Ken Burns

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Speaker 2 Richard Powers, a novelist, said, the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to Where Everybody Knows Your Name. Without a doubt, Ken Burns is one of our greatest storytellers.

Speaker 1 Whether it's the Civil War, jazz, baseball, the Vietnam War, or the Roosevelts, his documentaries are often a mirror to America, showing us who we truly are, both in times of prosperity and in times of crisis.

Speaker 1 That is why I'm so excited for Ken's next docuseries, which explores the founding of this country and how it turned the world upside down.

Speaker 1 It's called the American Revolution, and it premieres on PBS on November 16th, airing over six nights. Here he is, Ken Burns.

Speaker 1 Can I start with,

Speaker 1 I'm giddy, I feel like the young kid

Speaker 1 growing up around my parents. My father was an archaeologist, a professor, PhD.

Speaker 1 He was an anthropologist and a director of a museum. So I was surrounded all my life by scientists.
hard cut. I

Speaker 1 go through life and go to Cheers and Cheers starts paying me too much money at some point.

Speaker 1 And so I start an environmental organization called American Oceans Campaign that became Oceana, which is one of the largest organizations.

Speaker 1 But really what I'm doing is I'm saying, hey, dad, I may not be a scientist, but I'm hanging out with them. I'm trying to be like you.
And I think that was kind of my motivating force in life.

Speaker 1 And here I am talking with somebody who's very dad-like to me. So I'm so much tickled.

Speaker 2 My dad was an anthropologist.

Speaker 1 I read that.

Speaker 2 A cultural anthropologist. And I grew up with a map of the United States over my bed that did have very loosely the political divisions of the states, but they were all.
native tribes.

Speaker 2 They were all the 300 nations that made up. And so I grew up with kachina dolls and with arrowheads and with

Speaker 2 Neolithic tools and a kind of father interested in communicating what had happened in Ulduvi Gorge in East Africa in the dawn of human beings and understanding even though his thing wasn't physical anthropology, as they call it, but cultural anthropology studying alpine peasants.

Speaker 2 And so in a way, I think

Speaker 2 I'm like you, we're here having a kind of complicated dad conversation because I'm an anthropologist of American. There's a kind of grand canyon, a strata of

Speaker 2 the stories of us that have layered upon layer created who we are.

Speaker 1 I want to do one more thing because I think we both share,

Speaker 1 is it Dr. Henry? I always call him skip gates,

Speaker 1 finding your roots. I read that you did that as well.
I did.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we have,

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, this always sounds bizarre, but not to you.

Speaker 2 Have you brought your skip book?

Speaker 1 My skip book, because I couldn't remember. His last name was Smith, but he was Mayflower, you know, came across, which I noticed you also did.

Speaker 2 I've got some pretty close, not quite Mayflower, but on my mother's side, Tupper, there's somebody, but I've learned from Skip and from others doing genealogical research and having just finished this massive thing on the American Revolution that one of my relatives is Eldad Tupper.

Speaker 2 When I heard that for a while, I thought, Eldad's great, listen, and dog Eldad. Then it turns out he's a loyalist and refused to sign an oath and ended up in New Brunswick.

Speaker 2 And then I was, I was sort of, he was dead to me.

Speaker 1 I mean, literally and figuratively.

Speaker 1 I have on my side, on the Allen side of my family, my father's mother, pardon me, mother's side,

Speaker 1 Jolly Allen, who was a tavern owner and whose cheap.

Speaker 2 Jolly Adam.

Speaker 1 Jolly Allen.

Speaker 1 Jolly Allen. Wonderful name.
Yeah, and I think that was maybe the name of his tavern, but his last name was Alan.

Speaker 1 And it was his tea, or at least some of his tea, that ended up in the harbor because he was a loyalist. He was a loyalist.

Speaker 2 So we have that burden, too.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Not just

Speaker 2 that. I've got a slave owner.
And I actually took it with, I thought, a degree of equanimity when Skip and others earlier before that had done it. My big thing was my grandmother, who got a Ph.D.

Speaker 2 at Yale in 1922 in zoology and biology, ahead of my grandfather, who she then set aside her career to raise three boys, including my father, the oldest, a remarkable woman, had said that we're related to Robert Burns, but I can't prove it.

Speaker 2 And nothing we could do, no genealogical, no spit test, no nothing. I'd even gone to Scotland lecturing in 99 for the

Speaker 2 State Department and got a day off and I went to Alloway Cottage and, you know, there was a portrait.

Speaker 2 We'd seen the black and white sort of cameo frontispieces, but there's a portrait that looked exactly like me. And I had my second daughter with me and her.

Speaker 2 And we went in, and the matrons at the bookshop just dropped their jaws. I'm reaching into my wallet and showing them I'm Kenneth Lauren Burns.

Speaker 2 It would have been Mick Lauren, but my parents loved Lauren Bacall, so they cut the Mick off, and I'm Kenneth Lauren Burns. And they are like, we could do no wrong that day.
So I knew in my gut,

Speaker 2 as far back as my grandmother, because I trusted her implicitly, but in 1999, I could see the visual stuff. And then, God bless, Skip.

Speaker 2 You know, even the historic New England Genealogical Society that took me back to Charlemagne could not.

Speaker 1 Good to see you.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God. I knew, I knew, just watching cheers all that year.

Speaker 1 I went, That's got Charlemagne energy in it. That's not Charlemagne energy in it.

Speaker 1 Holy Roman Empire.

Speaker 1 So I

Speaker 2 finally had sort of kind of given up and thought maybe this was a sort of genealogical cul-de-sac.

Speaker 2 But he did the mitochondrial DNA, which is the mother stuff, and got a hit of a cousin and an aunt of Robert Burns. Robert Burns was born in 1759.

Speaker 2 My folks came over in 1750 from Scotland, but from that area. But we are related.
And I just had that great relief. I could just go, okay, you're an American.

Speaker 2 You got to deal with slavery and all of the stuff. I mean,

Speaker 2 99.99% of my films,

Speaker 2 we bump into race all the time in it. And the loyalist stuff was hard to digest, but it's complicated.

Speaker 2 But I've got Robert Byrne, so with some power, the gift to give us, to see ourselves as others see us.

Speaker 1 Okay, so now that I've proven that I'm just like you.

Speaker 2 And we're cousins. Yes.

Speaker 1 Which is cousin related.

Speaker 2 Do you want to spend Christmas or Thanksgiving together? Thanksgiving.

Speaker 1 Thanksgiving. Because my guy on the Mayflower.
Oh, Mayflower. We're are there.
Would that be a famous painting? Okay. Supposedly him.

Speaker 2 So I'm not going to bring anything. Like you'll do all the cooking.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, great.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 I don't want to mess up this quote, but that I heard you say when I was listening to the Sunday morning

Speaker 1 interview that the

Speaker 1 Declaration of Independence, the words that were used and what that set up

Speaker 1 was as earth-shattering as,

Speaker 1 and I don't want to mess this up because when you say Christ, everyone gets everybody's attention. And

Speaker 2 the American Revolution is the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ. It is a device to get your attention and to think about the fact

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 2 this second sentence of the Declaration, second only in the English language to, I love you,

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 2 about as earth-shattering and is as complicated. And we have to embrace and understand and tolerate the undertow and the contradictions.

Speaker 2 Obviously, written by a person who had known almost all there was to know, could read in many, many languages, and distilled a century of enlightenment thinking into this second sentence of the Declaration that begins, we hold these truths to be self-evident.

Speaker 2 He doesn't go with John Locke. He doesn't say life, liberty, and property, which is what they're all thinking about.

Speaker 2 He's saying, in the pursuit of happiness, which is not the acquisition of material things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.

Speaker 1 So he- And let's bracket that. Lifelong learning is freedom equals freedom.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 the founders, all of them, would say, yes, that's exactly what we mean by it, that in order to be this new thing, a citizen, it required a kind of virtuous, lifelong pursuit of something.

Speaker 2 This was a huge responsibility. A few phrases later, Jefferson says, all all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

Speaker 1 It can go.

Speaker 1 Do that again.

Speaker 2 All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

Speaker 2 That means all of human history heretofore, everybody has been essentially subject to an authoritarian ruler. They have been subjects, and we are creating a new thing.

Speaker 2 And it's going to take a little bit more energy.

Speaker 2 And so today, as we grapple with all of the forces surrounding us, we can go back to our founding and take real strength from the fact that, you know, we lost and we lost and we lost and we lost.

Speaker 2 And somehow, at the end, we actually won. And what we triumphed over was the momentum of how human history had unfolded.
And that was...

Speaker 2 tyranny and authoritarian rule and we had created something else that was going to suggest that the people could, through lifelong learning, through virtue, through less ambition and avarice, as John Adams would say, would be able to govern themselves.

Speaker 2 And so, what you required was an educated populace, not a superstitious peasantry in which you've taken education out.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm still waking up suffering from the fact that where I have all of my films, all my professional life on PBS has just been defunded by the federal government in an attempt, I think, to actually

Speaker 2 make us less aware of ourselves.

Speaker 2 And it's going to hurt not the urban areas as much as the rural areas, where the last vestige of local news is the NPR or the PBS station that is covering the school board or the

Speaker 2 city council meeting or whatever.

Speaker 1 And that's not just spin. That is the truth.

Speaker 2 That is the truth. And so

Speaker 2 Jefferson's words, particularly this morning, are kind of resonating with me.

Speaker 2 And yet I think this story that we've told of the American Revolution that's coming out in November, I think well in advance of next

Speaker 2 July's potentially fife and drum treacle, you know, where we're just kind of bombarded with all the patriotic tropes and forget how violent

Speaker 2 our revolution was. It was a civil war.
Our civil war was a sectional war, one part of the country against the other. And this is really interior.
Your neighbor could be a loyalist.

Speaker 2 And a loyalist is not a bad person. They're what we'd call a conservative.

Speaker 2 Someone says, you know, the British constitutional monarchy is the best form of government on earth, and you'd be right up until now. And why would you want to change this?

Speaker 2 I've got health, I've got property, I've got, I'm literate.

Speaker 2 Things are pretty good here. What's the problem? You know, do you want to be ruled,

Speaker 2 one loyalist minister said to another,

Speaker 2 by a tyrant 3,000 miles away or 3,000 tyrants a mile away, meaning the mob of democracy, which was scaring to death everybody. So

Speaker 2 we forged this thing out of a really complicated, diverse set of people, native peoples living among us on our western border, enslaved and free blacks, women who are huge part of the resistance and yet are left out entirely from

Speaker 2 the spoils. It's a great, great story, and I think might give us

Speaker 2 some courage as we sort of face the current set of resistance.

Speaker 1 I want to go back in a second, but to finish to just off what you just said, there is hope in realizing I heard you talk about, you know, we do tend to both sides of, you know, whatever conversation, to...

Speaker 1 hype up the unnatural thing that's happening in the world at the moment.

Speaker 1 Whereas the truth is,

Speaker 1 that's human nature and we've been doing it forever.

Speaker 2 We've divided out our revolution during this know-nothing periods of the early

Speaker 2 19th century, of course, the Civil War. We killed 700 and we murdered 750,000 of our own people over the question of slavery, which we were still tolerating.

Speaker 2 There were 4 million human beings owned by other Americans in a country which was bragging to the world that all men were created equal.

Speaker 2 We've struggled through the Vietnam period, through lots of other things. Division is given.

Speaker 2 And I think we do have a kind of chicken little sense of that always, that whatever's happening now has got to be the end, the worst sort of thing. And I think that's where history becomes,

Speaker 2 I don't want to say it's pollyannish or it's optimistic. It just means you're armed with the fact that, as the Ecclesiastes said, there's nothing new under the sun.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And like faith,

Speaker 1 democracy or freedom is not set in concrete. Faith is a, I think, is something that you don't

Speaker 1 sign up for and then every Sunday or whatever, you know,

Speaker 1 it's a living thing that if you do not wake up every morning like you do with your love for your mate and refresh it and work hard for it and make mistakes with it, but engage it literally every day, then you're not really engaging faith or democracy or love.

Speaker 2 That is exactly right. And all of those things, faith, democracy, and love, I think that's it.

Speaker 2 I gave the commencement address last year at Brandeis, and at one point I just said, you know, you have to realize that the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith.

Speaker 2 It's what keeps it, as you're saying, a practice and not something that then you just wear and say I'm this and not do the work necessary. The opposite of faith is certainty.

Speaker 2 Certainty destroys the kind of mystery that the search provides. So every morning I wake up and have, for 10 and a half years, received a photograph from a friend.

Speaker 2 It used to be just him and his dying son, who's now passed away, back in 2015. And he photographs the page of Tolstoy's calendar of wisdom.

Speaker 2 At the end of his life, he published two books, each with every day of the year, had a set of paragraphs and quotes from other people that are signed. And I respond to it.

Speaker 2 It comes in at like 5 a.m., and I respond as soon as I'm up.

Speaker 2 And over the years, it's grown, and there's a couple hundred people who receive this email, and very few respond, but some of them come in with extra extraordinary stuff.

Speaker 2 But I make a comment every day, and it's my, I don't know what, you know, vespers or the evening prayers.

Speaker 2 I don't know what the equivalent of what the morning prayer is, but for me, it's a way to start. And it's almost like breaking the ice on

Speaker 2 something that's beginning to harden. Whatever we think, we always take our faith, we take our love, whatever, and there's a something happens and it begins to harden.

Speaker 2 And it's a way to break it up and saying, you know, I'm starting over, you know, and I start every, I make a note and I just always say new day, exclamation point, meaning,

Speaker 2 what, what are you going to do? And you think about this.

Speaker 2 Sometimes he's quoting the Buddha, sometimes he's quoting Jesus, sometimes he's quoting the Quran, sometimes he's quoting, and you realize that all of these faiths, which are responsible for so many of our

Speaker 1 violent things, are all, you know,

Speaker 2 great rivers flowing into the same sea. They have exactly at their heart.
I mean, I said in that same speech that, you know, this is a

Speaker 2 Jewish university,

Speaker 2 Brandeis, named after the first Jewish

Speaker 2 Supreme Court justice. And I said, you know, we are now so dialectically preoccupied, gay, straight, young, old, black, white, Palestinian, Israeli.

Speaker 2 And you just take that dichotomy and you just look at the situation.

Speaker 2 There is this land, which is actually the holy land for three great religions, all of them children of Abraham, who've turned it into a shameful graveyard.

Speaker 2 And I said, God does not distinguish between the dead.

Speaker 2 The founders of our country, many of them were what are called deists. That is to say that they believe in a supreme being, but one disinterested in the daily activities.
So when you hit

Speaker 2 a game, a walk-off home run, you don't need to thank. Nobody did, there was no bigger power that did that, and doesn't distinguish between faiths.

Speaker 2 So it gives us a country started unlike any other country, not just on this thing, citizen, but with no established religion. And so you are not essentially saying,

Speaker 2 I am going to participate in the squabbles that inevitably arise from the

Speaker 2 I'm right, you're wrong aspects of even the most, you know,

Speaker 2 all the different Protestant sects. Each one is slightly different from the other with a different thing.
And we've permitted those differences and between the larger religions to cloud everything.

Speaker 2 And that

Speaker 2 it's all the same, you know, and it gets back.

Speaker 2 I live in New Hampshire. I have a yard sign and and political yard sign.
We're a big state, people come through. And my yard sign says love multiplies,

Speaker 2 which I think is the only equation, no, the only equation that actually addresses the universe.

Speaker 1 And it's great because it's a bit of a haiku. So what the hell does that mean? Yeah, a couple of people come by, and then

Speaker 2 inevitably somebody will come by, usually a woman, and say, well, that's really beautiful. And I said, you want one?

Speaker 2 So I go to the garage and I pull out, you know, and give them a yard sign that says love multiplies.

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Speaker 1 We've gone down many

Speaker 1 verbal

Speaker 1 hallways

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 they're all so

Speaker 1 they're so fascinating that I just wanted to do two things. One,

Speaker 1 timeout. No, no, no, no, no, calling myself out.
I did that thing, you know, in

Speaker 1 school when you don't know the answer, but you want to show that you're, you know, the smart kid raises his hand. And you, once they start, they call him the smart kid, you go, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Speaker 1 I knew that too. I knew that too.

Speaker 1 When you did Brandeis and said, named after, I mouthed about a second behind you, Supreme Court Justice.

Speaker 1 Just in case my friends here saw that I. I saw that, but I still think we're in sync.
We are in sync. But here's why I bring that up.

Speaker 1 The conversation is at a pretty high level of of knowledge of history and everything else. I find you fascinating beyond belief.

Speaker 1 And one of the things that makes you so fascinating, I think, and drives you is your curiosity. Everything you've talked about is you wake up and you're curious.

Speaker 1 Little parentheses, I remember my friend Jeff Bridges went through a health scare, nut scare, real deal cancer thing. And I asked his brother, how's he doing? And he said, well, you know, he's Jeff.

Speaker 1 He went, wow, a new experience. I wonder what this is going to be like.
That sense of curiosity keeps you alive.

Speaker 1 That's my little hallway I went down. Now, my other thing is I want to make sure that people know,

Speaker 1 just because some of them may be raising their hand after you start, you know, give the answer,

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 Your films, your documentaries, the American Revolution, which is so important and covers so many things, is so accessible to anybody. Everybody.

Speaker 1 No matter if you picked up a history book ever, or you go, What the hell does this have to do with me? You'll find out it does.

Speaker 1 Or this is not going to reflect my experience or my relatives' or ancestors' experience. Wrong.
Wrong. It is literally covered.
You will see yourself in

Speaker 1 these documentaries you make. Great mirror.
Yes. And

Speaker 1 one more hallway. Skip Gates did that for me.
It's like when I started hearing,

Speaker 1 well, one of the things that was most potent was discovering that

Speaker 1 one of my relatives had a slave named Venture Smith who wrote a book, famous book, and

Speaker 1 who was allowed to buy his freedom. And when I heard the allowed,

Speaker 1 Someone was allowed to work

Speaker 1 for you and get this pittance and then use that pittance to buy his freedom. And it wasn't like me being, oh,

Speaker 1 softy. I broke into tears

Speaker 1 because it's like, no, wait, what? Yeah.

Speaker 2 I get it.

Speaker 1 So anyway, that's available in everything you're doing and talking about. And once you would see yourself there or see your relatives there, history is opened up to you.

Speaker 1 And you're all of a sudden really curious yourself.

Speaker 2 That's a nice thing to say, Ted. I think documentaries have had this honorable history of being about a contemporary moment and advocating a particular point of view, all of which is great.

Speaker 2 You know, we think about... the mindfulness when I was growing up about the farm workers in the Central Valley of California.
And CBS News had a white paper called Harvest of Shame.

Speaker 2 It's a really great documentary in and of itself. Of course, we know all the ones that command our attention over the last several decades.

Speaker 2 But we've tried not to put our thumb on the scale, but to be umpires, to go back to the baseball stuff and throw balls and strikes and just be

Speaker 2 able to tell a story that's complicated, that tolerates undertow.

Speaker 2 Because what I was trying to communicate to the students at Brandeis is that we are so dialectically preoccupied that we now are certain they're binaries.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 2 that you're different from me, that she's different from me, that you're this, I'm red state, you're blue state, whatever it is. And

Speaker 2 we're always making the other wrong. And the success for love multiplies is try not to make the other wrong, to not create.
I mean, I've, you know,

Speaker 2 the sort of headline thing is that I've been making films for 50 years about the U.S., but I've also been making films about us.

Speaker 2 That is to say, the two-letter, lowercase, plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our,

Speaker 2 and all of the majesty and complexity and contradiction and even controversy of the United States. And if you call balls and strikes, then there's room for everybody.

Speaker 2 And then you are understanding that when we need to create a villain, we've just, I mean, you can throw George Washington out for a few reasons, right?

Speaker 2 But we don't have a country without him.

Speaker 2 So you want to stay and find out his complexity and learn also about the hundreds of other people who didn't have their portrait painting and didn't lead the Continental Army and didn't become the first president and didn't give up his military commission and didn't give up the presidency setting in motion for at least 249 years.

Speaker 2 This unbelievable experiment in

Speaker 2 self-government.

Speaker 2 And then you can also learn all the other people who themselves, wherever, whatever station they also have complexity. And so everybody's invited in.

Speaker 2 And just that moment that you said, I started to, Tira himself

Speaker 2 was allowed to buy his freedom means there's a fissure, there's a crack, there's an opening door.

Speaker 2 When the people were talking about liberty in the American Revolution, it mattered very much, as the scholar Maggie Blackhawk says in her film, to the people at the margins.

Speaker 2 The people who's serving tea to the George Washingtons and the Patrick Henrys and the Thomas Jefferson and the Samuel and John Adams up in Massachusetts, they're hearing that liberty talk.

Speaker 2 And they're saying, I believe it.

Speaker 2 There's a guy that we follow in our film named James Fortin, who was nine years old when the Declaration was read out loud for the first time in Philadelphia a few days after it was signed on July 4th, 1776.

Speaker 2 He never for a second didn't think it didn't apply to him. He took its self-evident truths to be applied.
And he fought for the

Speaker 2 Patriot cause and is captured and is put in a prison ship called the Jersey, a horrible prison ship in the East River, nearly died, got out at the end of the war, walked home barefoot to Philadelphia.

Speaker 2 Mother didn't recognize him, went on, made a fortune as a black man, and

Speaker 2 used the profits to help fund the nascent abolition movement. William Floyd Garrison's The Liberator that begins to be published in the 1820s.
So everybody knows slavery's wrong.

Speaker 2 Jefferson knows it's wrong.

Speaker 2 Washington knows it's wrong. You can hear it in the quotes in our film.
But

Speaker 2 it's too good a deal, right? It's free labor, right? They're not working for any.

Speaker 2 I mean, and then when the

Speaker 2 abolition movement starts and they're really talking about taking it away in the next couple of generations, then the arguments come out where they're inferior.

Speaker 2 We're taking care of them. They're children.
They wouldn't know what to do with freedom. And that's the white supremacy that we are still imprisoned by now, lashed

Speaker 2 down and held back by this this sense that the other there's no you know if if you go back to that I've been making films about us the only thing I've known is that there's no them

Speaker 2 there's no them

Speaker 1 it's so hard when you when you take a path which we all do and I'll say you know

Speaker 1 I do it in my relationship I will

Speaker 1 the only time I really get mad at Mary is when I'm flat out wrong and I know of course because then I have to defend it because I can't be that person you're describing.

Speaker 1 I can't allow myself to sit with that.

Speaker 2 That's a pretty brave thing to say and it's true of all of us and everybody recognizes it, but you said it.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 you double down on something that's a real taboo like owning another human being.

Speaker 1 You can see how people

Speaker 1 have to double down and double down and double down because otherwise you have to have the kindness to yourself to realize that you are capable of doing evil and good. And

Speaker 1 you need to embrace both because it's the truth and it will indeed set you free.

Speaker 2 That's exactly right. And why tyrants and authoritarians are able to do it.
They're offering you the simple way out. Simple.
And they're saying, look, it's not your fault. It's always our fault.

Speaker 1 My mom taught me that. Oh, I have to do that phrase.
It's our law. It's always our fault.

Speaker 2 And so if you say, no, it's their fault. It's them.

Speaker 2 They're doing that to you. It might be a Mexican rapist.
You know, it's this person. It's a Democrat.
Whatever is the popular stuff. And when in fact it's us.

Speaker 2 You know, there's a comic strip in the 40s called Pogo by Walt Kelly. And the most famous line in it is, we have met the enemy and he is us.

Speaker 2 And that, if you can embrace that in a kind of almost spiritual dynamic about oneself, then if you've got a problem with me, it's my fault. If I've got a problem with you, it's still my fault.

Speaker 2 And then there are no wars. Love multiplies.

Speaker 1 And there's

Speaker 1 no pointing your, you know, because

Speaker 1 not to get into politics or partisanship or whatever, but I know the LA Times did a non-scientific study once where they wired people up with a conservative, their brains and a self-professed liberal and conservative.

Speaker 1 The conservative brain had a lot of trouble and make them anxious with paradox,

Speaker 1 with holding both, you know,

Speaker 1 I can do evil and I can do good, and

Speaker 1 that's in me and always is. That's hard to deal with and make some people anxious.

Speaker 1 Then if you're the other person who can deal with paradox, one of the things that we have done that's unforgivable and is contrary to what you just said, if you have a problem with me, it's still my fault.

Speaker 1 That's right. We make people feel less than if they can't hold paradox.

Speaker 1 We are snotty sons of guns.

Speaker 1 I am.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I know. And, you know, we spend an awful lot of time.
You know, people use the phrase,

Speaker 2 I'm an amateur historian, I'm a filmmaker, I'm a storyteller. And, you know, we've, but I've spent 50 years telling stories in American history.
And

Speaker 2 you hear people say history repeats itself. It never, no event has happened happened twice, or we're condemned to repeat what we don't remember.

Speaker 2 It's lovely, often attributed to George Santayana, often about the Holocaust, and you want to say it. It's a lovely thought.
It's just not going to happen. That's not the way human beings are wired.

Speaker 2 Mark Twain is

Speaker 2 supposed to have said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, which is just perfect.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 2 So I've spent my entire professional life realizing that there rhymes, but trying so hard to concentrate on telling the story. And I'll give you a good example with the the revolution.

Speaker 2 The revolution, I said, I looked up and I said to Sarah Botstein, my co-director, I said,

Speaker 2 We're finishing our film on Vietnam. And it was still a year and a half from broadcast, but we were beginning to lock some of the episodes.
And I said, We're doing Revolution Next.

Speaker 2 And, you know, she nodded and kind of gulped. There are no pictures, no newsreels, everything we had, a plethora of.
So it's a gulp. And

Speaker 2 it's a big gulp.

Speaker 2 And yet, we have this possibility to tell the story of what's going on. So So, when I said, let's do it, Barack Obama had 13 months in his presidency.

Speaker 2 And so, as you were working on that, there's stuff that was rhyming all the time, that you just had to say, okay, it's in there.

Speaker 2 We're not going to point at Neon Signet and said, boy, isn't this so much like today? Because that then helps make the other person wrong.

Speaker 2 Oh, you can't stand paradox, or I can do that, you know, you can't, whatever the thing is, or I'm morally certain, and you can contain paradoxes.

Speaker 2 So if our film had come out last year, last fall, for example, we had a moment, it's still

Speaker 1 an American Revolution.

Speaker 2 If we'd finished it early and we were out last fall, we have the wife of a German mercenary general who's coming to join her husband in the ill-fated Burgoyne campaign, which is going to convince the French to come in.

Speaker 2 She doesn't know that. She thinks she's coming to America with her three little babies, and she's a little bit worried because her reputation is that Americans eat cats.

Speaker 2 Now, that would have just rhymed like anything last fall. Right.
Now, this fall, when it comes out in November, I'm not sure there'll be many, and maybe a few cognicenti that will go, eating cats?

Speaker 2 Oh, doesn't that trigger a bell? So there's all this stuff. There's a failed invasion of Canada.
There's an epidemic of smallpox.

Speaker 2 There's a big, you know, you know, stuff that happens, maybe multiple epidemics that take place. There's an eclipse.
You know, all of those things happen. And so we've just tried to look at them.

Speaker 2 And if you're an umpire calling balls and strikes, you're not going, oh, that's one for our side, right? Oh, that's one for another side.

Speaker 2 We've got lots of loyalists, and we're not saying they're bad people. In fact, there's just to give you an idea what our revolution is about, big ideas.

Speaker 2 But it's also about a guy named John Peters who lived in what's now Vermont. And he is a loyalist.
He has escaped to Canada because of the opprobrium that has been heaped on him by his neighbors.

Speaker 2 His wife has also escaped and found sanctuary on a British boat.

Speaker 1 Life and death kind of story.

Speaker 2 Oh, life and death. Well, I'm going to get to that.
So he forms a regiment in Quebec, a loyalist regiment. His 15-year-old son signs up first, and they come back down.

Speaker 2 They're involved in the Battle of Bennington, which is actually into New York State. And he's losing.
It's a battle that his side is going to lose.

Speaker 2 And the Patriots are overwhelming the redoubt, the hastily built fort that he's in.

Speaker 2 And his quote to us, and we follow him through most every episode, but this is the fourth episode, his quote is that he is manning this redoubt, and he hears John Peters, you damn Tory,

Speaker 2 as this person is sticking his bayonet in John Peters and being deflected by the rib cage. He recognizes it as the voice of Jeremiah Post, his dear friend growing up in New Haven.

Speaker 2 And then I was obliged to destroy him as he fires his pistol, killing Jeremiah Post.

Speaker 2 That, Ted, is also the American Revolution, in addition to all those other things.

Speaker 2 So I think maybe because there's no photographs or newsreels, maybe because we're so afraid that we might diminish the big ideas, we accept the violence of the Civil War, we accept the violence of the 20th century wars, but we sort of want to protect the guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts and signing great documents that we're unwilling to sort of open up.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 we've encrusted the revolution with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia, which are the enemies of any real understanding.

Speaker 2 But when you open it up and understand all of the players, loyalist, black, native, women, patriots, disaffected people who want to be left alone, what a German soldier or his wife feels, what a French diplomat or a French soldier feels, what a British king,

Speaker 2 prime minister,

Speaker 2 his officers, the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh and English men that make up that army, what they all felt, the native voices, the Spanish voices, all of them become this incredible chorus of contradiction and complication.

Speaker 2 But if you can hold it, it's one hell of a story and there is a place for you.

Speaker 2 So maybe not the corridors that we keep going down, but maybe the mansion, which we think you can only go through the front door.

Speaker 2 There are lots of different doors, lots of different entrances that you can get into.

Speaker 1 It's sad that, and this may just be me and I'm reading life wrong, but it's a little bit sad that I'm trying to also say, hey, it doesn't matter what your persuasion is, it doesn't matter if you're pissed and angry and feel victimized by life.

Speaker 1 It doesn't matter. Watch this.

Speaker 1 You could watch it for any number of reasons, but you can also watch it to be entertained. You know, take your most famous.
Yeah, it's a good story.

Speaker 2 It's a good story, it's a good story, it's a good story. That's really the end.
In fact,

Speaker 2 the novelist Richard Power says, and this is where we're at right now, and I think

Speaker 2 what you're trying to do is appeal to something bigger than the dialectic, bigger than the biology. There's nothing binary in nature.
It's just, it's all complicated, and it all has

Speaker 2 laws that are much higher than we perceive. But Richard Powers, the novelist, said, the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view.

Speaker 2 The only thing that can do that is a good story. Because the good story is like a benevolent Trojan horse.
You let it in. It's not going to slay the city.
It's going to come out and transform you.

Speaker 2 So yes, if you are a die-hard MAGA person, I've got some over mountain men in North Carolina that you will recognize.

Speaker 2 These people are fighting the British because they're pissed off that they're going to tell them first they can't cross the Appalachians, and we're going to do it anyway.

Speaker 2 And when you tell us to come and join the Loyalist cause, we're not going to. We're going to come and join the Patriot cause and we're going to beat your ass on Kings Mountain And that's what happens.

Speaker 2 And so you see, and then later on when the revolution's over, they go, we don't want to live under this new thing. We want to start our own state in Western thing.

Speaker 2 We're going to call it Franklin, by the way. So there are people who are upset at the idea of democracy.
Like democracy was not the intention of the founding fathers.

Speaker 2 Democracy was a consequence because in order to win this revolution, you had to extend rights beyond your class of propertied intellectual elites, we would call them.

Speaker 2 And that the revolution in our country comes about because people, teenagers, felons, second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance, ne'er-do-wells, unscrupulous sorts, reach immigrants from Germany and Ireland, they make up the Continental Army.

Speaker 2 The sturdy militiamen, they disappear when the crops have to be sown or reaped, or they're scared.

Speaker 2 And it's these teenagers and this other rabble, as Johann Ewald, a Hessian mercenary, describes them, that are able to defy kings.

Speaker 2 Got some problem with that? If you're left, right, or center?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 No. Able to defy kings.

Speaker 1 Pretty good stuff. Unbelievable story.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's our story. Yeah.
All of our stories. And there's...
uncomfortable parts of that story. And I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 You know, if you think sanitizing it is a Soviet way was to take your picture off the top of the, you know, the political list watching the May Day parade. What? He's gone now.

Speaker 2 Well, he's displeased me. You know, and that's kind of the editing that goes on all the time when you want to simplify stuff.
Nothing simple. We know this in our case.

Speaker 1 And what you're saying when you do that is you're not adult enough. You're not grown up enough to be able to hold the idea that people change.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to have to take this picture off because I don't trust you to be smart enough, bright enough to hold paradox is what that person is saying.

Speaker 2 That's great. And so that's an insult to you.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That is an insult to you to say, you know, we're going to pull out of this library, Tony Morrison, and leave, you know, Mein Kampf. Because certainly

Speaker 1 you can't deal with, you know, it's so condescending. Yeah, really.
Well,

Speaker 2 that's what I think the problem is.

Speaker 2 This idea of setting up an other then presumes that they're lower than you or that in a celebrity culture that you're higher than somebody or that somebody looks up to you.

Speaker 2 There's only communication among equals. So

Speaker 2 at your first gesture, as we wake up in the morning, breaking the ice, responding to the Tolstoy messages, doing whatever thing we have, we have to actually make sure that everyone we meet, we know, is equal to us in all matters.

Speaker 2 The person who serves you, your coffee that you get, the person who serves your meal later on, the kid that's got a stupid question you think, and maybe, if you stopped and listened to it, the central question of the moment.

Speaker 1 Right. And there's a smidge of Christ-like

Speaker 1 thoughts in what you just said. And there's certainly, you know, democracy thoughts in what you just said.
So there really is

Speaker 1 everything for everybody.

Speaker 2 So we go back to trying to make the point, although it's over dramatic, this is the most important event since the birth of Christ because it is

Speaker 2 Christ has used an example in the Christian religion as a way to be and as a teacher of that way to be, just as Muhammad, just as Buddha, just as all the various personifications and manifestations in the other religions.

Speaker 2 And so you can either,

Speaker 2 as you said earlier, so well, you know, you can just take it as, okay, it's Sunday and now I'm done. Now can I watch the game?

Speaker 2 But it's got to be a daily kind of a breathing exercise and be every respiration has to have that possibility that you could be aware. And it begins with how we treat others.

Speaker 1 We're going to take a commercial break now. And by that I mean.

Speaker 1 I'm going to talk about Mary Steenbridge and my wife. Oh, good.

Speaker 2 I was going to try to sell green tea, right?

Speaker 2 I love green tea. First of all, I love your wife.

Speaker 1 Yeah, oh, good.

Speaker 2 She's the best. And I know my brother, who's a great documentary filmmaker, too, has used her in many, many films.

Speaker 2 And I'm sort of screwing up the courage to ask both of you cats to come and do more work. You've already read.

Speaker 1 Smacks, my bailiwick, false humility.

Speaker 1 You're screwing your courage up to ask Mary and me to be.

Speaker 1 We're there. Okay.

Speaker 1 I have you on record. We're there.
And if we're not doing something within the year, oh, we're coming after you. So here's my commercial break.

Speaker 1 And it comes from Skip Gates, finding your roots. And Mary and I both said, yes, of course we want to do it because we knew Skip from Martha's Vineyard and all that.
And

Speaker 1 so when she, you're on camera when your life is being revealed to you. Exactly.
So there is a degree of, uh-oh, I'm on camera.

Speaker 2 And my life is being revealed to me.

Speaker 1 And I need to respond in a nice, you know, on-camera way.

Speaker 1 And I think someone had just complained recently about finding out that their relatives owned slaves and were upset about it and wanted to edit it. I don't remember who it was.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 But it was like, I remember that.

Speaker 1 And Mary's going, that boy, that's not my. concern.

Speaker 1 My family was so poor, I doubt that we had, anyone had slaves. Turns out that's not true.
They did. But her great fear, Mary's great fear, sitting down with Skip, was that I will be boring.

Speaker 1 All of my ancestors will just be boring. And please, God, don't let that be so.

Speaker 1 So she sits down, and here's your mom, here's your father, and you know about your grandparents, and these are your grandparents. Do you know about your great-grandparents?

Speaker 1 And Mary's going, no, please God, please God. And

Speaker 1 they were wood choppers. And Mary, who's on camera, can't go, oh, shoot me now.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, and she, oh, oh, really? Wood choppers. And then, yes.
And then do you know what his father did?

Speaker 1 Wood choppers. And she was just horrified.
Not horrified, you know, just that kind of, oh, gosh. I was hoping for something more exciting in my.
ancestry. And then he said, okay, now

Speaker 1 when we get to the

Speaker 1 French Indian War or something, I I can't remember his fifth grandfather or something, a man named Peter Steenbergen

Speaker 1 from Holland

Speaker 1 went to, I think, Jamaica, where he did indeed buy a slave, and then came to,

Speaker 1 I don't remember where in the United States and New England, and

Speaker 1 joined the army. He was a great linguist under George Washington.
And this is where you can start tracking Peter Steenbergen because they're in letters.

Speaker 1 And once George is writing a letter, it's there. Yeah.
So this French Indian, so I don't know what he was, a lieutenant or a captain, George Washington.

Speaker 1 And Peter Stevenson was a very handsome, charismatic rogue and was just getting his entire

Speaker 1 platoon or, you know, all of the men under George in this particular area into deep trouble for his carousing and this, this and letters were written to George saying if you don't handle this

Speaker 1 we may have to handle you in essence so Peter could have changed history right you know by being this thorn and they were both friends but he was a problematic friend He ended up getting dismissed over time and married some wealthy woman and had a tavern, but then during the Revolutionary War, came back and served under Washington.

Speaker 1 And in one of the British chasing the

Speaker 1 army across a river,

Speaker 1 Peter Steenbridge stayed behind and untied the British boats so that they couldn't follow the Americans. So he became very heroic.
But anyway, that's my commercial break to marry.

Speaker 2 I was just so overjoyed.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 And then just think about it. Then

Speaker 2 their grandchildren settled down and chopped wood. That's okay.

Speaker 1 That's okay, right? Yes, it's okay.

Speaker 2 There's no communication except among equals. And what I learned, I was working on a film in the aughts on the history of

Speaker 2 the Second World War. And it's the only film I've really done that had hundreds of brethren, like lots of films.
And we were telling this story to

Speaker 2 ordinary Americans in four geographically distributed towns.

Speaker 2 Waterbury, Connecticut, Mobile, Alabama, Sacramento, 100,000 population in 1941, and then a tiny little town in southwestern Minnesota called Laverne, you know, a few thousand.

Speaker 2 And what I understood, or what a dear friend of mine sort of reminded me, he goes, there are no ordinary people.

Speaker 2 And then, because you realize that woodchopper might have been in another generation landing at D-Day at Omaha Beach, where there's not a financial reward, you're not going to get empire, there's no conquest involved, you're not gaining territory for your land, there's no treasure to loot.

Speaker 2 You're there and you're a farm boy from Iowa and you've never seen the ocean, let alone dropped it under those circumstances.

Speaker 2 Then you're talking about the animation of big stuff, ideas, and they're at the heart of our story.

Speaker 1 We talk about great experiments. I mean, yes.

Speaker 1 The Constitution, the United States creation of it, isn't a grand experiment.

Speaker 1 The reason why I get close to

Speaker 1 thinking about a higher,

Speaker 1 when you say God or Christ or religion, it just, everything gets so small. But if you, when I think big thoughts, my thought is what a grand experiment being human is.

Speaker 1 Because everybody has to go through the same, it's not like

Speaker 1 the more generations we learn and go, oh, okay,

Speaker 1 we learned that, so I don't have to relearn it. No, you have to wake up and discover what it's like to be human, fallible, angry.
That's right. Magnificent.
All these things.

Speaker 2 When you were talking about Jeff Bridges and his trouble with health, I thought that I had a friend who's maybe the highest person I've ever met, kind of a holy man.

Speaker 2 He's a painter, but also a philosopher and a businessman. And he was just into sort of esoteric stuff.
And I had the great good fortune to know him.

Speaker 2 And I made three films, little tiny films about him.

Speaker 1 You're talking Da Vinci, right? No, no.

Speaker 2 Well, that's another one. I didn't meet him, but I knew William Siegel was his name.

Speaker 2 And he was in a terrible car accident before I met him, broke most of the bones in his body. And one of the great Zen masters from Tokyo had come over to visit him, named DT Suzuki.

Speaker 2 He wrote beautiful books about Zen, Zen flesh, Zen bones, really wonderful stuff. And he went over and he said, you know, Bill,

Speaker 2 an accident is worth 10,000 meditations. So you see the, and I think Jeff was communicating to you or your friend that there is even opportunity in this.

Speaker 2 My origin story is that not my father, but my mother died of cancer when I was 11. There was never a moment growing up when she wasn't there.

Speaker 2 And I saw after she had died, my father loved movies and he would let me stay up at night on a school night. And we were watching Odd Man Out by Carol Reed with James Mason about the Irish troubles.

Speaker 2 And my dad started to cry. Never cried when she was sick, 10 years, never cried at her death, didn't cry at this impossibly sad funeral, but he cried now at a movie.
And I just said, I was now 12,

Speaker 2 I want to be a filmmaker, right? That's what I want to be, because it had given him these emotions. And so I was telling this story to...

Speaker 1 But how old were you when that happened?

Speaker 2 My mother died when I was 11, just a few months, and this is maybe 12, 12 and a half. And I remember it and I said, oh, that's what I want to be.

Speaker 2 And that meant John Ford, Howard Hawkes, Alfred Hitchcock. And I went to Hampshire College, and they were all social documentary still photographers.
I became that. Years later, I was in a crisis.

Speaker 2 And my late father-in-law was an eminent psychologist. And I was talking about not having really dealt with my mother's death.
And he said a few things into me.

Speaker 2 Like, you blew out the candles on your birthday wishing she'd come back. I said, how'd you know? And they do all this stuff.
He finally just looked at me. He says, look what you do for a living.

Speaker 1 I said, what?

Speaker 2 He said, you wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive.
Who do you think you're really trying to wake up?

Speaker 2 And so what I'm trying to tell you, and I was interviewed by a sociologist a few years after that, and their last question after three hours, I was like, why did I do this?

Speaker 2 Their last question was, what was your mother's greatest gift? And I looked and I said instantly, dying. And I burst into tears.
And I said, I didn't want her to die, but I wouldn't be talking to you.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't be making the films.

Speaker 2 It's all based on on loss. It's all based on how you go in and transform suffering, how you meet

Speaker 2 the thing that you didn't want to meet

Speaker 2 and overcome it. And so that's the basis.

Speaker 2 All of this work is born out of loss. And I would suggest probably

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 the thing that defines you are less those good times when things ran smoothly or the traffic in Los Angeles was just, just, strangely, I'm getting here very quickly,

Speaker 2 but other moments when there were obstacles, when there was pain, when there was loss, when there was, you know, self-doubt,

Speaker 2 whatever it might be.

Speaker 2 And then in those transformational moments, something accrues that is

Speaker 2 more important than the ordinary. And that's the essence of story, right? It's the essence of spiritualism.
It's the essence of

Speaker 2 your final triumvirate, which is love. And that multiplies.

Speaker 1 And it's also, if you just want to say, what's in it for me? Your brain. At 77, I'm very curious about how to keep my brain firing as much as possible.
And

Speaker 1 doing things, discover curiosity.

Speaker 1 Stay curious.

Speaker 1 You know, literally to the point of, you know,

Speaker 1 change hands. If you brush your teeth with your left hand, brush everything.

Speaker 2 I once did a commencement. I said, do this.
You know, I said, try brushing your teeth with the other hand tonight. Try even remembering what I just said.
And of course, there is no one,

Speaker 2 I don't think, that remembered, let alone tried to brush it with the other hand.

Speaker 1 And to those who haven't tried it yet, it sucks.

Speaker 2 It really sucks.

Speaker 1 But going against yourself

Speaker 2 has an amazing payoff. Yeah.
It has an amazing payoff.

Speaker 1 Because you want to be comfortable.

Speaker 2 Everybody wants to slide into the thing that says, look, here's the news. I'm really sorry.
None of us are getting out of here alive. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That is my actually, when everything is really hard for me, or I feel victimized by life or by

Speaker 1 whatever it is. My,

Speaker 1 or no, when I look at life and go,

Speaker 1 oh.

Speaker 1 I care about oceans and, you know, and it's such an ongoing process and there's so many defeats and so many this and so many that

Speaker 1 or something like what's going on politically, all of that kind of stuff. At some point I turn to myself and go, and then you die.

Speaker 2 And then you die.

Speaker 1 You don't get some award for saving an ocean.

Speaker 2 Nope, you die. So I think a therapist once told me years ago that there are two sort of big fallacies that animate lots of our parts of our lives for many people.

Speaker 2 One is that I'm going to find somebody who is the perfect match. You actually find somebody that you can be a partner in your own self-development and that you grow together.

Speaker 2 But it's not, it's never the perfect match, the one that completes you.

Speaker 2 You are a priori complete. And so what you've got to do is figure out how to realize that and manifest that.
And the other is that there'll be some exception in your case and you'll live forever.

Speaker 1 Life is, death is becoming less and less of a rumor at my age.

Speaker 1 But But it's been a rumor.

Speaker 2 I'm going to be 72 in a few days, and I hear you. I hear you.
We're talking about even walking into this room.

Speaker 2 Do you go to the bathroom? No, I'm okay. Okay, yeah.
No, I think.

Speaker 1 This, by the way, is the longest I've ever gone without being. That's how fascinating you are.

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Speaker 1 I don't want to let go of you. I don't want to let go of you quite yet.

Speaker 1 I've been asking people, you know, what's your guiding light? What's your North Star?

Speaker 1 What gives you hope and all that? We've been talking about it with you. I mean, you are, to my mind, but I will ask you this anyway,

Speaker 1 living your life by these documentaries that you've been putting out into the world.

Speaker 1 You are, your life is a demonstration of what you, I think, believe in. So anyway, here goes.
What is your

Speaker 1 guiding light? What is that thing that

Speaker 1 it must be actually hard for you because you are

Speaker 1 your life is so defensible in doing the right thing

Speaker 1 to my outsider's mind.

Speaker 1 How do you not slip into complacency, the complacency of, boy, am I on target here, boy am I doing the right thing for the world.

Speaker 1 How does that not turn into a complacency? How do you stay?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 the first, I left New York City in 1979 with my girlfriend, that's soon to be my first wife, and we moved up to a little village in New Hampshire, actually to a farmhouse about a mile and a half outside that

Speaker 2 village. And I'm still sleeping in the same bedroom 46 years later next month.

Speaker 2 And soon after that, I saw a New Yorker cartoon, which I cut out and put on the refrigerator.

Speaker 2 And then, as it was getting yellowed and torn a little bit, I framed it and I made copies of it and I put it every place where I can see it every day.

Speaker 2 And it shows three men standing in hell, the flames licking up around them.

Speaker 2 And one guy says to the other two,

Speaker 2 Apparently, my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn damn thing.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 2 I mean, there has to be. And one of the virtues of living in a small town is they don't care how many Emmys you have.

Speaker 2 They don't care how many Oscar nominations or Grammys you have or what awards you've won or whatever.

Speaker 2 They're actually looking at you from a different way. They're not unaware that

Speaker 2 I've got a job that is a little bit different than

Speaker 2 most of the jobs there. But in this small town, there's everything.
Somebody said, well, what do you do here? They came up from New York. What do you do here? And I said, everything you do,

Speaker 1 plus farming, you know.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 that's our little town. So it has sophistication, but it also has sort of real grounding.
And I love the fact.

Speaker 2 We are imperfect and nature is perfect. And if you live close to nature, then you have the ability to be reminded of that.

Speaker 2 We made a film on the National Parks and there was a guy who went up to Denali in the 19 teens and he said, it reminds you of your atomic insignificance.

Speaker 2 And that really feels right. There's a wonderful paradox in that too, Ted, because

Speaker 2 when you experience that, you feel your relationship to the immensity of nature and the universe,

Speaker 2 that humility actually inspirits you and makes you bigger, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard. And

Speaker 2 that's a kind of wonderful thing. And so, you know,

Speaker 2 I'm struggling with impatience, with complaint, with, you know, all the stuff. You know, even when I'm untying my double-knoted sneakers and they get into a knot and I'm, you know,

Speaker 2 swearing and, you know, and I'm going, what?

Speaker 2 What is the problem here? You know, all of us are struggling with that. I just think I've got the best job job in the country.
I'm so, so lucky that I work with incredibly talented people.

Speaker 2 And there are, this is a collaborative, as you know, medium. And I can't say I to any one of the films.
I say we to them because it's not royal.

Speaker 2 No kings. We defy kings, right?

Speaker 2 But it's because it's so gloriously collaborative and so many people, even this film is co-directed by Sarah Botstein, as I said, and David Schmidt, who's out there. And so we're, you know,

Speaker 2 we're trying to figure out. And while the credits go by and there's hundreds of people we quite correctly thank, there's also about a nucleus of about 20 people that handmade this film over

Speaker 2 10 years on the American Revolution. They'll be out in November.
And I'm really proud of the intimacy of that. George Washington talks about kind of the intimacy of what happens between people

Speaker 2 in a struggle like this. And so

Speaker 2 you find it. I mean, I can't believe that we haven't even talked about Lincoln, who for me is like the B's knees of, you know, Americans.

Speaker 2 But what's so surprising about this is I didn't expect to realize for all his flaws, for his rashness, and someone call it bravery or courage on the battlefield, but a lot of times he risks his life where if he gets killed, it's all over.

Speaker 2 And makes lots of stupid tactical mistakes as a general.

Speaker 2 Not a good field general in many ways, but is so able to pick subordinate talent, is so able to be there in the middle of the night with some courage to have understood his role as the historian Jane Kamensky says, as a leader of an insurrection, that you just can't be crushed.

Speaker 2 And Joe Ellis, the historian, says he just comes to this fundamental thing after losing battle after battle after battle, is that he doesn't have to win. He just can't be

Speaker 2 surrender. The British have to win.
And that's not going to happen because

Speaker 2 mom and dad are 3,000 miles away. And they're just not, our continent is is big.
They forget. It's not like Liverpool to London.
It's like Boston

Speaker 2 to Charleston is London to Venice. It's a big deal.
And it's

Speaker 2 the weather is going to play a part. The beauty, the natural, you know, the waterways, all of these impediments.
And he gets it. He understands it.

Speaker 2 And he's one of the ones very early on where you've got 13 colonies that are separate countries. They don't.
I mean, a Georgian and a New Hampshire

Speaker 2 are like diametrically opposed, but he's the one who begins to talk, as others begin to do, Franklin and Patrick Henry and others, that we're not

Speaker 2 a Virginian. We're not a New Englander.
We're this new thing, Americans. Or actually, not a new thing.
It's very old, and they've been there for 22,000 years,

Speaker 1 but...

Speaker 2 you get the idea. I mean, remember, first of all, you know from grade school, like, how are the settlers who dump your relatives' tea in the

Speaker 2 in the Boston harbor dressed?

Speaker 2 They're dressed as Native Americans.

Speaker 1 Oh, right, right. Sorry.
Right.

Speaker 2 So there's no test on this, Ted. It's okay.
Just let it go. Let it go.

Speaker 1 That was an easy one. Yeah, it was an easy one.

Speaker 2 Okay, so why were they dressed as Native Americans?

Speaker 1 Probably to

Speaker 2 say we're not British anymore.

Speaker 2 We're indigenous.

Speaker 1 We're native to this moment.

Speaker 2 Phil Delaurie, a great scholar at Harvard, says this.

Speaker 2 And you suddenly go, of course, we are putting on crudely the dress of the Native Americans who we live among and whose territory we are systematically dispossessing of on our Western frontiers, but they represent who's here, who's a real American, right?

Speaker 2 So the great paradox is, of course, we name our Army the Continental Army. We name our Congress the Continental Congress.

Speaker 2 We're a collection clinging to the eastern seaboard, seaboard, but we know where we're going. And the tragedy, of course, for Native peoples is they're the real losers in this story.

Speaker 2 But the amazing thing is, at that moment, we identified ourselves. We dressed as Indians as a way to say, we're no longer part.
of you guys.

Speaker 2 And it becomes in 1773, you know, well before, you know, two years and a month before the revolution actually starts on Lexington Green and, you know, three

Speaker 2 years and a few months before the the Declaration is signed of independence,

Speaker 2 that we're feeling that we're something different. And that's the beginning of some really big stuff, because what becomes quarrels between Englishmen, as a scholar in our film Christopher Brown says,

Speaker 2 suddenly are becoming

Speaker 2 differences about natural rights or the identification of natural or universal rights. And all of a sudden, when it isn't just, how come you're not treating us the way you treat your own people?

Speaker 2 How come we don't have representation? How come you won't let us take Indian land because you can't protect us from their reaction to that?

Speaker 2 You're now into the territory that out of the Renaissance comes the Enlightenment, and out of the Enlightenment comes the United States of America.

Speaker 2 That's what Jefferson and that

Speaker 2 are doing is distilling a century of this new thought about human beings could live as citizens, not subjects, and putting it into that one sentence.

Speaker 1 Cannot thank you enough.

Speaker 1 Let me make sure people know when and how they can see the American Revolution.

Speaker 2 So, November 16th, it will be broadcast on PBS and also released the entire thing, six episodes, 12 hours for streaming. That's a Sunday night.
It will run Sunday through Friday night on PBS twice.

Speaker 2 Each episode played twice. There'll be marathons.
Inevitably, it will go into pledge. And there are even things called DVDs,

Speaker 2 DVDs and Blu-rays. I'm not sure exactly what they're talking about, but I came from a meeting and apparently there'll be DVDs and Blu-rays.

Speaker 2 There's a beautiful book that comes with it, but it'll be available for streaming. It'll be, I hope, hard to miss.

Speaker 2 I'm wearing out enough shoe leather talking about it that I hope that we'll be able to

Speaker 2 grab the attention of enough of us that maybe, I mean,

Speaker 2 I don't, people say, well, what do you want people to take away? And I go, you know, we've worked 10 years to tell a story.

Speaker 2 You know, we just want you to see this good story and see if there's a place that you can find purchase and identification. But I'd like to put the us back in the U.S.

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 1 I think you are.

Speaker 2 Trying.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's a battle that's gone on for

Speaker 1 the very beginning. So don't be

Speaker 1 disappointed.

Speaker 2 Best friend, right? John Peters kills his best friend, Jeremiah Post, they're on that redoubt. It's a little bit southwest of what is now Bennington, Vermont.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 So stay hopeful, stay nurturing, stay loving and kind, and do what you can when you can, but don't be hopeless.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, no, no. We've always been divided.
So what you do is you figure out what the lemonade version of that lemon of division is.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much. This is so great.

Speaker 1 And you know what's so wonderful about you is you make me feel smart. So thank you for that.
Thank you for that brief moment in my day. That's crazy.

Speaker 1 The one and only Ken Burns. His new six-part docuseries, The American Revolution, premieres on PBS on November 16th.
As many of you know, this is a dire time for the survival of public broadcasting.

Speaker 1 To help PBS continue its vital work, make a donation if if you have the means. Visit pbs.org/slash donate.
That's all for our show this week. Special thanks to our friends at Team Cocoa.

Speaker 1 If you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone you love. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and maybe give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 1 If you like watching your podcasts, all our full-length episodes are on YouTube. Visit youtube.com/slash teamcoco.

Speaker 1 See you next time

Speaker 1 where everybody knows your name.

Speaker 3 You've been listening to Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson sometimes. The show is produced by me, Nick Liao.

Speaker 3 Our executive producers are Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross, and myself. Sarah Federovich is our supervising producer.
Engineering and Mixing by Joanna Samuel with support from Eduardo Perez.

Speaker 3 Research by Alyssa Grahl. Talent Booking by Paula Davis and Jane Batista.
Our theme music is by Woody Harrelson, Anthony Yen, Mary Steenbergen, and John Osborne.

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Speaker 4 See Totalwine.com for details. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina.
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