working on this thing, and every Mac computer that comes out next month, January of 2003, is going to have this feature on it. And he's showing me, and it's sort of like you can upload your photographs and pan and zoom on them very, very simply, kind of crude, superficial version of what we do or try to do with our stuff to wake up the image, to wake the dead. You know, I'm looking at it, and I'm kind of going, cool, because I don't really know what's going on. And. And he says, so we'd like to keep the working title. And I said, what's that? And. And he said, the Ken Burns Effect. I said, you know, I don't do commercial endorsements.

[Theo]

He goes, what?

[Ken Burns]

And the engineers kind of blanch. And I'd known a little bit that he had a temper. He never showed it to me, but we went back to his office, and after an hour, I. I worked out agreement that he could use it, but I'd.

[Theo]

Yeah, I already had a temperature. I already. His. His iPhone always had a cracked screen.

[Ken Burns]

Maybe, but I know some got yelled at. He never. He said, what? So at the end, I walked out, and he basically agreed to give us what turned out to be over a million dollars of hardware and software that we gave away to nonprofits, except for one or two computers that stayed in the office because we didn't have a good Mac computer in the office. And then we became friends for the rest of his life. And so whenever I visited Silicon Valley, I'd stay with him, you know, his kids. His daughter became an intern for us for a couple of semesters. So it was a really good relationship, but it is really funn. It's the technological tail that wags the dog of what I'm trying to do, which is take these old things where you don't have newsreels or you don't have living witnesses and try to wake up moments in the past and make them as dramatically compelling as you would if you could talk to some veteran, say, of the Iraq war who's still alive.

[Theo]

Well, you certainly mastered it, man. You know, I mean, and the. And the Ken Burns effect, it's like that was at the time where everybody was trying to be. Could suddenly. Everybody could suddenly be a filmmaker, right?

[Ken Burns]

That's right. Well, what. This is what Steve did by inventing this. He made us all filmmakers. He made us. It democratized it all. And what you needed were the tools to be able to polish it. I mean, my kids now and my grandkids can do stuff with this that I wouldn't have any idea how to do it. And one of the cruder tools is the Ken Burns effect, which has saved lots of vacations, lots of birthdays, lots of memorial services, lots of bar mitzvahs. You know, it's a great point, you know what I mean? And people say, oh, like, man, you didn't ask him for a cut. And I said, no, I don't do commercial endorsements. But if I'd said like, I want 1/100th of a penny every time it's used, he'd go, okay, we'll call it the pan and zoom effect. You know what I mean? It was like the great thing was to just sort of split the difference in the middle and not be so obstinate that I couldn't yield. I don't do commercial endorsement. So it was sort of awkward. But at the same time, I wasn't endorsing a thing. I was endorsing an idea of how you use and manipulate images is. Which is what I do for an image living.

[Theo]

And also you manipulate the past. Right. Just in a way to bring it to life.

[Ken Burns]

Right.

[Theo]

It's almost like you're giving CPR to it in a way. You know, I can't believe that you.

[Ken Burns]

Said that because my mom was sick from the time I was born, like a couple of years in.

[Theo]

And you grew up here in New York City, which is where we are.

[Ken Burns]

No, no, no. I was born in Brooklyn. I grew up in Delaware and Michigan and came to Massachusetts for college. But my mom had cancer from the very, very beginning and she died from.

[Theo]

When you were a child?

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, when I was 11. And it was just a horrible. Just, just the worst, shittiest growing up. And my dad had some mental illness stuff, so it was really hard. I'm. I'm not alone in having a hard.

[Theo]

Yeah, yeah. Childhood, but it's not self pity. You're just.

[Ken Burns]

But I watched my dad cry at a movie after my mom died. And he had never seen him cry when she was sick or when she died or at the impossibly sad funeral. And I realized at 12 years old, I go, I'm gonna be a filmmaker. This is 1965. This is, you know, a long time ago. 60 years ago.

[Theo]

Great.

[Ken Burns]

It's way too long to be without a mom. But I, But I said I. That meant I'd be John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock. Hollywood directors and stuff like that. And then I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and they were all documentary still photographers and filmmakers. That reminded me that there's as much drama in what. What is and was, is anything to human imagination. So I'm a documentary filmmaker By 22, I'm making films in history and I've been doing that for 50 years. So I had a crisis going through a crisis. My late father in law was an eminent psychologist. And I said to him one night, I said, I seem to be keeping my mom alive. And he goes, yeah, I bet you blew out your candles on your birthday wishing she'd come back. I go, how'd you know? And then he named two or three other things that only I knew. You know, really intimate stuff, because that's.

[Theo]

How children like that operate.

[Ken Burns]

Yes. And, and it's just, you know, what grief does and what, the inability to express it when you're 11 years old or when you're 2 years old and realize there's never a moment when there's not a sword of Damocles hanging over your head that's going to ruin everything. So, so I just, I, I said, what do you mean? And he goes, well, look what you do for a living. You wake the dead, you make Jackie Robinson and Abraham Lincoln come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? And then all of a su. I knew that's what I do. I'm waking the dead. And it's. Everything is a conversation with this woman that has not been around Theo for 60 years. 60 years, which is way too long to be without a mom.

[Theo]

It's all a love story, isn't it? In a way. Life. You know, there's a, There's a musician, Stephen Wilson Jr. Who's really great. He's a great poet. And he says that grief is only love that's got no place to go.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, it's, that's, it's. Man, I just, well, just think about the energy, the propulsion of this loss. Just for me is. And also my father's sort of. He's the smartest guy I knew, but kind of a Maserati without a clutch, you know, looked really good, sounded boom, boom, really good, but couldn't get into first gear. That, that made me, you know, such, you know, keep working. I mean, I've got 40 films, you know, I'm not stopping. All my friends are retiring and I'm like, what, what's retiring? You know, I'm, you know.

[Theo]

Yeah, you're drinking plasma at the House and taking electrolytes.

[Ken Burns]

I got stuff to do. You know, if I were given a thousand years to. Would never run out of topics in American history. Like. So this is sort of a. You know, I make films about the US But I make films about us. You know what I mean?

[Theo]

Got you. Yeah.

[Ken Burns]

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 and it is a magnificent space to operate in. I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to be. Have the responsibility. It's a huge responsibility to dive into something like the Vietnam War right now, the American Revolution, which we just finished. And, you know, or the Civil War or World War II, or the biographies we did. Huey Long, you know, we're talking about from your state of Louisiana, which is just like one of the great unknown stories. Is such an amazing story. Yeah, there he is. Good job.

[Theo]

Yeah, man. Oh, he was like. He was definitely a big.

[Ken Burns]

He had amassed more personal power than anyone else in the history of the United States in a state context. He was both governor and United States senator, which is not legal. And he was already running for president against Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 when he was assassinated in September of 1935 in the state House in Baton Rouge in the big, magnificent art deco state house he built as a kind of monument to himself when he was governor.

[Theo]

Yeah. Kind of wild to build a monument while you're alive. And then it also immediately kind of turned to Liam.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, exactly right.

[Theo]

Pretty wild how that works. As children, we would go there and, yeah, it was like a big part of the field trips and stuff like that we're growing up in. In Louisiana. But, yeah, there was something really amazing about him that he. He riled the poor, but he also was able to operate with the elite. You know, you had like. But it was hard to know if he was just out for himself. That's how I felt at the end of. There's a kind of watching your documentary.

[Ken Burns]

Ultimate Corruption of Power, you know, and. And Jefferson said power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts. Abso. And so I think Huey has that. But unlike all the other demagogues that we know, he actually did provide schools. He did provide school books. He did build bridges, he did pave roads so that the poor of Louisiana could bring their products to market. He did, you know, create hospitals. He did do all the things that he's. That he said he was going to do, but he did it in a corrupt fashion and basically leveled as the journalist I of Stone said in our film all the liberties of the republic, you know, he was kind, kind of like a Caesar who took charge and thought it was his right to destroy the democratic institutions that had more or less work. And so we have this woman from the Garden District in, in Louisiana, beautiful woman high to the man are born. And she says in the film, right in the first couple of minutes, there wasn't a Saturday night when we didn't talk about killing Yui Long. It didn't mean you were going to do it. You just wish there was some way to rid the state of this incubus which is like an old, you know, evil thing.

[Theo]

And because he wasn't born into wealth, he.

[Ken Burns]

No, no.

[Theo]

So that's another thing. If you're not in that, if you're not part of that echelon, especially in a traditional area like New Orleans, like Louisiana, then you, there's, you never really can get to those rungs of that ladder.

[Ken Burns]

Well, you know, it's really many different states, but certainly there's New Orleans, there's the Catholic south, there's the Protestant north, and he's from a wind Parish in north Louisiana.

[Theo]

Oh ye. Yeah, there's nothing up there.

[Ken Burns]

And, and was able to articulate the aspirations of people who then surrendered to him and then also had to then pay the price for the kind of dictatorial stuff. I mean he was surrounded by jack booted state troopers. He was, you know, had bodyguards. He's eventually killed by the son in law of a judge that he fired got out of his job. And so, or, or so we think.

[Theo]

Right.

[Ken Burns]

Because with all you know, things like that, there's an attached conspiracy theory that maybe he didn't even have a gun. Carl Austin Weiss was his name. Maybe he didn't do anything except confront Huey about this. And that bodyguard shot him and the ricocheting bullet in the close quarters of the, of the hallway of this state house ricocheted and killed him. But you know, we, we just don't know 100% what happened. But it's one hell of a. An American story. Yeah.

[Theo]

Yeah. I love it, man. Yeah. I think one thing about documentaries is it makes people think that you, you feel cared about. You know, I think the past feels cared about. And there's something that's very beautiful about that. I want to. The American Revolution, it's a new series, it comes out next month.

[Ken Burns]

It comes out in November, November 16th. And I've been working on it for. When it comes out. It'll be nine years and 11 months. I started it, I said yes to it when Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. And you know, Mark Twain says doesn't repeat itself. He's absolutely right. No event has happened twice. But the Bible, Old Testament says there's nothing new under the sun, meaning human nature doesn't change. So Mark Twain is supposed to have said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. So I've never worked on a film in which it wasn't rhyming in the present moment. And so the revolution is just another one of these extraordinary stories, our origin story, which we've lost touch with.

[Theo]

Oh, I think there's no doubt about it.

[Ken Burns]

It's at arm's length because there are no photographs, there's no newsreels. They're in buckets, buckled shoes, they got hoes, they got breeches, they got waistcoats, they got powdered wigs. And somehow we don't want to fuss with the, the great ideas. And the great ideas are the greatest ideas ever. I actually think the American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ.

[Theo]

I heard you say that.

[Ken Burns]

I really, really firmly believe that. Because if you think about it, up until that moment, everybody was under an authoritarian rule. They were subjects, they were superstitious peasants and we created citizens. And that's a big deal. When we say we hold these truths to be self evident. There was nothing self evident about what Jefferson was about to say, that all men are created equal. No one on earth had made that proposition that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

[Theo]

Let's go.

[Ken Burns]

That is not stuff that the world had ever really heard. He had distilled a century of enlightenment, thinking he'd been goaded on by what was happening in the. The breakdown of relationships with the British over stuff. And what became quarrel between Englishmen suddenly got broken out into natural rights. Like this is what we all not only deserve, but the world needs to change. And it did from that moment on. And that was Jefferson, and that's Jefferson distilling it. But it's the sensibility of everybody. The other thing is that it's a process thing. It's like democracy isn't something that you, you. It's a thing, it's a process, it's something you do. So when it says pursuit of happiness, the key is we can get to happiness in a second, but the key is pursuit. It's like after a more perfect union, as the Constitution says, the pursuit Means it's a process you're never getting there. And happiness did not mean the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning so that you would be virtuous enough, they borrowed from the classical traditions to, to earn the right of citizenship. And everybody talked, you hear it as we're working on that. Virtue, virtue, virtue. It's all about character. It's all about the idea that character is destiny. John Adams is petrified that there's too much ambition and avarice, too much lust for profit, that we won't be virtuous enough to sustain this republic. It's so interesting because they're all the ideas that we wrestle with today.

[Theo]

So the Declaration is kind of like a love letter to the future in a way.

[Ken Burns]

Oh God. My God, that's the biggest, best expression I've ever heard. That's exactly what it is. Tom Payne, Thomas Paine, an Englishman who came off the boat in Philadelphia, failure in everything. And he contracted dysentery or typhus on the way. And he writes this pamphlet that's published in January, early January of 1776. At that point, the war has already started at Lexington and Concord the previous April. But nobody's really sure what we're going to do with this rebellion. And certainly independency, as they called it, is not on the mind of everybody. But he writes this thing called common sense. It's this pamphlet, the most important pamphlet in American history. And just comes out and says, the king is an ass. You know.

[Theo]

Thomas Paine.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, Thomas Paine, you know. And he then says, not since the time of Noah, you know, what happened with Noah, do we have a chance to remake the world. And that's the American Revolution. It's suddenly you're no longer quarreling over Native American land or taxes or representation. You're actually into the biggest idea that human beings have suggested that we could actually govern ourselves. No, that had never happened before. And that we could, we could sustain. And we then sponsor these ideas, sponsor revolutions for the next 200 plus years. And you know, we've been going along for 249 years pretty well. Thank you.

[Theo]

And we're in it. Thank you very much. That's, that's a great answer.

[Ken Burns]

I love the Love Letter to the future though, man. I'm not going to forget that. That's a great gift you gave me today. Thank you. Oh, man, that's, that's what it is. Because it's all about.

[Theo]

Well, you said it's the pursu of happiness, right? It's like, right. Sometimes we. Even now you're challenging the way that I've thought about some of this because it's like. And you, and you're, and you're. The documentary does this and I think it's eight parts.

[Ken Burns]

I'm not sure, six, six 12 hours.

[Theo]

I haven't watched all of it. But, but, but it challenges you to think about that. It's like you're not just here to just be here. Right. You're not just here. Like you got this Willy Wonko ticket. Like to be in a, a citizen or a part of a society. It's something that is alive and that's evolving. And you need to constantly put it under the microscope.

[Ken Burns]

That's correct.

[Theo]

And you need to put you under the microscope. Right, right. We don't have a relationship with ourselves. That's one thing. I think a lot of people don't have a relationship with themselves anymore. And so I think when you're not sitting there and thinking and contemplating where you're at and how the world's affecting you and how you can affect the world, I think it starts to limit us to just looking at our, at our Declaration of Independence almost just as like a receipt of times instead of as a living document, you know, or more of like a living will and testament.

[Ken Burns]

I don't know how it could be said any better than that. I think we wear too many things instead of be too many things. We wear our faith and use it as a cudgel. You know, if there's one thing I learned about making films about the us and us is that there's only us, there's no them. I mean, and people are always creating a them to make an enemy in order to, to, to postpone the active work that I have to do that sel. And that's interestingly enough that that self reflective sense that I need to improve. You know, Mark Twain once said, nothing so needs improving as other people's habits. Like we're always ready to say how, man, you should do this differently, you should do that differently. But we're not willing to. You know, my. I have an ancestor, the Scottish poet Robert Burns, who said, oh, with some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us. And I think that this whole work of not just wearing your ideas like a piece of clothing, of fashion, but absorbing them and living it is the big dynamic. So everybody, it is in the interest of an authoritarian to have everybody be a kind of superstitious peasant. Right. Uneducated, not improving, not in pursuit of happiness and, and lifelong learning, which is what that, what they all meant.

[Theo]

Right? That's where they want us. That's where, that's where the, the rulers want you there.

[Ken Burns]

They want you in a place where you're passive, where you're distracted by your, your things and your whatever and this scandal and stuff like that. Eleanor Roosevelt once said that, that great people discuss ideas, average people discuss events and small minds discuss other people, you know, and you realize the extent to which our whole culture is based on kind of, of judgment, not of ourselves, not with the, with the self reflective scrutiny that all of our religious teachings, all of our philosophy and all of the common sense of negotiating this complicated thing that we call our lives suggest, but abandoning that in favor of. I can tell you what you're doing and I could tell you what he's doing wrong. But. Oh no, I'm, I'm, I'm fine here.

[Theo]

You know, I believe it's nice, it's nice to ref. Because it's painful to look at yourself, that is. And I think it's painful. Painful or I don't know if it's painful. It was inventive of these guys at the time and the American Revolution, it also, it, it all, it often gets classified as like 1776. That's the year everybody, everybody has. But your documentary, it kind of goes, I think from 75 or to 83.

[Ken Burns]

Well, we start at 55 and back up and show you, you know, the French and Indian War, what we call the French and Indian War was really called the Seven Years War, which is probably, probably the third global war over the prize of North America. And our revolution is the fourth global war. We don't like to think of it as a global war. So it leads up to it. But at the end of the first episode, Lexington concord happens in 1775. By 1776, the land we're sitting on, by the way, is farmland. The biggest battle of the revolution will take place on the battle of Long island, which we lose because of George Washington, who's the most important person in the history of the United States. Without him, we don't have a country. Country because of his mistakes. So nobody's perfect. Everybody's pretty complicated and wait, we don't.

[Theo]

Have a country because of his mistakes?

[Ken Burns]

No, no, we, if he didn't live, if he didn't survive, or if he surrendered, we wouldn't have a country. He's central to it and at the same time he's flawed, he's rash, he rides out on the battlefield at Kips Bay, just over there. And his aides grab the reins of the horse because he's going to get killed. If he gets killed, it's all over. He rides out in Princeton in the next January in the middle of the battle, and some aid covers his eyes. He's gonna get killed. But he makes a classic mistake at the battle of Long island in Brooklyn, what is now Brooklyn, and he doesn't protect his left flank, and the British curl him up. Makes the same mistake again the next year at the battle of Brandywine. And yet he keeps his army together. And he suddenly realizes he doesn't have to win. He just can't not completely lose. The British have to win, and they're 3,000 miles away from headqu and nobody knows what weather is coming. And it takes six weeks to get back. The news to get back to England takes even longer because the Gulf stream's not working in your favor coming the other way. And so what are you going to do? So it's. It's an amazing story. So New York, 104, 249 years ago, is in British hands, and it stays in British hands through the rest of the war ends in the fall of 1781 at Yorktown and another two years and two months before the Treaty of Paris and the British evacuate. Evacuation day is November 25th. So it's two months and 10 days.

[Theo]

That's when the Brits had to take a hike.

[Ken Burns]

Eight years when they finally leave. And it just drove Washington crazy. And in fact, everybody's going, saying, go to Virginia. The French are going, go to Virginia. Let's get them there. Which they do. And he's going, no, no. What about New York? Why don't we take back New York? Because he's the humiliation of having lost the city. And this is the biggest big British stronghold and loyalist stronghold for the war. And people don't remember that our revolution was a civil war more than our civil war.

[Theo]

Right.

[Ken Burns]

Our civil war was a sectional war, one part of the country against the other. But this is a civil war in which people in your own town, in your own family, might be loyalists and you might be a patriot or you might be disaffected. Please leave me alone. I just want to keep my head down and not be bothered by it. So there's a constant set of interesting struggles that we don't tend to deal with. I think we don't want to accept. Accept the violence of the revolution because we think it might diminish those big ideas we've been talking About.

[Theo]

Right.

[Ken Burns]

They're not in any way diminished. They're made even more inspirational and more impressive.

[Theo]

Right. It's better when you look at.

[Ken Burns]

Because of how incredibly violent and bloody this, this revolution was.

[Theo]

Well, people were willing to die for something, you know, I think you should know that Bitcoin just hit an all time high, which is pretty wild considering that it was at about $60,000 last year. When I need more bitcoin, Moonpay is always the first app that I open because it doesn't force you to buy a whole coin and it's super easy to use. Moonpay is one of the biggest partners on the show, which is why I'm excited to share that I've made my decision to accept my compensation from them in bitcoin instead of US Dollars. I'm planning to hold and save that bitcoin in my Moonpay account. Yep, that bitcoin will sit in a digital wallet that no one can access except for me. The US dollar continues to fluctuate in value, so by making this decision, I'm diversifying my portfolio and hopefully earning more from our partnership than I would have otherwise. Remember, while Moonpay makes buying crypto straightforward, it's essential to do your own research and understand the risks involved. Crypto trading can be volatile and you could lose your investment. Moonpay is a tool to facilitate your transactions, not a source of financial advice. Trade responsibly. Take me into those 20 years before. There's two groups, right? The Patriots and the Loyalists. We discovered America, right? We, we developed these colonies along the Eastern sea. So there's 13 colonies, but there's also the Native Americans. I mean, there's so many things going.

[Ken Burns]

On, so, so many elements going on. So what happens is, is everybody wants to bust out, cross over the Appalachians and take more Native American land. And it isn't just them. They are many, many nations that are lined up again. And there is different.

[Theo]

You mean, so is it many nations wanted to go over there?

[Ken Burns]

No, no, no. Many Native American nations are there. So you might have the Delaware, the Shawnee. You might have the Six nations of the Iroquois Confederation Confederacy, the Seneca, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, Oneida and Mohawk. You've got, you know, all the Cherokees in the South. You have all these different. And they're as separate and as unique as, say, Virginia is or, say France is or the Netherlands. And so you need to treat them not as a monolithic them, you need to treat them as themselves. In fact, Franklin's Whole idea. Benjamin Franklin has the idea of uniting the colonies counties because he reads about the Iroquois confederacy and they said, we are a powerful confederacy. Never fall out one with the other. So they had their individual interests. We call that states rights. But they had the federal connection that protected them in their general rights. So it's. The great irony is the American revolution destroys their confederacy. But what's going on here is people are wanting to move west. The British. British win the French and Indian war. Their treasury is bankrupt, and they have no way to protect the settlers as they're pouring across the land, trying to take land.

[Theo]

So the British are trying to control everything from over there.

[Ken Burns]

Yes, but remember, they have no money to protect their own people. They're all Brits from that. They also have 13 other colonies in the Caribbean which are much more profitable. They're all based on slave labor. Only Virginia and South Carolina are profitable. All the rest the of aren't. But we're the most populous, we're the most literate. We make things, we trade with them. And so. And we're also on the continent, which is what everybody wants. The French want it, the Spanish want it, The Dutch want it. Everybody wants to be in the Americas and to own what we call North America. And of course, the native peoples who've been there for, you know, 20,000 years want to keep it. And so there's all these tensions. And so they're big land speculators too. Like normally you and I, we'd have. We'd be working our land for a thousand years for somebody else in Wales or Scotland or Ireland or England. But now we're over here, and we can get 125 acres of our own. But there's big speculators like Franklin and Washington and. And they. They just decided that native American land is mine. Why don't I divide it up and sell it and be the middleman for land they didn't yet own? The British are like, we can't protect you. Our treasury is whatever. So not only can you not cross the Appalachians in 18. In 1763, they made a rule. You can't go over that. That enraged the colonists. And then they said, we need you.

[Theo]

To help pay the stamp act. Is that it?

[Ken Burns]

And they various things that they were going to tax us t Stamp Act. They proposed and everybody went.

[Theo]

That was amazing. That was a good sign of how the people had a lot of control.

[Ken Burns]

Well, this is what happened. The individual colonies that had no interest in connecting with one another. Franklin had suggested back in the 1750s, let's get together into a union. Union like the native peoples can't do. And we all said, no, we're not giving up our autonomy. Nobody came. Nobody wanted to do it. But then as these taxes happened, as the. The decision to not allow colonists to go into Indian land was enforced, they just suddenly started coming together. And there's committees of correspondences, the Sons of Liberty. There's resistance. Women are hugely part of it. You never hear about this. They keep this thing going. They said, we can do without. This is imported goods. We'll make our own homespun cloth. And so people are in competition. The ladies of this province are this. And. And so what happens is eventually, as always happens, and this happens in history so much is that I tell you, you know, you're acting radical. You may not be acting radical, but then you start acting more radical. You say, me, you're being tyrannical, and I may not be tyrannical, but I start acting more tyrannical. And you get to this point where somebody says this, we think they're storing arms in Lexington and Concord. Let's go and capture their leaders, this firebrand, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and let's collect this stuff, the weapons of mass destruction. Well, it's. It's their rifles and muskets and flints and gunpowder. And they go and, you know, the patriots meet them on the. On the green at Lexington. And the British say, disperse. And they'd start to. And a shot fires out. Somebody said, it's a massacre. The British kill eight or nine of us and wound others. And then they march onto Concord. And then finally at Concord, everybody said, f this, you know, we're going. And so they fight back. And the whole way, the retreat back to Boston is just a slaughter for the British. And then they're hemmed in. They're not. They can get out. They've got their. The most powerful navy on earth, but they can't. They can't move out because there's just thousands of patriots who've rushed from Rhode island and Connecticut and New Hampshire, as well as Massachusetts, Massachusetts towns, to the defense of Boston. And they ring them and they've got them in. And then it begins a war that is going to take six and a half years until Yorktown. And anytime you're in telling a story, you have to remember that everyone who's in it doesn't know how it's going to turn out. And that if you're a good storyteller, you have people tune in, pay attention to the story. Because you think it may not turn out the way you know it did. That's the essence of it. So I have people telling me about my Civil War series. They say, you know, I went into that Ford's Theater hoping the gun would jam this time. And I went, yes, that's exactly what you want, right? That's exactly what you want. Even. Even when the French decide to come in after the Battle of Saratoga, it's still not a given that we're going to win. Washington isn't totally sure that we're going to win. And when Charleston falls in in the spring of 1780, it's like, I think the game is over. I'm not sure how we can continue. And he does. And. And then the French, we have a few engagement. The first couple of engagements with the French are disasters. And we're thinking, maybe we don't. Their help isn't going to be helpful. And then their army comes and they march with Washington not to New York to liberate it, but around and down, and they trap Cornwallis and the French navy, defeats the British and allows the big guns to come in from New. I mean, it is as riveting a story as you could ever tell. And it's our story, and nobody knows it. It's our origin story. It's our origin mythology. It's our. It's our, you know, Valhalla. It's our. It's our Thor and Odin. These are all the founding stuff. And what could be more important and particularly today when we feel like we're divided, so divided. Well, you go, well, we're pretty divided back then, and we were pretty divided during the Vietnam. We were really divided during the Great Depression. And. And we were really, you know, in America first. And we were really divided during the Civil War. So maybe we're always divided and maybe the essence is not to just keep pointing and escalating it, but say, how do. What do we share in common? Common? Well, I'll tell you what we share in common. We share an origin story that on July 4th in 1776, very few countries know exactly when they were born. Where? Philadelphia. When? July 4, 1776. And what we hold these truths to be self evident. That's our story.

[Theo]

What's our zodiac sign?

[Ken Burns]

So we are. Cancer. That's our zodiac sign. Yeah, July 4th. Although I read an article the other day that suggests that actually these borders of the signs might have be shifting. So now I'm going to. Now I'm going to put an asterisk next.

[Theo]

Okay, so America's a cancer.

[Ken Burns]

Cancer with an asterisk.

[Theo]

Okay, I love that. Take me. Character. Cancer is characterized as highly emotional, imaginative and loyal.

[Ken Burns]

There you go.

[Theo]

That's.

[Ken Burns]

Maybe, maybe we ought to work on those things. Tenacious, sympathetic, creative, protective. That's pretty good.

[Theo]

Weaknesses are moodiness, insecurity, pessimism, and being easily hurt. Hurt.

[Ken Burns]

So there's a. So we. This is us, right? This is the U.S. this is us. This is us. So this is. We have. You know, there's a. There was a cartoonist named Walt Kelly and he had a cartoon series called Pogo Strip. And, and at one point he, he, the main character is this odd animal figure, says, we have met the enemy and he is us. Right, because it's a variation on a military moment. And it's, it's really true. Lincoln, as a young lawyer, not yet 29 years old, 28 years old, addresses the Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. And he's. And they're discussing foreign policy and he says, whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? And then he answers his own question. Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa could not by force take a drink in the Ohio river or make a track in the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. We are a nation of free men who will live forever or die by suicide.

[Theo]

Wow.

[Ken Burns]

So there's our challenge, right? You want to get self involved. You want to make the. Your neighbor, your enemy. You want to make lots of them. Them. Then you are headed towards that self destruction that Lincoln's talking about. You want to figure out what we share in common. This corny sort of civic virtue, civic energy that is, comes from the Declaration of Independence, like how you can work together to do it. And you know, a lot of people who are unbelievable citizens, it's like they go to the school board meeting. They like, they participate in, you know, we, I live in New England and we have a town meeting. And, and you know, sometimes the biggest decision is whether to buy a new pumper for the fire department. That's a big deal. That's civics. That's dealing with the stuff. And it's also saying, I've got to vote and I. And I have a responsibility as a citizenship to do it, and then we'll save our country then, then, you know, if, if you like the abstraction of, of disagreement and violence and all that sort of stuff, or Suddenly, just because your, your feed tells you one thing, that somebody's an enemy, then you're lost. But if you look across the room and you say, you know, I don't share in common that much with somebody who comes from Louisiana and lives in Tennessee. I, I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Delaware and Michigan. And now I've lived in New England for the last, you know, 54 years. What would we have in common? We share a love of those ideas. We share a love of that process, the pursuit of happiness. Happiness.

[Theo]

God, yeah. It comes so much back to, like, your own integrity with yourself, you know, And I think it's interesting whenever, like, as I'm watching your documentary, it's like you learn that, like, even as you were saying earlier that this is like the first time that people thought of themselves as not under rule, but of like, it's almost like we were away at summer camp or something and you kind of, your imagination started to. Boom, Bloom.

[Ken Burns]

That's right.

[Theo]

You know, like, that's kind of the feeling that I get of those of the first colonists here.

[Ken Burns]

So it's so exciting. There's a moment, I mean, blooming on.

[Theo]

Somebody else's land as well. It's definitely blooming on Native Americans. I don't want to not say so.

[Ken Burns]

So here's, here's the deal. You ask any school kid, how's the. How are the colonists who threw the tea in Boston harbor dressed? And they say, as Native Americans. Why were they dressed as Native Americans? And they go to deflect the blame. And you go, no, they were dressing. And it's so ironic and poignant and sad and also ennobling that we were saying to Britain, we're no longer part of you. The scholar Phil Deloria says, we're Aboriginal. We choose to dress this way because we're severing our feelings and our affections with the motherland because of what you're doing to us.

[Theo]

Us.

[Ken Burns]

And who do you choose? Oh, the people that you've spent the last 150 years dispossessing of their land. And, oh, by the way, are going to spend the next 150 years continuing to dispossess them of their land. So there's a great irony, but there was a point you made a second ago, a little bit later in the Declaration, after he says pursuit of happiness. There's the phrase he says, Jefferson says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer. Suffer. While evils are sufferable, it's not that.

[Theo]

Difficult to take me through that a little bit, but can you break that down for me a little bit so I can understand it?

[Ken Burns]

So he says, basically he says all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning heretofore all human beings have been under the boot of an authoritarian. And basically it's the human lot to just put up with it. And we are creating something new called a citizen. It's going to take hard work. It's going to take that self examination, it's going to take that self criticism which we're so unwilling to do. It's rather criticize the other than ourselves. Rather the to assume the discipline necessary to have the virtue getting better as a human being to be a citizen. But he's, he's putting it right down there. You will devolve back to that state where when somebody comes in who is acting as an authoritarian, you'll go, go. Fine, take it over for me, Mussolini. The trains are running on time. That's all I need is for the trains to run on time. You know, you think that's what it's about? It's not about. We know what the story of tyranny is and we know what this our story is. And our story is not the story of tyranny. And that we. And it never happens with a light switch. It happens incrementally.

[Theo]

Yes.

[Ken Burns]

You know, you don't. It's like two frogs sitting in the boiling pot of water and somebody says they're still saying to each other, I really like a hot bath, you know, until they're cooked.

[Theo]

Right.

[Ken Burns]

And so you, at some point, what Jefferson is saying is do not be so disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning do not put up with the yoke of authoritarianism. You know, be more active as a citizen and understand that that person that you disagree with, we want them to disagree. Remember, we're the first country on earth that didn't establish a religion. Like almost all of the wars that are fought are over some interpretations of religion or some other such thing that devolves from that. And we were saying make no notice of it. Thomas Jefferson himself said, if my Neighbor believes in 20 gods or no God at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. And like New York and Pennsylvania have got worked into their state constitutions, just not paying attention to a particular religion means you are free from all the tyrannical thou shall. Rather than. This is like the thing that you're talking about, that individual responsibility, that's another them and me. That's exactly when. When it. When it is. This is. And it is an acceptance. Thou shall. Is telling somebody else how to be and how. How that's wrong. So the whole story is trying to figure out we. You could say that we're a nation in the process of becoming like. And what do you want to be? Ever seen the movie? It's a wonderful.

[Theo]

You should always be a nation in the process of becoming.

[Ken Burns]

Otherwise, what are you? You are static. You're, you know, Putin's Russia, you're Xi's China. You've just got people telling you what to do. And. And nobody wants that. You want to develop ideas. You want to pursue science, you want to pursue arts, you want to have lot. You want to tolerate lots of different points of view. And right now, we've gotten to the place where we don't even want to listen to another point of view. We only want to hear the information that, you know, satisfy. Oh, yeah, that's what I agree with, you know, and not sort of expand ourselves and say, I can listen to someone that I totally disagree with. With, and I don't have to then make that person the enemy. That's the key to the American experiment.

[Theo]

Yeah. Well, I think even just a conversation like this, man, it's so good for me. Like, it's so good. It takes me out of this. Like, I don't get too caught up in the, like, us and them thing, but it puts me back in a place of, like, oh, yeah, well, I'm here with a purpose, right? Like, it gives you a purpose of, like, being a citizen, of being a human, right? Of, like.

[Ken Burns]

Like.

[Theo]

Of, like a Rubik's Cube that will never be solved, right? It's like, I don't need to win, right? Like, but I. I do need to keep playing and also be a good competitor and an earnest competitor. And, yeah, it just. It puts it more back on you, Right. It makes the mirror a little bit stronger, I think that's nice.

[Ken Burns]

That is a beautiful thing. And it goes along with your dream of the. I mean, Jefferson wrote that Adams, you know, they were friends and they were enemies, and then they were friends again at the end of their life. They Both died on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the moment of the signing of the Declaration. And they both thought the other was alive. Jefferson had died first. Adams survived him by a couple of hours. But just before he died, he said, you know, I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. And, And. And we. And so we shall go on, on. So we will go on and shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of mankind. And I love that idea. That's puzzled and processed. I gave a commencement address last year at Brandeis University, and I was talking about how we're so preoccupied with these binaries, you know, red state, blue state, Democrat, Republican, young, old, black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, east, west, north, south. We always have these divisions.

[Theo]

They.

[Ken Burns]

They don't exist in nature. They're just arbitrary divisions that we've imposed on things. And so I said, when you look at things and you see how it's going, the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty.

[Theo]

I was going to say certainty.

[Ken Burns]

Certainty destroys the mystery of this thing that you and I have been talking about. Who wants to stop that? Unless. Yes, it's a thou shall. You can't dance. You can't do this. You can't do this. You can't. All the things that we're told or because you do this, you are not a good person or you are not a real American or what. What's a real American? I mean, there are a group of Native Americans, and I'm very pleased to report that there are more Native Americans now in the United States. Not in the best of circumstances and in many cases, but more than there were when the American Revolution took place. However, they do have a legitimate claim to saying, you know, we're the real Americans. And so all of the stuff in the Revolution then has to parse that. Who are we in Massachusetts? Who are we in Georgia? Who are we in New Hampshire and South Carolina? What are the native people in our midst? What are the native people at our borders? And there are lots of different cultures as distinct, I said, as any other cultures. And we've also imported by force 500,000 enslaved African Americans. Where are they going to go and what are they going to do? And then we have all this pressure from all these big superpowers like Britain that owns us, and France that is sorry that they lost us, and Spain, that wants. That gots the bottom and they want more. And the Dutch who used to be in there, you know, New York was a. This. This was a Dutch city. And so in Brooklyn is a Dutch name. Harlem is a Dutch name that. I mean, so you've got this overlay of all of these cultures competing here. And so the revolution is the place where we coalesce. We bring together the best ideas that had ever been fought in humankind. About human organization amongst a huge variety of people. People. Yeah. And we've made it work for at least 249 years. And I'm super proud to be an American. I mean, I, I, with the exception of one film, all of the things I've done have been about American history. Because I'm trying to ask this deceptively simple question. Who are we? Who are these strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans? And what does an investigation of the past, that particular moment, that particular person, that particular war tell us about not only where we were back then, but where we are now and where we may be going.

[Theo]

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Did you know that October 10th is World Mental Health Day? And this year we're saying thank you, therapists. Better Help Therapists have helped over 5 million people worldwide on their mental health journeys. That's millions of stories. And behind everyone is a therapist therapist who showed up, listened, and helped someone take a step forward. I want you to know that the right therapist can help change everything. And BetterHelp has 12 plus years experience in matching people to the right therapists. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US This World Mental Health Day, we're celebrating the therapists who have helped millions of people take a step, step forward. If you're ready to find the right therapist for you, Better Help can help you start that journey. Our listeners get 10% off their first [e-mail] Theo that's better. HP.com Theo thank you so much, man. This is so fun.

[Ken Burns]

It is fun.

[Theo]

It is fun.

[Ken Burns]

I'm having the best time.

[Theo]

I appreciate that. Let's look at a little bit of the minutia. So just to make, just to like, add, just to get into a little bit of the storytelling, to add some, like, blush to the cheeks of this conversation. What about Paul Revere's ride? What was real about that? Was he just a loud mouth that some people said it was autism? He got a hold of a horse and some booze. There's a lot of, like, lot of rumors going on out there. Some of that's TikTok, but still.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, well, so let me dispel the most important thing, which is he did not say the British are coming. The British are coming.

[Theo]

He didn't.

[Ken Burns]

He didn't say the red coats are coming or the red coats are coming. What he yelled was the regulars are coming out. The regulars are coming out, meaning the regular British army that has been Stationed in Boston for whatever it is, almost two years are, are coming out. And so he is a patriot. He has made, he's a silversmith and an engraver, and he's made an engraving of the 81770 event in March called the Boston Massacre. He calls it the Bloody Massacre. We end up calling it the Boston Massacre. When some of these occupying a standing army, I mean, this is the big deal, right? You didn't send an army to a place unless you were protecting them. You didn't send an army there to police the population. That's not what free people have. Right? Is the army in your midst?

[Theo]

So, so the British army is in.

[Ken Burns]

There in the colonies, because there's so much.

[Theo]

Only in Boston or in all the.

[Ken Burns]

Colonies, they've got a presence to protect the stuff. But they are in Boston particularly to try to put down the resistance to their taxes, the resistance to that.

[Theo]

So the people realize that the military is there kind of against this them. Huh. And, and that's kind of what. We have a lot going on right now, hypothetically, a lot.

[Ken Burns]

I, I, I had a, a premiere of the film at the Telluride Film Festival. Episode Telluride.

[Theo]

Beautiful over there.

[Ken Burns]

Gorgeous, gorgeous. And we go every year, even whether we have a film or not. Anyway, so they were doing it and when they got to the point when General Gage imported these number of ships from Halifax, Nova Scotia to go to occupy Boston, not to protect it, but to police it. And then you hear the voices from the people passing a standing army in peacetime. This is horrible. You know, like that. And the audience in Telluride erupted because they're going, wait, that's happening now. That's where history can be your best teacher to go, wait a second. Did we just get, did they just raise the temperature on that pot I'm sitting in, Am I about to be boiled? You know, what's going on? So anyway, he does an engraving. Paul Revere does an engraving of the massacre before you move on.

[Theo]

Actually, do you mind, Ken? Yeah, I'm sorry, but let's. They just had a thing in Britain the other day where people showed up and I don't know if it was half a million, a million people showed up to support, like, the British just what it, what being British. Yes. And so, like, I'm not sure exactly what doing, but this is just incredible.

[Ken Burns]

Wow.

[Theo]

Unite the Kingdom rally in Britain. And it wasn't, they weren't putting this on a lot of news channels. I think a lot of the news we're trying to label this is like A far right thing. You know, the news, I don't think has done a good job. I feels like they want us to be at odds a lot of times.

[Ken Burns]

I think. I think that.

[Theo]

Do you think that's a fair statement?

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, I think that in many ways, media, regardless of its, you know, orientation, depends on conflict and that we. We spend a lot of time. That's the essence of a story, is we think conflict rather than. And, you know, it's. Oh, it's. You know, it's so funny. You get involved. It's just street after street. You get involved in a war, and then after the war you get involved in negotiations and you just wonder. We were making our film on Vietnam and we were introducing a Marine who just did some amazing thing, got a chest full of medals, just, you know, almost the Congressional Medal of Honor. Just amazing stuff for his action. We kept pressing him, wanting to hear this stuff, and he finally looked up and he said, it's the history of the world, meaning warfare. It's what we do. And you would think that at some point we get to a place, all of our religious teachings, all of them are just big tributaries flowing into the same sea. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. That we would just jump from the argument to the negotiation and the solution rather than what we seem to have. And I'm guilty of focusing, as, you know, I tell other things, but, you know, history of country music, history of jazz music, baseball, all of that stuff. But I focus on Civil War and World War II and Vietnam and the American Revolution now because they're so instructive about human behavior. Bad, of course, but also really good. These ennobling ideas that we've been talking about. First ever. Which is why. Why I feel comfortable saying it's the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ. And yet the violence is unnecessary and certainly political violence is unnecessary and certainly reactive violence. Well, that. Because they did that, then we have to do that. And you realize that it's like the Old Testament, an eye for an eye. And you realize you keep going with that and everybody's blind.

[Theo]

Yeah, everybody has a seeing eye dog or something. Go back to that rally. I just want to even read who was there.

[Ken Burns]

Just.

[Theo]

I just want to even know a little bit about it. I just saw videos of this, and it blew my mind. I think a lot of what. What this. What I liked about this is it's people showing up for something, right?

[Ken Burns]

Yes.

[Theo]

It's people in the streets.

[Ken Burns]

Well, they're expressing what they're allowed to do right. And that, that's what in a democratic society, which Britain is, you get a chance to, you know, as our First Amendment says, it's, it's. The government will establish no religion. You have freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. You have the ability to. These are the hallmarks. The, the number one thing after the Constitution was done, everybody said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, timeout. We've got a constitution, we got an operating manual, but we're not going to go forward in this unless we get a Bill of Rights that tells us what, you know, that, that enshrines the things we just fought for, the things we just died for. There's, you know, there's one, you know, the Saving Private Ryan story of, you know, sons are dying. It's based on a true story where a woman, I think from Iowa, his last name is Sullivan, lost four sons in a battleship that went down. And the Department of War said, you know, we're now going to separate every, everybody, all the brothers. Rebecca Tanner, a Mohegan woman, meaning probably Connecticut lost five sons, not four, but five sons fighting for the patriot cause. This is a Native American woman. So you realize that's the sacrifice that people have made in order for us to be able to hold a demonstration, express our point of view nonviolently, and to be able to tolerate lots of ideas. I mean, you can't say we're only going to tolerate our ideas and everybody else who doesn't agree with us are therefore bad. You know, I mean, across the street from us on 23rd street in New York City, where we are right now is the headquarters of the Communist Party of the United States. That has as much right to its office space as, as the Republican National Committee or the Democratic National Committee, doesn't it? In a country in which all ideas.

[Theo]

Are free, is the head of the Communist Party.

[Ken Burns]

The American Communist Party has its headquarters across the street and they have had their headquarters there for decades and decades and decades.

[Theo]

Well, you know what's funny to me, Ken, is that it feels like just being a regular American that's hopeful. You're almost a Communist these days in our own country. Well, that's, you know what I'm saying that that idea, that's what I think is interesting about these. Let me just start here. The Unite the Kingdom rally was a massive, and this says far right demonstration held in London on September 13, 2025. Organized by Anti immigrant activist Tommy Robinson, the event attracted between 110,000 every thousand people, making one of the largest protests in British history. The rally was built as a free speech festival, and the demonstration featured chants like, we won our country back. What I think is interesting about this, it's people who have a set of beliefs and ideals of what British life is. Right. And history is to them, and that they want to speak out for it. Right. That's one thing that I thought was pretty cool.

[Ken Burns]

You know, this is the democratic. Right. Right. I mean, I remember when I was.

[Theo]

Growing up, people tweeting with their feet. Right. I said this the other day in a conversation, but it's like, it's not people sitting in the fucking background yelling stuff or screaming or, you know, but it's people who are actually out. Right. And this. This to me, is always inspiring because it's. You're putting your face out there with your voice. Right. And you're putting your feet out there with your voice. And that, to me, feels like a real tweet.

[Ken Burns]

Any. Any. They could be left wing, they could be right wing.

[Theo]

I agree.

[Ken Burns]

They could be immigrants saying we're as much Britain's as any of that is possible within a peaceful context.

[Theo]

Yeah. And it's people that, like, you know, people get an idea of what a culture is. Right?

[Ken Burns]

Yeah.

[Theo]

And especially, I mean, Britain was predominantly white, probably, I would guess, until they took in slaves and native Americans and much.

[Ken Burns]

Well, they.

[Theo]

They.

[Ken Burns]

There was not a Caucasian, I guess.

[Theo]

They would have called it at the time, or European.

[Ken Burns]

They were European, but they're also a mixture of lots of European cultures. And they. Their whole worldwide economy was dependent on slavery, Mostly in the Caribbean, as the Spanish had it, mostly in south and Central America. And then we had it in the southern states. Slavery was legal in the colonies, from New Hampshire to Georgia. And then one by one, the northern states sort of realized it. And George Washington freed his slaves. I mean, they all knew he kept a couple.

[Theo]

Somebody said, I don't know if that's true.

[Ken Burns]

Thomas Jefferson understood. They were. They understood that slavery was morally wrong. And. And yet it was an impossible. What's the right word? It was a con. They're making too much money not to give it up. And it's only later in the 19th century when the abolitionist movement comes, we should abolish slavery, that then you find slaveholders now making really big arguments about how, oh, they're inferior, their children, they can't handle freedom, and all of stuff, all of which they didn't really express. Thomas Jefferson did a little bit in his notes on the state of Virginia. It's very, very Complicated. But we're always looking for a way to say that some people are more equal than others. And if you believe in equality, that's not the case. That if you believe in the second line of the Declaration, which is our catechism, then it's everybody. And that people have the ability to rise according to their abilities and opportunities. And you try to provide as many opportunities for as many people. But the minute you transform this civic just explosion, this beautiful civic compact that we have and racialize it, it can only be white, it can only be black and it can only be this. It can only be that it's already lost. It is not one thing or one type of people. That's where you go wrong.

[Theo]

But, but history does that alike. It's kind of interesting because it's like even, like even whenever they were declaring America right and deciding what it meant to be American and they were in this period that you, that you investigate in the American American Revolution documentary, it's like they were saying this is who we are. Right. At the same time they're also colonizing. It's just, it's interesting when colonization and human and being human started to sort of. I don't. Do you know what I'm kind of saying?

[Ken Burns]

I know what you're talking.

[Theo]

It's just such a weird. It's the dichotomy.

[Ken Burns]

It's the difference between the ideal and the human possibility at any given moment. And what the founders were saying is that in order to have a government that operates, not only do all people have to be created equal, but you have to be pursuing this self examination. We should be interested in improving ourselves. So when Thomas Jefferson wrote all men are created equal, he meant all white men of property free of debt. He did not mean a majority of the white population of the colonial colonies, women. He did not mean the 500,000 free and enslaved African Americans. He did not mean the native peoples both intermixed with people and part of the rest of the continent. And remember, we didn't say when we started our Congress and when we started our army. We didn't say the Eastern Seaboard Congress. We didn't say the Eastern Seaboard army. We said the Continental Congress. The Continental Army. We knew where we were going and we knew who we were going to run over to get get it. And even when the Constitution was started, women were let out. There's a one of the leading women of Philadelphia, Elizabeth Willing Powell met Benjamin Franklin as he came out in Mid September in 1787 from Independence hall where they had Been figuring out the Constitution and getting it down and said, what have you created, Dr. Franklin, a monarchy or a republic? And he said, a republic if you can keep it. Meaning we're going to do this now. When they went into it in 1776, they were not after democracy. Democracy meant mob rule to a lot of people. They were interested in an aristocracy of the elites, right. But in order to win the war, they had to enlist. Not the sturdy militiamen who often left to go plant a crop or often left to go harvest that crop. But they ended up with an army. The Continentals, the regular army of the United States of America. America. The Continental army were teenagers, second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance. Felons ne' er do wells, Recent immigrants from Germany and England. And they won the war. And so as they're beginning, the dogs won the war. And as they're beginning and we follow them, as you'll see, you know, in this story, 14 year old kid from Boston named John Greedron, 15 year old kid Joseph Plum Martin from Connecticut, you know, a 10 year old girl from Yorktown who's a refugee. All of the war, you get to meet them. So it's not just George Washington and all, all of that stuff, but when they start trying to figure out their state constitutions, Pennsylvania says, well, why don't we give votes to every white man who's 21 or older, whether their own property or not. And, and, and John Adams is like, wait, wait, wait, we're not going to. What about the aristocracy? Not, not, you know, not the land. So what happens is, is that democracy is not an object of our revolution, it's a consequence of it. Which is okay, because if you've got an unintended consequence of democracy, that's pretty good.

[Theo]

Pretty cool.

[Ken Burns]

Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's just so exciting. I mean, I have the best job in the country. I have the best job in the country. It educates all my parts. I don't go in knowing about the revolution solution and telling you what you should know. Because Theo, that is like saying there's a test on, on next Tuesday. Yeah, I'm sharing with you the process of discovery. Like Betsy Ross isn't mentioned in here. We don't actually know who made the first flag. No one says don't fire till you hear the whites of our eyes. Paul Revere did not say the red coats are coming. The red coats.

[Theo]

He said the regular.

[Ken Burns]

The regulars are coming out. The regulars are coming out.

[Theo]

Right, I meant the regulars are coming out of their homes, out of Boston.

[Ken Burns]

To the pro, to. Out to Lexington and to. And to Concord. Concord was the place where they thought everything was hidden, and they were right, and they just never found it. And then we. And then we started fighting back. We didn't fight back so much on Lexington Green. It was. It was a massacre on Lexington Green and then conquered. At the North Bridge, we meet a guy named Isaac Davis, who's a gunsmith from Acton, Massachusetts. And he leaves early in the morning. Morning. And he's at the North Bridge. And he is, along with a fellow guy. Abner Hosmer is one of the first Americans to be killed at the North Bridge. But then the fury of the. Of the. Of the militia, Patriot militia, just overwhelms the British and they start a retreat. And it's. If there hadn't been some reinforcements that caught up with them when they limped, were limping back, retreating back through Lexington, it would have been a route. And it was strange still. All the way. Every spot of ground all the way back to Boston was contested. And everybody's sitting there going, like, yesterday, these were our brothers. Yesterday, these were our fellow countrymen. Yesterday we were, you know, arguing. Today we're at war. And there's a. There's a great sense of thing. Abigail's. I mean, Adam says something. We're in the midst of a revolution. The most glorious and. And the fate of. Of millions yet unborn are being decided, meaning you and me so great. And then Abigail, his own wife, his greatest conver. Correspondence between anybody.

[Theo]

Oh, yeah.

[Ken Burns]

And she maybe wrote better than anybody. She said we should be very cautious about tearing down empires because of all the blood and suffering that attends to it. That's in the first minutes of our film, which, meaning, be careful what you wish for. You know, she's something else. Yeah, she's. And. And you know when people say who's the best writer? Is it? Is it. Is it Thomas Payne? Is it Thomas Jefferson? Is it George Washington? Great writers at John Adams. Great writer. Abigail's holds her own. She's pretty good.

[Theo]

That's cool, man.

[Ken Burns]

And she's got a friend named. I bet you can call this up too.

[Theo]

Yeah.

[Ken Burns]

Named Mercy Otis Warren, pull up with a friend. Mercy Otis Warren.

[Theo]

Loki.

[Ken Burns]

OT yeah. There she is there. You got a book of her. She writes one of the first histories of it. There she is. She's in our film there. Oh, yeah. She. Meryl Streep reads her verse. That's the one thing we haven't talked about. We got Peter Coyote as the third person narrator. But we have the best cast that has ever been assembled. They all reading off camera of any film or every television show maybe. So the longest, the the Longest day about Dday had cast list but we've got Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep who reads Mercy Otis Warren and Claire Danes who's reads Abigail Adams and Paul Jamati and Josh Brolin and Sir Kenneth Branau and Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson and Lev Shrier and Ed Norton and.

[Theo]

That have all voiced in your docs in this doc.

[Ken Burns]

Oh, in this doc in American Revolution alone and Dom Nell Gleason and Jeff Daniels. He's the voice of Thomas Jefferson. It is. I, I probably listed a, a fifth of the voices that are.

[Theo]

We ask them or no, how does it happen?

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, we ask them and, and you know a lot of people have read for us before. A lot of new people have read this time but we ask him. Tom Hanks has read for us for almost 25 years.

[Theo]

Well he's, he did the D Day museum in New Orleans. He's their whole D Day guy. Yeah.

[Ken Burns]

Oh man, that's. I took my little girl a year ago to a year and a half ago. My then 13 year old she and we just loved it. And I've been there many, many times. Stephen Ambrose, the late historian really started it but Tom and many other people made it possible and he's just so, so phenomenal. And he's also like, like Meryl Streep and Jeff Daniels and others. Josh Brolin couldn't be nice, Sammy. You know I recorded long distance. Morgan Freeman who's you know in his, in his mid to late 80s he's getting up there and he lives on the Gulf coast and in Mississippi. And I'm saying. And so I'm just making idle chat. I said Morgan, so why are you in Mobile? He says I'm recording for Ken Burns. Like he'd driven up.

[Theo]

Oh yeah.

[Ken Burns]

To come and do this thing and that. It just made me feel really good and you know, and I'll bump into someone and they go why haven't you come Called me like cuz this. They're not making anything. We pay them SAG minimum. And I always tease Tom, I always go and I'm giving you a check for $313.22. Please don't spend it all in one place, please, you know, save it. But you know they come and they work. Look at, look at that list, right? It's remarkable, you know.

[Theo]

Yeah. Josh Brolin is an Exceptional man.

[Ken Burns]

Oh, he's great. He's George Washington. And what I did is I told him George Washington is unknowing and opaque, and yet he's able to motivate men in the dead of night when they're losing. And you somehow have to be somebody that is both unknowable, like only. Only as a historian. One of the historians in the film says, maybe Martha gets in there, his wife, maybe Lafayette, maybe Hamilton, but very, very few people. People get into that inner space of him and yet his rectitude. He's taller than most of the folks, but he has a bearing that is so powerful that men that are leaving, men that are deserting, men that are mutinying, stop. When he starts and talks and they sign up and say, okay, we'll fight for another six weeks, or you're right, I'm going to put down my arms. This is crazy. And there are moments when the entire family fate, even after the revolution, the entire fate of the United States of America is dependent on the army angry that they haven't been paid by Congress, not marching on Philadelphia and turning this into a military dictatorship. And it's George Washington who stops. And then what does he do when everything's got together? He resigns his military commission and then he is asked to be the president of the Constitutional Convention. He lends his. His stuff. He is voted unanimously. President.

[Theo]

Wow.

[Ken Burns]

And what does he do after two terms? He leaves it.

[Theo]

He's kind of the coach of the Bad News Bears, kind of he.

[Ken Burns]

George iii, who's not the idiot that we try to make him out to be.

[Theo]

George W. Bush.

[Ken Burns]

No, George the.

[Theo]

I was gonna say the King.

[Ken Burns]

George. He says when he hears that Washington.

[Theo]

Voted, he was an idiot. He might have when.

[Ken Burns]

When Washington resigned as military voluntary commission and then resigned a presidency. He said then he is the most powerful character of the age. So this. Imagine what that means today, that we're in an age where everybody wants me and that he is no you. He understood that the actual highest office is citizen, and he was determined to go back to that and to not claim for himself. Well, wealth didn't make money during the war, you know, didn't try to amass personal power. He just said, it is my service to this new idea. You know, as Payne was saying, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to reset and go back to zero and create something new, as he called it, an asylum for mankind. That's the second episode of our film. Every one of our episodes is named after phrase from Thomas Paine the first is in order to be free. You know that the feeble engines of despotism only work, he said, unless you, you can will it. In order to be free, you just need to will it. And then asylum for mankind. And then when things are dark, the times that try man's soul. And then great title called conquer by the drawn game. It's what Washington understood. Britain, they have to win and they can't do it. They can't sustain armies. 3000 Hawaiis from home in an area that's they, they misunderstand how big we are. And of course nobody's got a weather report. So that storm, right, he realized a.

[Theo]

Battle'S not, it's not, it's, it's not right here in this moment. It is but there's, if you look at the different legs of it, there's more than, there's more than a couple of ways to win this thing. You know.

[Ken Burns]

The historian Jane Kaminsky says he knows what every insurrectionary leader means meaning gorilla. You know that you just, you, you, you, you eat at them there. You know like more British and Hessian, their mercenaries soldiers die in New Jersey from being picked off in guerrilla moments foraging than they are in three big set battles of Trenton, Princeton and Monmouth Courthouse. So it is a down and dirty war and there are terrorist organizations of Loyalists.

[Theo]

It's like Grand Theft America.

[Ken Burns]

Okay. Yeah, it's, it's pretty wild. It's pretty wild. And yet out of it comes an extraordinary order. And yet out of it comes the echo of Lincoln who understood the founding better than anyone else and delivers the Declaration of Independence 2.0 at Gettysburg in which he said we really do mean all men are created equal. Oh yeah, right.

[Theo]

Lincoln was that white Iverson.

[Ken Burns]

We're going to live through all time or die by suicide. Like nobody's coming to attack us and conquer us us. If we dissolve, it's on us. And so that's the message for today. It is, it's what Washington's example of giving up power. It's of the non authoritarian stuff of Thomas Paine and Jefferson and this sense of the power of the civic example. And then of course Lincoln's warning that you have to to stay together. And he presided over the close we ever closest we ever came to national suicide or civil war. And without him, like without Washington, who knows what happens.

[Theo]

Yeah, yeah. Lincoln was the guy that like just that really that kept the pilot light of what these other guys had lit going. Right. I have like one or two questions. Do you think there's been this thing in my lifetime where you felt like colonialism ended up.

[Ken Burns]

Right?

[Theo]

You kind of felt like that through articles that were written and just looking like that's bad, this is wrong. Right. But then you still have things that happen. Like you still have genocides happening, you still have like ethnic cleansing in Gaza that some people believe is happening. You know, you still have colonial. Is that just something the media tricked us to think? Is it safe for us to think that that kind of thing is ended? Like, you know, because you almost want to evolve as a species and think that that's not happening anymore because it seems so brutal, right? That war and conquering isn't happening anymore because it seems so brutal. But do you think it will always be a part of us? And then a second question is like, yeah, like these guys like lit like this pilot light a long time ago, like being a citizen and reflection of yourself and how that's going to be, that's going to need to always be a part of what it means to be an American.

[Ken Burns]

Yes.

[Theo]

And for this to, to evolve and to stay alive and then. And the only way it can die is by suicide. Right. It really puts it immediately back on you, especially with that word, suicide. But what can we do now? Where do you feel like we're at now? And not in a judgmental way, but just in like a hopeful way even. Where do you think that we're at now and what can we do? Because it feels scary now.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, it is scary. I think we pull, pull out the fuel rods of our own self righteousness and just take it down a notch and realize that all the people we're saying are evil and whatever are just fellow citizens who disagree with us and then just let it go. The first part of your question is the sadder one. Ecclesiastes, that's 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. War, ethnic violence, religious disagreements, the pain of slavery, of some form of subjugation, of other totalitarianism. It's as my Marine, Tommy Vallely was his name, Corporal Tommy Vallely. It's the history of the world world. And what we the United States represent is the beacon, the pilot light. I love that phrase of yours, Theo. Better than the beacon. It's the pilot light of where we could be, who we could be. So if we are a nation in the process of becoming, we got a lot of work to do and we take a few steps forward and you think Ah, it's the end of colonialism. It's the end of partisan rancor. It's the end of the. This. It's progress. We're at some, you know, we're colorblind. You know, isn't we like a black person? Isn't it all, you know.

[Theo]

Right. We solved it.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah. Well, I. Friends would say I've centered race in a lot of my films, and I've gotten some criticism for it, you know, telling the story that, you know, of that our asterisk. Our. Yes, but. And then when Obama was inaugurated, they said, now will you stop talking about that? And I held up the Onion magazine and it said, black men given worst job in nation. You know, And I just said, just watch what happens. And what it did is it actually awoke in some people the darker sides in which you judge people not by the content of their character, as Dr. King suggested, but by the color of their skin, that somehow I could know everything about you by the color of your skin. Oh, what your type is, what it is. And that's, of course, I think Obama.

[Theo]

Got us out of that.

[Ken Burns]

I think he moved it in a way. And then all of a sudden, there was a reactive thing, which is almost lawful as well, if it's physics, in a way that allowed people to play to their worst basis instincts. Basis instincts that had been in some ways by both parties sort of suppressed. No, no, we're not going to manifest that way kids behave. We've still got two hours before we get to the beach, Right? And suddenly, by the time we get to the beach, we're at war again. And, you know, we're not. Okay, we're turning around. We're going home. There's no ice cream today. Whatever it is, there's got to be that thing that you and I, that the essence of what we've talked about, it seemed to me, has been about this incredibly difficult thing, which is self discipline, discipline. Like I need to actually do the work on myself. I cannot assume. I cannot insist that you do the work for you before. I'm willing to do it for myself.

[Theo]

But there are people now where it seems like a lot of people are. Do people like the people who have been doing the work and following the rules hypothetically and be trying their best to be an American? I feel like some of those people are starting to wear thin because it seems like. Like everybody doesn't want to. And that may be. And that may be that their idea of what being an American is isn't the same as the other people. Right.

[Ken Burns]

Well, I don't think that's the case. I. I think a lot of it has to do with this device in our back pocket and all the.

[Theo]

That's true.

[Ken Burns]

The atomized sources of. Of information that we have. Like when I grew up, there were three channels and pbs, which I work all my films on, PBS and maybe an independent channel, you basically got your local newspaper that had a staff of lots of people who covered the school board meeting and this. And so people knew what it was. Now, you know, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York here, said, everybody's entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. Right. We do know that the battle of Gettysburg happened on July 1st, 2nd and 3rd, 1863. But what we're now in a situation is, and this is the greatest danger is that we are being told things that aren't true. And there's not amongst the exponentially greater number of possibilities of outlets that everyone has anybody saying, well, actually, that's not true. And so what happens, that demoralization that you're talking about or that sense that I played by the rules and whatever it may be more imbalanced by the fact that they have been convinced of a lot of things that aren't necessarily true. You know, 1 and 1 has got to equal 2. Right. Except in our faith, in that faith where 1 and 1 has to equal 3, that we say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So here are the sum of the parts and here's the whole. And so what's the difference? That's where we want to spend our lives here. Not in parsing how you really don't get it. And you're wearing that, and you've got this thing. You got your hat backwards. So I know exactly who you are.

[Theo]

Right?

[Ken Burns]

Right. And that's not who I am. And. And we are all the same. You know, Shakespeare has it when the shylock in the Merchant event, are, are we not human, having not eyes, organs, senses, dimensions, affections, fed by the same foods, subject to the same diseases? Is if you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? I mean, if you poison us, do we not die? We are all the same. And unless you can stop and turn and not say, oh, you're a radical leftist, destroying. And you're looking at this person who's like this Midwestern whatever, or you are a right wing, you know, you know, fascist that we. You don't have a chance.

[Theo]

You're boiling gay people in your Apartment or whatever. Yes, but just shit like that. It's like what is going. It is crazy.

[Ken Burns]

Well, you think about what happens in an unchecked information world, that is to say, where you don't have the self discipline of the traditional media outlets.

[Theo]

That was reliable, too.

[Ken Burns]

That was reliable. I mean, I would still. When people say, what would you do? I would say I would watch one of the nightly news of the three networks or all of them, if you can get them, and I would read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or the Washington Post or maybe all three, and don't look at anything else because the other things will tell you that all Democrats are into pedophilia and all, you know, and you just, after a while you have to go, stop. This noise is crazy. What you've done is by telling the lie up on top of the mountain and formed it into this snowball, it's rolled down the hill and it's now this giant thing where truth is lies and knowledge is ignorance and everything is the opposite of what it actually is. And what you have to get back is to what is verifiable. And as much as people say, oh, the mainstream media, the lamestream media or whatever it is, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that are have opposite editorial positions, their actual papers, if you really want to follow what's going on and pretend that it's not just, oh, well, their interest is this in promoting the elites. It's just they're actually really good at what they do. And I think if Americans were to sort of say, I mean, Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, just in the middle of our tragedy, he said, turn your phones off, turn off social media, media. Because you know what?

[Theo]

I want to have him on here. Yeah, Spencer Cox, I would love to get to have you have a conversation.

[Ken Burns]

I met him last January, Governor's Association. He was, I was talking about the revolution and we showed some clips at the National Governors association. And he came up and he asked a question. He said, you talk about virtue, I want to pursue this question of virtue. And I said, thank God here's a place where we can have it. But he's the guy who said, turn off your social media, go ahead out into nature, hug somebody that you know. Because if you look at it, social media isn't. You ever been in a room of teenagers where they've all got their phones?

[Theo]

Yeah. There's nothing social about it.

[Ken Burns]

There's nothing social about it. It's all an interior dialogue with yourself. It's Schizophrenic, it's, it actually creates a thousand people in you. When our object, as we've been talking for the entire time we talked about, is to find out who this person is inside. Who am I?

[Theo]

Yeah.

[Ken Burns]

Is the central question. I start with an easier question, very hard. Who are we? The United States of America. But then inevitably all of those questions form a mirror. And I don't know if you get out in nature much, but nature is perfect and nature puts a mirror back to all of your imperfections. And that's, that's tough. A lot of people would rather be, you know, know, completely occupied by other stuff all the time rather than say, what is it that I could do that could make me a better person?

[Theo]

Yeah. Thank you. Some of these, some of these thoughts are so great. A group of friends.

[Ken Burns]

Oh, you've given me the, I mean, just this dream of the future, the pilot light, all of that stuff. Thank you.

[Theo]

Well, it's important that we're thinking about this stuff together. And I would even like, I would disagree, like on the news outlets that you mentioned.

[Ken Burns]

Right.

[Theo]

I would disagree. For me, I don't need to disagree with you about it. But I see when you are and I are here talking, we probably have a lot of the very same, of course, ideas and hopes. But I don't need to sit there and tell you, hey, I don't, I don't. I disagree with a news source you might like. You know, it's like, it just shows that like what you're even saying is just like us conversating about something is what really matters.

[Ken Burns]

That's all.

[Theo]

This is real media right here.

[Ken Burns]

Exactly. Is when we talk about each other. All I meant about choosing stuff is that you want to make sure that the source is fact checking itself, that it has its own responsibility, you know, because like when the cat's away, the mice will play. And that's all we have now are mice out there. And you just need a little bit of people who go, we have to check this to make sure it's true.

[Theo]

Yeah, I wonder if we'll get to a place where there's some sort of a purity test test of some, you know, that we could all agree on. I wonder if AI or something in some way gets us to a purity test.

[Ken Burns]

Well, that would be a wonderful unintended consequence because. Right. Isn't it supposed to destroy us? Because I know it's going to drive us crazy and maybe, maybe, maybe the opposite will happen.

[Theo]

You know, we're going to be data slaves you and I are going to have pickaxes. We'll be in a bit mine somewhere and we'll literally be hammering out like statistics from old NBA games so some guy can upload them for his DraftKings account.

[Ken Burns]

That's right.

[Theo]

It's all. That's what's exactly how it sounds.

[Ken Burns]

Where we're gonna go and.

[Theo]

And years later, your son or some orb that you created will be doing a documentary on that or your daughter, who you just had a nice time with at the D Day Museum last year. You. She will be doing a documentary on. On you and I, right, working as mining miners in a bit mine.

[Ken Burns]

So somewhere I'm running back to New Hampshire so that I can go back to my little tiny town where things work and people are civil and they've got their, their signs out. But nobody says, you know, you're wrong. They just say that's what you believe. I disagree with that. It's really.

[Theo]

Yeah. And I think there's, there's a lot of good places out there that do have a lot of peace in them. So since we're talking about kind of information and stuff, where do you get your information? How do you do it? Do you have 10, a team that helps you source? Like, what do you guys do? You walk into the Library of Congress and you know, like, Kenny boy, they.

[Ken Burns]

Do know my face. So in the American Revolution, we've got materials drawn from 340 sources, archives, libraries around the world. We have drawn on thousands of volumes. And we have gone to scholars who spent their lives delving, delving deep into one aspect of it. Maybe it's the British Empire's economic structure. Right. Just to understand the difference between the 13 colonies that we are and the other 13 colonies that really make their money for them. Because in Jamaica, they got 90% of the population is enslaved. And Barbados, same thing, as opposed to, you know, very few in Massachusetts and maybe half in South Carolina. So, you know, we just want to find out the, that we want to check the dates. So we always have lots of different sources. We want to source thing from scholars who've been working. And you find there's sometimes a little desperate stuff, different stuff. So we will say even after we lock the film, we might have the word 16, it might be battleships, it might be days, it might be dead, whatever the number is. But we've got footnotes on our script of all the sources that have contributed, treated to why we believe it's 16. And then you read a fifth source and it says, not sure. So I. So we go somewhere in all this, the narration that Peter Coyote has read and found the word perhaps cut it, duplicate it and pull it and go perhaps 16. That we do not sleep at night until we know we're absolutely dead certain.

[Theo]

We don't slander even the past.

[Ken Burns]

We don't even want to say. We particularly don't want to slander the past because the past, our greatest teacher and people manipulate the past. We know what it's like in a Soviet system where they cut somebody else out of the picture or they're on the presidium, you know, in the Politburo in front of the May Day parade and that somebody's out of favor. So suddenly they edited out of the pre.

[Theo]

Pre libraries in Cuba. You can't even get history books before.

[Ken Burns]

Certain years because people, people want to manipulate this stuff. And what's so great about a free country is we go, yeah, we screwed up there. You know what I mean? It's so funny that we're in a, we live in a, in a, a country that is totally devoted to football, right? Understandably so. Every level. Friday night, high school, Saturday, college, Sunday, pro. And if that coach comes up and says, yeah, well, you know, we're, we're, we're okay, you go, he's fired. You go, we really sucked on special teams this time. We really need to do some work here. And we do. And there's a sense of. And we do this in business all the time.

[Theo]

And we just say what you're saying.

[Ken Burns]

How do we get better? What is it that we did wrong? And so there is that incredible American drive to be super honest and just say, I really messed up here and I can do better the next time. If you think that Tom Brady wins his first super bowl and he goes, okay, cruise control for the rest of my career, right? And I'll get six more Super Bowls. He is phenomenally dedicated to self criticism and where you can improve. If we extended that into our civic and our political world, we would not be in the kind of argumentative mud that we're in right now where we feel stuck and unable to move and, and this. And it's always the other person, not me. And I'm in the mud because of you, not because of. I stepped in it. It's just if we, if we brought that ethic of self improvement. It's what we've been talking along all along. It's, it's my response. My mom used to say that to me, you know, if, if he's got a problem with you, it's your responsibility. You've got a problem with him, it's your responsibility. Right. Which means I don't need you to change. I need to figure out, out what it is. If this is worth repairing, which I think our experiment is, then it always begins with myself. And it's so rare to see people, particularly in politics, take a stand that says, you know, a George Washington stand, I'm leaving, I'm giving up power. Or you know what, my party is wrong in this. Right. I am not going to do this.

[Theo]

More people would vote for that guy. Of course.

[Ken Burns]

Course. Of course.

[Theo]

I think it's one of the reasons why it's like I think we're getting down to people don't trust entities for information. Right. I think it's one of the problems that you have with news and stuff and because some of those are, you know, they make money based on advertising. So there's a bit of, there's somewhat of a conflict of interest in a way. Not really. It didn't seem like there used to be, but then that kind of evolved. So I think people now are trying to find a person that they believe. Right? Because it's easier for them to like, to like concept, to, to analyze. Right. Like I can figure out if I believe this person so I'll get information from them. Whereas I think entities, it's people, people don't trust entities anymore as much, you know.

[Ken Burns]

Well, I, I have spent my entire professional life as an independent filmmaker, but all of my films are made for pbs. And let me tell you why they are. The Declaration of Independence, the Pursuit of Happiness. Applied to communication locations. There's rigorous fact checking. I cannot put a film out unless I have been vetted by scholars from all different perspectives and understandings and, and, and knowledge. And they also are not. They're free of that advertising thing, right? So that I am able to do it. Like I could tell you, like, let me just say our Vietnam serious series took ten and a half years to make, cost 30 million bucks. I spent ten of the ten and a half years with my cup out going to foundations and corporations. Bank of America has been a corporate underwriter. They're not a sponsor, so they're not saying, hey, we don't like that content. They accept whatever content I'm going to do because they know my process is rigorous. Foundations, individuals of wealth, government granting agencies until they were just killed. So that p. That CPB kill, you know, the death of cp, CPB is, is a big.

[Theo]

I was going to ask you about that your funding, how's that been affected?

[Ken Burns]

It's huge. It's huge. But it's, you know, more importantly it's such a short sighted decision because you know where it's going to hurt Most. Most of CPB's money went to rural stations.

[Theo]

What is CPB?

[Ken Burns]

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting which was just not only they took back money, they'd already appropriated 4 million for an upcoming project. But they, we had been in discussions for another 10 million. So I just lost 14 million for about three or four projects coming up in the future. I'll recover. But the problem is most of the money goes to rural stations which would be and will be when these stations die, a news desert. Right. They're used to the PBS not just for the children's programming, not just for the great primetime, but for their homeland security, their alerts. They may be, you know, the most important, the only signal they get. And you don't want to be a news desert where you've got somebody telling you because you want somebody there covering the school board. You want somebody there.

[Theo]

You want somebody, you want a personal.

[Ken Burns]

You want a personal person that you know. So I have worked with him. So go back to my, my Vietnam example. I, I spent 10 of the 10 and a half years trying to raise that. I could have walked into a streaming service or a premium cable and with my reputation walked in and given them a description of Vietnam and walked out in half an hour with a check for $30 million. They would not have given me the 10 and a half years it took me to do the good job. Now that film came out in the fall, in September of 2017. If I do my math right, that's eight years ago. It is still. Even though it's a film. One stop shopping for the most aggregation of the most recent information about the Vietnam. More still after eight years, I am so proud of that. But it, I didn't take the money, do it in a year or a year and a half and have it be a piece of.

[Theo]

Oh, you're not a T Bill, you're a Bond dude.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, I am. Long term. That's exactly it. And I'm. And I need to marinate and mature and come to term and I need to just redeem it at its face value. I'm not making up. I am trying to share this. And you know what PBS stands for, for it's not system. The S is not. It's public. I like that part. Meaning you and me. Broadcasting obviously. Service, service. It's not the Columbia Broadcasting system.

[Theo]

It's not the public broadcasting self.

[Ken Burns]

It's, it's a, not a top down right. Like it's not a network saying what part of our, our primetime schedule don't you understand? You're taking it all. It's individual stations working with independent filmmakers making stuff and sending it up and then it's going out. And there's no. You have to take this. It is exactly. The Declaration of Independence applied to the communications world just as the national parks or the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape. Because we, for the first time in human history, and you could have only done that operating under a Declaration of Independence. Tenants, we set aside the most beautiful landscape in the world. Not for kings, not for noblemen, not for the very rich, but for you and for me and for more importantly, our posterity, our children's children's children. That's what Theodore Roosevelt says. We are not saving this for a day. We know we are saving it for all time. And that's beautiful stuff because if we didn't have that, if we had a different kind of system, Zion and Yosemite would be gated communities. The rim of the Grand Canyon. There may be one little place where you could go and look out, but the rest would be owned by other people. The Everglades would been drained and be endless strip malls and golf courses and condominiums. And Yellowstone would be a down on its luck sort of amusement place called Geyser World.

[Theo]

Yeah.

[Ken Burns]

You know, and, and just think about it.

[Theo]

There'd be a lot of hippies there, a lot of be a lot of EDM out there.

[Ken Burns]

Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny says we're going to take the whole continent and you're going to have to get out of the way, whoever you are. And that stand of trees I look at and I think bored feet, that river, I think dam, that canyon, I think mineral rights, that's fine. But some of those places you can set aside free from that so that we can go. So there are places in the United States like, like the South Rim or the North Rim of the Grand Canyon or Zion or Yosemite, what I think is one of the most beautiful places on earth, if not the most beautiful place, or Yellowstone. And you can go there and look at it and see exactly what Theodore Roosevelt saw. And more importantly, you can see in the case of the native people who, who occupied Yosemite, what they saw 2,000 years ago.

[Theo]

Right.

[Ken Burns]

And that gives you an access to all time, which then gives you a perspective. Some journalist when he went up to Alaska. And he saw what was then called Mount McKinley and has been called Denali. Said McKinley never saw the mountain. He said it reminds me of my atomic insignificance, meaning the way nature dwarfs you. You just look up at a night sky and yeah, when it's 10 below zero and you just see all those stars and you go whole. I mean, I'm like nothing. Yeah, I need a drink or whatever. But the, the thing is about that it's paradoxical nature and I would suggest our national parks because they. That feeling of insignificance in spirits you makes you larger just as the egotist in our myth midst is diminished by his or her self regard. Right. You know that like you see somebody who's so full of, so full of themselves and you think they just get smaller and smaller, but the person who goes, wow, you know, I'm nothing in the scheme of things. And that's true. Seems bigger.

[Theo]

Yeah.

[Ken Burns]

You know, seems like somebody I want to listen to, you know.

[Theo]

Oh yeah.

[Ken Burns]

All, all the great gurus of the national parks like Emerson and, and particularly John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, they're all. They have distance in their eyes. That's what Stuart Udall, who's a former secretary of the Interior out of Kennedy and Johnson, he said he had distance in his eyes. I just love that phrase. As if somebody could almost look around the curve of the earth and see not only physically what's going to happen, but in time. So he's this blustery, you know, guy that we love for all his belligerence, walks awfully, but carry a big stick. But what does he do? He, he sets up the Grand Canyon, the grandest canyon on earth, I assure.

[Theo]

You, and have that longevity of thought to have the. Want other people to come here and see the same thing.

[Ken Burns]

And I want my great, great grandchildren to enjoy it. And guess what? They are.

[Theo]

We touched on Spencer Cox really quickly. I think we're in a new space for an American revolution in the sense. You know, I know part of it was the Bill of Rights do. We don't have an Internet bill of rights. We don't have a social media bill of rights. And it's. I think it's stuff like that that's killing us. You know, it's like you can have. If I'm a restaurant and you come there and I poison you. Yes, you can sue me, you can file charges against me that will shut me down. But there's all these algorithms that are poisoning people. Right? Feeding people, literally poisoning. And they know what they're Feeding. They have a log of it. They have a log of the recipe. If you go here, we're going to see and you hear they're poisoning people to the point where people are sick. People are literally sick, addicted and sick. And there's no way to, to kind of stop them. It feels like.

[Ken Burns]

I agree completely. I think that's beautifully said. And so one would hope that there was a health department that might have noticed that that restaurant had ingredients or there was, you know, mice or rats around in the kitchen that might be poisoning. They're going to contribute to this. That shuts them down or gives them a, a bad grade as they do in New York City. You see the A or the B or the C and oh yeah, you know, be forewarned, I'll eat a little C, you'll eat a C. Now I draw the line at B. I'm sorry, this is where you and I disagree on this. But you know, maybe there is some, some overarching sense of discipline or maybe there's self discipline. Maybe. I realize that, you know in, in Fantasia, in the Sorcerer's Apprentice, where he's got the endless number of brooms carrying the, the buckets of water, like it's just so proliferated, we're just so out of control and unable to make sense of anything that at some point you need someone, in this case the wizard to come and recast a spell. So, so it goes back to being one room that's carrying these things. And then you've got, you know, we've got that possibility. And that's my impulse is always to just reduce, reduce, get down to something that you know you can trust. And I think what you're saying is, could we agree to maybe a set of rules that would govern facts, that we would say that facts were primary, that we couldn't just constantly, not just speculate, but wildly lie. Because the toxicity of that is, as you say, as lethal. Lethal over the long term as that poison is in your restaurant.

[Theo]

Yeah. And the algorithms, the fact that you can continue to poison, imagine a 15.

[Ken Burns]

Year old kid, but it pays. If it bleeds, it leads. So then right now, that used to be the thing in the 70s when there's still just three stations and whatever, but then you've got millions of outlets who have no responsibility and they can say that up is down and down is up. And what's your problem? You're, you know, you're wrong. It's a big conspiracy that you've been thinking that up is down all of your Life. And I can prove to you why you're absolutely dead wrong. So follow me over this cliff.

[Theo]

Well, I guess it goes to show, like, even, as we said in the beginning, that this doesn't end right. The, the, the, the idea to be free, to think, free, to feel all those things will. You're going to constantly have to come into, to bring those into the present day to keep America evolving. And I think that it's no more evident than ever than right now with just a new front line. If, like war for information, for pure. For facts, for the ability for our children not to be contaminated. You know, maybe it used to be by dirty water, but now it's by bad information. It's by algorithms that aren't, like, shackled by any facts, you know, or, or they're, or they're that. That they don't want to poison people, you know.

[Ken Burns]

So I think one of the impulses ten years ago was to go back to the story of our founding, to our creation story, and ask essential questions. What happened? It isn't just Lexington and Concord. And then he crosses the Delaware and captures Trenton, and then they surrender at Yorktown town. Boom, done. And in the middle, these great documents were signed. But say it's a really complicated story about very complicated and very interesting people who were able to, as you said at the very beginning, what cause are you willing to serve? What are you willing to risk your life for? And these people coming from a wide variety of backgrounds, it's not like the purity of. It's only one type of person that makes up our country. We've been a huge variety from the very beginning. And from. And of many different faiths and of many different perspectives, were able to figure out how they could govern themselves. And it set an example for the world. And so maybe going back and collecting, you know, as, maybe as unsexy as it sounds like American history. Oh, Jesus. Last thing I need to know. I'm so glad I'm out of high school because I don't have to take another history. Maybe as Harry Truman said, the only thing that's really new is the history you don't know. And that by telling a story of our creation, we might have the ability to save the experiment because we could rededicate ourselves to the things that the people who are willing to give, as they said in the Declaration, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honors, too.

[Theo]

I think it's worth a shot.

[Ken Burns]

Let's do it.

[Theo]

Let's do it. Ken Burns, thank you so much, man.

[Ken Burns]

It's been so much fun and so cool, dude. So happy to meet you. Yeah. Really, really happy to meet you.

[Theo]

You too. And thank you for all your commitment and your undying desire. And I bet your mother's very proud of.

[Ken Burns]

Can I tell you, my, my. My mother's name was Lila. L Y L A. And so that name for ever was just draped in black crepe, right? We didn't say it. We called her Mommy. My oldest daughter, who's now 42, in on January 18, 2011, had her first child, my first grandchild, and named her after a grandmother she never met named Lila. So now we say Lila every day. And we smile and flowers bloom and birds chirp and it's. The music plays. So it's. It's a wonderful kind of, you know, nose dive.

[Theo]

And then the pilot lights relit.

[Ken Burns]

The pilot light is relit, Lila.

[Theo]

We'll have to put a picture of her up there at the end if you'll send us a Cute 1.

[Ken Burns]

L l y l a. We'll get it to you.

[Theo]

Oh, that'd be awesome. Thank you so much. Keep working. Stay alive. Get on Peptides. We need more. We need more. Ken Burns forever. We need the. The pilot. Keep burning. Thank you so much, brother.

[Ken Burns]

Thank you.

[Theo]

Now I'm just.

[Ken Burns]

I'm on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves I must be cornerstone oh, but when I reach that ground I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it.

[Theo]

In my bones but it's gonna take.