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

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Speaker 3: as you know, there are three hundred and forty two

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Speaker 3: million podcasts and I've done half of them. And I'm

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Speaker 3: absolutely certain not in this case that I'm speaking to

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Speaker 3: myself and to the person i'm talking to. At least

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Speaker 3: now I know that there's at least a few other

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Speaker 3: people listening.

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Speaker 2: God bless you, man.

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Speaker 4: I yeah, no, I imagine that's got to be the

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Speaker 4: biggest change for you. So since you started this right

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Speaker 4: twenty years ago, had been a you know, the broadcast

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Speaker 4: 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 it 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 to The New York Times,

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

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

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

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

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Speaker 1: are 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 4: When you were talking to THEO and Joe and guys

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Speaker 4: like that that maybe you know, proceed on a number

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Speaker 4: of issues lean a little bit more to the right.

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Speaker 4: Were they surprised by the fact that we are so

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Speaker 4: surprised by this division that we have in this country,

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Speaker 4: and you're able to contextualize that and say, you know,

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Speaker 4: give me a break, you know, particularly with this thought

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Speaker 4: which is as much about the Civil War, not just

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Speaker 4: 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 centry 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 you a

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Speaker 1: little bittive 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 4: I love it, And as we get through, I want

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Speaker 4: to get back to more deeply the current project, and

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Speaker 4: not just the ones you're working on, but the one

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Speaker 4: we're here to really celebrate and at least reflect upon

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Speaker 4: its We reflect on the two hundred and fifteenth anniversary.

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Speaker 4: But I'm curious, you know, just going back to how

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Speaker 4: we began gusually the conversation, it's interesting you talked about

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Speaker 4: I love this no sort of a razor blade editing

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Speaker 4: back in the day, et cetera. And now as you're

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Speaker 4: out on podcasts and you're you're sort of battling traditional

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Speaker 4: media people in person and then of course online in

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Speaker 4: so many different podcasts. But when you were doing those

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Speaker 4: first films, what was I mean, what did Ken burns?

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Speaker 4: What was How did you go out there and promote

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Speaker 4: these things? Was it primarily through the platform at PBS,

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Speaker 4: or you know what was finding your way? Oprah is

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Speaker 4: a 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 know, 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, liberal is only like this, and it's it's

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Speaker 1: not true. The novelist Richard Powers said something that I've

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Speaker 1: been quoting for years now. He said, the best arguments

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Speaker 1: in the world, and that's all we do is argue

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Speaker 1: won't change a single person's point of view. The only

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Speaker 1: thing that can do that is a good story. Because

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

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

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Speaker 1: young or old, black or white, gere strait, Richard pooor

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Speaker 1: north or southeast 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? It comes from the Greeks,

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Speaker 1: and they endow their gods with these examples for us

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Speaker 1: mortals to study. And are those gods perfect? No Achilles

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

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

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

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

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

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Speaker 1: a lie, cut down a cherry tree, point across the Potomac.

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Speaker 1: But if you examine him and understand that he's a

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Speaker 1: very human character. He owns five hundred and seventy seven

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Speaker 1: human beings in his lifetime. As the writer Rick Atkinson said,

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Speaker 1: you can't square that circle. He's right. He's rash on

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Speaker 1: the battlefield, risking the entire cause by rushing out into

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Speaker 1: the field. If he's killed or captured, it's all over.

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Speaker 1: He makes some tactical mistakes that are in some ways inexcusable,

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Speaker 1: and yet he's able to convince people to fight him

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Speaker 1: the dead or night he defers to Congress. He has

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Speaker 1: great humility. He picks subordinate talent generals that are better

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Speaker 1: than him, like Benedict Arnold and Nathaniel Greene, and he

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Speaker 1: twice gives up power military at the height of his

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

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Speaker 1: political power. And that has set us in motion. So

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Speaker 1: you can have, in a story that we tell which

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Speaker 1: is as much bottom up as it is top down,

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Speaker 1: you can have the almost exhilarating off brand thing that

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Speaker 1: we don't have a country without him. And yet in

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Speaker 1: order to tell the story correctly, you know, you have

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Speaker 1: to do all the other things. We live in a

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

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Speaker 1: Right Baybruth struck out many more times than he hit

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Speaker 1: home runs, and bab Ruth only comes up once every

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Speaker 1: nine times at bad So Sometimes, as any inhabitant of

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Speaker 1: Los Angeles can tell you, sometimes it's the middle infielder.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes it's the second baseman that is the deciding factor

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Speaker 1: in any given moment. So we're obligated to tell a

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Speaker 1: complicated history. There's no other word. It's almost redundant, complicated

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

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Speaker 1: simplify it is really just the work of an authoritarian,

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Speaker 1: that is to say, we're going to make this simple.

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

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

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Speaker 1: from the fact that I have my boot on the

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Speaker 1: back of your neck.

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

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Speaker 4: You know, two hundred years ago, this notion of sensory

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Speaker 4: historic facts rewriting history was you know, was was that

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Speaker 4: 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 are wringing their hands. This is the end

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

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Speaker 1: 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 of the

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Speaker 1: intimacy of us and we and our and all of

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Speaker 1: the majesty, complex, contradiction and even controversy of the US.

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Speaker 1: But the one thing I've learned, if I've learned anything

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

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

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Speaker 1: agenda that is not one that is in sync with

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

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

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Speaker 1: the word liberal fall shot dead, you know, at a

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Speaker 1: firing squad. I've watched all these sorts of things. And

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Speaker 1: we've just witnessed the end of dei. But you know,

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Speaker 1: isn't e pluribus unum dei? You know, that's our Latin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Speaker 1: called citizens. And it's going to take an extra amount

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Speaker 1: of energy to do that. And human beings will naturally

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Speaker 1: devolve to the camps, to the tribal stuff. But there

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Speaker 1: we're actually going to experiment. We're going to put the

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Speaker 1: Enlightenment into practice, and we're going to call it the

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Speaker 1: United States of America. And we're going to be in

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Speaker 1: pursuit of happiness, not things, but knowledge and virtue. And

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Speaker 1: we're going to be after a more perfect union. It's

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Speaker 1: going to require a lot of coming together. But we

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Speaker 1: live in a place right now where it's so it

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Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 4: But this notion, you know, in the Bible teaches us

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Speaker 4: many parts one body, one part suffers. We all suffer

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Speaker 4: this this thing. You know, Doctor King talked so evocalarly

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Speaker 4: about that we're all bound together by that web of mutuality.

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Speaker 4: And and but I think about this, and I think

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Speaker 4: about in the context of what you're you know, so

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Speaker 4: much of the work you're doing, and so much of

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Speaker 4: the notion of myth, and this sort of chiseled notion

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Speaker 4: of a monument, et cetera, and how we sanitize so

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Speaker 4: much of that, But the importance of myth at the

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Speaker 4: same time, this notion of the things that bind us together,

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Speaker 4: not just celebrating our interesting differences, but how we can

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Speaker 4: be bound together? What I mean, how do you where's

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Speaker 4: that tension between you know? When I you know, I

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Speaker 4: talk about California and was born into genocide. The first

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Speaker 4: governor in California eighteen fifty one, Burnett literally talked about

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Speaker 4: the war and extermination.

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Speaker 2: It was his first State of the State speech.

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Speaker 4: But I use that language and people are immediately offended,

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Speaker 4: and I find it shameful, and I'm not providing context.

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Speaker 4: He was in the vast majority. He was truly representative

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Speaker 4: of the time. And so what's that, you know, this

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Speaker 4: notion of myth and the importance of myth, the importance

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Speaker 4: of things that we can unite around. How do you

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Speaker 4: find that tension or you just try to go straight

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Speaker 4: to the facts.

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Speaker 1: Well, you know, we were interested governor in 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 has

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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 assume 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

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Speaker 1: like are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin

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

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

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

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

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Speaker 1: else who gets to come to bath.

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Speaker 4: And when you when you endeverardem you said it a

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Speaker 4: 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 unex 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 man 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 teos 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 said, 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 is 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: Then all of a sudden, we're letting everybody in German immigrants,

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

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Speaker 1: early nineteenth century, people are trying to shut it down. No,

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Speaker 1: no Catholics can come. No to keep the Irish out.

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Speaker 1: Let's not do that. And then from eighteen seventy till

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Speaker 1: nineteen twenty it's wide open, except for as you know,

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Speaker 1: the Chinese Exclusion Act, attempting to regulate the inflow of

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Speaker 1: Asian peoples to the United States, and then in the

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Speaker 1: nineteen twenties the door slam shut. Johnson Red Immigration Act

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Speaker 1: in twenty four sets quotas. So it's going to make

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Speaker 1: it impossible for us to respond to the Holocaust with

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Speaker 1: only the even though we let in more people than

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Speaker 1: any other sovereign nation. I have to say sovereign because

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Speaker 1: of the number of people we immigrated to Palestine. But

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Speaker 1: we could have saved so many more human beings if

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Speaker 1: we weren't imprisoned locked into this straight jacket of Johnson Reid.

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Speaker 1: And then you'd make an addempt in the six million

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Speaker 1: number that we throw out without thinking there are nine

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Speaker 1: million Jews in Europe in nineteen thirty three, and by

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Speaker 1: nineteen forty five, two out of three are dead. That's

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Speaker 1: another way of saying six million. But if we knock

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

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Speaker 1: which we could have easily done, think where we'd be

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Speaker 1: in terms of our own greatness and our own you

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Speaker 1: know thing. But we that those impulses towards anti Semitism,

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Speaker 1: the impulses to make of them of somebody who's Catholic

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Speaker 1: or black, or female or different, are are always going

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

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

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

429
00:23:23,440 --> 00:23:26,280
Speaker 1: the temptation is to regulate it, you know, and say, oh,

430
00:23:26,320 --> 00:23:28,400
Speaker 1: it's got to be this one way. We can only

431
00:23:28,400 --> 00:23:32,520
Speaker 1: have this superficial history. There's no better form of government,

432
00:23:32,520 --> 00:23:36,720
Speaker 1: as chaotic as it is, is uncertain. The great jurist

433
00:23:36,920 --> 00:23:39,639
Speaker 1: learned Hand, I mean, governor. Could there ever be a

434
00:23:39,640 --> 00:23:42,600
Speaker 1: better name for a judge than learning? Hand? Said said,

435
00:23:42,680 --> 00:23:47,040
Speaker 1: Liberty is never being too sure you're right. And there's

436
00:23:47,040 --> 00:23:50,560
Speaker 1: a sort of sense now as we try to impose

437
00:23:50,640 --> 00:23:54,119
Speaker 1: our will on chaotic events, that the opposite of faith

438
00:23:54,280 --> 00:23:57,320
Speaker 1: must be doubt. No doubt is central to faith. The

439
00:23:57,359 --> 00:24:02,840
Speaker 1: opposite of faith is certainty kills faith. And yet we

440
00:24:02,960 --> 00:24:06,400
Speaker 1: see the damage that has done in the name of faith,

441
00:24:06,600 --> 00:24:09,120
Speaker 1: that my faith is the only faith, you know. That's

442
00:24:09,160 --> 00:24:13,240
Speaker 1: why many of the founders sort of gravitated toward what's

443
00:24:13,320 --> 00:24:17,200
Speaker 1: called deism, particularly Thomas Jefferson, and that is this idea

444
00:24:17,240 --> 00:24:20,639
Speaker 1: that there is a supreme being, a supreme architect, divine providence,

445
00:24:20,840 --> 00:24:23,639
Speaker 1: however you do it, but disinterested in the affairs of

446
00:24:23,720 --> 00:24:31,720
Speaker 1: men and obviously making no distinction between faiths. So Jefferson

447
00:24:31,760 --> 00:24:34,919
Speaker 1: has this wonderful line, if my neighbor believes in twenty

448
00:24:34,960 --> 00:24:38,240
Speaker 1: gods or no god at all, it neither picks my

449
00:24:38,359 --> 00:24:42,760
Speaker 1: pocket nor breaks my leg. I mean, just think about

450
00:24:42,840 --> 00:24:47,359
Speaker 1: how how much we're governed by the intolerance of the

451
00:24:47,400 --> 00:24:51,560
Speaker 1: people who want to make distinctions between their correct right

452
00:24:51,680 --> 00:24:54,320
Speaker 1: set of facts and someone else's.

453
00:24:54,800 --> 00:24:55,119
Speaker 2: Does it?

454
00:24:55,240 --> 00:24:58,360
Speaker 4: I mean, in contemporary terms, we're talking on a day

455
00:24:58,560 --> 00:25:02,440
Speaker 4: where the Supreme Court is hearing arguments on sort of

456
00:25:02,480 --> 00:25:05,280
Speaker 4: a core construct. When you talk about the Chinese Exclusion Act,

457
00:25:05,320 --> 00:25:08,400
Speaker 4: it's origin stories in the San Fransco Bay Area, Oakland.

458
00:25:08,720 --> 00:25:11,800
Speaker 4: The original forgive me Donald Trump, I think was Dennis Kearney,

459
00:25:12,000 --> 00:25:15,600
Speaker 4: who began and ended every speech the Workingmen's Party with the.

460
00:25:15,560 --> 00:25:16,480
Speaker 2: Chinese must go.

461
00:25:16,720 --> 00:25:19,600
Speaker 4: And I go down to Chinatown and the museums there

462
00:25:19,600 --> 00:25:22,760
Speaker 4: and you'll see the virtual walls being built to keep

463
00:25:22,800 --> 00:25:25,320
Speaker 4: the Chinese out. Led to the Chinese Exclusion Act, and

464
00:25:25,480 --> 00:25:27,480
Speaker 4: obviously part of the ur oral arguments today in the

465
00:25:27,480 --> 00:25:30,480
Speaker 4: Supreme Court were around the Wong decision in the late

466
00:25:30,520 --> 00:25:32,920
Speaker 4: eighteen eighties. What do you make of I mean, it

467
00:25:33,080 --> 00:25:35,320
Speaker 4: just it sounds like I mean none of this again,

468
00:25:35,440 --> 00:25:38,880
Speaker 4: nothing is surprising. It's very consistent with that threat of history.

469
00:25:40,280 --> 00:25:42,000
Speaker 1: Well, you know, everybody likes to say, in a kind

470
00:25:42,000 --> 00:25:44,920
Speaker 1: of lazy fashion, that history repeats itself. It doesn't, right,

471
00:25:45,040 --> 00:25:49,399
Speaker 1: no event has ever happened twice. Ecclesiastes, which governors the

472
00:25:49,440 --> 00:25:52,919
Speaker 1: Old Testament, says what has been will be again, what

473
00:25:53,000 --> 00:25:55,520
Speaker 1: has been done will be done again. There's nothing new

474
00:25:55,600 --> 00:25:58,720
Speaker 1: under the sun. It means that human nature doesn't change,

475
00:25:58,760 --> 00:26:03,360
Speaker 1: and it superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events,

476
00:26:03,359 --> 00:26:07,680
Speaker 1: and we see echoes, patterns, themes, motifs, or, as Mark

477
00:26:07,720 --> 00:26:10,359
Speaker 1: Twain is supposed to have said, rhymes. You know, history

478
00:26:10,359 --> 00:26:12,800
Speaker 1: doesn't repeat itself, but at rhymes. So all these things

479
00:26:12,840 --> 00:26:15,920
Speaker 1: are there, and they're lazy ways to approach this subject.

480
00:26:16,119 --> 00:26:20,359
Speaker 1: To be an. I mean, the America at its best,

481
00:26:21,320 --> 00:26:26,040
Speaker 1: you know, has always been pluralistic and like an alloy,

482
00:26:26,600 --> 00:26:30,560
Speaker 1: benefiting from all the ingredients that went into it. When

483
00:26:30,600 --> 00:26:34,080
Speaker 1: it's at its worst is when it's nativist and saying, oh,

484
00:26:34,119 --> 00:26:38,920
Speaker 1: there's really only one us and you're definitely not part

485
00:26:38,920 --> 00:26:42,600
Speaker 1: of that. And this attempt at I mean, look, you know,

486
00:26:42,680 --> 00:26:47,239
Speaker 1: one of my favorite amendments is the fourteenth, and you know,

487
00:26:47,320 --> 00:26:49,520
Speaker 1: the first really trumps it, but people say, oh, first

488
00:26:49,560 --> 00:26:53,160
Speaker 1: Amendment free speech or freedom to assemble, those are number

489
00:26:53,160 --> 00:26:56,240
Speaker 1: two and three. The first is Congress will make no

490
00:26:56,400 --> 00:26:59,200
Speaker 1: establishment of a religion. We're the first country on earth

491
00:26:59,240 --> 00:27:02,040
Speaker 1: that didn't have enough official religion, and it made all

492
00:27:02,119 --> 00:27:04,840
Speaker 1: the difference. The energy it gave us by being able

493
00:27:04,880 --> 00:27:07,520
Speaker 1: to draw in from the people who don't believe in

494
00:27:07,560 --> 00:27:11,720
Speaker 1: any god or believe in twenty gods, has been a

495
00:27:11,800 --> 00:27:16,160
Speaker 1: phenomenal achievement in the course of human history. And maybe

496
00:27:16,200 --> 00:27:19,119
Speaker 1: we should just remember starting with the Declaration and the

497
00:27:19,119 --> 00:27:23,960
Speaker 1: Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and you know, the

498
00:27:24,080 --> 00:27:28,840
Speaker 1: Land Grant College Act and the Homestead Act, and National

499
00:27:29,200 --> 00:27:35,520
Speaker 1: Parks and child labor and antitrust, and you know, the

500
00:27:36,280 --> 00:27:41,399
Speaker 1: Social Security, labor's right to organize, the GI Bill, the

501
00:27:41,400 --> 00:27:47,240
Speaker 1: Interstate Highway System, a man on the Moon, Medicare, Medicaid.

502
00:27:47,720 --> 00:27:52,000
Speaker 1: So I've said social Security up to the Affordable Care Act.

503
00:27:52,400 --> 00:27:56,400
Speaker 1: So many things that we have done which have been

504
00:27:57,000 --> 00:28:00,879
Speaker 1: transforming not only for our own people but for the world.

505
00:28:01,240 --> 00:28:06,240
Speaker 1: And then you find inevitably the retrenchment that takes place

506
00:28:06,400 --> 00:28:10,560
Speaker 1: the people, the oligarchs, the former slave owners who are

507
00:28:10,800 --> 00:28:14,480
Speaker 1: still unhappy of the way the Civil War took out

508
00:28:14,480 --> 00:28:18,760
Speaker 1: and want to just you know, get back what they

509
00:28:18,800 --> 00:28:22,359
Speaker 1: had before. And you can't go back, you have to

510
00:28:22,400 --> 00:28:22,959
Speaker 1: go forward.

511
00:28:23,080 --> 00:28:23,919
Speaker 2: You got to go forward.

512
00:28:24,680 --> 00:28:29,200
Speaker 4: When you speak of you know, patriotism, we talk of nationalism.

513
00:28:29,280 --> 00:28:31,840
Speaker 4: But what does patriotism mean to you? How do you

514
00:28:31,960 --> 00:28:34,119
Speaker 4: know what's the sort of core essence of patriotism.

515
00:28:34,200 --> 00:28:38,880
Speaker 1: Well, if you deal with American patriotism first, because I'm

516
00:28:38,880 --> 00:28:43,160
Speaker 1: not that you know, there's complicated relationships to British patriotism.

517
00:28:43,160 --> 00:28:47,720
Speaker 1: We called ourselves patriots, and the British colors rebels never

518
00:28:47,880 --> 00:28:53,280
Speaker 1: once said patriot because patriot meant something, you know, something

519
00:28:53,320 --> 00:28:56,680
Speaker 1: different in Britain, and they weren't going to ascribe us

520
00:28:56,720 --> 00:28:59,560
Speaker 1: any other motives. Even when they were surrendering, the British

521
00:28:59,600 --> 00:29:02,479
Speaker 1: soldiers and the German soldiers were forbidden to look at

522
00:29:02,480 --> 00:29:06,080
Speaker 1: the Americans. Only the French were worthy of their attention. Right,

523
00:29:06,320 --> 00:29:08,520
Speaker 1: we were still just a rabble and they were so

524
00:29:08,680 --> 00:29:12,280
Speaker 1: humiliated had having the greatest military power on earth, in

525
00:29:12,360 --> 00:29:16,000
Speaker 1: the most far flung empire on earth, had to admit

526
00:29:16,080 --> 00:29:19,280
Speaker 1: that they had just lost to this ragtag. But who

527
00:29:19,280 --> 00:29:22,440
Speaker 1: would have thought of German Hessian Johann Eveld said, who

528
00:29:22,440 --> 00:29:24,360
Speaker 1: would have thought one hundred years ago that out of

529
00:29:24,400 --> 00:29:27,520
Speaker 1: this multitude of rabble would arise a people who could

530
00:29:27,560 --> 00:29:31,080
Speaker 1: defy kings. So if you accept an American form of

531
00:29:31,080 --> 00:29:33,240
Speaker 1: patriotism just as a way for us to have a

532
00:29:33,240 --> 00:29:37,520
Speaker 1: conversation for a few seconds, then embedded in his sense

533
00:29:37,560 --> 00:29:40,640
Speaker 1: of a sense of our own exceptionalism, which is reasonable.

534
00:29:40,760 --> 00:29:43,720
Speaker 1: Lincoln says in his address to Congress in what we'd

535
00:29:43,720 --> 00:29:46,360
Speaker 1: call the State of the Union in sixty two, in

536
00:29:46,400 --> 00:29:50,320
Speaker 1: the middle of the Civil Wars, just given the Emancipation Proclamation,

537
00:29:50,600 --> 00:29:52,280
Speaker 1: it won't go into effect for a few weeks, but

538
00:29:52,320 --> 00:29:55,120
Speaker 1: he said, we're the last best hope of earth. Right,

539
00:29:55,120 --> 00:29:58,080
Speaker 1: he saw that, and I think Americans imbibe that and

540
00:29:58,200 --> 00:30:00,520
Speaker 1: have a feeling in the list of accomplished that I

541
00:30:00,600 --> 00:30:04,960
Speaker 1: made across time and missing half of them. Are are

542
00:30:05,200 --> 00:30:07,840
Speaker 1: are spectacular, But if you are the best, if you

543
00:30:07,880 --> 00:30:11,880
Speaker 1: are the goat of countries, do you think Tom Brady

544
00:30:12,080 --> 00:30:14,400
Speaker 1: said after he won the first Well, now I can

545
00:30:14,480 --> 00:30:17,200
Speaker 1: just rest of my lawans. There is a kind of

546
00:30:18,200 --> 00:30:25,200
Speaker 1: almost furious self involvement, that is to say, self reflection, socratic,

547
00:30:25,600 --> 00:30:29,800
Speaker 1: know yourself. There's an incredible criticism. Even more discipline is applied,

548
00:30:29,840 --> 00:30:32,960
Speaker 1: and I think what happens is that patriotism sort of

549
00:30:33,040 --> 00:30:35,400
Speaker 1: splits off down the road and one way is a

550
00:30:35,480 --> 00:30:38,360
Speaker 1: kind of lazy thing, fills of slogans, and it is

551
00:30:38,440 --> 00:30:42,080
Speaker 1: basically used to exclude people. And the other patriotism, which

552
00:30:42,080 --> 00:30:45,360
Speaker 1: I think you subscribe to, is one which is energetic.

553
00:30:45,480 --> 00:30:49,400
Speaker 1: It is engaged in process, It is in pursuit of happiness,

554
00:30:49,440 --> 00:30:53,200
Speaker 1: It is after a more perfect union, and it involves

555
00:30:53,600 --> 00:30:56,760
Speaker 1: self reflection. This is what our founders when they said

556
00:30:56,760 --> 00:30:59,840
Speaker 1: pursuit of happiness was lifelong learning. If you learned all

557
00:31:00,080 --> 00:31:05,000
Speaker 1: your life, then could earn this this extraordinary gift and

558
00:31:05,040 --> 00:31:08,520
Speaker 1: responsibility of citizenship. You wanted to become more virtuous. This

559
00:31:08,600 --> 00:31:11,800
Speaker 1: is reaching back over the dark ages into antiquity and

560
00:31:12,560 --> 00:31:17,160
Speaker 1: pulling out these virtues. The most important is to be virtuous,

561
00:31:17,200 --> 00:31:21,400
Speaker 1: and that if you did that, this constant self awareness

562
00:31:21,440 --> 00:31:24,920
Speaker 1: and improvement, then you'd be okay. I mean, in the

563
00:31:24,960 --> 00:31:28,920
Speaker 1: middle of the deliberations about the Articles of Convention, while

564
00:31:29,040 --> 00:31:33,280
Speaker 1: Washington's fighting in New York City against the British and

565
00:31:33,320 --> 00:31:38,520
Speaker 1: about to lose because of a bad decision, strategic tactical decision,

566
00:31:38,960 --> 00:31:41,600
Speaker 1: John Adams is going is there enough? There's so much

567
00:31:41,640 --> 00:31:45,280
Speaker 1: ambition and avarice, so much less for profit. Is there

568
00:31:45,360 --> 00:31:48,960
Speaker 1: enough virtue enough to create a republic? Those are the

569
00:31:49,080 --> 00:31:52,840
Speaker 1: questions we should be asking ourselves, not is this group bad?

570
00:31:53,000 --> 00:31:53,280
Speaker 2: Is this?

571
00:31:53,640 --> 00:31:56,080
Speaker 1: Is it blood and soil? I mean, if you're making

572
00:31:56,080 --> 00:31:59,680
Speaker 1: a blood and soil argument to me, you're just you're

573
00:31:59,720 --> 00:32:02,400
Speaker 1: going to say, this is the Native American story, right,

574
00:32:02,400 --> 00:32:06,520
Speaker 1: because if anybody has six or seven hundred generations of

575
00:32:06,560 --> 00:32:11,760
Speaker 1: experience to our nine or ten, it's Native people's in California,

576
00:32:11,800 --> 00:32:15,480
Speaker 1: as you correctly pointed out, has an unbelievably shameful period

577
00:32:15,520 --> 00:32:19,920
Speaker 1: where you have essentially state sponsored genocide and people were

578
00:32:20,000 --> 00:32:27,280
Speaker 1: given a bounty. But you know, we have this this

579
00:32:27,520 --> 00:32:31,240
Speaker 1: responsibility to be self critical, to be self improving, to

580
00:32:31,880 --> 00:32:33,800
Speaker 1: if we're going to say we're the greatest, then we

581
00:32:33,880 --> 00:32:36,080
Speaker 1: have to live up to that, and that requires an

582
00:32:36,080 --> 00:32:41,800
Speaker 1: incredible amount of self examination, which you find autocrats do

583
00:32:41,880 --> 00:32:44,760
Speaker 1: not want to participate in. To do that would be

584
00:32:44,800 --> 00:32:47,000
Speaker 1: to admit a mistake. To do that would be to

585
00:32:47,040 --> 00:32:49,280
Speaker 1: say there's room for me to improve. To do that

586
00:32:49,440 --> 00:32:52,120
Speaker 1: is to apologize. To do that is to be sympathetic.

587
00:32:52,200 --> 00:32:54,280
Speaker 1: To do that is to walk a mile in someone

588
00:32:54,360 --> 00:33:00,640
Speaker 1: else's shoes. And that's what people are doing as they

589
00:33:00,760 --> 00:33:04,560
Speaker 1: are now. There's a kind of muscular patriotism that I'm

590
00:33:04,600 --> 00:33:08,800
Speaker 1: beginning to sense coming. And it's not a Democrat or

591
00:33:08,800 --> 00:33:11,200
Speaker 1: Republican thing. It's go, wait a second, I did not

592
00:33:11,360 --> 00:33:14,880
Speaker 1: sign up for this. I signed up for something is Yes.

593
00:33:14,920 --> 00:33:18,280
Speaker 1: I don't agree with you about this Texas or that

594
00:33:18,920 --> 00:33:21,840
Speaker 1: or whatever it might be, but I do believe in

595
00:33:21,880 --> 00:33:27,720
Speaker 1: these founding documents. I do not think that somebody should

596
00:33:27,840 --> 00:33:31,400
Speaker 1: enrich themselves in office. I do not think I mean

597
00:33:31,440 --> 00:33:34,720
Speaker 1: the founders if they came, as the scholar uve L

598
00:33:34,760 --> 00:33:37,479
Speaker 1: Eleven told me back in November, he said, they wouldn't

599
00:33:37,480 --> 00:33:41,000
Speaker 1: be surprised that someone was seeking monarchical power, but they'd

600
00:33:41,040 --> 00:33:44,720
Speaker 1: be so surprised and so disappointed in that their first

601
00:33:44,840 --> 00:33:48,760
Speaker 1: article of the Constitution, after the beautiful poetic preamble written

602
00:33:48,800 --> 00:33:51,719
Speaker 1: by Governor Morris of New York, the rest of it

603
00:33:51,760 --> 00:33:55,920
Speaker 1: is code. It's just sort of the operating manuals like ikea, hell,

604
00:33:55,960 --> 00:33:58,120
Speaker 1: am I going to put this thing together? And the

605
00:33:58,160 --> 00:34:02,719
Speaker 1: first article is the legislative, And he would be they

606
00:34:02,720 --> 00:34:06,680
Speaker 1: would be so shocked that the legislative had yielded so

607
00:34:06,800 --> 00:34:09,640
Speaker 1: much out of fear of some kind of retribution that

608
00:34:09,680 --> 00:34:13,160
Speaker 1: they'd seeded the ability to tax. It's tariffs. That's the

609
00:34:13,160 --> 00:34:16,440
Speaker 1: province of Congress. The idea that you could change what

610
00:34:16,480 --> 00:34:18,520
Speaker 1: the White House look like, or build a ballroom, or

611
00:34:18,560 --> 00:34:21,360
Speaker 1: clap your name, and that's the province of Congress. The

612
00:34:21,600 --> 00:34:25,080
Speaker 1: second article, the executive would be the managers to carry

613
00:34:25,120 --> 00:34:28,279
Speaker 1: out what Congress had said. Oh no, we're in too

614
00:34:28,320 --> 00:34:30,920
Speaker 1: moderated age. Things happened too fast, so you can have

615
00:34:31,000 --> 00:34:35,120
Speaker 1: wars of choice and inevitably the chaos that's created if

616
00:34:35,120 --> 00:34:37,600
Speaker 1: you get back to where you were before. Somehow that's

617
00:34:37,640 --> 00:34:42,680
Speaker 1: an overwhelming victory. You know, you go, Okay, what Orwellian

618
00:34:42,880 --> 00:34:44,160
Speaker 1: world are you living in?

619
00:34:45,760 --> 00:34:48,360
Speaker 4: What ken when you so much done fact the I

620
00:34:48,360 --> 00:34:51,600
Speaker 4: mean that would and he was. He's a conservative historian

621
00:34:51,719 --> 00:34:53,200
Speaker 4: that you were just referencing.

622
00:34:53,239 --> 00:34:55,840
Speaker 1: Oh oh, Uve eleven, a conservative scholar of the Constitution.

623
00:34:55,960 --> 00:34:57,840
Speaker 1: But this is where I'm saying, we're all if you

624
00:34:57,960 --> 00:35:02,200
Speaker 1: could just Judd Luddig, you know, these are people who

625
00:35:02,280 --> 00:35:06,040
Speaker 1: are stunned at the kind of liberties that have been

626
00:35:06,040 --> 00:35:08,920
Speaker 1: taken in the presumption that this is You know that

627
00:35:09,280 --> 00:35:13,799
Speaker 1: the original founders intended a Christian nation. They wanted a

628
00:35:13,840 --> 00:35:17,399
Speaker 1: god fearing nation, but they were saying, No, look, what's

629
00:35:17,440 --> 00:35:21,520
Speaker 1: happened in the whole history of humanity when a government,

630
00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:25,920
Speaker 1: you know, a kingdom has said that we have one way,

631
00:35:26,040 --> 00:35:29,399
Speaker 1: my way, or the highway, you know, Protestant Henry the eighth,

632
00:35:29,560 --> 00:35:33,279
Speaker 1: or a Catholic Louis the fourteenth. You know, and if

633
00:35:33,320 --> 00:35:36,640
Speaker 1: you you know, presume that it's it's one thing. You

634
00:35:36,840 --> 00:35:41,160
Speaker 1: violated the entire spirit of the United States.

635
00:35:40,920 --> 00:35:41,319
Speaker 2: Did you.

636
00:35:41,480 --> 00:35:44,440
Speaker 4: I mean talk about presumption when you went through this project.

637
00:35:44,480 --> 00:35:47,400
Speaker 4: I mean, was how revelatory was all of this to

638
00:35:47,440 --> 00:35:48,600
Speaker 4: you over the last ten years.

639
00:35:48,600 --> 00:35:49,160
Speaker 2: I mean for.

640
00:35:49,200 --> 00:35:52,080
Speaker 4: Someone that knows his stuff, you must have come in

641
00:35:52,360 --> 00:35:53,120
Speaker 4: with all kinds.

642
00:35:53,160 --> 00:35:54,160
Speaker 2: You were like, I got.

643
00:35:54,000 --> 00:35:58,480
Speaker 1: This, yes, right exactly. You know, well, I actually, Governor,

644
00:35:58,520 --> 00:36:02,440
Speaker 1: I learned years ago to drop that arrogance, because you know,

645
00:36:02,880 --> 00:36:04,759
Speaker 1: when I got my seventh or eighth film was a

646
00:36:04,760 --> 00:36:08,080
Speaker 1: big hit history on baseball, and I go, well, I

647
00:36:08,080 --> 00:36:11,520
Speaker 1: have no baseball now, and each day was a daily

648
00:36:11,600 --> 00:36:14,719
Speaker 1: humiliation of what I didn't know. And so now I

649
00:36:14,880 --> 00:36:17,319
Speaker 1: just presume that I've got a kind of working man's first.

650
00:36:17,360 --> 00:36:20,080
Speaker 1: I'll do all right on Jeopardy. It's I'm the guy

651
00:36:20,160 --> 00:36:24,040
Speaker 1: you wanted. Trivial pursuits as your party, But I know nothing.

652
00:36:24,360 --> 00:36:27,160
Speaker 1: And so rather than think about it, rather than tell

653
00:36:27,200 --> 00:36:31,279
Speaker 1: you what you should know about the revolution, why don't

654
00:36:31,320 --> 00:36:34,879
Speaker 1: I share with you what I just discovered. What we

655
00:36:35,120 --> 00:36:38,040
Speaker 1: just discovered. It's very much a we over the course

656
00:36:38,239 --> 00:36:40,600
Speaker 1: of the last ten years, and we've got two dozen

657
00:36:40,680 --> 00:36:44,480
Speaker 1: scholars and writers, and we're not we're taking what they've learned,

658
00:36:44,560 --> 00:36:48,640
Speaker 1: not what they're political, and not with their particular philosophy,

659
00:36:48,680 --> 00:36:53,160
Speaker 1: not political, but their philosophy, what the historians call historiography.

660
00:36:53,200 --> 00:36:55,200
Speaker 1: We don't have to buy into that. And so you

661
00:36:55,239 --> 00:36:58,200
Speaker 1: can be strengthened like the spokes on a wheel that

662
00:36:58,400 --> 00:37:02,200
Speaker 1: give the great dynamic strength to a wheel. Because you've

663
00:37:02,239 --> 00:37:05,279
Speaker 1: got lots of different perspectives, isn't just one. You're not

664
00:37:05,320 --> 00:37:08,480
Speaker 1: seeing it through one lens, you're able to And this

665
00:37:08,520 --> 00:37:14,440
Speaker 1: is where story narrative, which was understandably out of fashion

666
00:37:15,040 --> 00:37:18,640
Speaker 1: by the middle of the twentieth century, is actually still

667
00:37:18,640 --> 00:37:20,800
Speaker 1: the only way to tell a story. Honey, how is

668
00:37:20,840 --> 00:37:25,120
Speaker 1: your day? Does not begin? I back slowly down the driveway,

669
00:37:25,520 --> 00:37:28,000
Speaker 1: avoiding the garbage can at the curb unless somebody t

670
00:37:28,120 --> 00:37:30,120
Speaker 1: bones doing That's exactly the way you do it. What

671
00:37:30,280 --> 00:37:32,839
Speaker 1: you do is you edit human experience, and to do that,

672
00:37:33,480 --> 00:37:35,960
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to know what that was. And so

673
00:37:36,120 --> 00:37:39,399
Speaker 1: we studied scholars who knew the Native American countries, knew

674
00:37:39,400 --> 00:37:41,880
Speaker 1: the difference between the Delaware and the Shawnee, who were

675
00:37:41,880 --> 00:37:46,080
Speaker 1: actually partners, or the Creek, the Muskogee Creeks, or the Cheyenne,

676
00:37:46,239 --> 00:37:50,040
Speaker 1: or you know whatever the I mean, the Cherokee, or

677
00:37:50,080 --> 00:37:58,600
Speaker 1: the Anashinabe, or the Hoden and Shone, the Cayuga, Seneca, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida,

678
00:37:58,640 --> 00:38:02,320
Speaker 1: in Mohawk, that made up up the Iroquois Confederacy, this

679
00:38:03,560 --> 00:38:07,440
Speaker 1: democracy in a way, this union, this confederacy that Franklin

680
00:38:07,480 --> 00:38:10,480
Speaker 1: twenty years before the revolution said, whoa, this is pretty good.

681
00:38:10,480 --> 00:38:13,640
Speaker 1: We should try it ourselves, and everybody said, really good idea,

682
00:38:13,800 --> 00:38:16,520
Speaker 1: and every colony said, nope, we don't want to give

683
00:38:16,600 --> 00:38:19,919
Speaker 1: up one ounce of authority to anything bigger than I'm

684
00:38:20,120 --> 00:38:24,640
Speaker 1: than ourselves. And so twenty years later this will will

685
00:38:24,680 --> 00:38:26,360
Speaker 1: come to a head and we'll be able to figure

686
00:38:26,360 --> 00:38:29,880
Speaker 1: out on our own that. But it just tells you

687
00:38:29,920 --> 00:38:32,399
Speaker 1: how much we're bound to each other, how much we're

688
00:38:32,440 --> 00:38:36,360
Speaker 1: dependent on each other. We know what the social compact is,

689
00:38:36,400 --> 00:38:40,080
Speaker 1: and unfortunately we live in a world today in computers

690
00:38:40,080 --> 00:38:43,600
Speaker 1: where it's one and zero, or the media culture where

691
00:38:43,600 --> 00:38:45,759
Speaker 1: it's one thing or the other, and we forget to

692
00:38:45,840 --> 00:38:48,719
Speaker 1: select for the things that we hold in common. I mean,

693
00:38:48,760 --> 00:38:51,240
Speaker 1: I say this to my I have four daughters forty

694
00:38:51,239 --> 00:38:54,279
Speaker 1: three to fifteen, and I just say, social media isn't

695
00:38:55,040 --> 00:38:57,560
Speaker 1: right and it's not social. You've been in a room

696
00:38:57,680 --> 00:39:01,439
Speaker 1: where people are all in their stuff, you know, how

697
00:39:01,520 --> 00:39:03,680
Speaker 1: is that connecting? It's not. I live in a little

698
00:39:03,760 --> 00:39:05,600
Speaker 1: village in New Hampshire. We get together, we have a

699
00:39:05,600 --> 00:39:07,279
Speaker 1: town meeting. We decide whether they're going to buy a

700
00:39:07,320 --> 00:39:10,600
Speaker 1: new bumper. It's a big deal, you know, for the

701
00:39:10,640 --> 00:39:13,120
Speaker 1: fire department. And that's what civics has gone out of

702
00:39:13,120 --> 00:39:17,480
Speaker 1: our lives. And so too. I think that artificial intelligence

703
00:39:17,560 --> 00:39:21,279
Speaker 1: isn't as long as we always I mean is artificial

704
00:39:21,320 --> 00:39:24,319
Speaker 1: intelligence is artificial. So as long as you keep that

705
00:39:24,360 --> 00:39:27,880
Speaker 1: in mind that the glory is what our founders understood

706
00:39:28,160 --> 00:39:32,720
Speaker 1: was the primacy of the individual. Right, this holds primacy.

707
00:39:32,440 --> 00:39:35,399
Speaker 1: It's at the heart the value of each human life.

708
00:39:35,440 --> 00:39:39,479
Speaker 1: Is at the heart of all religious practices, all of them,

709
00:39:39,520 --> 00:39:44,640
Speaker 1: and particularly the children of Abraham, which would include Christians

710
00:39:44,680 --> 00:39:48,279
Speaker 1: and Jews and Muslims. Where that is there, but it's

711
00:39:48,320 --> 00:39:52,240
Speaker 1: not displayed any other religion which all has this sense

712
00:39:52,719 --> 00:39:55,359
Speaker 1: of the primacy of the individual. And when we get

713
00:39:55,400 --> 00:39:58,360
Speaker 1: away with it, we said, well, you know, in animal

714
00:39:58,360 --> 00:40:01,480
Speaker 1: farm or Well's animal f which is why we have

715
00:40:01,600 --> 00:40:06,280
Speaker 1: invoked the word Orwellian, the adjective Orwellian so much lately,

716
00:40:06,440 --> 00:40:09,840
Speaker 1: is that, well, some animals are more equal than others,

717
00:40:10,120 --> 00:40:13,000
Speaker 1: all right, And then that's the slippery slope in which

718
00:40:13,040 --> 00:40:15,880
Speaker 1: you just go back and you suddenly wake up to

719
00:40:15,960 --> 00:40:19,839
Speaker 1: do that. You know, I think our next chapter, which

720
00:40:19,880 --> 00:40:24,200
Speaker 1: I think has already begun to being written, is repair

721
00:40:24,360 --> 00:40:28,120
Speaker 1: and restoration, Like yeah, look, we'll go back to let's

722
00:40:28,200 --> 00:40:32,440
Speaker 1: let's go back to arguing about the things that matter

723
00:40:32,840 --> 00:40:35,840
Speaker 1: without demonizing us. You know, just wondered. You know, for

724
00:40:35,880 --> 00:40:39,560
Speaker 1: a long time, the Republican Party admirably and nobly held

725
00:40:39,600 --> 00:40:43,080
Speaker 1: to this notion of the thread of communism, sometimes to

726
00:40:43,640 --> 00:40:47,320
Speaker 1: great expense if you think about the McCarthyism of the fifties,

727
00:40:47,360 --> 00:40:50,440
Speaker 1: but also just the sort of the willingness to say, no,

728
00:40:50,760 --> 00:40:54,080
Speaker 1: that's that's what it is. But when that system collapsed,

729
00:40:54,600 --> 00:40:58,400
Speaker 1: unfortunately they there was an absence a surface of ideas,

730
00:40:58,440 --> 00:41:00,520
Speaker 1: and so what did you do you made bil Clinton,

731
00:41:00,520 --> 00:41:03,560
Speaker 1: and then by extension, all Democrats the enemies, and then

732
00:41:03,560 --> 00:41:05,600
Speaker 1: all of a sudden we have people that I meet

733
00:41:05,719 --> 00:41:08,120
Speaker 1: in the course of my life who believe we're pedophiles.

734
00:41:08,120 --> 00:41:12,200
Speaker 1: I mean, actually, the stuff is coming out that it

735
00:41:12,280 --> 00:41:16,440
Speaker 1: may not be limited to Democrats or even any political party,

736
00:41:16,640 --> 00:41:20,080
Speaker 1: but just bad actors, and we need to get to

737
00:41:20,120 --> 00:41:22,359
Speaker 1: the bottom of it and figure out that we don't

738
00:41:22,400 --> 00:41:27,200
Speaker 1: need to, you know, keep wagging the dog here by

739
00:41:27,520 --> 00:41:31,560
Speaker 1: you know, capturing you know, South American leaders, or threatening

740
00:41:31,640 --> 00:41:38,800
Speaker 1: Greenland or starting another war just to distract from information

741
00:41:38,920 --> 00:41:41,239
Speaker 1: that I believe was supposed to come out in December

742
00:41:41,400 --> 00:41:45,120
Speaker 1: mid December by law, by congressional law, and not all

743
00:41:45,160 --> 00:41:47,319
Speaker 1: of the information has come out. And I just want

744
00:41:47,360 --> 00:41:50,440
Speaker 1: to know who's being protected.

745
00:41:51,520 --> 00:41:54,719
Speaker 2: God bless uh. Too much there to unpack. I want

746
00:41:54,719 --> 00:41:55,120
Speaker 2: to go back.

747
00:41:55,239 --> 00:41:58,120
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, No, I know, I appreciate all in this

748
00:41:58,200 --> 00:41:59,959
Speaker 4: notion of you know, being repairs of the breed.

749
00:42:00,239 --> 00:42:00,799
Speaker 2: I love that.

750
00:42:00,840 --> 00:42:02,480
Speaker 4: I want to and I need we all, I think

751
00:42:02,520 --> 00:42:04,000
Speaker 4: all of us need to get back a little bit

752
00:42:04,040 --> 00:42:04,319
Speaker 4: to that.

753
00:42:04,560 --> 00:42:07,760
Speaker 2: But I'm curious as you went back over the course.

754
00:42:07,560 --> 00:42:11,080
Speaker 4: And I appreciate how you you sort of unpacked this

755
00:42:11,200 --> 00:42:14,239
Speaker 4: journey that you went on with your team trying to

756
00:42:14,320 --> 00:42:16,440
Speaker 4: understand our origin story.

757
00:42:17,280 --> 00:42:18,560
Speaker 2: What were they?

758
00:42:18,560 --> 00:42:22,200
Speaker 4: I mean begs the question what what was most revelatory

759
00:42:22,239 --> 00:42:22,640
Speaker 4: to you?

760
00:42:23,000 --> 00:42:25,360
Speaker 2: What did you come in and just stop, you know,

761
00:42:25,440 --> 00:42:27,920
Speaker 2: you sort of stopped in your tracks, like how did

762
00:42:27,960 --> 00:42:31,600
Speaker 2: I miss this? How did I not understand more fully?

763
00:42:31,760 --> 00:42:35,560
Speaker 1: That? Well, one of it is the centrality of Washington.

764
00:42:35,640 --> 00:42:38,120
Speaker 1: I mean I just was like not willing to accept

765
00:42:38,120 --> 00:42:40,920
Speaker 1: the notion that he's the father of our country. But

766
00:42:40,960 --> 00:42:46,480
Speaker 1: there's a German language newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania the spring

767
00:42:46,520 --> 00:42:49,840
Speaker 1: after the first the Valley Forge, the horrible Valley Forge,

768
00:42:49,880 --> 00:42:53,040
Speaker 1: who calls him deslond de Slater, the Country's father, And

769
00:42:53,080 --> 00:42:57,360
Speaker 1: you begin to realize that invested in this person is

770
00:42:57,960 --> 00:43:00,239
Speaker 1: the future of this place. It in captured, it had

771
00:43:00,320 --> 00:43:03,400
Speaker 1: been all over. But I think it's more the grassroots

772
00:43:03,400 --> 00:43:07,080
Speaker 1: of this, how much it meant to people. Remember if

773
00:43:07,120 --> 00:43:10,040
Speaker 1: you were this is a civil war, and that means

774
00:43:10,080 --> 00:43:12,399
Speaker 1: it's not just the British three thousand miles away we're

775
00:43:12,400 --> 00:43:15,080
Speaker 1: just trying to throw them off. It's our neighbors. This

776
00:43:15,160 --> 00:43:17,359
Speaker 1: is a civil war. We're born in violence at least

777
00:43:17,360 --> 00:43:20,960
Speaker 1: twenty percent overall, but in any given place it might

778
00:43:21,000 --> 00:43:24,840
Speaker 1: be a hotbed of loyalism. They're against it, they believe,

779
00:43:24,960 --> 00:43:29,240
Speaker 1: and we don't make them enemies. They believe quite correctly

780
00:43:29,280 --> 00:43:31,680
Speaker 1: that the British constitutional marnarchy is a hell of a

781
00:43:31,719 --> 00:43:34,640
Speaker 1: good form of government, and it is their prosperity, the

782
00:43:34,760 --> 00:43:38,239
Speaker 1: land they have, their literacy, their life expectancy, their good

783
00:43:38,280 --> 00:43:41,800
Speaker 1: fortune is based on. And you're asking me to give

784
00:43:41,880 --> 00:43:45,720
Speaker 1: this all up to support an idea that has never

785
00:43:45,800 --> 00:43:48,279
Speaker 1: been tried before. Are you out of your mind? The

786
00:43:48,320 --> 00:43:52,600
Speaker 1: thing that blows my mind, Governor, is that how many

787
00:43:52,640 --> 00:43:57,720
Speaker 1: people said yes to this completely new idea, and that

788
00:43:57,920 --> 00:44:02,440
Speaker 1: it was not just the declaration, the list of injuries

789
00:44:02,480 --> 00:44:06,080
Speaker 1: and usurpations, eighteen of them that the King, not Parliament

790
00:44:06,120 --> 00:44:09,279
Speaker 1: was now guilty of. It wasn't just common sense. It

791
00:44:09,320 --> 00:44:12,080
Speaker 1: wasn't just later on the American crisis. These are the

792
00:44:12,120 --> 00:44:15,279
Speaker 1: times that try men sold the summer soldier and the

793
00:44:15,280 --> 00:44:19,400
Speaker 1: sunshine patriot. Already then they know there's a distinction between

794
00:44:19,400 --> 00:44:21,920
Speaker 1: the people who love to wave the flag and then

795
00:44:22,360 --> 00:44:25,120
Speaker 1: aren't there. And at the end of the declaration, we

796
00:44:25,280 --> 00:44:29,880
Speaker 1: mutually pledged to each other our lives, our fortunes, and

797
00:44:29,920 --> 00:44:34,520
Speaker 1: our sacred honor. It means something. George Washington may have

798
00:44:34,560 --> 00:44:37,640
Speaker 1: been the richest person in the country, certainly was for

799
00:44:37,680 --> 00:44:43,200
Speaker 1: a time. He risked his life and his fortune and

800
00:44:43,280 --> 00:44:46,680
Speaker 1: his sacred honor in support of a thing. And that's unbelievable.

801
00:44:46,680 --> 00:44:49,239
Speaker 1: And so did a fourteen year old kid named John

802
00:44:49,280 --> 00:44:52,080
Speaker 1: Greenwood from Boston. So did a fifteen year old named

803
00:44:52,160 --> 00:44:55,360
Speaker 1: Joseph plum Martin from Connecticut. So did a lot of

804
00:44:55,400 --> 00:44:59,359
Speaker 1: people that we don't know their stories, who just said, yeah,

805
00:44:59,400 --> 00:45:04,759
Speaker 1: I'm throwing with this lot. It behooved most Native Americans

806
00:45:04,800 --> 00:45:07,319
Speaker 1: to side with the British because they think at least

807
00:45:07,360 --> 00:45:11,840
Speaker 1: they could forestall the onslaught into their territory at the

808
00:45:11,880 --> 00:45:15,839
Speaker 1: Ohio Valley. It was a short term arrangement, and then

809
00:45:15,960 --> 00:45:19,560
Speaker 1: many times the British, whose empire depended entirely on the

810
00:45:19,600 --> 00:45:24,000
Speaker 1: wealth that was generated from slavery, particularly in the Caribbean.

811
00:45:24,040 --> 00:45:27,280
Speaker 1: They had thirteen colonies there that were huge profit centers,

812
00:45:27,320 --> 00:45:29,879
Speaker 1: only South Carolina and Virginia for the reasons you can

813
00:45:29,920 --> 00:45:34,040
Speaker 1: assume our profit centers. The rest of the colonies aren't.

814
00:45:34,200 --> 00:45:37,399
Speaker 1: But we're populated and we make things, so we're good

815
00:45:37,640 --> 00:45:40,920
Speaker 1: trading partners. And you know, they want to keep us

816
00:45:40,920 --> 00:45:43,520
Speaker 1: from taking Indian land because they can't afford to protect us,

817
00:45:43,800 --> 00:45:46,160
Speaker 1: and we want to take Indian land. So it's not

818
00:45:46,239 --> 00:45:49,279
Speaker 1: just taxes and representation. So you begin to see this

819
00:45:49,400 --> 00:45:52,080
Speaker 1: like dropping a stone in the water, and you follow

820
00:45:52,120 --> 00:45:55,440
Speaker 1: the ripples out and it becomes so amazing that we

821
00:45:55,520 --> 00:46:00,719
Speaker 1: see Lexington Green April nineteen seventeen seventy five, chances of

822
00:46:00,760 --> 00:46:05,480
Speaker 1: success are zero, and six and a half years later,

823
00:46:05,800 --> 00:46:11,000
Speaker 1: on the seventeenth of October at Yorktown, they're one hundred percent.

824
00:46:11,640 --> 00:46:14,000
Speaker 1: Don't you want to know how that happened? And does

825
00:46:14,120 --> 00:46:17,920
Speaker 1: Washington win every battle? No, he loses most of his battles.

826
00:46:18,120 --> 00:46:21,960
Speaker 1: The big victory at Saratoga is away from him. He's

827
00:46:22,000 --> 00:46:25,720
Speaker 1: sent Daniel Morgan and most importantly Benedict Darnold, who becomes

828
00:46:25,760 --> 00:46:28,759
Speaker 1: the hero of Saratoga for the Patriots. We can get

829
00:46:28,760 --> 00:46:32,759
Speaker 1: into Benedict Darnald later. It's so interesting that for us

830
00:46:32,800 --> 00:46:36,759
Speaker 1: it means one thing, and it's actually a much more dynamic,

831
00:46:36,960 --> 00:46:40,840
Speaker 1: complicated thing that teaches an essential lesson about humanity and

832
00:46:41,200 --> 00:46:44,920
Speaker 1: the conflicts not only between people but within them. Just

833
00:46:44,960 --> 00:46:48,319
Speaker 1: as George Washington is wrestling Thomas Jefferson is wrestling, they

834
00:46:48,360 --> 00:46:53,000
Speaker 1: know slavery's wrong. They know it's wrong. And the great

835
00:46:53,040 --> 00:46:55,799
Speaker 1: Harvard scholar and at Gordon Reid says, how can you

836
00:46:55,840 --> 00:46:58,040
Speaker 1: do something if you know it's wrong? And she comes

837
00:46:58,040 --> 00:47:01,680
Speaker 1: on camera and says, well, that's the human question for

838
00:47:01,800 --> 00:47:05,040
Speaker 1: all of us, meaning she's not taking Thomas Jefferson off

839
00:47:05,040 --> 00:47:07,400
Speaker 1: the hook and forgiving him. She's leaving him on the

840
00:47:07,440 --> 00:47:12,200
Speaker 1: hook and putting the rest of us for our sanctimonious

841
00:47:13,200 --> 00:47:17,759
Speaker 1: idea of our ability to judge another when we ourselves

842
00:47:17,960 --> 00:47:22,600
Speaker 1: are walking contradictions and flaws. So the fact that we

843
00:47:22,680 --> 00:47:25,239
Speaker 1: had a success, that something was born out of here

844
00:47:25,280 --> 00:47:28,879
Speaker 1: that turned out to be the greatest country ever right,

845
00:47:29,640 --> 00:47:34,400
Speaker 1: is just spectacular to me and is a wonderful one.

846
00:47:34,880 --> 00:47:38,480
Speaker 1: If you just think that it's only spectacular, then you

847
00:47:39,080 --> 00:47:42,560
Speaker 1: missed a point. We had some compromises in the Constitution

848
00:47:42,680 --> 00:47:48,600
Speaker 1: that were incredibly genius and some that were unbelievably tragic

849
00:47:48,680 --> 00:47:52,520
Speaker 1: that perpetuated the institution of slavery even when they knew.

850
00:47:52,560 --> 00:47:55,160
Speaker 1: I mean, they were saying, George Washington said, you know,

851
00:47:55,320 --> 00:47:57,800
Speaker 1: they're treating us like slaves. They're treating us in the

852
00:47:57,840 --> 00:48:00,440
Speaker 1: same way that we treat the negroes, over which we

853
00:48:00,520 --> 00:48:04,760
Speaker 1: have arbitrary sway, so they know they're using the language

854
00:48:04,760 --> 00:48:07,960
Speaker 1: of slavery, and they're going, you know, wait a second,

855
00:48:07,960 --> 00:48:10,080
Speaker 1: and you have find the British going, how is it

856
00:48:10,120 --> 00:48:14,040
Speaker 1: that this driver of negroes, George Washington is having success

857
00:48:14,040 --> 00:48:17,080
Speaker 1: against us? I mean not that they're opposed to slavery,

858
00:48:17,120 --> 00:48:18,960
Speaker 1: they're for it. But every once in a while, though

859
00:48:19,160 --> 00:48:24,400
Speaker 1: offer freedom to those enslaved people of rebels. As a

860
00:48:24,600 --> 00:48:26,640
Speaker 1: scholar pointed out in the film, not sure how you

861
00:48:26,680 --> 00:48:30,600
Speaker 1: tell if you're a if you're an enslaved person of

862
00:48:30,640 --> 00:48:35,200
Speaker 1: a loyalist and you hear there's freedom promise, I would say, oh, yeah,

863
00:48:35,239 --> 00:48:39,040
Speaker 1: my master's of this, and you know, and so people

864
00:48:39,120 --> 00:48:41,759
Speaker 1: would just we think of it as big ideas, and

865
00:48:41,800 --> 00:48:45,120
Speaker 1: they are. They're really important there, and we're going to

866
00:48:45,120 --> 00:48:47,520
Speaker 1: sponsor revolutions for the next two hundred plus years. When

867
00:48:47,520 --> 00:48:51,160
Speaker 1: Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnamese independence in nineteen forty five,

868
00:48:51,280 --> 00:48:55,000
Speaker 1: he's quoting Thomas Jefferson. But the decisions that people make

869
00:48:55,280 --> 00:48:59,279
Speaker 1: are incredibly local. Where is the daylight that I can

870
00:48:59,320 --> 00:49:03,120
Speaker 1: get to for me, not only me, but my children

871
00:49:03,160 --> 00:49:06,719
Speaker 1: and my children's children's children, Like that's the important thing.

872
00:49:07,000 --> 00:49:10,640
Speaker 1: If you're enslaved. This is the last thing anybody on

873
00:49:10,760 --> 00:49:13,799
Speaker 1: earth wants to be, and you're going to make the

874
00:49:13,840 --> 00:49:16,359
Speaker 1: decision which you think is the best. Sometimes that's going

875
00:49:16,360 --> 00:49:20,640
Speaker 1: to the British. There's painful, painful moments in New York City,

876
00:49:20,680 --> 00:49:24,000
Speaker 1: which doesn't evacuate. The British don't leave there until two

877
00:49:24,080 --> 00:49:27,439
Speaker 1: years and a month after Yorktown. And what they're doing

878
00:49:27,480 --> 00:49:30,319
Speaker 1: in those last months is they're adjudicating which of the

879
00:49:30,360 --> 00:49:34,239
Speaker 1: black people that have been with the British get to

880
00:49:34,239 --> 00:49:36,680
Speaker 1: go and who have to stay. So a mother gets

881
00:49:36,680 --> 00:49:39,280
Speaker 1: to go because she can prove employment with an officer

882
00:49:39,560 --> 00:49:44,000
Speaker 1: or a loyalist, but the daughter can't. It's the reverse

883
00:49:44,080 --> 00:49:48,000
Speaker 1: of the birthright citizenship right. So the daughter goes back

884
00:49:48,040 --> 00:49:50,880
Speaker 1: to Virginia and is enslaved, and the mother goes to

885
00:49:50,920 --> 00:49:55,560
Speaker 1: Nova Scotia going what happened? And there's two lists, they're

886
00:49:55,600 --> 00:49:58,839
Speaker 1: collists of Negroes. And every week or so they meet

887
00:49:58,880 --> 00:50:02,520
Speaker 1: at Fonce's tavern in Lower Manhattan. Still there table, still there,

888
00:50:02,840 --> 00:50:06,759
Speaker 1: and four Brits and three Americans determine who gets to

889
00:50:06,800 --> 00:50:09,000
Speaker 1: go and who doesn't get to go. And they're horse

890
00:50:09,080 --> 00:50:11,560
Speaker 1: trading with human lives in a country that had just

891
00:50:11,840 --> 00:50:15,440
Speaker 1: proclaimed to the world less than ten years before that

892
00:50:15,560 --> 00:50:17,720
Speaker 1: all human beings, all men are created equal.

893
00:50:19,360 --> 00:50:22,799
Speaker 4: Pretty good story, so so much, I mean, and I

894
00:50:22,840 --> 00:50:26,200
Speaker 4: love your language about this notion of a finished monument

895
00:50:26,360 --> 00:50:30,560
Speaker 4: versus this notion of an unfinished responsibility. And you keep

896
00:50:30,600 --> 00:50:34,080
Speaker 4: coming back this notion of citizenship active, not inert citizenship,

897
00:50:34,120 --> 00:50:36,200
Speaker 4: that we have agency, we can shape the future. We're

898
00:50:36,200 --> 00:50:39,200
Speaker 4: not bystanders. I think it was Brandeis who said, in

899
00:50:39,239 --> 00:50:43,080
Speaker 4: a democracy, the most important office is office of citizen.

900
00:50:43,600 --> 00:50:46,759
Speaker 1: So this is what Washington knew right when he resigns.

901
00:50:47,080 --> 00:50:50,400
Speaker 1: I think he was tacitly saying, even when he resigned

902
00:50:50,440 --> 00:50:53,879
Speaker 1: the military commission, I am a citizen, and then at

903
00:50:53,880 --> 00:50:57,840
Speaker 1: the presidency, I'm a citizen of Adams wanted him to

904
00:50:57,880 --> 00:51:01,280
Speaker 1: take a kind of royal or princely title and goes, no, present,

905
00:51:01,320 --> 00:51:03,680
Speaker 1: It's okay for me, right, And so I'm sorry I

906
00:51:03,719 --> 00:51:06,000
Speaker 1: interrupted you, But I think that's really at the heart

907
00:51:06,000 --> 00:51:09,440
Speaker 1: of it, that this building block is not the top,

908
00:51:09,840 --> 00:51:13,600
Speaker 1: it's the bottom or the bottom is the top. The

909
00:51:13,800 --> 00:51:17,520
Speaker 1: individual agency of each human being. And the story of

910
00:51:17,680 --> 00:51:21,080
Speaker 1: us has been the expansion of what was a very

911
00:51:21,080 --> 00:51:23,560
Speaker 1: limited phrase, all men are created equal, all white men

912
00:51:23,600 --> 00:51:26,680
Speaker 1: of property free of debt. We don't mean that anymore.

913
00:51:27,160 --> 00:51:29,680
Speaker 1: And the more we grow and the more we expand it,

914
00:51:29,760 --> 00:51:34,520
Speaker 1: the richer we become. And that's that's the story of us,

915
00:51:35,000 --> 00:51:36,920
Speaker 1: know them involved, but of us.

916
00:51:38,320 --> 00:51:40,880
Speaker 2: No kings rallies this sense. I mean.

917
00:51:42,440 --> 00:51:45,319
Speaker 4: You've start I'm starting to feel more optimistic listening to

918
00:51:45,360 --> 00:51:49,160
Speaker 4: you about this moment, this sort of this energy, this percolation,

919
00:51:49,320 --> 00:51:51,759
Speaker 4: this notion that the top is the bottom, this notion

920
00:51:52,800 --> 00:51:57,200
Speaker 4: that we this foundational of principles that you have allowed

921
00:51:57,280 --> 00:51:59,440
Speaker 4: us to endure and endure these moments, and the fact

922
00:51:59,480 --> 00:52:02,560
Speaker 4: that these moments are hardly unique in our history, and

923
00:52:02,640 --> 00:52:05,359
Speaker 4: the fact that we've been able to persevere. I mean,

924
00:52:06,000 --> 00:52:08,720
Speaker 4: are you feeling more or less optimistic in that content?

925
00:52:08,760 --> 00:52:11,160
Speaker 4: I know it's the real question you get every interview.

926
00:52:12,000 --> 00:52:14,719
Speaker 4: So in the context of this moment in particular, and

927
00:52:14,760 --> 00:52:17,160
Speaker 4: I mean quite literally, perhaps this moment.

928
00:52:18,000 --> 00:52:21,560
Speaker 1: Yes, Governor, I believe in that. I do think that

929
00:52:22,320 --> 00:52:26,160
Speaker 1: the three great crises that we could identify after our founding,

930
00:52:26,280 --> 00:52:29,719
Speaker 1: the Civil War, the depression in World War two were

931
00:52:29,760 --> 00:52:32,160
Speaker 1: the great crises. I think we're in a fourth. I

932
00:52:32,239 --> 00:52:37,239
Speaker 1: think the existential threats are unprecedented. In those first three crises,

933
00:52:37,560 --> 00:52:39,960
Speaker 1: there were free and fair elections, there was a peaceful

934
00:52:39,960 --> 00:52:43,839
Speaker 1: transfer of power, there was an independence of the judiciary,

935
00:52:43,960 --> 00:52:47,880
Speaker 1: all of which seems in play. And yet I think

936
00:52:48,360 --> 00:52:52,440
Speaker 1: part of the sort of arrogance of the present is

937
00:52:52,520 --> 00:52:56,040
Speaker 1: you think that because you're alive, that you must know

938
00:52:56,200 --> 00:52:59,560
Speaker 1: more than those who came before us, that somehow, because

939
00:52:59,600 --> 00:53:05,400
Speaker 1: we've our situation is so much more bad or worse

940
00:53:05,520 --> 00:53:08,720
Speaker 1: or great. And I think that we have to Lincoln

941
00:53:08,719 --> 00:53:12,680
Speaker 1: says it in that same address to Congress. He says,

942
00:53:14,360 --> 00:53:17,480
Speaker 1: the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the

943
00:53:17,520 --> 00:53:20,480
Speaker 1: stormy present. As our case is new, we must think

944
00:53:20,520 --> 00:53:24,520
Speaker 1: a new, We must act anew, We must disenthrall ourselves,

945
00:53:24,840 --> 00:53:28,279
Speaker 1: and then we can save our country. That leads to

946
00:53:28,320 --> 00:53:31,600
Speaker 1: the last best hope of earth. It means that you've

947
00:53:31,640 --> 00:53:35,200
Speaker 1: got to just sort of say, yes, it's unprecedented, but

948
00:53:35,520 --> 00:53:38,800
Speaker 1: also have faith in the American people, which is something

949
00:53:38,840 --> 00:53:42,759
Speaker 1: that autocrats don't have. They can use them, they can

950
00:53:42,800 --> 00:53:45,760
Speaker 1: play groups off one another, but they have zero faith

951
00:53:46,440 --> 00:53:51,200
Speaker 1: in the actual stuff of what it is to struggle

952
00:53:51,239 --> 00:53:54,600
Speaker 1: to be human and to just you know, in economies

953
00:53:54,640 --> 00:53:59,200
Speaker 1: and families get by, you know, with opioid addictions, with

954
00:53:59,560 --> 00:54:03,560
Speaker 1: hard work, work with illness, unexpected illnesses, all of the

955
00:54:03,600 --> 00:54:06,960
Speaker 1: things not you know, the disparity of wages. I mean

956
00:54:07,160 --> 00:54:09,839
Speaker 1: I made a film on baseball and in the seventies.

957
00:54:10,920 --> 00:54:14,080
Speaker 1: You know, it's the same thing with corporate CEOs that

958
00:54:14,160 --> 00:54:17,760
Speaker 1: you know, the CEO of a company made it best

959
00:54:17,800 --> 00:54:22,000
Speaker 1: like eight nine times with the line guy made and

960
00:54:22,040 --> 00:54:24,920
Speaker 1: now we're talking about eight hundred times as much. And

961
00:54:24,960 --> 00:54:28,759
Speaker 1: so we the proportionality of things and it permits you know,

962
00:54:28,800 --> 00:54:33,120
Speaker 1: we have great articulators of that disparity. And we sort

963
00:54:33,160 --> 00:54:35,360
Speaker 1: of think as politics as a line, it's a circle.

964
00:54:35,680 --> 00:54:40,000
Speaker 1: You know, like a third of Bernie's supporters voted for Hillary,

965
00:54:40,040 --> 00:54:42,040
Speaker 1: a third state home, and a third voted for Trump.

966
00:54:42,360 --> 00:54:46,120
Speaker 1: So you know that somewhere in this you have to

967
00:54:46,400 --> 00:54:51,160
Speaker 1: just be able to articulate that you understand what is

968
00:54:51,200 --> 00:54:53,080
Speaker 1: the stuff of life? How do you get through? How

969
00:54:53,120 --> 00:54:55,720
Speaker 1: do you put food on the table for your families?

970
00:54:55,760 --> 00:54:59,280
Speaker 1: How do you do that? But incumbent in an American

971
00:54:59,360 --> 00:55:02,719
Speaker 1: dynamic is that you have to exercise citizenship. It is

972
00:55:02,920 --> 00:55:07,080
Speaker 1: no longer convenient to stay home or to say it

973
00:55:07,120 --> 00:55:10,880
Speaker 1: doesn't count, because it does count and it does matter,

974
00:55:10,920 --> 00:55:13,319
Speaker 1: and you can't stay home and it doesn't mean you

975
00:55:13,360 --> 00:55:15,600
Speaker 1: have to be involved. You don't have to go to marches,

976
00:55:15,800 --> 00:55:18,200
Speaker 1: you don't have to do this, but you can vote,

977
00:55:18,640 --> 00:55:22,360
Speaker 1: you can be engaged in civics taken out of our curriculum.

978
00:55:22,400 --> 00:55:25,400
Speaker 1: It's been a dirty word for three or four decades.

979
00:55:26,160 --> 00:55:29,319
Speaker 1: They don't teach history anymore either. They just want the

980
00:55:29,400 --> 00:55:33,800
Speaker 1: automatons of STEM to just go forward. There's something missing.

981
00:55:33,840 --> 00:55:36,080
Speaker 1: I remember an executive when I was working on my

982
00:55:36,120 --> 00:55:38,719
Speaker 1: first film on the Brooklyn Bridge executive at AT and

983
00:55:38,760 --> 00:55:41,359
Speaker 1: T Very Seniories. He was just lamenting. He said, I

984
00:55:41,440 --> 00:55:43,239
Speaker 1: just wish you would come to work for me. I

985
00:55:43,239 --> 00:55:45,319
Speaker 1: can teach you what I know. I have all these

986
00:55:45,360 --> 00:55:48,680
Speaker 1: newly minted MBAs, but they can't write a letter. They

987
00:55:48,680 --> 00:55:51,239
Speaker 1: don't know about ethics, they don't know about history, they

988
00:55:51,239 --> 00:55:55,400
Speaker 1: don't know about comparative religion, and so there absent something

989
00:55:55,400 --> 00:55:58,239
Speaker 1: and I can't teach them that. You have that, and

990
00:55:58,280 --> 00:56:01,000
Speaker 1: I can teach you whatever things. And you don't want

991
00:56:01,040 --> 00:56:03,000
Speaker 1: to do this, I said, no, I do not. I

992
00:56:03,040 --> 00:56:05,520
Speaker 1: want to go off and make documentary films. And thank

993
00:56:05,560 --> 00:56:08,600
Speaker 1: you very much for introducing me to people who would

994
00:56:08,640 --> 00:56:11,000
Speaker 1: help us do it. But it really stuck with me.

995
00:56:11,080 --> 00:56:14,560
Speaker 1: It was a lament that somehow, in our rush for

996
00:56:14,880 --> 00:56:19,000
Speaker 1: the bottom line, we've forgotten to serve the basic instincts

997
00:56:19,040 --> 00:56:23,040
Speaker 1: of a democracy, which is a mechanical question. How does

998
00:56:23,080 --> 00:56:27,080
Speaker 1: it work? Who are we? What's the ingredients? You know,

999
00:56:27,120 --> 00:56:31,239
Speaker 1: people talk about Machiavelli. The Prince says this Machiavellian is

1000
00:56:31,239 --> 00:56:34,239
Speaker 1: a pejorative adjective, but it really is the study of

1001
00:56:34,280 --> 00:56:36,200
Speaker 1: how you get things done, how you get along with

1002
00:56:36,239 --> 00:56:39,319
Speaker 1: your neighbors, how do you make something, how do you compromise,

1003
00:56:39,520 --> 00:56:41,960
Speaker 1: how do you say, okay, you want this. I remember

1004
00:56:42,000 --> 00:56:46,680
Speaker 1: in my film about Thomas Jefferson twenty plus years ago,

1005
00:56:47,080 --> 00:56:50,600
Speaker 1: George Will said, democracy is the politics of the half loaf.

1006
00:56:51,120 --> 00:56:54,600
Speaker 1: You don't get everything, half loaf, half love. You don't

1007
00:56:54,600 --> 00:56:57,879
Speaker 1: get everything. You know, be so suspicious of the ninety

1008
00:56:57,960 --> 00:57:01,240
Speaker 1: nine to one vote, and be choice at the fifty

1009
00:57:01,239 --> 00:57:05,320
Speaker 1: one to forty nine vote. You know, that's okay, that's okay.

1010
00:57:05,360 --> 00:57:08,000
Speaker 1: And what you're you know, people are you Oh, we're

1011
00:57:08,040 --> 00:57:11,560
Speaker 1: just trying to address this, you know, those two percentage

1012
00:57:11,600 --> 00:57:15,399
Speaker 1: points of independence or soccer moms or whatever the new

1013
00:57:15,400 --> 00:57:17,120
Speaker 1: thing is. It's no, it's not about that. You're in

1014
00:57:17,400 --> 00:57:20,680
Speaker 1: try and engage everybody in this process and that's where

1015
00:57:20,840 --> 00:57:23,720
Speaker 1: I think you can have a sense of optimism, you

1016
00:57:23,720 --> 00:57:26,000
Speaker 1: can have a sense of purpose. You could say, no,

1017
00:57:26,080 --> 00:57:29,520
Speaker 1: this doesn't sit right. I don't like it. Somebody celebrating

1018
00:57:29,560 --> 00:57:32,640
Speaker 1: the death of somebody else that I that I that

1019
00:57:32,720 --> 00:57:37,960
Speaker 1: they didn't agree with, or demonizing somebody else that they

1020
00:57:38,920 --> 00:57:44,080
Speaker 1: disagree with. Disagreement is human right, you know, even within ourselves.

1021
00:57:44,400 --> 00:57:47,640
Speaker 1: Whitman said, do I contradict myself? I contradict myself. And

1022
00:57:47,680 --> 00:57:50,520
Speaker 1: it's it's about as American a catechism as I know.

1023
00:57:52,680 --> 00:57:55,920
Speaker 4: So as we march forward kind of to toly forth,

1024
00:57:55,960 --> 00:57:58,880
Speaker 4: and you know, here we are just a few months out.

1025
00:57:58,920 --> 00:58:01,280
Speaker 4: I mean, what you know, if you could you can

1026
00:58:01,320 --> 00:58:04,720
Speaker 4: write the next the chapters of the next few months,

1027
00:58:04,720 --> 00:58:07,200
Speaker 4: what I mean, at our best, what would you expect?

1028
00:58:07,280 --> 00:58:08,640
Speaker 2: What what do you expect of the States?

1029
00:58:08,640 --> 00:58:11,400
Speaker 4: And what do you I mean obviously you've got the

1030
00:58:11,480 --> 00:58:13,800
Speaker 4: Sacarin version as you describe it, that you know is

1031
00:58:13,960 --> 00:58:16,440
Speaker 4: likely to be portrayed top down, and you know we

1032
00:58:16,920 --> 00:58:19,680
Speaker 4: can anticipate. I mean, you know everything died in purple,

1033
00:58:19,760 --> 00:58:22,160
Speaker 4: and you know pictures on the side of walls, and

1034
00:58:22,280 --> 00:58:26,640
Speaker 4: you know arches and coins that version. But what you know,

1035
00:58:26,880 --> 00:58:31,320
Speaker 4: what's what's give me write that story. What's what's what should.

1036
00:58:31,120 --> 00:58:31,640
Speaker 1: We be doing? So?

1037
00:58:31,680 --> 00:58:33,760
Speaker 2: What can I be doing in the next few months?

1038
00:58:33,840 --> 00:58:34,800
Speaker 2: What should we be doing?

1039
00:58:35,560 --> 00:58:38,040
Speaker 1: In many of our religious traditions we have, there's a

1040
00:58:38,040 --> 00:58:42,200
Speaker 1: phrase as above, so below, and you could say, if

1041
00:58:42,240 --> 00:58:45,000
Speaker 1: you want to translate to something more rational, that there

1042
00:58:45,080 --> 00:58:49,000
Speaker 1: is a startling and profound similarity between the architecture of

1043
00:58:49,040 --> 00:58:52,160
Speaker 1: an atom and the architecture of the solar system. Right,

1044
00:58:52,720 --> 00:58:57,000
Speaker 1: so just hold that and say, I need to be

1045
00:58:57,080 --> 00:59:01,880
Speaker 1: two things. I need to be individual. I read at

1046
00:59:01,920 --> 00:59:06,760
Speaker 1: the lake on the porch the Declaration of Independence every

1047
00:59:06,800 --> 00:59:10,600
Speaker 1: single fourth of July, you know, and my poor kids

1048
00:59:10,640 --> 00:59:14,920
Speaker 1: and now grandkids can't start eatingn hamburgers, not dogs until

1049
00:59:15,040 --> 00:59:19,480
Speaker 1: Granddaddy gets through this reading. And whatever you do that

1050
00:59:19,640 --> 00:59:22,720
Speaker 1: makes you happy. My favorite holiday, without a doubt, before

1051
00:59:22,760 --> 00:59:26,480
Speaker 1: this film, before any conversation, has always been the fourth

1052
00:59:26,480 --> 00:59:30,320
Speaker 1: of July followed by Thanksgiving because of the way we

1053
00:59:30,400 --> 00:59:34,120
Speaker 1: come together. So let's have what we always do, that

1054
00:59:34,280 --> 00:59:39,480
Speaker 1: individual thing, but then let's try to imagine it as

1055
00:59:39,560 --> 00:59:42,960
Speaker 1: a larger thing. So if there's an atomic moment on

1056
00:59:43,000 --> 00:59:47,520
Speaker 1: that porch at the lake, what's the solar system of this?

1057
00:59:47,880 --> 00:59:51,840
Speaker 1: And it has to be a kind of righteous re

1058
00:59:51,960 --> 00:59:55,520
Speaker 1: engagement with the principles of our founding. Let's go back

1059
00:59:55,640 --> 00:59:58,160
Speaker 1: and say this is what we meant. And you know,

1060
00:59:58,440 --> 01:00:00,880
Speaker 1: I had screenings of the film before it was done.

1061
01:00:00,920 --> 01:00:02,800
Speaker 1: We're working on it, we're trying to get better, and

1062
01:00:03,280 --> 01:00:05,760
Speaker 1: I go, jeez, there's a lot of red meat for mega.

1063
01:00:05,800 --> 01:00:09,320
Speaker 1: And then I went and said, great, great, you know

1064
01:00:09,920 --> 01:00:12,280
Speaker 1: this is it. You know, there's these over mountain men

1065
01:00:12,360 --> 01:00:16,080
Speaker 1: in the Carolinas that are have defied the British proclamation

1066
01:00:16,160 --> 01:00:18,120
Speaker 1: that you can't cross the Appalachians, and they just said

1067
01:00:18,240 --> 01:00:20,520
Speaker 1: f you and went over there and started it. And

1068
01:00:20,560 --> 01:00:22,880
Speaker 1: then when the British said, unless you do this, this,

1069
01:00:22,920 --> 01:00:25,200
Speaker 1: and this, we will come over and make your lives unpleasant,

1070
01:00:25,240 --> 01:00:27,520
Speaker 1: they go, oh, yeah, we're coming over and making your

1071
01:00:27,520 --> 01:00:31,080
Speaker 1: life unpleasant. So you know, where you did not want

1072
01:00:31,120 --> 01:00:33,760
Speaker 1: to be in the Revolution was New Jersey because it's

1073
01:00:34,080 --> 01:00:38,720
Speaker 1: gorilla warfare and it's patriots killing loyalists and loyalists killing patriots.

1074
01:00:39,160 --> 01:00:44,640
Speaker 1: Or South Carolina, particularly where it's just unjust fettered slaughter.

1075
01:00:44,680 --> 01:00:48,840
Speaker 1: But there's some battles in which big battles King's Mountain

1076
01:00:49,000 --> 01:00:51,919
Speaker 1: cut over the border in North Carolina, in which there's

1077
01:00:51,960 --> 01:00:55,160
Speaker 1: only one British officer. He's leading the loyalists, and everybody

1078
01:00:55,200 --> 01:00:57,640
Speaker 1: else is an American killing an American. And so I

1079
01:00:57,680 --> 01:01:02,160
Speaker 1: think we have to just disenthrall ourselves, as Lincoln said,

1080
01:01:02,200 --> 01:01:05,920
Speaker 1: of this obsession with the other, and understand how if

1081
01:01:05,960 --> 01:01:08,440
Speaker 1: you want to get things done. You know, you're not

1082
01:01:08,520 --> 01:01:12,960
Speaker 1: making America great again. You're making America great going forward.

1083
01:01:13,040 --> 01:01:17,080
Speaker 1: It's always been great. It has not been diminished except

1084
01:01:17,120 --> 01:01:20,840
Speaker 1: by those moments when we have pretended that our future

1085
01:01:20,920 --> 01:01:27,960
Speaker 1: is in our past. Our future is up ahead, you know,

1086
01:01:28,200 --> 01:01:34,160
Speaker 1: big headline stop. You know, documentary filmmaker says future is

1087
01:01:34,200 --> 01:01:34,919
Speaker 1: ahead of us.

1088
01:01:35,960 --> 01:01:37,280
Speaker 2: It's also inside of us.

1089
01:01:37,320 --> 01:01:39,800
Speaker 4: Decisions that conditions inside of it.

1090
01:01:40,160 --> 01:01:41,200
Speaker 2: You're going to manifest it.

1091
01:01:42,120 --> 01:01:44,200
Speaker 1: You have to manifest it. And I think that there's

1092
01:01:44,240 --> 01:01:47,000
Speaker 1: a way to do it at an individual level. I mean, obviously,

1093
01:01:47,200 --> 01:01:50,280
Speaker 1: our biggest responsibility is how we raise our kids and

1094
01:01:50,360 --> 01:01:53,800
Speaker 1: who we are to our neighbors, you know, the content

1095
01:01:53,880 --> 01:01:58,360
Speaker 1: of our character. Doctor King would say, but it, but it.

1096
01:01:58,440 --> 01:02:02,280
Speaker 1: Then there's a there's a kind of responsibility that we have.

1097
01:02:02,440 --> 01:02:06,680
Speaker 1: It says, however small the orbit of the Solar system is,

1098
01:02:06,960 --> 01:02:10,440
Speaker 1: we have to be engaged in something bigger than ourselves.

1099
01:02:11,520 --> 01:02:15,040
Speaker 4: I love that and Ken before we leave, i'd be remiss.

1100
01:02:16,160 --> 01:02:20,120
Speaker 4: An adjacent topic, though connected to all things ken Burns

1101
01:02:20,680 --> 01:02:24,400
Speaker 4: and the ken Burns Effect. Today is the fiftieth anniversary

1102
01:02:24,560 --> 01:02:29,560
Speaker 4: of the founding of Apple, and I know you've talked

1103
01:02:29,560 --> 01:02:32,120
Speaker 4: in the past, and just, you know, just very briefly,

1104
01:02:32,160 --> 01:02:35,120
Speaker 4: I'm curious, just sort of reflecting on you know, you've

1105
01:02:35,120 --> 01:02:38,640
Speaker 4: said some very very generous things about Steve Jobs, though

1106
01:02:39,200 --> 01:02:42,160
Speaker 4: you weren't generous enough to give in to his requests

1107
01:02:42,160 --> 01:02:43,720
Speaker 4: that you commercialize your support.

1108
01:02:43,960 --> 01:02:47,160
Speaker 1: Well, you know, it was the opposite thing. He called

1109
01:02:47,160 --> 01:02:50,280
Speaker 1: me up in November of two thousand and two and said,

1110
01:02:50,320 --> 01:02:52,160
Speaker 1: will you come and see me. First of all, I

1111
01:02:52,160 --> 01:02:54,160
Speaker 1: didn't believe it was Steve Job. So I went out

1112
01:02:54,200 --> 01:02:56,919
Speaker 1: there and I met him, and he led me into

1113
01:02:56,920 --> 01:02:59,040
Speaker 1: this room with a couple of engineers and he showed

1114
01:02:59,080 --> 01:03:01,000
Speaker 1: me this thing. And I'm still luddite, and it was

1115
01:03:01,040 --> 01:03:04,080
Speaker 1: how you could download your photographs or upload your photographs

1116
01:03:04,080 --> 01:03:06,840
Speaker 1: and pan and zoom kind of like that. I said,

1117
01:03:06,880 --> 01:03:09,440
Speaker 1: oh great, and he said and next month, January of

1118
01:03:09,440 --> 01:03:12,400
Speaker 1: two thousand and three, all Mac computers will have this

1119
01:03:12,600 --> 01:03:15,640
Speaker 1: on it. And I said, wow, that's great. Basically, going

1120
01:03:16,040 --> 01:03:18,360
Speaker 1: I have no idea really what he's talking about. And

1121
01:03:18,440 --> 01:03:20,840
Speaker 1: he says, and so we'd like to keep the working title,

1122
01:03:20,840 --> 01:03:22,439
Speaker 1: and I said, oh, okay, what's that? And he goes

1123
01:03:22,600 --> 01:03:24,720
Speaker 1: the ken Burns evac and I go, I don't do

1124
01:03:24,800 --> 01:03:28,840
Speaker 1: commercial endorsements, and he goes, what, go back to his office.

1125
01:03:28,880 --> 01:03:31,520
Speaker 1: We spent about an hour in which we became friends,

1126
01:03:31,880 --> 01:03:34,560
Speaker 1: and whenever I was in Silicon Valley, I would stay

1127
01:03:34,560 --> 01:03:37,240
Speaker 1: at his house and sleep in his guest bedroom. And

1128
01:03:37,280 --> 01:03:40,360
Speaker 1: we eventually took his famous daughter Lisa as an intern

1129
01:03:40,400 --> 01:03:43,320
Speaker 1: and got to know his wife and his smaller kids.

1130
01:03:43,360 --> 01:03:47,880
Speaker 1: And you know, it was wonderful walk endlessly walking to dinner,

1131
01:03:47,920 --> 01:03:52,800
Speaker 1: even when he was sick into Palolato from his home.

1132
01:03:53,680 --> 01:03:55,600
Speaker 1: But I walked out of the room an hour later,

1133
01:03:55,680 --> 01:03:57,840
Speaker 1: not just with that friendship, but with a commitment that

1134
01:03:57,880 --> 01:04:03,640
Speaker 1: Apple continued to honor of giving software and hardware to nonprofits,

1135
01:04:04,880 --> 01:04:07,200
Speaker 1: which was the only way I could sort of handle it.

1136
01:04:07,240 --> 01:04:09,520
Speaker 1: And he just couldn't conceive a bit. And it's so

1137
01:04:09,600 --> 01:04:11,640
Speaker 1: funny that when I tell the story, people say, oh,

1138
01:04:11,640 --> 01:04:14,040
Speaker 1: you should have asked him for, like, you know, a

1139
01:04:14,080 --> 01:04:15,880
Speaker 1: tenth of a penny every time we use I said,

1140
01:04:16,200 --> 01:04:19,880
Speaker 1: you don't know, Steve Jobs he would have said, we'll

1141
01:04:19,880 --> 01:04:22,080
Speaker 1: call it the pain and zoom effect, goodbye, right, and

1142
01:04:22,120 --> 01:04:26,440
Speaker 1: I but what he respected was somebody who was just

1143
01:04:26,560 --> 01:04:29,920
Speaker 1: outside him saying, at one point he came to me

1144
01:04:29,960 --> 01:04:31,960
Speaker 1: and he says, he calls me up, and he goes,

1145
01:04:32,120 --> 01:04:34,560
Speaker 1: you don't you're not You're not doing this right. You're

1146
01:04:34,600 --> 01:04:37,280
Speaker 1: you're being taken advantage of. And he said, I want

1147
01:04:37,320 --> 01:04:39,760
Speaker 1: your lawyer to talk to my lawyer about your your

1148
01:04:39,880 --> 01:04:43,680
Speaker 1: PBS deals because I'm in PBS and and they're outside

1149
01:04:43,680 --> 01:04:47,080
Speaker 1: the marketplace, right, And and then he came back he said, oh,

1150
01:04:47,160 --> 01:04:49,360
Speaker 1: looks like you're doing like you've got the right thing.

1151
01:04:49,440 --> 01:04:51,320
Speaker 1: And I said, look, all he want is to be independent.

1152
01:04:51,360 --> 01:04:53,480
Speaker 1: I want to be able to talk to you or

1153
01:04:53,680 --> 01:04:57,160
Speaker 1: the governor of California and say, all of these films

1154
01:04:57,200 --> 01:04:59,840
Speaker 1: are director's cuts. There's not a layer of suits above

1155
01:04:59,880 --> 01:05:03,400
Speaker 1: me there saying longer, shorter, sexier, or less sexier. You're

1156
01:05:03,400 --> 01:05:06,720
Speaker 1: more violent, less violent. But that another way. Let me

1157
01:05:06,760 --> 01:05:08,560
Speaker 1: just put it this way. If you don't like any

1158
01:05:08,600 --> 01:05:11,720
Speaker 1: of those films, it's all my fault. And that's what

1159
01:05:11,800 --> 01:05:15,040
Speaker 1: I wanted to be. You know, I love it.

1160
01:05:15,120 --> 01:05:18,160
Speaker 4: Hey, Ken, just just very briefly, just previewing you you

1161
01:05:18,280 --> 01:05:19,920
Speaker 4: mentioned a couple of films you're working on.

1162
01:05:19,960 --> 01:05:21,840
Speaker 2: I mean, I think there's an LBJ film as well.

1163
01:05:21,880 --> 01:05:24,120
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, well, yeah, we're doing LBJ in the

1164
01:05:24,120 --> 01:05:26,240
Speaker 1: Great Society. You know, we'd done the Vietnam thing. And

1165
01:05:26,360 --> 01:05:29,800
Speaker 1: lbj's liked Nixon, one of these great tragic figures. But

1166
01:05:30,240 --> 01:05:33,120
Speaker 1: his domestic agenda, he was trying to be the next

1167
01:05:33,120 --> 01:05:35,840
Speaker 1: coming of FDR. In fact, he chooses the initials because

1168
01:05:35,880 --> 01:05:39,200
Speaker 1: the first person who ever had initials in a big

1169
01:05:39,240 --> 01:05:43,040
Speaker 1: way to the population was FDR. And so here's LBJ

1170
01:05:43,640 --> 01:05:48,440
Speaker 1: and that that was an interesting thing, and it's we

1171
01:05:48,560 --> 01:05:51,040
Speaker 1: take care of his domestic agenda in one sentence in

1172
01:05:51,040 --> 01:05:53,920
Speaker 1: in eighteen hour film, ten episodes in Vietnam, So we

1173
01:05:54,000 --> 01:05:57,200
Speaker 1: wanted to reverse engineer, to pull the sweater inside out

1174
01:05:57,360 --> 01:06:00,360
Speaker 1: and be inside the White House. Watch the guns of

1175
01:06:00,360 --> 01:06:03,640
Speaker 1: of Vietnam get louder and louder. But see this extraordinary

1176
01:06:03,720 --> 01:06:07,200
Speaker 1: domestic achievement. He's able to pass the civil rights bill

1177
01:06:07,240 --> 01:06:09,720
Speaker 1: that John F. Kennedy, who's very late to civil rights,

1178
01:06:09,760 --> 01:06:12,360
Speaker 1: probably couldn't get passed, and of voting rights. And he

1179
01:06:12,400 --> 01:06:14,960
Speaker 1: knew as a Southerner what the cost would be. And

1180
01:06:15,000 --> 01:06:18,720
Speaker 1: I think to be able to shed from waking up

1181
01:06:19,240 --> 01:06:22,640
Speaker 1: on election day and knowing you had every former state

1182
01:06:22,680 --> 01:06:25,640
Speaker 1: of the Confederacy on your pocket is not necessarily the

1183
01:06:25,680 --> 01:06:28,360
Speaker 1: best thing you want to be in, because you're dealing

1184
01:06:28,400 --> 01:06:32,280
Speaker 1: with people who are continued to perpetuate the lost cause.

1185
01:06:33,240 --> 01:06:35,760
Speaker 1: And then he does all this other Medicare and medicaid,

1186
01:06:35,760 --> 01:06:38,880
Speaker 1: public broadcasting, all these things that are sort of under hisself.

1187
01:06:38,920 --> 01:06:41,200
Speaker 1: But it's an amazing story, so we're just doing that.

1188
01:06:41,240 --> 01:06:44,400
Speaker 1: We're also doing history of reconstruction called Emancipation to Exodus.

1189
01:06:44,840 --> 01:06:49,000
Speaker 1: I've had the privilege of interviewing Barack Obama eight times,

1190
01:06:49,000 --> 01:06:51,280
Speaker 1: eight two hour, hour and a half two hour interviews.

1191
01:06:52,120 --> 01:06:56,200
Speaker 1: No rush, We want to wait until there's scholarship and whatever.

1192
01:06:56,240 --> 01:06:58,920
Speaker 1: And we also are saving a couple of interviews to

1193
01:06:59,000 --> 01:07:02,000
Speaker 1: sort of think about what happened after his presidency and

1194
01:07:02,080 --> 01:07:04,680
Speaker 1: until the dust settles a bit, it's going to be

1195
01:07:04,680 --> 01:07:07,080
Speaker 1: hard to talk about it. We've also been filming people

1196
01:07:07,080 --> 01:07:09,000
Speaker 1: who knew doctor King in the service of a big

1197
01:07:09,000 --> 01:07:12,440
Speaker 1: biography on King, so those are very much active, and

1198
01:07:12,480 --> 01:07:15,440
Speaker 1: we've just begun work on a big history. We originally

1199
01:07:15,680 --> 01:07:17,919
Speaker 1: thought for years we do something on the Cold War,

1200
01:07:18,320 --> 01:07:20,760
Speaker 1: and I just switched it about a year ago or

1201
01:07:20,800 --> 01:07:23,120
Speaker 1: six months ago in my mind to doing a history

1202
01:07:23,120 --> 01:07:28,480
Speaker 1: of the CIA, and it's just think about it. You'll

1203
01:07:28,480 --> 01:07:31,080
Speaker 1: get the Cold War, but you'll get all the intimacies

1204
01:07:31,120 --> 01:07:35,000
Speaker 1: of the stories, and you'll be in every president's oval office,

1205
01:07:35,040 --> 01:07:38,920
Speaker 1: and you'll be, you know, in exotic places all around

1206
01:07:38,960 --> 01:07:41,840
Speaker 1: the world with people who are putting their life on

1207
01:07:41,880 --> 01:07:48,640
Speaker 1: their lines and big mistakes, huge mistakes, and heroic, unsung successes.

1208
01:07:49,160 --> 01:07:52,160
Speaker 1: And you know, that's the essence of a good story, right.

1209
01:07:52,960 --> 01:07:54,800
Speaker 2: In, an essence of the hell of a life. Ken,

1210
01:07:54,880 --> 01:07:58,560
Speaker 2: look at you, I mean decades of where I mean

1211
01:07:58,720 --> 01:08:00,959
Speaker 2: so that you are not slowing down.

1212
01:08:01,440 --> 01:08:03,760
Speaker 1: No, no, no, So I'm seventy two and I'm I'm

1213
01:08:03,880 --> 01:08:05,760
Speaker 1: like an idiot. I've got more on my plate than

1214
01:08:05,760 --> 01:08:08,160
Speaker 1: I've ever had, because you know, if I were given

1215
01:08:08,200 --> 01:08:10,560
Speaker 1: a thousand years to live, which I will not be given,

1216
01:08:10,880 --> 01:08:13,240
Speaker 1: I would not run out of topics in American history.

1217
01:08:13,280 --> 01:08:16,559
Speaker 1: So there's this kind of sense of urgency of like

1218
01:08:17,000 --> 01:08:21,120
Speaker 1: having to get it done. There's so many great stories

1219
01:08:21,160 --> 01:08:21,920
Speaker 1: still to be told.

1220
01:08:22,280 --> 01:08:24,600
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for being such a great storyteller.

1221
01:08:24,640 --> 01:08:27,120
Speaker 4: Thank you for reminding me it's not just arguments that

1222
01:08:27,160 --> 01:08:31,040
Speaker 4: win the day. It is story's story to can move people,

1223
01:08:31,080 --> 01:08:32,200
Speaker 4: and and well.

1224
01:08:32,080 --> 01:08:35,040
Speaker 1: You know, it's a benign trojan horse. You let the

1225
01:08:35,160 --> 01:08:38,240
Speaker 1: story in and it doesn't come out in the middle

1226
01:08:38,240 --> 01:08:40,200
Speaker 1: of the night and slay the populace and burn the

1227
01:08:40,240 --> 01:08:43,880
Speaker 1: city down. It comes out and it has the possibility

1228
01:08:43,920 --> 01:08:47,599
Speaker 1: of offering people, not the binary that doesn't exist in

1229
01:08:47,680 --> 01:08:50,080
Speaker 1: the real world, only in computers at one in a

1230
01:08:50,200 --> 01:08:53,120
Speaker 1: zero and only an immediate thing red state or blues day. Right,

1231
01:08:54,080 --> 01:08:58,320
Speaker 1: So if you've got a complicated story, then you have

1232
01:08:58,400 --> 01:09:01,160
Speaker 1: to begin to understand, like, oh, I have these too,

1233
01:09:02,560 --> 01:09:05,080
Speaker 1: and I can't be I can't be convinced that it's

1234
01:09:05,120 --> 01:09:08,280
Speaker 1: only black or white from what the TV tells me.

1235
01:09:08,320 --> 01:09:10,439
Speaker 1: It's one. It's not one thing or the other. I

1236
01:09:10,520 --> 01:09:14,759
Speaker 1: have inside me these contradictions, these these flaws and these weaknesses.

1237
01:09:14,800 --> 01:09:16,880
Speaker 1: And it makes me a better citizen, makes me a

1238
01:09:16,920 --> 01:09:19,439
Speaker 1: better parent, makes me a better husband or wife, It

1239
01:09:19,479 --> 01:09:22,840
Speaker 1: makes me a better politician, It makes me a better American.

1240
01:09:22,920 --> 01:09:24,240
Speaker 1: And that's all we want.

1241
01:09:25,000 --> 01:09:25,559
Speaker 2: I love it.

1242
01:09:26,320 --> 01:09:32,479
Speaker 4: Ken, thanks for joining us, Thank you, thank you so

1243
01:09:29,560 --> 01:09:29,640
Speaker 4: mu