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Speaker 1: We live in a place right now where it actually

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Speaker 1: pays to promote division. I do not think somebody should

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Speaker 1: enrich themselves in office. Let's go back to arguing about

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Speaker 1: the things that matter without demonizing. This is Gavin Newsom

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Speaker 1: and this is Ken Burns. Hi, Governor, Hey, Ken, how

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Speaker 1: to meet you?

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Speaker 2: I know that background.

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Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I'm sorry to say I think that there

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Speaker 1: as you know, there are three hundred and forty two

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Speaker 1: million podcasts and I've done half of them. And I'm

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Speaker 1: absolutely certain not in this case that I'm speaking to

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Speaker 1: myself and to the person i'm talking to. At least

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Speaker 1: now I know that there's at least a few other

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Speaker 1: people listening.

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Speaker 2: God bless you, man. I yeah, no, imagine that's got

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Speaker 2: to be the biggest change for you since you started

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Speaker 2: this right twenty years ago had been a you know,

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Speaker 2: the broadcast work or in person, and now it's you know, ubiquity.

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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well, we were still doing all of the

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Speaker 1: old stuff. I mean, I've been doing that for it's

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Speaker 1: almost fifty years. And you know, we started off in

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Speaker 1: film and analog, you know, with razor blades, cutting film

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Speaker 1: and taping them together and drawing grease pencils on the

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Speaker 1: film and then you know, digital editing and videotape, and

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Speaker 1: we were always ten years behind, intentionally so that the

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Speaker 1: technological tale didn't wag the dog. And so we're just

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Speaker 1: you know, perpetually ledites catching up with everything. But we're

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Speaker 1: doing the old broadcast stuff too. I went to forty cities,

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Speaker 1: had eighty screenings, you know, but also did seventy five

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Speaker 1: podcasts from Joe Rogan to you know, the cut, whatever

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Speaker 1: the comparable is. On the other side, Mark Twain said,

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Speaker 1: if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

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Speaker 1: So I said the same thing to Joe Rogan and

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Speaker 1: THEO Vaughan as I said the New York Times to

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Speaker 1: inner city kids in Charleston and De Troit and suburban

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Speaker 1: kids in Chicago, Land and all the other places. And

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Speaker 1: it worked out okay, because the story is so compelling

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Speaker 1: that a lot of these divisions, which we think are

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Speaker 1: completely clogging our arteries, fall away because if you tell,

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Speaker 1: if you tell a good story, then you tell a

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Speaker 1: good story, and everybody's got an interest in a good story.

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Speaker 2: When you were talking to THEO and Joe and guys

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Speaker 2: like that that maybe you know, proceed on a number

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Speaker 2: of issues lean a little bit more to the right.

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Speaker 2: Were they surprised by the fact that we are so

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Speaker 2: surprised by this division that we have in this country,

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Speaker 2: and you're able to contextualize that and say, you know,

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Speaker 2: give me a break, you know, particularly with this though,

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Speaker 2: which is as much about the Civil War, not just

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Speaker 2: the World War.

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Speaker 1: Right, No, no, no. And I think one of the things

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Speaker 1: about the revolution is that it is a civil war.

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Speaker 1: It's a revolution, and we've sort of made it gallant

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Speaker 1: and bloodless because I think, you know, accepting the violence

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Speaker 1: of the Civil War and the twenties century wars. We

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Speaker 1: don't want to have anything take away from the big

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Speaker 1: ideas in Philadelphia in seventy six and then in seventeen

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Speaker 1: eighty seven. But in fact, if you tell the correct story,

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Speaker 1: those ideas aren't diminished in anyway. They're actually made even

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Speaker 1: more impressive. That we were born in violence. So I

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Speaker 1: think that the divisions that we experience are part of

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Speaker 1: the narcissism. It's always the best time or the worst

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Speaker 1: time that we're living in. So I think everybody's less

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Speaker 1: aware of the way in which they might contribute to

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Speaker 1: those divisions than they want to just sort of repeat

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Speaker 1: the same thing over and over again, and I'd suggest that, yeah,

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Speaker 1: we're really divided, but not as bad as the Revolution,

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Speaker 1: not as bad as the Civil War, not as bad

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Speaker 1: as the period of reconstruction right after the Civil War,

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Speaker 1: which I'm working on a film on right now called

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Speaker 1: Emancipation to Exodus. Not during the depression, like the Second Vietnam.

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Speaker 1: You remember Vietnam sixty nine to seventy five, hundreds of bombings,

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Speaker 1: hundreds of bombings, and so I think the good thing

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Speaker 1: about the study of history is it gives a little

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Speaker 1: bit and a little bit of even optimism. You know,

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Speaker 1: if you accept a priori that optimism is not a

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Speaker 1: pejorative or a naive position, but in fact a legitimate stake,

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Speaker 1: which is, you know, we'll get through this.

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Speaker 2: I love it, And as we get through, I want

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Speaker 2: to get back to more deeply the current project, and

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Speaker 2: not just the ones you're working on, but the one

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Speaker 2: we're here to really celebrate and at least reflect upon

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Speaker 2: its We reflect on the two hundred and fifteth anniversary.

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Speaker 2: But I'm curious, you know, just going back to how

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Speaker 2: we began gusually the conversation, it's interesting you talked about

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Speaker 2: I love this no sort of a razor blade editing

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Speaker 2: back in the day, et cetera. And now as you're

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Speaker 2: out on podcasts and you're you're sort of battling traditional

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Speaker 2: media people in person and then of course online in

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Speaker 2: so many different podcasts. But when you were doing those

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Speaker 2: first films, what was I mean, what did Ken burns?

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Speaker 2: What was how'd you go out there and promote these things?

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Speaker 2: Was it primarily through the platform at PBS or you

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Speaker 2: know what was finding your way to Oprah is a

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Speaker 2: sort of monumental moment and achievement.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's exactly right, and it still remains the same,

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Speaker 1: and still PBS is the broadcast platform is great, only

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Speaker 1: this time The American Revolution, you know, six Parts twelve

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Speaker 1: hours comes out in mid November last year, and by

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Speaker 1: the end of the year we've accumulated eighteen million viewers

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Speaker 1: in traditional broadcast, which is pretty damn good. But we've hit,

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Speaker 1: for the first time in PBS's history, the top ten

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Speaker 1: of streaming and for me, at this led height, they've

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Speaker 1: got a metric which is at that moment at the

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Speaker 1: end of November, five hundred and sixty five million minutes

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Speaker 1: of streaming. So you go, you know, my kids can

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Speaker 1: do the divide by seven hundred and twenty minutes that

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Speaker 1: twelve hours is. But now it's well over four billion,

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Speaker 1: and that's a big deal. And it was a big

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Speaker 1: deal that we broke the top ten, but it's an

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Speaker 1: even bigger deal that we now have something in which

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Speaker 1: we're told that, you know, conservative only like Yellowstone, as

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Speaker 1: if that's a simplistic story, and it's not, and that

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Speaker 1: you know, liberals only like this, and it's it's not true.

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Speaker 1: The novelist Richard Powers said something that I've been quoting

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Speaker 1: for years now. He said, the best arguments in the world,

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Speaker 1: and that's all we do is argue won't change a

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Speaker 1: single person's point of view. The only thing that can

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Speaker 1: do that is a good story. Because in a computer

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Speaker 1: world where everything's at want or a zero, in a

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Speaker 1: media culture where everything's red state or blue state, young

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Speaker 1: or old, black or white, Gere strait, Richard pooor north

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Speaker 1: or south, east or west, all the dialectics that we

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Speaker 1: are preoccupied with which don't actually exist, there's no room

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Speaker 1: for the complexity that we extend to the people we love,

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Speaker 1: to the friends that we have, to the colleagues that

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Speaker 1: we work with, to the understanding that the struggles are

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Speaker 1: within us, that you know, we say they're no We

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Speaker 1: lament that they're no heroes today, Governor, you know. And

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Speaker 1: and if you go back and say, well, where does

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Speaker 1: the notion of heroism come from? That comes from the Greeks,

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Speaker 1: and they endow they are gods with these examples for

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Speaker 1: us mortals to study, and are those gods perfect? No

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Speaker 1: Achilles has his heel and his hubris to go along

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Speaker 1: with his great strengths. So heroism is really a negotiation,

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Speaker 1: sometimes a war within a person over their great strength.

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Speaker 1: So if you leave George Washington out on his marble

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Speaker 1: statue collecting pigeon shit, he seems perfect, you know, never

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Speaker 1: tells a lie, cut down a cherry tree, coint across

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Speaker 1: the Potomac. But if you examine him and understand that

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Speaker 1: he's a very human character. He owns five hundred and

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Speaker 1: seventy seven human beings in his lifetime. As the writer

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Speaker 1: Rick Atkinson said, you can't square that circle. He's right.

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Speaker 1: He's rash on the battlefield, risking the entire cause by

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Speaker 1: rushing out into the field. If he's killed or captured,

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Speaker 1: it's all over. He makes some tactical mistakes that are

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Speaker 1: in some ways inexcusable, and yet he's able to convince

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Speaker 1: people to fight him the dead or night he defers

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Speaker 1: to Congress. He has great humility. He picks subordinate talent

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Speaker 1: generals that are better than him, like Benedict Arnold and

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Speaker 1: Nathaniel Greene, and he twice gives up power military at

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Speaker 1: the height of his military power, and the presidency at

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Speaker 1: the height of his political power. And that has set

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Speaker 1: us in motion. So you can have, in a story

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Speaker 1: that we tell which is as much bottom up as

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Speaker 1: it is top down, you can have the almost exhilarating

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Speaker 1: off brand thing that we don't have a country without him.

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Speaker 1: And yet in order to tell the story correctly, you know,

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Speaker 1: you have to do all the other things. We live

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Speaker 1: in a highlight world. Right Babruth comes up, he hits

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Speaker 1: a home run. Right Baybruth struck out many more times

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Speaker 1: than he hit home runs, and Babbruth only comes up

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Speaker 1: once every nine times at bad. So sometimes, as any

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Speaker 1: inhabitant of Los Angeles can tell you, sometimes it's the

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Speaker 1: middle infielder. Sometimes it's the second baseman that is the

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Speaker 1: deciding factor in any given moment. So we're obligated to

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Speaker 1: tell a complicated history. There's no other word. It's almost

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Speaker 1: redundant complicated history or complicated human being, and that any

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Speaker 1: attempt to simplify it is really just the work of

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Speaker 1: an authoritarian, that is to say, we're going to make

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Speaker 1: this simple. We're going to keep you uninformed. We're going

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Speaker 1: to keep you subscribing to superstitions and conspiracy theories that

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Speaker 1: distract you from the fact that I have my boot

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Speaker 1: on the back of your neck.

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Speaker 2: Did was that? I mean, was that omni present? You know,

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Speaker 2: two hundred years ago, this notion of sensory historic facts

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Speaker 2: rewriting history was you know, was was that constantly present?

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Speaker 1: Yeah? I think disinformation has always been I'm sure the

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Speaker 1: first conversation between do human beings ever was a lie,

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Speaker 1: you know, or at least a lie was part of that.

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Speaker 1: And I think that we do a disservice and say, oh,

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Speaker 1: our time is worse, you know, the chicken littles, this

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Speaker 1: guy's falling. I remember when, you know, when new technologies

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Speaker 1: come along, like oh, say the telegraph in the eighteen fifties,

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Speaker 1: people are a are wringing their hands. This is the

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Speaker 1: end of letter writing. It's the end of this, and

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Speaker 1: so I think, yeah, there's a lot. In fact. Sam Adams,

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Speaker 1: who we think of as a beer he was a

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Speaker 1: failure as a brewer and a tax collector, but he

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Speaker 1: is really good propagandas And he said something that reminded

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Speaker 1: me of our current media landscape. He said, there were

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Speaker 1: times when the British would acquiesce, okay, the stampback, We're

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Speaker 1: done with it, We're not going to impose it. And

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Speaker 1: so everybody, the Sons of Liberty, disband and it's all over.

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Speaker 1: And Sam Adams is going, no, they're just going to

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Speaker 1: do something bad. And he said, my job was to

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Speaker 1: keep my fellow countrymen alive to their grievances. Right, sound familiar,

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Speaker 1: in which you only have a politics that has to

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Speaker 1: do with them and us. And my whole thing is

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Speaker 1: that I've been making films about the US, but I've

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Speaker 1: also been making films about us. That is to say,

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Speaker 1: the lower case two letter plural pronoun, all the intimacy

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Speaker 1: of us and we and our and all of the majesty, complexity,

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Speaker 1: contradiction and even controversy of the US. But the one

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Speaker 1: thing I've learned, if I've learned anything, is that there's

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Speaker 1: no them, there's no them, There's only us, and that

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Speaker 1: whenever anyone creates them, it is for an agenda that

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Speaker 1: is not one that is in sync with what a

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Speaker 1: pluralistic democracy is. I mean, well, now we now have

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Speaker 1: been over the last fifty years. I've watched the word

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Speaker 1: liberal fall shot dead, you know, at a firing squad.

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Speaker 1: I've watched all these sorts of things. And we've just

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Speaker 1: witnessed the end of dei. But you know, isn't e

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Speaker 1: pluribus unum dei? You know that's our Latin motto that

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Speaker 1: we're going to figure out how to come together. Jefferson

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Speaker 1: says a couple of sentences after the second one, the

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Speaker 1: great the great one. He says, all experience has shown

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Speaker 1: that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

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Speaker 1: It's not hard to parse. It just means the to

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Speaker 1: four in the history of human beings, people have have

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Speaker 1: have been subjects, and we're creating something new called citizens.

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Speaker 1: And it's going to take an extra amount of energy

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Speaker 1: to do that, and human beings will naturally devolve to

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Speaker 1: the camps, to the tribal stuff. But there we're actually

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Speaker 1: going to experiment. We're going to put the Enlightenment into practice,

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Speaker 1: and we're going to call it the United States of America.

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Speaker 1: And we're going to be in pursuit of happiness, not things,

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Speaker 1: but knowledge and virtue. And we're going to be after

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Speaker 1: a more perfect union. It's going to require a lot

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Speaker 1: of coming together. But we live in a place right

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Speaker 1: now where it's so it actually pays to promote division.

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Speaker 2: Pays to promote division. I couldn't agree more with that.

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Speaker 2: It's interesting, you know, it's interesting. You probably learn about

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Speaker 2: this notion. You know, in the Bible teaches us many

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Speaker 2: parts one body, one part suffers. We all suffer this

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Speaker 2: this thing. You know, Doctor King talked so evocalarly about

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Speaker 2: that we're all bound together by that web of mutuality.

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Speaker 2: And and but I think about this, and I think

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Speaker 2: about in the context of what you're you know, so

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Speaker 2: much of the work you're doing, and so much of

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Speaker 2: the notion of myth, and this sort of chiseled notion

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Speaker 2: of a monument, et cetera, and how we sanitize so

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Speaker 2: much of that. But the importance of myth at the

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Speaker 2: same time, this notion of the things that bind us together,

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Speaker 2: not just celebrating our interesting differences, but how we can

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Speaker 2: be bound together? What I mean, how do you where's

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Speaker 2: that tension between you know? When I you know, I

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Speaker 2: talk about California and was born into genocide. The first

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Speaker 2: governor in California eighteen fifty one, Burnett literally talked about

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Speaker 2: the war and extermination. It was his first State of

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Speaker 2: the State speech. But I use that language and people

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Speaker 2: are immediately offended, and I find it shameful, and I'm

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Speaker 2: not providing context. He was in the vast majority. He

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Speaker 2: was truly representative of the time. And so what's that

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Speaker 2: you know, this notion of myth and the importance of myth,

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Speaker 2: the importance of things that we can unite around. How

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Speaker 2: do you find that tension or you just try to

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Speaker 2: go straight to the facts.

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Speaker 1: Well, you know, we were interested governor and calling balls

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Speaker 1: and strikes, so I'm interested in the facts, however messy.

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Speaker 1: I have in my editing room a neon signed that's

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Speaker 1: been there for years and years and years, the main

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Speaker 1: editing room, and it says it's complicated in lower case

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Speaker 1: cursive neon. And that's what you want to do. The

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Speaker 1: mythologies grow up around a desire to simplify and control

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Speaker 1: that history so say, with the revolution, you inherit something

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Speaker 1: that is really just about white men when half the

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Speaker 1: population women are deeply involved. The revolution doesn't happen without

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Speaker 1: the resistance that leads up to it. In the nearly

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Speaker 1: decade of resistance, and women are at the heart of that.

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Speaker 1: There are the buyers in each homestead. There are among

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Speaker 1: the two and a half to three million Americans in

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Speaker 1: the time of resistance, and at the beginning of the revolution,

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Speaker 1: two and a half to three million Americans, five hundred

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Speaker 1: thousand of whom are free or enslaved black people. There

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Speaker 1: are within those thirteen colonies becoming states, native peoples whose

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Speaker 1: land has already been acquired and they have either assimilated

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Speaker 1: or they're trying to figure out how to coexist. And

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Speaker 1: on the western border, there are dozens of nations that

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Speaker 1: are as as individual and as important on a global

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Speaker 1: stage economically, diplomatically, militarily as say, France and Prussia are,

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Speaker 1: And we don't extend to them. We just say them.

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Speaker 1: And we also remember we don't call ourselves the Eastern

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Speaker 1: Seaboard Congress. Who appoints George Washington the head of the

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Speaker 1: Eastern Seaboard Army, they know what's out there. They've heard

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Speaker 1: of California, they know what's there, and they are a

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Speaker 1: continental army and they're planning to get so all of

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Speaker 1: a sudden, you have really interesting dynamics of Black Americans

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Speaker 1: deciding to fight, decide with the British or fight with

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Speaker 1: the Patriots, or Native Americans doing the same things that

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Speaker 1: are sometimes dividing their old alliances and confederacies and destroying them.

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Speaker 1: There's one woman, a Mohegan woman from I assumed Connecticut,

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Speaker 1: north central Connecticut, named Rebecca Tanner who loses five sons,

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Speaker 1: five sons fighting for the Patriot cause. And so we

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Speaker 1: have a much more interesting it's a very enormous variety

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Speaker 1: of people. People in my state of New Hampshire, where

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Speaker 1: I've lived for the last forty seven years, and Georgia

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Speaker 1: feel like they're from different countries. They're like totally different.

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Speaker 1: The idea that someone like Washington, Thomas Payne or Thomas

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Speaker 1: Jefferson or others that we don't know that much about.

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Speaker 1: Mercy Otis Warren is the first historian of the American Revolution,

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Speaker 1: a friend of Abigail Adams. It's nice when you have

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Speaker 1: Meryl Streep reading off camera and bringing mercy otis Warren alive,

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Speaker 1: but they're talking about how it might be that we

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Speaker 1: could not be an individual thing, but a one thing,

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Speaker 1: and that, you know, it's the first idea that Washington's

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Speaker 1: really great as he's trying to inspire men to fight

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Speaker 1: in the dead of night, and often they're teenagers, children,

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Speaker 1: it's not all the militia, and they're going back to

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Speaker 1: plant their crops or to reap their crops, And so

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Speaker 1: what happens is the continental army becomes filled with narrative

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Speaker 1: wells and teenagers and recent immigrants, and so democracy becomes

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Speaker 1: not the intention of the revolution. It becomes a byproduct

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Speaker 1: because all of a sudden, you can't just win against

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Speaker 1: the greatest power on earth without foreign help, the French.

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Speaker 1: But you also can't win unless you say, we're going

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Speaker 1: to give you something for the sacrifices that you've made.

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Speaker 1: And so what happens is that you emerge with a

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Speaker 1: kind of fledgling democracy out of what was going to

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Speaker 1: be a republic, a kind of aristocracy. The right would

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Speaker 1: say the elites who control everything, But those elites are

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Speaker 1: the guys that we're supposed to all agree that we like.

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Speaker 1: Are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and

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Speaker 1: Patrick Henry and James Mason and James Monroe and all

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Speaker 1: of the so called founding fathers, and they are they're

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Speaker 1: a remarkable group of people. But you can't tell a

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Speaker 1: complete story without the balls and strikes and everybody else

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Speaker 1: who gets to come to back.

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Speaker 2: And when you when you Endevordem, you said it a

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Speaker 2: ten year process from.

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Speaker 1: The so I released a film a year. Yeah. I

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Speaker 1: looked up from a map that we were doing well.

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Speaker 1: We were finishing our Vietnam series. And in December of

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Speaker 1: twenty fifteen, Barack Obama, remember him, used to had thirteen

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Speaker 1: months to go on his presidency. And I said, we're

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Speaker 1: doing the American Revolution, and I knew it would take that.

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Speaker 1: No one was talking Semiquincentennial, no one was talking to fiftieth.

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Speaker 1: About halfway through, I thought, Man, if we accelerate, we

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Speaker 1: could be at the two hundred and fiftieth of Lexington

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Speaker 1: and Conquered. My co director Sarah Botsign correctly corrected me

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Speaker 1: and said, it will still be mixing and online and

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Speaker 1: you'll be out on the road promoting it. It'll be

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Speaker 1: in the fall. I said, okay, and then I realized, oh, well,

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Speaker 1: there's going to be a celebration. At least we might

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Speaker 1: be offering something a little bit more substantive than what

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Speaker 1: I worried would be kind of fife and drum treacle.

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Speaker 1: You know that you would just devolve to the lowest

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Speaker 1: common denominator of an une examined patriotism. And then, of

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Speaker 1: course we're in the circumstances that we're in where we

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Speaker 1: really have an opportunity, in crisis to look back at

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Speaker 1: our founding, just as an individual would do. You'd go

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Speaker 1: to a pastor or a professional, and the first thing

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Speaker 1: they'd ask you is where'd you come from? Who are

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Speaker 1: your parents? What are your early life like? So if

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Speaker 1: you go back to your origin story is a way

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Speaker 1: to reset, recommit to those ideals that were brand new

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Speaker 1: on July fourth, seventeen seventy six. There's some folks called citizens,

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Speaker 1: and there's the only place is the eastern seaboard of

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Speaker 1: the United States. White men of property mostly, but it's

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Speaker 1: going to grow. And the second you break out this

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Speaker 1: argument between Englishmen into natural rights saying, oh no, we

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Speaker 1: hold these teoths to be self evident, Jefferson wrote it governor.

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Speaker 1: He wrote, we hold these choos to be sacred and undeniable,

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Speaker 1: which would be a really good enlightenment. I want to

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Speaker 1: make an argument to you, this is what we believe. Right.

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Speaker 1: Franklin gets it and says, you know, no, no, no

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Speaker 1: self evident. There's nothing self evident about these ideas. But

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Speaker 1: as someone said in a film we made about Franklin

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Speaker 1: a few years ago, that it's the old lawyer's dodge.

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Speaker 1: You know, you just say it's self evident, and then

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Speaker 1: you make it so. These are people on the outer

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Speaker 1: edge of human thought saying oh yeah, isn't this obvious?

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Speaker 1: And once you break that out as hypocritical as the

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Speaker 1: tolerance of slavery by many of the founders, is slavery's done.

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Speaker 1: It may take too long, obviously, because one minute more

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Speaker 1: in slavery is bad. Women will get the vote, even

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Speaker 1: though it's a shameful one hundred and forty four years

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Speaker 1: from that day before they will have it. Gay marriage

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Speaker 1: is going to happen. I mean, all of these things

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Speaker 1: get unlocked when you take no pun intended. John Locke's

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Speaker 1: life liberty property, we change it to pursuit of happiness,

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Speaker 1: not objects, but lifelong learning, to be more virtuous when

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Speaker 1: you unlocked that human energy. You look what We created

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Speaker 1: the greatest country on earth for all the flaws. And

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Speaker 1: I'm more than happy to spend the rest of our

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Speaker 1: time together enumerting those things, or to understand that they

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Speaker 1: come together and they're they're not mutually exclusive. They are

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Speaker 1: actually kind of lawfully bound to each other, just as

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Speaker 1: we make advances. In the mid eighteenth century, Franklin was

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Speaker 1: disturbed by German immigration to Pennsylvania, and he said, I

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Speaker 1: like the lovely white and red, meaning the white English

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Speaker 1: settlers and the Native Americans. And he thought the Germans,

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Speaker 1: this will come as a shock to everybody, were worthy,

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Speaker 1: and they were, you know, they were not befitting the character.

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Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden, we're letting everybody in

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Speaker 1: German immigrants, Irish immigrants, whatever. Then the doors are completely

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Speaker 1: In the early nineteenth century, people are trying to shut

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Speaker 1: it down. No, no Catholics can come. No to keep

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Speaker 1: the Irish out. Let's not do that. And then from

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Speaker 1: eighteen seventy till nineteen twenty it's wide open, except for

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Speaker 1: as you know, the Chinese Exclusion Act, attempting to regulate

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Speaker 1: the inflow of Asian peoples to the United States, and

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Speaker 1: then in the nineteen twenties the door slam shut. Johnson

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Speaker 1: Red Immigration Act in twenty four sets quotas. So it's

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Speaker 1: going to make it impossible for us to respond to

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Speaker 1: the Holocaust with only the even though we let in

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Speaker 1: more people than any other sovereign nation. I have to

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Speaker 1: say sovereign because of the number of people who emigrated

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Speaker 1: to Palestine. But we could have saved so many more

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Speaker 1: human beings if we weren't imprisoned, locked into this straight

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Speaker 1: jacket of Johnson Reid. And then you'd me making addempt

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Speaker 1: in the six million number that we throw out without thinking.

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Speaker 1: There are nine million Jews in Europe in nineteen thirty three,

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Speaker 1: and by nineteen forty five, two out of three are dead.

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Speaker 1: That's another way of saying six million. But if we

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Speaker 1: knock that down by a million or two million, or

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Speaker 1: three million, which we could have easily done, think where

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Speaker 1: we'd be in terms of our own greatness and our

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Speaker 1: own you know thing. But we that those impulses towards

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Speaker 1: anti Semitism, the impulses to make of them of somebody

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Speaker 1: who's Catholic or black, or female or different, are are

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Speaker 1: always going to be part of the complexion. And as

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Speaker 1: difficult as it is, and I don't need to tell

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Speaker 1: you to manage a modern democracy, there's no other, you know.

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Speaker 1: And the temptation is to regulate it, you know, and say, oh,

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Speaker 1: it's got to be this one way. We can only

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00:23:28,440 --> 00:23:32,520
Speaker 1: have this superficial history. There's no better form of government,

428
00:23:32,520 --> 00:23:36,679
Speaker 1: as chaotic as it is, is uncertain. The great jurist

429
00:23:36,960 --> 00:23:39,639
Speaker 1: learned Hand, I mean, governor. Could there ever be a

430
00:23:39,640 --> 00:23:42,600
Speaker 1: better name for a judge than learn in hand? Said said.

431
00:23:42,720 --> 00:23:47,040
Speaker 1: Liberty is never being too sure you're right. And there's

432
00:23:47,080 --> 00:23:50,560
Speaker 1: a sort of sense now as we try to impose

433
00:23:50,680 --> 00:23:54,159
Speaker 1: our will on chaotic events, that the opposite of faith

434
00:23:54,280 --> 00:23:57,359
Speaker 1: must be doubt. No doubt is central to faith. The

435
00:23:57,359 --> 00:24:02,399
Speaker 1: opposite of faith is certainty that kills faith. And yet

436
00:24:02,680 --> 00:24:05,080
Speaker 1: we see the damage that has done in the name

437
00:24:05,720 --> 00:24:08,600
Speaker 1: of faith, that my faith is the only faith, you know.

438
00:24:08,760 --> 00:24:12,760
Speaker 1: That's why many of the founders sort of gravitated toward

439
00:24:13,000 --> 00:24:16,679
Speaker 1: what's called deism, particularly Thomas Jefferson, and that is this

440
00:24:16,880 --> 00:24:19,720
Speaker 1: idea that there is a supreme being, a supreme architect,

441
00:24:19,720 --> 00:24:23,080
Speaker 1: divine providence, however you do it, but disinterested in the

442
00:24:23,080 --> 00:24:30,200
Speaker 1: affairs of men and obviously making no distinction between faiths.

443
00:24:30,480 --> 00:24:34,400
Speaker 1: So Jefferson has this wonderful line, if my neighbor believes

444
00:24:34,400 --> 00:24:37,760
Speaker 1: in twenty gods or no god at all, it neither

445
00:24:37,800 --> 00:24:42,040
Speaker 1: picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. I mean, just

446
00:24:42,200 --> 00:24:46,480
Speaker 1: think about how how much we're governed by the intolerance

447
00:24:47,119 --> 00:24:50,560
Speaker 1: of the people who want to make distinctions between their

448
00:24:50,680 --> 00:24:54,320
Speaker 1: correct right set of facts and someone else's.

449
00:24:54,840 --> 00:24:57,960
Speaker 2: Does it? I mean, in contemporary terms, we're talking on

450
00:24:58,040 --> 00:25:02,040
Speaker 2: a day where the Supreme Court is hearing arguments on

451
00:25:02,200 --> 00:25:04,280
Speaker 2: sort of a core construct. When you talk about the

452
00:25:04,320 --> 00:25:07,399
Speaker 2: Chinese Exclusion Act, it's origin stories in the San Fransco

453
00:25:07,480 --> 00:25:10,720
Speaker 2: Bay Area, Oakland. The original forgive me Donald Trump, I

454
00:25:10,760 --> 00:25:13,760
Speaker 2: think was Dennis Kearney, who began and ended every speech

455
00:25:13,800 --> 00:25:17,399
Speaker 2: the Workingmen's Party with the Chinese must go. And I

456
00:25:17,520 --> 00:25:19,840
Speaker 2: go down to Chinatown and the museums there, and you'll

457
00:25:19,840 --> 00:25:23,360
Speaker 2: see the virtual walls being built to keep the Chinese

458
00:25:23,400 --> 00:25:26,120
Speaker 2: out led to the Chinese Exclusion Act, and obviously part

459
00:25:26,160 --> 00:25:28,320
Speaker 2: of the our oral arguments today in the Supreme Court

460
00:25:28,680 --> 00:25:31,280
Speaker 2: were around the Wong decision in the late eighteen eighties.

461
00:25:31,680 --> 00:25:33,359
Speaker 2: What do you make of I mean, it just it

462
00:25:33,400 --> 00:25:36,640
Speaker 2: sounds like, I mean, none of this again, nothing is surprising.

463
00:25:36,720 --> 00:25:38,920
Speaker 2: It's very consistent with that threat of history.

464
00:25:40,280 --> 00:25:42,000
Speaker 1: Well, you know, everybody likes to say, in a kind

465
00:25:42,000 --> 00:25:44,960
Speaker 1: of lazy fashion, that history repeats itself. It doesn't, right,

466
00:25:45,040 --> 00:25:49,399
Speaker 1: no event has ever happened twice. Ecclesiastes, which governors the

467
00:25:49,440 --> 00:25:52,960
Speaker 1: Old Testament, says what has been will be again, what

468
00:25:53,000 --> 00:25:55,560
Speaker 1: has been done will be done again. There's nothing new

469
00:25:55,640 --> 00:25:58,720
Speaker 1: under the sun. It means that human nature doesn't change,

470
00:25:58,760 --> 00:26:03,360
Speaker 1: and it superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events,

471
00:26:03,400 --> 00:26:07,720
Speaker 1: and we see echoes, patterns, themes, motifs, or, as Mark

472
00:26:07,720 --> 00:26:10,360
Speaker 1: Twain is supposed to have said, rhymes. You know, history

473
00:26:10,400 --> 00:26:12,800
Speaker 1: doesn't repeat itself, but at rhymes. So all these things

474
00:26:12,840 --> 00:26:15,880
Speaker 1: are there, and they're lazy ways to approach this subject,

475
00:26:16,119 --> 00:26:20,399
Speaker 1: to be a I mean, the America at its best,

476
00:26:21,320 --> 00:26:26,080
Speaker 1: you know, has always been pluralistic and like an alloy,

477
00:26:26,640 --> 00:26:30,600
Speaker 1: benefiting from all the ingredients that went into it. When

478
00:26:30,600 --> 00:26:34,080
Speaker 1: it's at its worst is when it's nativist and saying, oh,

479
00:26:34,160 --> 00:26:38,920
Speaker 1: there's really only one us and you're definitely not part

480
00:26:38,960 --> 00:26:42,600
Speaker 1: of that. And this attempt at I mean, look, you know,

481
00:26:42,680 --> 00:26:47,239
Speaker 1: one of my favorite amendments is the fourteenth, and you know,

482
00:26:47,320 --> 00:26:49,560
Speaker 1: the first really trumps it, but people say, oh, first

483
00:26:49,600 --> 00:26:53,160
Speaker 1: Amendment free speech or freedom to assemble, those are number

484
00:26:53,200 --> 00:26:56,240
Speaker 1: two and three. The first is Congress will make no

485
00:26:56,400 --> 00:26:59,240
Speaker 1: establishment of a religion. We're the first country on earth

486
00:26:59,240 --> 00:27:02,040
Speaker 1: that didn't have enough official religion, and it made all

487
00:27:02,160 --> 00:27:04,840
Speaker 1: the difference. The energy it gave us by being able

488
00:27:04,880 --> 00:27:07,520
Speaker 1: to draw in from the people who don't believe in

489
00:27:07,560 --> 00:27:11,760
Speaker 1: any god or believe in twenty gods, has been a

490
00:27:11,800 --> 00:27:16,120
Speaker 1: phenomenal achievement in the course of human history. And maybe

491
00:27:16,200 --> 00:27:19,119
Speaker 1: we should just remember starting with the Declaration and the

492
00:27:19,160 --> 00:27:23,960
Speaker 1: Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and you know, the

493
00:27:24,080 --> 00:27:28,879
Speaker 1: Land Grant College Act and the Homestead Act, and National

494
00:27:29,200 --> 00:27:35,520
Speaker 1: Parks and child labor and antitrust, and you know, the

495
00:27:36,320 --> 00:27:41,399
Speaker 1: Social Security, labor's right to organize, the GI Bill, the

496
00:27:41,440 --> 00:27:47,320
Speaker 1: Interstate Highway System, a Man on the Moon, Medicare, Medicaid

497
00:27:47,720 --> 00:27:51,480
Speaker 1: so well, I've said, social Security up to the Affordable

498
00:27:51,520 --> 00:27:55,920
Speaker 1: Care Act, so many things that we have done which

499
00:27:55,960 --> 00:28:00,040
Speaker 1: have been transforming not only for our own people but

500
00:28:00,200 --> 00:28:05,360
Speaker 1: for the world. And then you find inevitably the retrenchment

501
00:28:05,440 --> 00:28:09,760
Speaker 1: that takes place the people, the oligarchs, the former slave owners,

502
00:28:10,240 --> 00:28:14,000
Speaker 1: who are still unhappy of the way the Civil War

503
00:28:14,080 --> 00:28:17,679
Speaker 1: took out and want to just you know, get back

504
00:28:18,359 --> 00:28:21,960
Speaker 1: what they had before. And you can't go back. You

505
00:28:22,080 --> 00:28:22,959
Speaker 1: have to go forward.

506
00:28:23,080 --> 00:28:28,160
Speaker 2: You got to go forward. When you speak of you know, patriotism,

507
00:28:28,240 --> 00:28:31,160
Speaker 2: we talk of nationalism, But what does patriotism mean to you?

508
00:28:31,520 --> 00:28:34,159
Speaker 2: How do you what's the sort of core essence of patriotism.

509
00:28:34,200 --> 00:28:37,879
Speaker 1: Well, look, if you deal with American patriotism first, because

510
00:28:38,680 --> 00:28:43,120
Speaker 1: I'm not that you know, there's complicated relationships to British patriotism.

511
00:28:43,200 --> 00:28:47,720
Speaker 1: We called ourselves patriots, and the British colors rebels never

512
00:28:47,880 --> 00:28:53,320
Speaker 1: once said patriot because patriot meant something, you know, something

513
00:28:53,360 --> 00:28:56,640
Speaker 1: different in Britain, and they weren't going to ascribe us

514
00:28:56,720 --> 00:28:59,600
Speaker 1: any other motives. Even when they were surrendering, the British

515
00:28:59,640 --> 00:29:02,479
Speaker 1: soldiers and the German soldiers were forbidden to look at

516
00:29:02,480 --> 00:29:06,080
Speaker 1: the Americans. Only the French were worthy of their attention. Right,

517
00:29:06,320 --> 00:29:08,520
Speaker 1: we were still just a rabble and they were so

518
00:29:08,680 --> 00:29:12,320
Speaker 1: humiliated had having the greatest military power on earth, in

519
00:29:12,360 --> 00:29:16,040
Speaker 1: the most far flung empire on earth, had to admit

520
00:29:16,120 --> 00:29:19,239
Speaker 1: that they had just lost to this ragtag. But who

521
00:29:19,280 --> 00:29:22,440
Speaker 1: would have thought of German Hessian Johann Eveld said, who

522
00:29:22,480 --> 00:29:24,400
Speaker 1: would have thought one hundred years ago that out of

523
00:29:24,400 --> 00:29:27,560
Speaker 1: this multitude of rabble would arise of people who could

524
00:29:27,560 --> 00:29:31,080
Speaker 1: defy kings. So if you accept an American form of

525
00:29:31,080 --> 00:29:33,240
Speaker 1: patriotism just as a way for us to have a

526
00:29:33,280 --> 00:29:37,520
Speaker 1: conversation for a few seconds, then embedded in his sense

527
00:29:37,600 --> 00:29:40,640
Speaker 1: of a sense of our own exceptionalism, which is reasonable.

528
00:29:40,800 --> 00:29:43,680
Speaker 1: Lincoln says in his address to Congress in what we'd

529
00:29:43,720 --> 00:29:46,360
Speaker 1: call the State of the Union in sixty two, in

530
00:29:46,400 --> 00:29:50,320
Speaker 1: the middle of the Civil Wars, just given the Emancipation Proclamation,

531
00:29:50,600 --> 00:29:52,320
Speaker 1: it won't go into effect for a few weeks, but

532
00:29:52,360 --> 00:29:55,120
Speaker 1: he said, we're the last best hope of earth. Right,

533
00:29:55,160 --> 00:29:58,080
Speaker 1: he saw that, and I think Americans imbibe that and

534
00:29:58,200 --> 00:30:00,520
Speaker 1: have a feeling in the list of accomplished that I

535
00:30:00,600 --> 00:30:05,000
Speaker 1: made across time and missing half of them. Are are

536
00:30:05,200 --> 00:30:07,840
Speaker 1: are spectacular, But if you are the best, if you

537
00:30:07,920 --> 00:30:11,880
Speaker 1: are the goat of countries, do you think Tom Brady

538
00:30:12,080 --> 00:30:14,440
Speaker 1: said after he won the first well, now I can

539
00:30:14,520 --> 00:30:17,200
Speaker 1: just rest of my lungs. There is a kind of

540
00:30:18,200 --> 00:30:25,200
Speaker 1: almost furious self involvement, that is to say, self reflection, socratic,

541
00:30:25,600 --> 00:30:29,840
Speaker 1: know yourself. There's an incredible criticism even more discipline is applied,

542
00:30:29,880 --> 00:30:33,000
Speaker 1: and I think what happens is that patriotism sort of

543
00:30:33,040 --> 00:30:35,440
Speaker 1: splits off down the road and one way is a

544
00:30:35,520 --> 00:30:38,920
Speaker 1: kind of lazy thing, fills of slogans and is basically

545
00:30:39,000 --> 00:30:42,200
Speaker 1: used to exclude people, and the other patriotism, which I

546
00:30:42,200 --> 00:30:45,640
Speaker 1: think you subscribe to, is one which is energetic. It

547
00:30:45,720 --> 00:30:49,400
Speaker 1: is engaged in process, It is in pursuit of happiness,

548
00:30:49,440 --> 00:30:53,240
Speaker 1: It is after a more perfect union, and it involves

549
00:30:53,600 --> 00:30:56,760
Speaker 1: self reflection. This is what our founders when they said

550
00:30:56,800 --> 00:30:59,880
Speaker 1: pursuit of happiness was lifelong learning. If you learned all

551
00:31:00,080 --> 00:31:05,000
Speaker 1: your life, then could earn this this extraordinary gift and

552
00:31:05,080 --> 00:31:08,560
Speaker 1: responsibility of citizenship. You wanted to become more virtuous. This

553
00:31:08,640 --> 00:31:11,840
Speaker 1: is reaching back over the dark ages into antiquity and

554
00:31:12,600 --> 00:31:17,160
Speaker 1: pulling out these virtues. The most important is to be virtuous,

555
00:31:17,200 --> 00:31:21,400
Speaker 1: and that if you did that, this constant self awareness

556
00:31:21,440 --> 00:31:24,920
Speaker 1: and improvement, then you'd be okay. I mean, in the

557
00:31:24,960 --> 00:31:28,960
Speaker 1: middle of the deliberations about the Articles of Convention, while

558
00:31:29,040 --> 00:31:33,280
Speaker 1: Washington's fighting in New York City against the British and

559
00:31:33,360 --> 00:31:38,520
Speaker 1: about to lose because of a bad decision, strategic tactical decision,

560
00:31:38,960 --> 00:31:41,600
Speaker 1: John Adams is going is there enough there's so much

561
00:31:41,640 --> 00:31:45,280
Speaker 1: ambition and avarice, so much less for profit. Is there

562
00:31:45,400 --> 00:31:49,000
Speaker 1: enough virtue enough to create a republic? Those are the

563
00:31:49,080 --> 00:31:52,840
Speaker 1: questions we should be asking ourselves, not is this group bad?

564
00:31:53,000 --> 00:31:55,640
Speaker 1: Is this? Is it blood and soil? I mean, if

565
00:31:55,680 --> 00:31:59,000
Speaker 1: you're making a blood and soil argument to me, you're

566
00:31:59,280 --> 00:32:02,400
Speaker 1: just you're going to say, this is the Native American story, right,

567
00:32:02,440 --> 00:32:06,520
Speaker 1: because if anybody has six or seven hundred generations of

568
00:32:06,560 --> 00:32:11,760
Speaker 1: experience to our nine or ten, it's Native people's in California,

569
00:32:11,800 --> 00:32:15,560
Speaker 1: as you correctly pointed out, has an unbelievably shameful period

570
00:32:15,560 --> 00:32:19,920
Speaker 1: where you have essentially state sponsored genocide and people were

571
00:32:20,000 --> 00:32:27,280
Speaker 1: given a bounty. But you know, we have this this

572
00:32:27,520 --> 00:32:31,280
Speaker 1: responsibility to be self critical, to be self improving, to

573
00:32:31,880 --> 00:32:33,840
Speaker 1: if we're going to say we're the greatest, then we

574
00:32:33,880 --> 00:32:36,080
Speaker 1: have to live up to that, and that requires an

575
00:32:36,120 --> 00:32:41,800
Speaker 1: incredible amount of self examination, which you find autocrats do

576
00:32:41,880 --> 00:32:44,760
Speaker 1: not want to participate in. To do that would be

577
00:32:44,800 --> 00:32:47,000
Speaker 1: to admit a mistake. To do that would be to

578
00:32:47,040 --> 00:32:49,320
Speaker 1: say there's room for me to improve. To do that

579
00:32:49,440 --> 00:32:52,160
Speaker 1: is to apologize. To do that is to be sympathetic.

580
00:32:52,200 --> 00:32:54,360
Speaker 1: To do that as to walk a mile in someone

581
00:32:54,360 --> 00:33:00,640
Speaker 1: else's shoes, and that's what people are doing as they

582
00:33:00,760 --> 00:33:04,560
Speaker 1: are now. There's a kind of muscular patriotism that I'm

583
00:33:04,600 --> 00:33:08,760
Speaker 1: beginning to sense coming. And it's not a Democrat or

584
00:33:08,840 --> 00:33:11,200
Speaker 1: Republican thing. It's go, wait a second, I did not

585
00:33:11,360 --> 00:33:14,880
Speaker 1: sign up for this. I signed up for something is Yes.

586
00:33:15,120 --> 00:33:18,280
Speaker 1: I don't agree with you about this Texas or that

587
00:33:18,920 --> 00:33:21,840
Speaker 1: or whatever it might be, but I do believe in

588
00:33:21,880 --> 00:33:27,760
Speaker 1: these founding documents. I do not think that somebody should

589
00:33:27,840 --> 00:33:31,400
Speaker 1: enrich themselves in office. I do not think I mean

590
00:33:31,440 --> 00:33:35,080
Speaker 1: the founders if they came, as the scholar u'vel eleven

591
00:33:35,160 --> 00:33:37,560
Speaker 1: told me back in November, he said, they wouldn't be

592
00:33:37,600 --> 00:33:41,120
Speaker 1: surprised that someone was seeking monarchical power, but they'd be

593
00:33:41,320 --> 00:33:45,200
Speaker 1: so surprised and so disappointed in that their first article

594
00:33:45,240 --> 00:33:48,920
Speaker 1: of the Constitution, after the beautiful poetic preamble written by

595
00:33:48,920 --> 00:33:52,280
Speaker 1: Governor Morris of New York, the rest of it is code.

596
00:33:52,280 --> 00:33:55,520
Speaker 1: It's just sort of the operating manuals like ikeia, Well,

597
00:33:55,720 --> 00:33:57,160
Speaker 1: the hell am I going to put this thing together?

598
00:33:57,720 --> 00:34:02,160
Speaker 1: And the first article is the legislative, and he would

599
00:34:02,200 --> 00:34:05,920
Speaker 1: be they would be so shocked that the legislative had

600
00:34:06,000 --> 00:34:08,759
Speaker 1: yielded so much out of fear of some kind of

601
00:34:08,840 --> 00:34:12,600
Speaker 1: retribution that they'd seeded the ability to tax the tariffs.

602
00:34:12,719 --> 00:34:16,000
Speaker 1: That's the province of Congress. The idea that you could

603
00:34:16,080 --> 00:34:18,320
Speaker 1: change what the White House look like, or build a ballroom,

604
00:34:18,400 --> 00:34:21,120
Speaker 1: or slap your name, and that's the province of Congress.

605
00:34:21,320 --> 00:34:24,640
Speaker 1: The second article, the executive would be the managers to

606
00:34:24,760 --> 00:34:28,000
Speaker 1: carry out what Congress had said. And oh no, we're

607
00:34:28,040 --> 00:34:30,560
Speaker 1: in too moderated age. Things happened too fast, so you

608
00:34:30,600 --> 00:34:34,279
Speaker 1: can have wars of choice and inevitably the chaos that's

609
00:34:34,320 --> 00:34:36,760
Speaker 1: created if you get back to where you were before.

610
00:34:37,000 --> 00:34:41,000
Speaker 1: Somehow that's an overwhelming victory. You know, you go, Okay,

611
00:34:41,719 --> 00:34:44,200
Speaker 1: what Orwellian world are you living in?

612
00:34:45,800 --> 00:34:48,320
Speaker 2: What ken when you so much done fact? The I

613
00:34:48,360 --> 00:34:51,600
Speaker 2: mean that was and he was. He's a conservative historian

614
00:34:51,719 --> 00:34:53,200
Speaker 2: that you were just referencing.

615
00:34:53,239 --> 00:34:55,880
Speaker 1: Oh oh u eleven a conservative scholar of the Constitution.

616
00:34:55,960 --> 00:34:57,840
Speaker 1: But this is where I'm saying, we're all if you

617
00:34:58,000 --> 00:35:02,279
Speaker 1: could just Judd luddig, you know, these are people who

618
00:35:02,320 --> 00:35:06,040
Speaker 1: are stunned at the kind of liberties that have been

619
00:35:06,080 --> 00:35:08,920
Speaker 1: taken in the presumption that this is You know that

620
00:35:09,280 --> 00:35:13,839
Speaker 1: the original founders intended a Christian nation. They wanted a

621
00:35:13,840 --> 00:35:17,439
Speaker 1: god fearing nation. But they were saying, no, Look what's

622
00:35:17,440 --> 00:35:21,520
Speaker 1: happened in the whole history of humanity when a government,

623
00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:25,960
Speaker 1: you know, a kingdom has said that we have one way,

624
00:35:26,040 --> 00:35:29,480
Speaker 1: my way, or the highway, you know, Protestant Henry the eighth,

625
00:35:29,600 --> 00:35:33,279
Speaker 1: or a Catholic Louis the fourteenth. You know, and if

626
00:35:33,320 --> 00:35:36,640
Speaker 1: you you know, presume that it's it's one thing. You

627
00:35:36,880 --> 00:35:41,160
Speaker 1: violated the entire spirit of the United States.

628
00:35:40,920 --> 00:35:43,719
Speaker 2: Did you. I mean talk about presumption when you went

629
00:35:43,760 --> 00:35:46,799
Speaker 2: through this project. I mean, was how revelatory was all

630
00:35:46,840 --> 00:35:48,680
Speaker 2: of this to you over the last ten years. I

631
00:35:48,719 --> 00:35:51,640
Speaker 2: mean for someone that knows his stuff, you must have

632
00:35:51,719 --> 00:35:54,240
Speaker 2: come in with all kinds. You were like, I got.

633
00:35:54,000 --> 00:35:55,800
Speaker 1: This, yes, right exactly.

634
00:35:56,280 --> 00:35:59,799
Speaker 3: You know, well, I actually, governor, I learned years ago

635
00:36:00,080 --> 00:36:03,600
Speaker 3: to drop that arrogance, because you know, when I got

636
00:36:03,600 --> 00:36:07,200
Speaker 3: my seventh or eighth film was a big history on baseball,

637
00:36:07,440 --> 00:36:10,360
Speaker 3: and I go, well, I have no baseball now, and each.

638
00:36:10,239 --> 00:36:13,799
Speaker 1: Day was a daily humiliation of what I didn't know.

639
00:36:14,080 --> 00:36:16,000
Speaker 1: And so now I just presume that I've got a

640
00:36:16,080 --> 00:36:19,080
Speaker 1: kind of working man's first. I'll do all right on Jeopardy.

641
00:36:19,600 --> 00:36:22,760
Speaker 1: I'm the guy you wanted trivial pursuits as your party.

642
00:36:23,040 --> 00:36:26,279
Speaker 1: But I know nothing. And so rather than think about it,

643
00:36:26,400 --> 00:36:30,400
Speaker 1: rather than tell you what you should know about the revolution,

644
00:36:30,840 --> 00:36:34,200
Speaker 1: why don't I share with you what I just discovered.

645
00:36:34,440 --> 00:36:37,520
Speaker 1: What we just discovered. It's very much a wee over

646
00:36:37,560 --> 00:36:40,120
Speaker 1: the course of the last ten years. And we've got

647
00:36:40,160 --> 00:36:43,640
Speaker 1: two dozen scholars and writers, and we're not we're taking

648
00:36:43,680 --> 00:36:47,120
Speaker 1: what they've learned, not what they're political, and not with

649
00:36:47,160 --> 00:36:51,560
Speaker 1: their particular philosophy, not political, but their philosophy, what the

650
00:36:51,680 --> 00:36:54,799
Speaker 1: historians call historiography. We don't have to buy into that.

651
00:36:54,840 --> 00:36:57,600
Speaker 1: And so you can be strengthened like the spokes on

652
00:36:57,640 --> 00:37:01,640
Speaker 1: a wheel that give the great dynamic strength to a wheel.

653
00:37:01,800 --> 00:37:04,600
Speaker 1: Because you've got lots of different perspectives, isn't just one.

654
00:37:05,000 --> 00:37:08,120
Speaker 1: You're not seeing it through one lens, you're able to.

655
00:37:08,200 --> 00:37:13,880
Speaker 1: And this is where story narrative, which was understandably out

656
00:37:13,960 --> 00:37:17,960
Speaker 1: of fashion by the middle of the twentieth century, is

657
00:37:18,000 --> 00:37:20,240
Speaker 1: actually still the only way to tell a story. Honey,

658
00:37:20,440 --> 00:37:23,640
Speaker 1: how was your day? Does not begin? I back slowly

659
00:37:23,840 --> 00:37:27,279
Speaker 1: down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb,

660
00:37:27,360 --> 00:37:29,600
Speaker 1: unless somebody t bones doing That's exactly the way you

661
00:37:29,640 --> 00:37:32,120
Speaker 1: do it. What you do is you edit human experience,

662
00:37:32,160 --> 00:37:34,759
Speaker 1: and to do that, you're gonna have to know what

663
00:37:34,800 --> 00:37:37,880
Speaker 1: that was. And so we studied scholars who knew the

664
00:37:37,960 --> 00:37:41,160
Speaker 1: Native American countries, knew the difference between the Delaware and

665
00:37:41,160 --> 00:37:43,880
Speaker 1: the Shawnee, who were actually partners, or the Creek, the

666
00:37:43,960 --> 00:37:47,600
Speaker 1: Muskogee Creeks, or the Cheyenne, or you know whatever the

667
00:37:48,680 --> 00:37:52,800
Speaker 1: I mean, the Cherokee, or the Anashinabe, or the Hoden

668
00:37:52,880 --> 00:37:59,200
Speaker 1: and Shone, the Cayuga, Seneca, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, in Mohawk,

669
00:37:59,440 --> 00:38:04,879
Speaker 1: that made up the Iroquois Confederacy. This democracy in a way,

670
00:38:05,239 --> 00:38:09,760
Speaker 1: this union, this confederacy that Franklin twenty years before the revolution, said, whoa,

671
00:38:09,800 --> 00:38:12,040
Speaker 1: this is pretty good. We should try it ourselves, and

672
00:38:12,200 --> 00:38:15,800
Speaker 1: everybody said, really good idea, and every colony said, nope,

673
00:38:15,840 --> 00:38:18,200
Speaker 1: we don't want to give up one ounce of authority

674
00:38:18,239 --> 00:38:22,200
Speaker 1: to anything bigger than I'm than ourselves. And so twenty

675
00:38:22,280 --> 00:38:25,360
Speaker 1: years later this will will come to a head and

676
00:38:25,400 --> 00:38:28,680
Speaker 1: we'll be able to figure out on our own that.

677
00:38:28,880 --> 00:38:31,040
Speaker 1: But it just tells you how much we're bound to

678
00:38:31,080 --> 00:38:34,440
Speaker 1: each other, how much we're dependent on each other. We

679
00:38:34,520 --> 00:38:38,239
Speaker 1: know what the social compact is and Unfortunately, we live

680
00:38:38,280 --> 00:38:40,680
Speaker 1: in a world today in computers where it's one and

681
00:38:40,920 --> 00:38:44,319
Speaker 1: zero or the media culture where it's one thing or

682
00:38:44,320 --> 00:38:47,400
Speaker 1: the other, and we forget to select for the things

683
00:38:47,600 --> 00:38:49,120
Speaker 1: that we hold in common. I mean, I say this

684
00:38:49,200 --> 00:38:52,080
Speaker 1: to my I have four daughters forty three to fifteen,

685
00:38:52,400 --> 00:38:56,200
Speaker 1: and I just say, social media isn't right and it's

686
00:38:56,200 --> 00:38:58,359
Speaker 1: not social. You've been in a room where people are

687
00:38:58,400 --> 00:39:02,320
Speaker 1: all in their stuff, you know, how is that connecting?

688
00:39:02,400 --> 00:39:04,680
Speaker 1: It's not. I live in a little village in New Hampshire.

689
00:39:04,680 --> 00:39:06,520
Speaker 1: We get together, we have a town meeting. We decide

690
00:39:06,560 --> 00:39:08,399
Speaker 1: whether they're going to buy a new bumper. It's a

691
00:39:08,400 --> 00:39:11,759
Speaker 1: big deal, you know, for the fire department. And that's

692
00:39:11,760 --> 00:39:14,839
Speaker 1: what civics has gone out of our lives, and so too.

693
00:39:15,080 --> 00:39:18,759
Speaker 1: I think that artificial intelligence isn't as long as we

694
00:39:18,920 --> 00:39:23,560
Speaker 1: always I mean is artificial intelligence is artificial. So as

695
00:39:23,600 --> 00:39:26,120
Speaker 1: long as you keep that in mind that the glory

696
00:39:26,480 --> 00:39:30,719
Speaker 1: is what our founders understood was the primacy of the individual. Right.

697
00:39:31,320 --> 00:39:34,600
Speaker 1: This holds primacy. It's at the heart the value of

698
00:39:34,640 --> 00:39:38,440
Speaker 1: each human life. Is at the heart of all religious practices,

699
00:39:38,880 --> 00:39:42,879
Speaker 1: all of them, and particularly the children of Abraham, which

700
00:39:42,880 --> 00:39:47,480
Speaker 1: would include Christians and Jews and Muslims where that is there,

701
00:39:47,520 --> 00:39:51,319
Speaker 1: but it's not to slay any other religion, which all

702
00:39:51,440 --> 00:39:54,840
Speaker 1: has this sense of the primacy of the individual. And

703
00:39:54,880 --> 00:39:57,000
Speaker 1: when we get away with it, we said, well, you know,

704
00:39:57,680 --> 00:40:00,840
Speaker 1: in animal farm or Well's animal f which is why

705
00:40:00,880 --> 00:40:05,600
Speaker 1: we have invoked the word Orwellian, the adjective Orwellian so

706
00:40:05,719 --> 00:40:09,280
Speaker 1: much lately, is that, well, some animals are more equal

707
00:40:09,320 --> 00:40:12,799
Speaker 1: than others. Right, And then that's the slippery slope in

708
00:40:12,800 --> 00:40:15,359
Speaker 1: which you just go back and you suddenly wake up

709
00:40:15,800 --> 00:40:19,000
Speaker 1: to do that. You know, I think our next chapter,

710
00:40:19,600 --> 00:40:23,560
Speaker 1: which I think has already begun to being written, is

711
00:40:23,800 --> 00:40:27,680
Speaker 1: repair and restoration, Like, yeah, look, we'll go back to

712
00:40:27,920 --> 00:40:32,440
Speaker 1: let's go back to arguing about the things that matter

713
00:40:32,840 --> 00:40:35,840
Speaker 1: without demonizing us. You know, just wondered. You know, for

714
00:40:35,880 --> 00:40:39,560
Speaker 1: a long time, the Republican Party admirably and nobly held

715
00:40:39,600 --> 00:40:43,080
Speaker 1: to this notion of the threat of communism, sometimes to

716
00:40:43,640 --> 00:40:47,360
Speaker 1: great expense if you think about the McCarthyism of the fifties,

717
00:40:47,360 --> 00:40:50,520
Speaker 1: but also just the sort of the willingness to say, no,

718
00:40:50,800 --> 00:40:54,080
Speaker 1: that's that's what it is. But when that system collapsed,

719
00:40:54,600 --> 00:40:58,440
Speaker 1: unfortunately they there was an absence a surface of ideas,

720
00:40:58,440 --> 00:41:00,600
Speaker 1: and so what did you do? You made Clinton and

721
00:41:00,640 --> 00:41:03,719
Speaker 1: then by extension all Democrats the enemies, and then all

722
00:41:03,719 --> 00:41:05,799
Speaker 1: of a sudden we have people that I meet in

723
00:41:05,840 --> 00:41:09,680
Speaker 1: the course of my life who believe we're pedophiles. I mean, actually,

724
00:41:09,760 --> 00:41:12,879
Speaker 1: the stuff is coming out that it may not be

725
00:41:13,360 --> 00:41:17,120
Speaker 1: limited to Democrats or even any political party, but just

726
00:41:17,640 --> 00:41:20,560
Speaker 1: bad actors, and we need to get to the bottom

727
00:41:20,600 --> 00:41:22,719
Speaker 1: of it and figure out that we don't need to,

728
00:41:23,040 --> 00:41:27,759
Speaker 1: you know, keep wagging the dog here by you know,

729
00:41:27,880 --> 00:41:32,600
Speaker 1: capturing you know, South American leaders, or threatening Greenland or

730
00:41:32,880 --> 00:41:39,160
Speaker 1: starting another war just to distract from information that I

731
00:41:39,239 --> 00:41:42,200
Speaker 1: believe was supposed to come out in December mid December

732
00:41:42,239 --> 00:41:45,400
Speaker 1: by law, by congressional law, and not all of the

733
00:41:45,400 --> 00:41:47,640
Speaker 1: information has come out. And I just want to know

734
00:41:48,280 --> 00:41:50,440
Speaker 1: who's being protected.

735
00:41:51,520 --> 00:41:54,719
Speaker 2: God bless uh. Too much there to unpack. I want

736
00:41:54,719 --> 00:41:55,120
Speaker 2: to go back.

737
00:41:55,239 --> 00:41:57,160
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, No, I know.

738
00:41:57,160 --> 00:41:59,200
Speaker 2: I appreciate all in this notion of you know, being

739
00:41:59,200 --> 00:42:01,279
Speaker 2: repairs of the breed. I love that. I want to

740
00:42:01,400 --> 00:42:03,000
Speaker 2: and I need we all, I think all of us

741
00:42:03,040 --> 00:42:04,680
Speaker 2: need to get back a little bit to that. But

742
00:42:04,760 --> 00:42:07,640
Speaker 2: I'm curious as you went back over the course, and

743
00:42:07,640 --> 00:42:11,520
Speaker 2: I appreciate how you you sort of unpacked, this journey

744
00:42:11,560 --> 00:42:14,840
Speaker 2: that you went on with your team trying to understand

745
00:42:15,440 --> 00:42:19,160
Speaker 2: our origin story. What were they? I mean it begs

746
00:42:19,160 --> 00:42:23,120
Speaker 2: the question what what was most revelatory to you? What

747
00:42:23,200 --> 00:42:25,520
Speaker 2: did you come in and just stop, you know, you

748
00:42:25,600 --> 00:42:27,880
Speaker 2: sort of stopped you in your tracks, like how did

749
00:42:27,960 --> 00:42:31,600
Speaker 2: I miss this? How did I not understand more fully?

750
00:42:31,800 --> 00:42:35,600
Speaker 1: That? Well, one of it is the centrality of Washington.

751
00:42:35,640 --> 00:42:38,120
Speaker 1: I mean I just was like not willing to accept

752
00:42:38,160 --> 00:42:40,960
Speaker 1: that notion that he's the father of our country. But

753
00:42:41,000 --> 00:42:46,520
Speaker 1: there's a German language newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania the spring

754
00:42:46,560 --> 00:42:49,840
Speaker 1: after the first the Valley Forge, the horrible Valley Forge,

755
00:42:49,920 --> 00:42:53,040
Speaker 1: who calls him deslond de Slater, the country's father, And

756
00:42:53,080 --> 00:42:57,400
Speaker 1: you begin to realize that invested in this person is

757
00:42:57,960 --> 00:43:00,279
Speaker 1: the future of this place. It been captured, it had

758
00:43:00,320 --> 00:43:03,399
Speaker 1: been all over. But I think it's more the grassroots

759
00:43:03,400 --> 00:43:07,080
Speaker 1: of this how much it meant to people. Remember if

760
00:43:07,120 --> 00:43:10,080
Speaker 1: you were this is a civil war, and that means

761
00:43:10,080 --> 00:43:12,399
Speaker 1: it's not just the British three thousand miles away we're

762
00:43:12,440 --> 00:43:15,080
Speaker 1: just trying to throw them off. It's our neighbors. This

763
00:43:15,160 --> 00:43:17,319
Speaker 1: is a civil war. We're born in violence. At least

764
00:43:17,360 --> 00:43:20,960
Speaker 1: twenty percent overall, but in any given place it might

765
00:43:21,000 --> 00:43:24,840
Speaker 1: be a hotbed of loyalism. They're against it, they believe,

766
00:43:24,960 --> 00:43:29,240
Speaker 1: and we don't make them enemies. They believe quite correctly

767
00:43:29,280 --> 00:43:31,719
Speaker 1: that the British constitutional marnarchy is a hell of a

768
00:43:31,719 --> 00:43:34,680
Speaker 1: good form of government and it is their prosperity, the

769
00:43:34,800 --> 00:43:38,279
Speaker 1: land they have, their literacy, their life expectancy, their good

770
00:43:38,280 --> 00:43:41,799
Speaker 1: fortune is based on. And you're asking me to give

771
00:43:41,880 --> 00:43:45,719
Speaker 1: this all up to support an idea that has never

772
00:43:45,800 --> 00:43:48,279
Speaker 1: been tried before. Are you out of your mind? The

773
00:43:48,320 --> 00:43:52,640
Speaker 1: thing that blows my mind, Governor, is that how many

774
00:43:52,640 --> 00:43:57,719
Speaker 1: people said yes to this completely new idea, and that

775
00:43:57,920 --> 00:44:02,440
Speaker 1: it was not just the declaration, the list of injuries

776
00:44:02,480 --> 00:44:06,080
Speaker 1: and usurpations eighteen of them that the King, not Parliament

777
00:44:06,160 --> 00:44:09,279
Speaker 1: was now guilty of. It wasn't just common sense. It

778
00:44:09,360 --> 00:44:12,080
Speaker 1: wasn't just later on the American crisis. These are the

779
00:44:12,120 --> 00:44:15,279
Speaker 1: times that try men sold the summer soldier and the

780
00:44:15,320 --> 00:44:19,360
Speaker 1: sunshine patriot. Already then they know there's a distinction between

781
00:44:19,440 --> 00:44:21,960
Speaker 1: the people who love to wave the flag and then

782
00:44:22,360 --> 00:44:25,120
Speaker 1: aren't there. And at the end of the declaration, we

783
00:44:25,320 --> 00:44:29,880
Speaker 1: mutually pledged to each other our lives, our fortunes, and

784
00:44:29,920 --> 00:44:34,520
Speaker 1: our sacred honor. It means something. George Washington may have

785
00:44:34,560 --> 00:44:37,640
Speaker 1: been the richest person in the country, certainly was for

786
00:44:37,680 --> 00:44:43,200
Speaker 1: a time. He risked his life and his fortune and

787
00:44:43,280 --> 00:44:46,680
Speaker 1: his sacred honor in support of a thing. And that's unbelievable.

788
00:44:46,680 --> 00:44:49,239
Speaker 1: And so did a fourteen year old kid named John

789
00:44:49,280 --> 00:44:52,080
Speaker 1: Greenland from Boston. So did a fifteen year old named

790
00:44:52,160 --> 00:44:55,360
Speaker 1: Joseph plum Martin from Connecticut. So did a lot of

791
00:44:55,440 --> 00:44:59,400
Speaker 1: people that we don't know their stories, who just said, yeah,

792
00:44:59,440 --> 00:45:04,759
Speaker 1: I'm throwing with this lot. It behooved most Native Americans

793
00:45:04,800 --> 00:45:07,359
Speaker 1: to side with the British because they think at least

794
00:45:07,400 --> 00:45:11,840
Speaker 1: they could forestall the onslaught into their territory at the

795
00:45:11,880 --> 00:45:15,839
Speaker 1: Ohio Valley. It was a short term arrangement, and then

796
00:45:15,960 --> 00:45:19,560
Speaker 1: many times the British, whose empire depended entirely on the

797
00:45:19,600 --> 00:45:24,000
Speaker 1: wealth that was generated from slavery, particularly in the Caribbean.

798
00:45:24,040 --> 00:45:27,280
Speaker 1: They had thirteen colonies there that were huge profit centers,

799
00:45:27,320 --> 00:45:29,880
Speaker 1: only South Carolina and Virginia for the reasons you can

800
00:45:29,920 --> 00:45:34,120
Speaker 1: assume our profit centers. The rest of the colonies aren't.

801
00:45:34,200 --> 00:45:37,439
Speaker 1: But we're populated, and are we make things. We're good

802
00:45:37,640 --> 00:45:40,960
Speaker 1: trading partners, and you know, they want to keep us

803
00:45:40,960 --> 00:45:43,520
Speaker 1: from taking Indian land because they can't afford to protect us,

804
00:45:43,800 --> 00:45:46,160
Speaker 1: and we want to take Indian land. So it's not

805
00:45:46,239 --> 00:45:49,319
Speaker 1: just taxes and representation. So you begin to see this

806
00:45:49,400 --> 00:45:52,120
Speaker 1: like dropping a stone in the water, and you follow

807
00:45:52,120 --> 00:45:55,480
Speaker 1: the ripples out and it becomes so amazing that we

808
00:45:55,520 --> 00:46:00,719
Speaker 1: see Lexington Green April nineteen seventeen seventy five, chances of

809
00:46:00,760 --> 00:46:05,480
Speaker 1: success are zero, and six and a half years later,

810
00:46:05,840 --> 00:46:11,000
Speaker 1: on the seventeenth of October at Yorktown, they're one hundred percent.

811
00:46:11,640 --> 00:46:14,000
Speaker 1: Don't you want to know how that happened? And does

812
00:46:14,120 --> 00:46:17,920
Speaker 1: Washington win every battle? No, he loses most of his battles.

813
00:46:18,160 --> 00:46:22,000
Speaker 1: The big victory at Saratoga is away from him. He's

814
00:46:22,000 --> 00:46:25,760
Speaker 1: sent Daniel Morgan and most importantly Benedict Arnold, who becomes

815
00:46:25,760 --> 00:46:28,759
Speaker 1: the hero of Saratoga for the Patriots. We can get

816
00:46:28,760 --> 00:46:32,759
Speaker 1: into Benedict Darnald later. It's so interesting that for us

817
00:46:32,800 --> 00:46:36,799
Speaker 1: it means one thing, and it's actually a much more dynamic,

818
00:46:36,960 --> 00:46:40,840
Speaker 1: complicated thing that teaches an essential lesson about humanity and

819
00:46:41,200 --> 00:46:44,960
Speaker 1: the conflicts not only between people but within them. Just

820
00:46:45,000 --> 00:46:48,359
Speaker 1: as George Washington is wrestling Thomas Jefferson is wrestling, they

821
00:46:48,360 --> 00:46:53,040
Speaker 1: know slavery's wrong. They know it's wrong. And the great

822
00:46:53,080 --> 00:46:55,799
Speaker 1: Harvard scholar and at Gordon Reid says, how can you

823
00:46:55,840 --> 00:46:58,000
Speaker 1: do something if you know it's wrong? And she comes

824
00:46:58,080 --> 00:47:01,719
Speaker 1: on camera and says, well, that's the human question for

825
00:47:01,800 --> 00:47:05,080
Speaker 1: all of us, meaning she's not taking Thomas Jefferson off

826
00:47:05,080 --> 00:47:07,440
Speaker 1: the hook and forgiving him. She's leaving him on the

827
00:47:07,440 --> 00:47:12,200
Speaker 1: hook and putting the rest of us for our sanctimonious

828
00:47:13,239 --> 00:47:17,759
Speaker 1: idea of our ability to judge another when we ourselves

829
00:47:17,960 --> 00:47:22,600
Speaker 1: are walking contradictions and flaws. So the fact that we

830
00:47:22,719 --> 00:47:25,239
Speaker 1: had a success, that something was born out of here

831
00:47:25,280 --> 00:47:28,879
Speaker 1: that turned out to be the greatest country ever right,

832
00:47:29,640 --> 00:47:34,400
Speaker 1: is just spectacular to me and is a wonderful one.

833
00:47:34,920 --> 00:47:38,480
Speaker 1: If you just think that it's only spectacular, then you

834
00:47:39,120 --> 00:47:42,560
Speaker 1: missed a point. We had some compromises in the Constitution

835
00:47:42,680 --> 00:47:48,640
Speaker 1: that were incredibly genius and some that were unbelievably tragic

836
00:47:48,680 --> 00:47:52,480
Speaker 1: that perpetuated the institution of slavery even when they knew.

837
00:47:52,560 --> 00:47:55,160
Speaker 1: I mean, they were saying, George Washington said, you know,

838
00:47:55,360 --> 00:47:57,840
Speaker 1: they're treating us like slaves. They're treating us in the

839
00:47:57,840 --> 00:48:00,480
Speaker 1: same way that we treat the negroes, over which we

840
00:48:00,560 --> 00:48:04,760
Speaker 1: have arbitrary sway, so they know they're using the language

841
00:48:04,800 --> 00:48:07,960
Speaker 1: of slavery, and they're going, you know, wait a second,

842
00:48:08,000 --> 00:48:10,239
Speaker 1: and you find the British going, how is it that

843
00:48:10,320 --> 00:48:15,080
Speaker 1: this driver of negroes, George Washington is having success against us?

844
00:48:15,200 --> 00:48:17,799
Speaker 1: I mean, not that they're opposed to slavery, they're for it.

845
00:48:17,880 --> 00:48:20,160
Speaker 1: But every once in a while, though offer freedom to

846
00:48:21,000 --> 00:48:25,359
Speaker 1: those enslaved people of rebels. As a scholar pointed out

847
00:48:25,360 --> 00:48:27,319
Speaker 1: in the film, not sure how you tell if you're

848
00:48:27,719 --> 00:48:31,840
Speaker 1: a if you're an enslaved person of a loyalist and

849
00:48:31,920 --> 00:48:35,240
Speaker 1: you hear there's freedom promise, I would say, oh yeah,

850
00:48:35,280 --> 00:48:39,080
Speaker 1: my master's of this, and you know, and so people

851
00:48:39,120 --> 00:48:41,759
Speaker 1: would just we think of it as big ideas, and

852
00:48:41,840 --> 00:48:45,120
Speaker 1: they are. They're really important there, and we're going to

853
00:48:45,160 --> 00:48:47,480
Speaker 1: sponsor revolutions for the next two hundred plus years. When

854
00:48:47,520 --> 00:48:51,160
Speaker 1: Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnamese independence in nineteen forty five,

855
00:48:51,280 --> 00:48:55,000
Speaker 1: he's quoting Thomas Jefferson. But the decisions that people make

856
00:48:55,280 --> 00:48:59,279
Speaker 1: are incredibly local. Where is the daylight that I can

857
00:48:59,360 --> 00:49:03,080
Speaker 1: get to for me, not only me, but my children

858
00:49:03,160 --> 00:49:06,719
Speaker 1: and my children's children's children, Like that's the important thing.

859
00:49:07,000 --> 00:49:10,680
Speaker 1: If you're enslaved this is the last thing anybody on

860
00:49:10,760 --> 00:49:13,799
Speaker 1: earth wants to be, and you're going to make the

861
00:49:13,880 --> 00:49:16,359
Speaker 1: decision which you think is the best. Sometimes that's going

862
00:49:16,360 --> 00:49:20,640
Speaker 1: to the British. There's painful, painful moments in New York City,

863
00:49:20,680 --> 00:49:23,960
Speaker 1: which doesn't evacuate. The British don't leave there until two

864
00:49:24,080 --> 00:49:27,479
Speaker 1: years and a month after Yorktown. And what they're doing

865
00:49:27,480 --> 00:49:30,319
Speaker 1: in those last months is they're adjudicating which of the

866
00:49:30,360 --> 00:49:34,239
Speaker 1: black people that have been with the British get to

867
00:49:34,280 --> 00:49:36,719
Speaker 1: go and who have to stay. So a mother gets

868
00:49:36,719 --> 00:49:39,280
Speaker 1: to go because she can prove employment with an officer

869
00:49:39,560 --> 00:49:44,040
Speaker 1: or a loyalist, but the daughter can't. It's the reverse

870
00:49:44,080 --> 00:49:48,000
Speaker 1: of the birthright citizenship right. So the daughter goes back

871
00:49:48,040 --> 00:49:50,920
Speaker 1: to Virginia and is enslaved, and the mother goes to

872
00:49:50,960 --> 00:49:55,600
Speaker 1: Nova Scotia going what happened? And there's two lists, they're

873
00:49:55,600 --> 00:49:58,839
Speaker 1: collists of Negroes. And every week or so they meet

874
00:49:58,880 --> 00:50:02,560
Speaker 1: at Fonce's tavern in Lower Manhattan. Still there tables still there,

875
00:50:02,840 --> 00:50:06,799
Speaker 1: and four Brits and three Americans determine who gets to

876
00:50:06,800 --> 00:50:09,040
Speaker 1: go and who doesn't get to go. And they're horse

877
00:50:09,080 --> 00:50:11,560
Speaker 1: trading with human lives in a country that had just

878
00:50:11,880 --> 00:50:15,440
Speaker 1: proclaimed to the world less than ten years before that.

879
00:50:15,560 --> 00:50:17,720
Speaker 1: All human beings, all men are created equal.

880
00:50:19,360 --> 00:50:22,839
Speaker 2: Pretty good story, so so much, I mean, and I

881
00:50:22,880 --> 00:50:26,200
Speaker 2: love your language about this notion of a finished monument

882
00:50:26,360 --> 00:50:30,560
Speaker 2: versus this notion of an unfinished responsibility. And you keep

883
00:50:30,600 --> 00:50:34,080
Speaker 2: coming back this notion of citizenship active, not inert citizenship,

884
00:50:34,120 --> 00:50:36,200
Speaker 2: that we have agency, we can shape the future. We're

885
00:50:36,239 --> 00:50:39,239
Speaker 2: not bystandards. I think it was Brandeis who said, in

886
00:50:39,280 --> 00:50:43,080
Speaker 2: a democracy, the most important office is office of citizen.

887
00:50:43,640 --> 00:50:46,799
Speaker 1: So this is what Washington knew right when he resigns.

888
00:50:47,080 --> 00:50:50,440
Speaker 1: I think he was tacitly saying, even when he resigned

889
00:50:50,480 --> 00:50:53,879
Speaker 1: the military commission, I am a citizen, and then at

890
00:50:53,920 --> 00:50:57,880
Speaker 1: the presidency, I'm a citizen. Of Adams wanted him to

891
00:50:57,920 --> 00:51:01,320
Speaker 1: take a kind of royal or princely title. He goes, no, present,

892
00:51:01,360 --> 00:51:03,719
Speaker 1: It's okay for me, right, And so I'm sorry I

893
00:51:03,760 --> 00:51:06,000
Speaker 1: interrupted you. But I think that's really at the heart

894
00:51:06,000 --> 00:51:09,440
Speaker 1: of it, that this building block is not the top,

895
00:51:09,840 --> 00:51:13,600
Speaker 1: it's the bottom or the bottom is the top. The

896
00:51:13,800 --> 00:51:17,600
Speaker 1: individual agency of each human being. And the story of

897
00:51:17,680 --> 00:51:21,080
Speaker 1: us has been the expansion of what was a very

898
00:51:21,120 --> 00:51:23,560
Speaker 1: limited phrase, All men are created equal, all white men

899
00:51:23,600 --> 00:51:26,680
Speaker 1: of property, free of debt. We don't mean that anymore.

900
00:51:27,160 --> 00:51:29,680
Speaker 1: And the more we grow and the more we expand it,

901
00:51:29,760 --> 00:51:34,520
Speaker 1: the richer we become. And that's that's the story of us,

902
00:51:35,040 --> 00:51:36,960
Speaker 1: no them involved, but of us.

903
00:51:38,320 --> 00:51:43,399
Speaker 2: No kings rallies. This sense, I mean you've start I'm

904
00:51:43,440 --> 00:51:46,480
Speaker 2: starting to feel more optimistic listening to you about well,

905
00:51:46,600 --> 00:51:49,400
Speaker 2: this moment, this sort of this energy, this percolation, this

906
00:51:49,480 --> 00:51:53,000
Speaker 2: notion that the top is the bottom, this notion that

907
00:51:53,040 --> 00:51:57,400
Speaker 2: we this foundational of principles that you have allowed us

908
00:51:57,440 --> 00:51:59,560
Speaker 2: to endure and endure these moments, and the fact that

909
00:51:59,600 --> 00:52:02,759
Speaker 2: these moments are hardly unique in our history, and the

910
00:52:02,800 --> 00:52:06,160
Speaker 2: fact that we've been able to persevere. I mean, are

911
00:52:06,200 --> 00:52:08,800
Speaker 2: you feeling more or less optimistic in that content? I

912
00:52:08,880 --> 00:52:12,120
Speaker 2: know it's the road question you get every interview. So

913
00:52:12,320 --> 00:52:14,880
Speaker 2: in the context of this moment in particular, and I

914
00:52:14,880 --> 00:52:17,160
Speaker 2: mean quite literally, perhaps this moment.

915
00:52:18,040 --> 00:52:21,560
Speaker 1: Yes, Governor, I believe in that. I do think that

916
00:52:22,360 --> 00:52:26,200
Speaker 1: the three great crises that we could identify after our founding,

917
00:52:26,280 --> 00:52:29,719
Speaker 1: the Civil War, the depression in World War two were

918
00:52:29,800 --> 00:52:32,239
Speaker 1: the great crises. I think we're in a fourth. I

919
00:52:32,239 --> 00:52:37,239
Speaker 1: think the existential threats are unprecedented. In those first three crises,

920
00:52:37,560 --> 00:52:39,960
Speaker 1: there were free and fair elections, there was a peaceful

921
00:52:40,000 --> 00:52:43,839
Speaker 1: transfer of power, There was an independence of the judiciary,

922
00:52:43,960 --> 00:52:47,880
Speaker 1: all of which seems in play. And yet I think

923
00:52:48,360 --> 00:52:52,480
Speaker 1: part of the sort of arrogance of the present is

924
00:52:52,520 --> 00:52:56,040
Speaker 1: you think that because you're alive, that you must know

925
00:52:56,200 --> 00:52:59,600
Speaker 1: more than those who came before us, that somehow, because

926
00:52:59,600 --> 00:53:05,360
Speaker 1: we've our situation is so much more bad or worse

927
00:53:05,520 --> 00:53:08,720
Speaker 1: or great. And I think that we have to Lincoln

928
00:53:08,760 --> 00:53:12,720
Speaker 1: says it in that same address to Congress. He says,

929
00:53:14,360 --> 00:53:17,480
Speaker 1: the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the

930
00:53:17,520 --> 00:53:20,520
Speaker 1: stormy present. As our case is new, we must think

931
00:53:20,520 --> 00:53:24,560
Speaker 1: a new, We must act anew, We must disenthrall ourselves,

932
00:53:24,880 --> 00:53:28,279
Speaker 1: and then we can save our country. That leads to

933
00:53:28,320 --> 00:53:31,600
Speaker 1: the last best hope of earth. It means that you've

934
00:53:31,640 --> 00:53:35,200
Speaker 1: got to just sort of say, yes, it's unprecedented, but

935
00:53:35,520 --> 00:53:38,800
Speaker 1: also have faith in the American people, which is something

936
00:53:38,840 --> 00:53:42,759
Speaker 1: that autocrats don't have. They can use them, they can

937
00:53:42,800 --> 00:53:45,800
Speaker 1: play groups off one another, but they have zero faith

938
00:53:46,440 --> 00:53:51,200
Speaker 1: in the actual stuff of what it is to struggle

939
00:53:51,280 --> 00:53:54,600
Speaker 1: to be human and to just you know, in economies

940
00:53:54,640 --> 00:53:59,200
Speaker 1: and families get by, you know, with opioid addictions, with

941
00:53:59,560 --> 00:54:03,600
Speaker 1: hard work, work, with illness, unexpected illnesses, all of the

942
00:54:03,600 --> 00:54:07,000
Speaker 1: things not you know, the disparity of wages. I mean,

943
00:54:07,160 --> 00:54:09,839
Speaker 1: I made a film on baseball and in the seventies.

944
00:54:10,920 --> 00:54:14,120
Speaker 1: You know, it's the same thing with corporate CEOs that

945
00:54:14,160 --> 00:54:17,800
Speaker 1: you know, the CEO of a company made it best

946
00:54:17,840 --> 00:54:22,000
Speaker 1: like eight nine times with the line guy made and

947
00:54:22,040 --> 00:54:24,920
Speaker 1: now we're talking about eight hundred times as much. And

948
00:54:24,960 --> 00:54:28,759
Speaker 1: so we the proportionality of things and it permits you know,

949
00:54:28,800 --> 00:54:33,160
Speaker 1: we have great articulators of that disparity. And we sort

950
00:54:33,160 --> 00:54:35,400
Speaker 1: of think as politics as a line, it's a circle.

951
00:54:35,680 --> 00:54:40,000
Speaker 1: You know, like a third of Bernie's supporters voted for Hillary,

952
00:54:40,040 --> 00:54:42,040
Speaker 1: a third state home, and a third voted for Trump.

953
00:54:42,400 --> 00:54:46,120
Speaker 1: So you know that somewhere in this you have to

954
00:54:46,400 --> 00:54:51,160
Speaker 1: just be able to articulate that you understand what is

955
00:54:51,200 --> 00:54:53,120
Speaker 1: the stuff of life? How do you get through? How

956
00:54:53,120 --> 00:54:55,760
Speaker 1: do you put food on the table for your families?

957
00:54:55,760 --> 00:54:59,280
Speaker 1: How do you do that? But incumbent in an American

958
00:54:59,360 --> 00:55:02,759
Speaker 1: dynamic is that you have to exercise citizenship. It is

959
00:55:02,960 --> 00:55:07,080
Speaker 1: no longer convenient to stay home or to say it

960
00:55:07,120 --> 00:55:10,920
Speaker 1: doesn't count, because it does count and it does matter,

961
00:55:10,960 --> 00:55:13,319
Speaker 1: and you can't stay home and it doesn't mean you

962
00:55:13,360 --> 00:55:15,560
Speaker 1: have to be involved. You don't have to go to marches,

963
00:55:15,800 --> 00:55:18,280
Speaker 1: you don't have to do this, but you can vote,

964
00:55:18,640 --> 00:55:22,320
Speaker 1: you can be engaged in civics taken out of our curriculum.

965
00:55:22,400 --> 00:55:25,400
Speaker 1: It's been a dirty word for three or four decades.

966
00:55:26,160 --> 00:55:29,319
Speaker 1: They don't teach history anymore either. They just want the

967
00:55:29,400 --> 00:55:33,800
Speaker 1: automatons of STEM to just go forward. There's something missing.

968
00:55:33,840 --> 00:55:36,120
Speaker 1: I remember an executive when I was working on my

969
00:55:36,120 --> 00:55:38,759
Speaker 1: first film on the Brooklyn Bridge executive at AT and

970
00:55:38,760 --> 00:55:41,400
Speaker 1: T Very Seniories. He was just lamenting. He said, I

971
00:55:41,480 --> 00:55:43,239
Speaker 1: just wish you would come to work for me. I

972
00:55:43,239 --> 00:55:45,319
Speaker 1: can teach you what I know. I have all these

973
00:55:45,360 --> 00:55:48,680
Speaker 1: newly minted MBAs, but they can't write a letter. They

974
00:55:48,680 --> 00:55:51,279
Speaker 1: don't know about ethics, they don't know about history, they

975
00:55:51,280 --> 00:55:55,400
Speaker 1: don't know about comparative religion, and so there absent something

976
00:55:55,440 --> 00:55:58,239
Speaker 1: and I can't teach them that. You have that, and

977
00:55:58,280 --> 00:56:01,000
Speaker 1: I can teach you whatever things. And you don't want

978
00:56:01,040 --> 00:56:03,000
Speaker 1: to do this, I said, no, I do not. I

979
00:56:03,040 --> 00:56:05,560
Speaker 1: want to go off and make documentary films. And thank

980
00:56:05,560 --> 00:56:08,640
Speaker 1: you very much for introducing me to people who would

981
00:56:08,640 --> 00:56:11,000
Speaker 1: help us do it. But it really stuck with me.

982
00:56:11,080 --> 00:56:14,600
Speaker 1: It was a lament that somehow, in our rush for

983
00:56:14,880 --> 00:56:19,040
Speaker 1: the bottom line, we've forgotten to serve the basic instincts

984
00:56:19,040 --> 00:56:23,080
Speaker 1: of a democracy, which is a mechanical question. How does

985
00:56:23,120 --> 00:56:27,080
Speaker 1: it work? Who are we? What's the ingredients? You know,

986
00:56:27,120 --> 00:56:31,239
Speaker 1: people talk about Machiavelli. The Prince says this Machiavellian is

987
00:56:31,280 --> 00:56:34,279
Speaker 1: a pejorative adjective, but it really is the study of

988
00:56:34,280 --> 00:56:36,239
Speaker 1: how you get things done, how you get along with

989
00:56:36,239 --> 00:56:39,319
Speaker 1: your neighbors, how do you make something, how do you compromise,

990
00:56:39,560 --> 00:56:42,000
Speaker 1: how do you say, okay, you want this. I remember

991
00:56:42,000 --> 00:56:46,680
Speaker 1: in my film about Thomas Jefferson twenty plus years ago,

992
00:56:47,080 --> 00:56:50,640
Speaker 1: George Will said, democracy is the politics of the half loaf.

993
00:56:51,120 --> 00:56:54,600
Speaker 1: You don't get everything half loaf, half level. You don't

994
00:56:54,640 --> 00:56:57,920
Speaker 1: get everything. You know, be so suspicious of the ninety

995
00:56:58,000 --> 00:57:01,240
Speaker 1: nine to one vote and be choice at the fifty

996
00:57:01,239 --> 00:57:05,320
Speaker 1: one to forty nine vote. You know, that's okay, that's okay.

997
00:57:05,360 --> 00:57:08,000
Speaker 1: And what you're you know, people are you Oh, we're

998
00:57:08,040 --> 00:57:11,600
Speaker 1: just trying to address this, you know, those two percentage

999
00:57:11,600 --> 00:57:15,399
Speaker 1: points of independence or soccer moms or whatever the new

1000
00:57:15,440 --> 00:57:17,560
Speaker 1: thing is. It's no, it's not about that. You're try

1001
00:57:17,600 --> 00:57:20,960
Speaker 1: and engage everybody in this process. And that's where I

1002
00:57:20,960 --> 00:57:23,880
Speaker 1: think you can have a sense of optimism, you can

1003
00:57:23,920 --> 00:57:26,200
Speaker 1: have a sense of purpose. You could say, no, this

1004
00:57:26,280 --> 00:57:29,720
Speaker 1: doesn't sit right. I don't like it. Somebody celebrating the

1005
00:57:29,760 --> 00:57:32,880
Speaker 1: death of somebody else that I that I that they

1006
00:57:32,880 --> 00:57:39,560
Speaker 1: didn't agree with, or demonizing somebody else that they disagree with.

1007
00:57:39,640 --> 00:57:45,000
Speaker 1: Disagreement is human right, you know, even within ourselves. Whitman said,

1008
00:57:45,000 --> 00:57:48,360
Speaker 1: do I contradict myself? I contradict myself. And it's it's

1009
00:57:48,440 --> 00:57:50,520
Speaker 1: about as American a catechism as I know.

1010
00:57:52,680 --> 00:57:55,920
Speaker 2: So as we march forward kind of to toly forth,

1011
00:57:55,960 --> 00:57:58,880
Speaker 2: and you know, here we are just a few months out.

1012
00:57:58,920 --> 00:58:01,280
Speaker 2: I mean, what you know, if you could, you can

1013
00:58:01,320 --> 00:58:04,720
Speaker 2: write the next the chapters of the next few months,

1014
00:58:04,720 --> 00:58:07,240
Speaker 2: what I mean, at our best, what would you expect?

1015
00:58:07,280 --> 00:58:09,040
Speaker 2: What what do you expect of the States? And what

1016
00:58:09,080 --> 00:58:12,280
Speaker 2: do you I mean, obviously you've got the Sacarin version

1017
00:58:12,280 --> 00:58:14,360
Speaker 2: as you describe it, that you know is likely to

1018
00:58:14,360 --> 00:58:17,720
Speaker 2: be portrayed top down, and you know we can anticipate.

1019
00:58:17,760 --> 00:58:20,360
Speaker 2: I mean, you know everything died in purple, and you

1020
00:58:20,360 --> 00:58:22,480
Speaker 2: know pictures on the side of walls, and you know

1021
00:58:22,680 --> 00:58:27,160
Speaker 2: arches and coins that version. But what you know, what's

1022
00:58:27,240 --> 00:58:31,400
Speaker 2: what's give me? Write that story, what's what's what should.

1023
00:58:31,120 --> 00:58:31,520
Speaker 1: We be doing?

1024
00:58:31,520 --> 00:58:33,840
Speaker 2: So what can I be doing in the next few months?

1025
00:58:33,880 --> 00:58:34,800
Speaker 2: What should we be doing?

1026
00:58:35,600 --> 00:58:38,040
Speaker 1: In many of our religious traditions we have, there's a

1027
00:58:38,080 --> 00:58:42,240
Speaker 1: phrase as above, so below, and you could say, if

1028
00:58:42,280 --> 00:58:45,000
Speaker 1: you want to translate to something more rational, that there

1029
00:58:45,080 --> 00:58:49,000
Speaker 1: is a startling and profound similarity between the architecture of

1030
00:58:49,040 --> 00:58:52,160
Speaker 1: an atom and the architecture of the solar system. Right,

1031
00:58:52,720 --> 00:58:57,000
Speaker 1: so just hold that and say, I need to be

1032
00:58:57,080 --> 00:59:01,919
Speaker 1: two things. I need to be individual. I read at

1033
00:59:01,920 --> 00:59:06,800
Speaker 1: the lake on the porch the Declaration of Independence every

1034
00:59:06,800 --> 00:59:10,640
Speaker 1: single fourth of July, you know, and my poor kids

1035
00:59:10,640 --> 00:59:14,920
Speaker 1: and now grandkids can't start eatingn hamburgers, not dogs until

1036
00:59:15,040 --> 00:59:19,480
Speaker 1: Granddaddy gets through this reading. And whatever you do that

1037
00:59:19,640 --> 00:59:22,720
Speaker 1: makes you happy. My favorite holiday, without a doubt, before

1038
00:59:22,800 --> 00:59:26,439
Speaker 1: this film, before any conversation, has always been the fourth

1039
00:59:26,520 --> 00:59:30,320
Speaker 1: of July followed by Thanksgiving because of the way we

1040
00:59:30,400 --> 00:59:34,120
Speaker 1: come together. So let's have what we always do, that

1041
00:59:34,280 --> 00:59:39,520
Speaker 1: individual thing, but then let's try to imagine it as

1042
00:59:39,560 --> 00:59:42,960
Speaker 1: a larger thing. So if there's an atomic moment on

1043
00:59:43,000 --> 00:59:47,560
Speaker 1: that porch at the lake, what's the solar system of this?

1044
00:59:47,920 --> 00:59:51,880
Speaker 1: And it has to be a kind of righteous re

1045
00:59:51,960 --> 00:59:55,520
Speaker 1: engagement with the principles of our founding. Let's go back

1046
00:59:55,640 --> 00:59:58,160
Speaker 1: and say this is what we meant. And you know,

1047
00:59:58,240 --> 01:00:00,919
Speaker 1: I had screenings of the film before it was done.

1048
01:00:00,920 --> 01:00:02,800
Speaker 1: We're working on it, we're trying to get better, and

1049
01:00:03,320 --> 01:00:05,760
Speaker 1: I go, jeez, there's a lot of red meat for mega.

1050
01:00:05,800 --> 01:00:09,360
Speaker 1: And then I went and said, great, great, you know

1051
01:00:09,920 --> 01:00:12,280
Speaker 1: this is it. You know, there's these over mountain men

1052
01:00:12,360 --> 01:00:16,120
Speaker 1: in the Carolinas that are have defied the British proclamation

1053
01:00:16,160 --> 01:00:18,160
Speaker 1: that you can't cross the Appalachians, and they just said

1054
01:00:18,240 --> 01:00:20,680
Speaker 1: fu and went over there and started it. And then

1055
01:00:20,720 --> 01:00:23,240
Speaker 1: when the British said, unless you do this, this, and this,

1056
01:00:23,320 --> 01:00:26,200
Speaker 1: we will come over and make your lives unpleasant, they go, oh, yeah,

1057
01:00:26,240 --> 01:00:29,800
Speaker 1: we're coming over and making your life unpleasant. So you know,

1058
01:00:30,040 --> 01:00:31,960
Speaker 1: where you did not want to be in the Revolution

1059
01:00:32,120 --> 01:00:36,520
Speaker 1: was New Jersey because it's gorilla warfare and it's patriots

1060
01:00:36,600 --> 01:00:40,640
Speaker 1: killing loyalists and loyalists killing patriots. Or South Carolina, particularly

1061
01:00:41,080 --> 01:00:45,680
Speaker 1: where it's just unjust fettered slaughter. But there's some battles

1062
01:00:46,080 --> 01:00:50,120
Speaker 1: in which big battles King's Mountain cut over the border

1063
01:00:50,160 --> 01:00:53,360
Speaker 1: in North Carolina, in which there's only one British officer

1064
01:00:53,440 --> 01:00:56,080
Speaker 1: he's leading the loyalists, and everybody else is an American

1065
01:00:56,320 --> 01:00:58,440
Speaker 1: killing an American. And so I think we have to

1066
01:00:58,640 --> 01:01:03,360
Speaker 1: just disenthrall ourselves, as Lincoln said, of this obsession with

1067
01:01:03,480 --> 01:01:06,600
Speaker 1: the other, and understand how if you want to get

1068
01:01:06,640 --> 01:01:10,080
Speaker 1: things done. You know, you're not making America great again.

1069
01:01:10,120 --> 01:01:14,400
Speaker 1: You're making America great going forward. It's always been great.

1070
01:01:14,920 --> 01:01:18,240
Speaker 1: It has not been diminished except by those moments when

1071
01:01:18,320 --> 01:01:21,800
Speaker 1: we have pretended that our future is in our past.

1072
01:01:22,360 --> 01:01:29,640
Speaker 1: Our future is up ahead, you know, big headline stop.

1073
01:01:30,840 --> 01:01:34,919
Speaker 1: You know, documentary filmmaker says future is ahead of us.

1074
01:01:35,960 --> 01:01:38,800
Speaker 2: It's also inside of us. Decisions that condition.

1075
01:01:38,600 --> 01:01:42,200
Speaker 1: Inside of it, and you're going to manifest it. You

1076
01:01:42,320 --> 01:01:44,320
Speaker 1: have to manifest it. And I think that there's a

1077
01:01:44,320 --> 01:01:47,040
Speaker 1: way to do it at an individual level. I mean, obviously,

1078
01:01:47,240 --> 01:01:50,320
Speaker 1: our biggest responsibility is how we raise our kids and

1079
01:01:50,360 --> 01:01:53,840
Speaker 1: who we are to our neighbors, you know, the content

1080
01:01:53,880 --> 01:01:58,400
Speaker 1: of our character. Doctor King would say, but it, but it.

1081
01:01:58,440 --> 01:02:02,040
Speaker 1: Then there's a there's a kind of civic responsibility that

1082
01:02:02,080 --> 01:02:05,680
Speaker 1: we have. It says, however small the orbit of the

1083
01:02:05,720 --> 01:02:08,640
Speaker 1: solar system is, we have to be engaged in something

1084
01:02:08,920 --> 01:02:10,440
Speaker 1: bigger than ourselves.

1085
01:02:11,520 --> 01:02:15,040
Speaker 2: I love that and Ken before we leave, i'd be remiss.

1086
01:02:16,160 --> 01:02:20,120
Speaker 2: An adjacent topic, though connected to all things ken Burns

1087
01:02:20,720 --> 01:02:24,480
Speaker 2: and the ken Burns Effect. Today is the fiftieth anniversary

1088
01:02:24,560 --> 01:02:29,520
Speaker 2: of the founding of Apple, and I know you've talked

1089
01:02:29,560 --> 01:02:32,120
Speaker 2: in the past, and just, you know, just very briefly,

1090
01:02:32,160 --> 01:02:35,120
Speaker 2: I'm curious, just sort of reflecting on you know, you've

1091
01:02:35,120 --> 01:02:38,680
Speaker 2: said some very very generous things about Steve Jobs, though

1092
01:02:39,200 --> 01:02:42,200
Speaker 2: you weren't generous enough to give in to his requests

1093
01:02:42,200 --> 01:02:43,760
Speaker 2: that you commercialize your support.

1094
01:02:43,960 --> 01:02:47,160
Speaker 1: Well, you know, it was the opposite thing. He called

1095
01:02:47,200 --> 01:02:50,320
Speaker 1: me up in November of two thousand and two and said,

1096
01:02:50,320 --> 01:02:52,160
Speaker 1: will you come and see me. First of all, I

1097
01:02:52,160 --> 01:02:54,160
Speaker 1: didn't believe it was Steve Job. So I went out

1098
01:02:54,200 --> 01:02:56,919
Speaker 1: there and I met him, and he led me into

1099
01:02:56,960 --> 01:02:59,080
Speaker 1: this room with a couple of engineers and he showed

1100
01:02:59,080 --> 01:03:01,040
Speaker 1: me this thing. And I'm still ludite, and it was

1101
01:03:01,040 --> 01:03:04,040
Speaker 1: how you could download your photographs or upload your photographs

1102
01:03:04,080 --> 01:03:06,880
Speaker 1: and pan and zoom kind of like that. I said,

1103
01:03:06,880 --> 01:03:09,440
Speaker 1: oh great, And he said and next month, January of

1104
01:03:09,440 --> 01:03:12,400
Speaker 1: two thousand and three, all Mac computers will have this

1105
01:03:12,600 --> 01:03:15,680
Speaker 1: on it. And I said, wow, that's great. Basically going

1106
01:03:16,040 --> 01:03:18,400
Speaker 1: I have no idea really what he's talking about. And

1107
01:03:18,440 --> 01:03:20,840
Speaker 1: he says, and so we'd like to keep the working title.

1108
01:03:20,880 --> 01:03:22,439
Speaker 1: And I said, oh, okay, what's that? And he goes

1109
01:03:22,600 --> 01:03:24,720
Speaker 1: the ken Burns evac and I go, I don't do

1110
01:03:24,840 --> 01:03:28,840
Speaker 1: commercial endorsements, and he goes, what, go back to his office.

1111
01:03:28,920 --> 01:03:31,520
Speaker 1: We spent about an hour in which we became friends,

1112
01:03:31,880 --> 01:03:34,560
Speaker 1: and whenever I was in Silicon Valley, I would stay

1113
01:03:34,560 --> 01:03:37,280
Speaker 1: at his house and sleep in his guest bedroom. And

1114
01:03:37,280 --> 01:03:40,360
Speaker 1: we eventually took his famous daughter Lisa as an intern

1115
01:03:40,440 --> 01:03:43,320
Speaker 1: and got to know his wife and his smaller kids.

1116
01:03:43,360 --> 01:03:47,880
Speaker 1: And you know, it was wonderful walk endlessly walking to dinner,

1117
01:03:47,920 --> 01:03:50,800
Speaker 1: even when he was sick into Palo Alto from his.

1118
01:03:52,560 --> 01:03:52,840
Speaker 2: Home.

1119
01:03:53,720 --> 01:03:55,600
Speaker 1: But I walked out of the room an hour later,

1120
01:03:55,720 --> 01:03:57,800
Speaker 1: not just with that friendship, but with a commitment that

1121
01:03:57,880 --> 01:04:03,640
Speaker 1: Apple continued to honor of giving software and hardware to nonprofits,

1122
01:04:04,880 --> 01:04:07,200
Speaker 1: which was the only way I could sort of handle it.

1123
01:04:07,240 --> 01:04:09,520
Speaker 1: And he just couldn't conceive a bit. And it's so

1124
01:04:09,600 --> 01:04:11,600
Speaker 1: funny that when I tell the story, people say, oh,

1125
01:04:11,640 --> 01:04:14,040
Speaker 1: you should have asked him for, like, you know, a

1126
01:04:14,080 --> 01:04:15,880
Speaker 1: tenth of a penny every time we use I said,

1127
01:04:16,240 --> 01:04:19,880
Speaker 1: you don't know, Steve jobs, he would have said, we'll

1128
01:04:19,920 --> 01:04:22,080
Speaker 1: call it the pay and zoom effect. Goodbye, right, and

1129
01:04:22,120 --> 01:04:26,240
Speaker 1: I but but what he respected was somebody who was

1130
01:04:26,360 --> 01:04:29,840
Speaker 1: just outside him saying, at one point he came to

1131
01:04:29,880 --> 01:04:31,960
Speaker 1: me and he says, he calls me up, and he goes,

1132
01:04:32,160 --> 01:04:34,560
Speaker 1: you don't You're not You're not doing this right. You're

1133
01:04:34,600 --> 01:04:37,320
Speaker 1: you're being taken advantage of. And he said, I want

1134
01:04:37,320 --> 01:04:39,760
Speaker 1: your lawyer to talk to my lawyer about your your

1135
01:04:39,880 --> 01:04:43,680
Speaker 1: PBS deals because I'm in PBS and and they're outside

1136
01:04:43,680 --> 01:04:47,120
Speaker 1: the marketplace, right And and then he came back he said, oh,

1137
01:04:47,120 --> 01:04:49,360
Speaker 1: it looks like you're doing like you've got the right thing.

1138
01:04:49,440 --> 01:04:51,360
Speaker 1: And I said, look, all he want is to be independent.

1139
01:04:51,400 --> 01:04:53,480
Speaker 1: I want to be able to talk to you or

1140
01:04:53,720 --> 01:04:57,160
Speaker 1: the governor of California and say, all of these films

1141
01:04:57,200 --> 01:05:00,000
Speaker 1: are director's cuts. There's not a layer of suits above me.

1142
01:05:00,160 --> 01:05:03,280
Speaker 1: They are saying longer, shorter, sexier, or less sexier, you

1143
01:05:03,440 --> 01:05:06,720
Speaker 1: more violent, less violent? But that another way. Let me

1144
01:05:06,760 --> 01:05:08,600
Speaker 1: just put it this way. If you don't like any

1145
01:05:08,640 --> 01:05:11,760
Speaker 1: of those films, it's all my fault. And that's what

1146
01:05:11,800 --> 01:05:15,080
Speaker 1: I wanted to be. You know, I love it.

1147
01:05:15,400 --> 01:05:18,600
Speaker 2: Ken, just just very briefly, just previewing you, you mentioned

1148
01:05:18,640 --> 01:05:20,120
Speaker 2: a couple of the films you're working on. I mean,

1149
01:05:20,160 --> 01:05:21,840
Speaker 2: I think there's an LBJ film as well.

1150
01:05:21,880 --> 01:05:24,120
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, well, yeah, we're doing LBJ in the

1151
01:05:24,120 --> 01:05:26,280
Speaker 1: Great Society. You know, we'd done the Vietnam thing. And

1152
01:05:26,360 --> 01:05:29,840
Speaker 1: lbj's liked Nixon, one of these great tragic figures. But

1153
01:05:30,240 --> 01:05:33,120
Speaker 1: his domestic agenda, he was trying to be the next

1154
01:05:33,160 --> 01:05:35,840
Speaker 1: coming of FDR. In fact, he chooses the initials because

1155
01:05:35,880 --> 01:05:39,240
Speaker 1: the first person who ever had initials in a big

1156
01:05:39,280 --> 01:05:43,040
Speaker 1: way to the population was FDR. And so here's LBJ

1157
01:05:43,640 --> 01:05:48,440
Speaker 1: and that that was an interesting thing, and it's we

1158
01:05:48,560 --> 01:05:51,040
Speaker 1: take care of his domestic agenda in one sentence in

1159
01:05:51,040 --> 01:05:53,960
Speaker 1: in eighteen hour film, ten episodes in Vietnam. So we

1160
01:05:54,000 --> 01:05:57,280
Speaker 1: wanted to reverse engineer, to pull the sweater inside out

1161
01:05:57,400 --> 01:06:00,400
Speaker 1: and be inside the White House. Watch the guns of

1162
01:06:00,400 --> 01:06:03,720
Speaker 1: of Vietnam get louder and louder. But see this extraordinary

1163
01:06:03,720 --> 01:06:07,200
Speaker 1: domestic achievement. He's able to pass the civil rights bill

1164
01:06:07,240 --> 01:06:09,720
Speaker 1: that John F. Kennedy, who's very late to civil rights,

1165
01:06:09,760 --> 01:06:12,360
Speaker 1: probably couldn't get passed, and of voting rights. And he

1166
01:06:12,440 --> 01:06:14,960
Speaker 1: knew as a Southerner what the cost would be. And

1167
01:06:15,000 --> 01:06:18,720
Speaker 1: I think to be able to shed from waking up

1168
01:06:19,680 --> 01:06:22,640
Speaker 1: on election day and knowing you had every former state

1169
01:06:22,680 --> 01:06:25,680
Speaker 1: of the Confederacy on your pocket is not necessarily the

1170
01:06:25,680 --> 01:06:28,360
Speaker 1: best thing you want to be in, because you're dealing

1171
01:06:28,440 --> 01:06:32,280
Speaker 1: with people who are continued to perpetuate the lost cause.

1172
01:06:33,240 --> 01:06:35,760
Speaker 1: And then he does all this other Medicare and medicaid,

1173
01:06:35,800 --> 01:06:38,880
Speaker 1: public broadcasting, all these things that are sort of under itself.

1174
01:06:38,920 --> 01:06:41,200
Speaker 1: But it's an amazing story, so we're just doing that.

1175
01:06:41,240 --> 01:06:44,440
Speaker 1: We're also doing history of reconstruction called Emancipation to Exodus.

1176
01:06:44,840 --> 01:06:49,000
Speaker 1: I've had the privilege of interviewing Barack Obama eight times,

1177
01:06:49,040 --> 01:06:51,320
Speaker 1: eight two hour, hour and a half two hour interviews.

1178
01:06:52,120 --> 01:06:56,200
Speaker 1: No rush, We want to wait until there's scholarship and whatever.

1179
01:06:56,240 --> 01:06:58,960
Speaker 1: And we also are saving a couple of interviews to

1180
01:06:59,040 --> 01:07:02,000
Speaker 1: sort of think about what happened after his presidency and

1181
01:07:02,080 --> 01:07:04,680
Speaker 1: until the dust settles a bit, it's going to be

1182
01:07:04,720 --> 01:07:07,080
Speaker 1: hard to talk about it. We've also been filming people

1183
01:07:07,120 --> 01:07:09,000
Speaker 1: who knew Doctor King in the service of a big

1184
01:07:09,040 --> 01:07:12,480
Speaker 1: biography on King. So those are very much active, and

1185
01:07:12,520 --> 01:07:15,440
Speaker 1: we've just begun work on a big history. We originally

1186
01:07:15,680 --> 01:07:17,959
Speaker 1: thought for years we do something on the Cold War,

1187
01:07:18,320 --> 01:07:20,720
Speaker 1: and I just switched it about a year ago or

1188
01:07:20,800 --> 01:07:23,120
Speaker 1: six months ago in my mind to doing a history

1189
01:07:23,120 --> 01:07:28,480
Speaker 1: of the CIA, and it's just think about it. You'll

1190
01:07:28,520 --> 01:07:31,120
Speaker 1: get the Cold War, but you'll get all the intimacies

1191
01:07:31,120 --> 01:07:35,040
Speaker 1: of the stories, and you'll be in every president's oval office,

1192
01:07:35,080 --> 01:07:38,920
Speaker 1: and you'll be, you know, in exotic places all around

1193
01:07:38,960 --> 01:07:41,840
Speaker 1: the world with people who are putting their life on

1194
01:07:41,880 --> 01:07:48,640
Speaker 1: their lines and big mistakes, huge mistakes, and heroic, unsung successes.

1195
01:07:49,160 --> 01:07:52,160
Speaker 1: And you know, that's the essence of a good story, right.

1196
01:07:52,960 --> 01:07:54,840
Speaker 2: In, an essence of the hell of a life. Ken,

1197
01:07:54,880 --> 01:07:58,600
Speaker 2: look at you, I mean decades of where I mean

1198
01:07:58,720 --> 01:08:00,959
Speaker 2: so that you are not slowing down.

1199
01:08:01,480 --> 01:08:03,800
Speaker 1: No, no, no, So I'm seventy two and I'm I'm

1200
01:08:03,920 --> 01:08:05,760
Speaker 1: like an idiot. I've got more on my plate than

1201
01:08:05,760 --> 01:08:08,200
Speaker 1: I've ever had. Because you know, if I were given

1202
01:08:08,240 --> 01:08:10,560
Speaker 1: a thousand years to live, which I will not be given,

1203
01:08:10,880 --> 01:08:13,240
Speaker 1: I would not run out of topics in American history.

1204
01:08:13,320 --> 01:08:16,559
Speaker 1: So there's this kind of sense of urgency of like

1205
01:08:17,040 --> 01:08:21,120
Speaker 1: having to get it done. There's so many great stories

1206
01:08:21,160 --> 01:08:21,880
Speaker 1: still to be told.

1207
01:08:22,320 --> 01:08:24,800
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for being such a great storyteller. Thank

1208
01:08:24,880 --> 01:08:27,320
Speaker 2: you for reminding me it's not just arguments that win

1209
01:08:27,400 --> 01:08:31,040
Speaker 2: the day, it is story. Story to can move people,

1210
01:08:31,080 --> 01:08:32,160
Speaker 2: and and.

1211
01:08:31,960 --> 01:08:34,920
Speaker 1: Well, you know it's a benign trojan horse. You'll let

1212
01:08:34,960 --> 01:08:37,960
Speaker 1: the story in and it doesn't come out in the

1213
01:08:38,000 --> 01:08:40,080
Speaker 1: middle of the night and slay the populace and burn

1214
01:08:40,160 --> 01:08:43,160
Speaker 1: the city down. It comes out and it has the

1215
01:08:43,200 --> 01:08:47,200
Speaker 1: possibility of offering people, not the binary that doesn't exist

1216
01:08:47,360 --> 01:08:50,000
Speaker 1: in the real world, only in computers at one in

1217
01:08:50,040 --> 01:08:52,439
Speaker 1: a zero and only an immediate thing red state or

1218
01:08:52,439 --> 01:08:56,599
Speaker 1: blues day. Right, So, if you've got a complicated story,

1219
01:08:56,760 --> 01:09:00,320
Speaker 1: then you have to begin to understand, like, oh, I

1220
01:09:00,439 --> 01:09:04,240
Speaker 1: have these too, and I can't be I can't be

1221
01:09:04,320 --> 01:09:07,439
Speaker 1: convinced that it's only black or white from what the

1222
01:09:07,520 --> 01:09:09,960
Speaker 1: TV tells me. It's one. It's not one thing or

1223
01:09:09,960 --> 01:09:13,639
Speaker 1: the other. I have inside me these contradictions, these these

1224
01:09:13,680 --> 01:09:16,240
Speaker 1: flaws and these weaknesses. And it makes me a better citizen,

1225
01:09:16,479 --> 01:09:18,880
Speaker 1: makes me a better parent, makes me a better husband

1226
01:09:18,960 --> 01:09:21,360
Speaker 1: or wife, It makes me a better politician, It makes

1227
01:09:21,400 --> 01:09:24,280
Speaker 1: me a better American. And that's all we want.

1228
01:09:25,040 --> 01:09:28,240
Speaker 2: I love it. Ken, thanks for joining us, Thank you,

1229
01:09:29,080 --> 01:09:29,640
Speaker 2: thank you so mu