Joe Rogan Experience #2336 - Ken Burns

Ken Burns 0:00 (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Narrator 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays) All right, we're up. Mr. Burns, pleasure to meet you.

Ken Burns 0:15 It's my pleasure. Thank you.

Joe Rogan 0:16 I'm a huge fan, dude. I've been watching your work for so long, and I've always had so many questions about how a person like you becomes a person like you, how you become the preeminent documentarian of our time. I mean, you have so much work out there. It's really extraordinary. And all of it on PBS, right?

Ken Burns 0:35 Right, all of it, all of it. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:36 Which is also extraordinary.

Ken Burns 0:38 You know, it's the Public Broadcasting Service. It's, uh, the Declaration of Independence applied to communications, just as the national parks, you could say was the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape, like, like manifestations of really American things. It may not seem obvious to us, but it seemed obvious to me that that's where I should go, so I had lots of... You know, I, I headed for the hills out of New York, uh, you know, 46 years ago 'cause I thought I was taking a vow of anonymity and poverty to do this stuff.

Joe Rogan 1:07 (laughs)

Ken Burns 1:07 And I've lived in the same house that I've lived in since then, in the same bedroom for 46 years in this tiny little village in, in New Hampshire. And when the first film was nominated for an Academy Award, that was a film called Brooklyn Bridge, everybody said, "Oh, you're coming back to New York. You're going to LA." And I said, "You know, I'm staying here. It's so labor-intensive." And I, I can sit here in front of you and tell you that every single one of my films is a director's cut. I'm not gonna sit here-

Joe Rogan 1:33 Mm.

Ken Burns 1:33 ... and give you an excuse, "Well that one, they, they wouldn't let me do this, or they didn't give me this amount of time." And so I, I could, with the reputation I have, go into a streaming service or a premium cable and say, "I need $30 million to do a history of the Vietnam War." And they'd give it to me.

Joe Rogan 1:49 What would be the-

Ken Burns 1:49 But they wouldn't, they wouldn't give me the 10 and a half years it took me to take.

Joe Rogan 1:52 Oh.

Ken Burns 1:52 You see what I mean?

Joe Rogan 1:53 It's the time.

Ken Burns 1:54 It's the time, and the ability to marinate the ideas, to do the deep dive into the scholarship, to triangulate the various scholarships. As you know better than anybody, there's lots of different viewpoints and perspectives, and you wanna find a way in which you can kind of if, if not average them out, you can find a way in which you can understand them and you can have a c- a conversation, a, a sort of a campfire around which you can discuss the complexity and the undertow of any subject. You pick it, the Brooklyn Bridge, the American Revolution most recently, you know?

Joe Rogan 2:26 How early on did you realize that the only way to get this, like, full autonomy was to, to do it with PBS?

Ken Burns 2:35 Uh, I, I'd like to attribute some consciousness to it, and I honestly can't do it. I, I realize that I was striking out trying to raise funds from folks, and the people who were interested in helping me, like the National Endowment for the, uh, Humanities or, th- this all required me to give it t- for free, as I still do to PBS. And we had foundations and, and that, and so suddenly that dream of being a filmmaker, which I'd had since 12, I wanted to be a filmmaker at 12, of, of the communion of, of strangers in dark rooms, the cinematic experience, is suddenly I had to go, "You know what? It's okay. I'm trading hundreds or maybe thousands of viewers for millions of viewers on a smaller screen, and they're not watching it together but they're, they're having an experience, and I can, I can do something over time." I can do a Civil War series and it can be 11 and a half, 12 hours, and get deep, deep into that experience, or Vietnam, which is 18 hours, 10 episodes, or Country Music, The National Parks, Jazz, Baseball. I mean, there are like 40 different, different things.

Joe Rogan 3:36 American Buffalo.

Ken Burns 3:37 American Buffalo-

Joe Rogan 3:38 Love that.

Ken Burns 3:39 ... most, most recently, and Leonardo da Vinci, the first non-American topic, or just finishing the American Revolution, is just, it was right for me. It, it was right for me, and I like the fact that they have, PBS, has one foot in the marketplace, and the, and the, and the other out.

Joe Rogan 3:56 Mm.

Ken Burns 3:56 You know, the f- that foot is tentatively there, and so it also reaches all parts of the country. It's the largest network in the country, 330 stations, and they really serve rural stations mostly. It's not this Upper West Side, Nob Hill, snobby kind of thing.

Joe Rogan 4:13 Mm.

Ken Burns 4:13 It's Homeland Security and crop reports and weather and, uh, continuing education and classroom of the air as well as children's programming and what I think is a pretty damn good primetime schedule, you know? So it, it, it works in the context of all of America, not just some of America.

Joe Rogan 4:31 So was this sort of a fortuitous sort of a thing that you came to be-

Ken Burns 4:36 I think so. I mean-

Joe Rogan 4:36 ... cooperative with them?

Ken Burns 4:37 ... the filmmaking thing was born in tragedy. My mom got cancer when I was two years old. There was never a moment when she wasn't dying that I was aware. She died when I was 11, a few months short of my, my 12th birthday, and, um, my dad had a pretty tough curfew for my younger brother and me, but he forgave it if there was a movie on TV that might go till 1:00 AM on a school night, a school night. Or he'd take me out to the, you know, the cinema and see like Old Silence or French New Wave that was happening in, in the mid-'60s. And I saw my dad cry for the first time. He didn't cry when she was dying, didn't cry when she died, didn't cry at this impossibly sad funeral, but we were watching this movie called Odd Man Out by Sir Carol Reed, um, about the Irish troubles in the 19, th- 19 teens and '20s, James Mason, you know, very tragic, and, and I saw him cry, and I got it immediately. I just went that provided him with this safe haven-

Joe Rogan 5:35 Mm.

Ken Burns 5:36 ... to express himself in a way nothing in his life, for whatever reasons, for his own psychology, his own history, his own traumas, his own whatever it is, he didn't pre- And I said, "That's what I want to do." And it, and it wasn't about sentimentality or nostalgia. It was about authentic emotional stuff, higher emotional stuff, the way our founders would talk about we'd be able to create a republic where you'd have higher emotions. Nothing sentimental about it, it's, it's that you would just get closer, be more virtuous.

Ken Burns 6:06 And so I, I said... And that meant-... you know, I was gonna be Alfred Hitchcock, or John Ford, or Howard Hawks, you know, big Hollywood directors. And I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which was a brand new experimental school, came in its second year in 1971. And all of the teachers there were social documentary still photographers and filmmakers, and they reminded me, correctly, that there is as much drama in what is and what was as anything the human imagination makes up, right?

Joe Rogan 6:36 Mm.

Ken Burns 6:36 And so, fiction's fine, but all of a sudden, my molecules are rearranged again. I'm no longer just a filmmaker going to hopefully go to Hollywood. I'm now a documentary filmmaker, and all of that merged with this latent... Joe, I, I don't know how to describe it, love of my country and its history. I mean, where everybody else growing up was reading novels, and, and stuff like that, I was reading encyclopedias, and reading histories, and trying to get at some aspect of who we are. And I think every single film that I've made has asked the same question, "Who are we? Who are those strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans? And what does an investigation of the past tell us about not only where we've been, but where we are and where we may be going?" Which is the great gift of history. It's the best teacher we have, a- as you know.

Joe Rogan 7:26 One of the more fascinating things about documentary work, and particularly your work, is it provides this entertainment pathway to education, where it's engrossing, and gripping, and fascinating, and it's really well edited, and there's music, and, and there's recreations of these scenes. And it makes becoming educated fascinating.

Ken Burns 7:52 Yes.

Joe Rogan 7:52 It, it makes it exciting, where instead of the stale, boring classrooms a lot of children face, if they could be exposed to something like your piece on Vietnam-

Ken Burns 8:03 Right.

Joe Rogan 8:03 ... w- was it 18 hours?

Ken Burns 8:04 18 hours.

Joe Rogan 8:05 18 hours.

Ken Burns 8:05 10, 10 episodes, yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:06 I mean, that, that piece on Vietnam is so fascinating. It's, it's so incredible, and, uh, to see those, the people that survived it, ex- express... So, like, there's this one moment where one of the guys is realizing that they're about... And he, it's just, it's a very simple statement. He goes, "Okay, here we go. We're going to war." And you could just see it in his face, him recalling that, and you're like, you don't get that from the written word. Seeing that man's face, him recounting it-

Ken Burns 8:37 And you don't get it from churning it out either, so I-

Joe Rogan 8:39 Right.

Ken Burns 8:39 ... spent five and a half years working on the Civil War, and I really was, like, daunted by it. But the first... All of the first five or six films that I've made... The Brooklyn Bridge wouldn't have been built without this new metal called steel, which the, the Civil War helped to promote the use of. The second film on the celibate religious sect, the Shakers, uh, wouldn't have declined so precipitously, not because they were celibate. Celibate- celibacy exists in lots of religious traditions. But because a country that had just murdered 650,000 of its own people was not interested, after the Civil War, in the questions of the sole survival in the, in the, uh, intensity that it had before the Civil War. The next film I made was on the Statue of Liberty, and it was originally a gift f- from the French to Mrs. Lincoln to commemorate the survival of the Union despite her husband's ultimate sacrifice. The next film was on Huey Long, the turbulent Southern demagogue. He came from a North Louisiana parish that refused to secede from the Confederacy. I mean, they refused to secede from the Union. They saw the Confederacy, the ownership of slaves, uh, as, as a, as a rich man's cause, and so they became a hotbed of kind of radicalism and populism, and later would spawn this swamp thing called Huey Long. Uh, you know, we made a film on the history of the Congress. Obviously, the most important time in the Congress was when, you know, there were two congresses. One in, in, in, uh, Washington obviously, one in Montgomery, and then later Richmond. And so I began to see the centrality. And after the Civil War was done and it was really just brought to life by those voices of the people that... What you're talking about. "Well, well, here we go." You're like-

Joe Rogan 10:14 Yeah.

Ken Burns 10:15 ... we didn't want to do another film on war. The guys both North and South who'd been in it, who said, "Here we go," were... They said they'd seen the elephant. That's how they described it. They said they'd seen the elephant. I assume it was the most exotic thing they could think of. That's what combat was, something that no one else experiences-

Joe Rogan 10:34 Mm-hmm.

Ken Burns 10:34 ... seeing the elephant. And we, just even removed from it, we're just looking at still photographs, still got us to our core, and we just sort of said, "We're not gonna do any more war films." And then, at the end of the '90s, The Civil War came out in 1990, the end of the '90s, we were working on lots of things, baseball and jazz, and biographies on Frank Lloyd Wright, and Lewis and Clark, and, and Mark Twain, and all sorts of stuff, Jack Johnson later on. I heard that lots of graduating seniors, high school students walking off the podium with their diploma, think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War, and-

Joe Rogan 11:08 (laughs)

Ken Burns 11:09 ... that a thousand veterans, American veterans, of the Second World War were dying each day in America. And I was like, "Fuck, you know, the, uh, uh, uh, h- we're losing them." And, and by the way, that figure today is so small. It's just actuarially true that it's not a thousand anymore. It's maybe five or six today, and p- pretty soon, it will be nobody, and there will be no memory. And so I wanted to make a film about that. Before the ink was di- dry on the World War II film, I said, "We're doing Vietnam."

Joe Rogan 11:40 Mm.

Ken Burns 11:40 And before the ink was dry, meaning re-locking it, and we're mixing it, and doing all the stuff we have to do, ten and a half years on Vietnam, uh, it came out in, in September of '17. In, in d- December of '15, Barack Obama still has 13 months left in his presidency, I said, "We're doing the Revolution," and I am now speaking to you where we are almost done with it. We're still mixing. We're still mastering. We're still on-lining-

Joe Rogan 12:08 Wow.

Ken Burns 12:08 ... some stuff. But what it allowed us to do in all of the cases of all of the war is get exactly at that thing that you're talking about. What is...What actually takes place in war? What is this thing? Like... Life is vivified to a- to an extent that we can't describe. Like, our imminent death right now as we speak is not a possibility. But if we're on the front lines, it is at any moment. And life is vivified. We understand why people come home and can't compartmentalize it. We understand why people have problems. We're amazed at the people who- who don't. It obviously brings out the worst. We're the most dangerous species on this planet, clearly, um, but it brings out the best, right? And it- and it's- it's worth pursuing. And I think particularly when you take... Most recently, we spent so many years studying the American Revolution. We- we kind of accept the violence of the Civil War. We accept the violence of the 20th century wars. But the American Revolution, you know, they're in breaches and they're in- in- in- in stockings and they have wigs and the ideas are too important. We don't want to admit that this was as bloody per capita as our Civil War, that it was in fact a civil war in ways that even our civil war wasn't. Our civil war was a sectional war, North and South. And that we were forged in violence. And it's okay. Those ideas, those big ideas that we seemingly want to protect by like putting it a bug in amber, you know, guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, it doesn't in any way get diminished. In fact, it- it enlarges. It makes them more inspiring and more exhilarating, the understanding that what happened when our country was formed is one of the most important events in the entire history of humankind. I mean, you and I were talking about some of the punctuated equilibriums of comets or meteors or striking this, you know, ice ages. I mean, Ecclesiastes, the Old Testament says there's nothing new under the sun. There w- And I agree with it. Human nature doesn't change, but for a few minutes, right here, we started something that was brand new. Thomas Paine said we're like not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to- to do this. And so we've just plowed ourselves into hearing not just those top-down voices, the bold-faced names that we all know, the Washingtons and the Thomas Paines and the Jeffersons and the- and the, uh, John Adams, but also the people you've never heard of, right? .01% of people have a painting made of them or a drawing. Everybody else is visually anonymous, but somewhere they wrote their name down, somewhere they're in a church record, somewhere they're here, somewhere they wrote a memoir and there it got handed down and so we could bring to life a 14-year-old kid who joins, um, the militia surrounding the British in Cambridge after Lexington and Concord, a 15-year-old who's from Connecticut who fights during the war, a 10-year-old girl who's, you know, from 10 to 16, uh, from Yorktown who's a refugee for most of the time as her family's well-to-do circumstances are diminished and she has to be on the road because Yorktown is so vulnerable to attack from British, in addition to all of this.

Joe Rogan 15:23 Mm.

Ken Burns 15:24 And who are the Native players? Who are the Black players? Who are the for- the- the Germans, the hired soldiers? You know, they're real people. Uh, who are the Irish and Scottish and Welsh, uh, grunts of the British army? Who were the generals? Who were the- the diplomats? Uh, who were the French? Uh, and- and- and then if you charge yourself with that, you can't turn that out in- in a year and a half.

Joe Rogan 15:47 Right.

Ken Burns 15:48 You have to spend a decade marinating that stuff, finding out what's too much. What... You know, you don't want to make an encyclopedia. When you started off by talking about entertainment, that- that- that you could make something that is, you know, technically educational, entertaining. This is a good story. I mean, the word history is mostly made up of the word story plus high, which is really- which is a really good way to begin a story, right?

Joe Rogan 16:14 Yeah.

Ken Burns 16:14 High. And then we begin the thing. And so I've tried to treat it as that way. I understand... And PBS is really good, and one of the reasons to stay with them is that they can reach every classroom in the country. So today's a school day in America, and hundreds of classrooms are showing a little bit of the Civil War, a little bit of baseball, a little bit of jazz, Lewis and Clark, the Roosevelts, country music, you name it.

Joe Rogan 16:34 Yeah.

Ken Burns 16:35 And I love that idea that it isn't like broadcast television or even just the release of anything like skywriting, the first breeze and- and then all of a sudden you can't see the words anymore. I like the fact that a film I made 35 years ago in the Civil War is like as durable now as it was then, that's all PBS.

Joe Rogan 16:52 That's amazing. It- it really is. And- and it is so cool that they do show these in classrooms because I think that same moment where you had where you saw your father cry, where it gave him some sort of a vehicle to express emotions that he couldn't show in real life, this will give children a way to be educated but also entertained and it will spark this sort of... It- it gives them a pathway to may- maybe children that are like very bored with school and just can't wait to get out, all of a sudden you have this spark of excitement and a pathway to like, "Maybe education is cool. Like maybe there's something about this that's actually fun."

Ken Burns 17:34 Exactly.

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Ken Burns 18:56 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 18:56 Yeah.

Ken Burns 18:56 And we have let...... a lot of what is fun about it. We've, we've sort of taken history out, we've taken civics out, we don't know about ethics, we don't know about values. We, we've placed everything over into one sort of set of educational prerogatives, forgetting that you want to build, as our founders said, these well-rounded citizens. Remember, we invented that. Everybody up until the point of, of our revolution were subjects, right?

Joe Rogan 19:23 Mm-hmm.

Ken Burns 19:24 And Jefferson says a few phrases, uh, beyond the famous second sentence. He goes, "All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable." Meaning, the whole history of human beings is like, "Okay, I'm gonna be under the boot of an authoritarian. I just, you know, that's my lot. I'm just gonna accept it."

Joe Rogan 19:42 Yeah.

Ken Burns 19:43 And he's going, "No, central to the success of this new thing you are creating, citizens, was the responsibility to educate and to be educated, and to do that your lifelong." In fact, he could've said, Jefferson could've said, "Life, liberty and property." He didn't, he said, "The pursuit of happiness."

Joe Rogan 20:03 Mm.

Ken Burns 20:03 That was not the, the chasing of objects, things, in a marketplace of objects, but it was lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. It was making the story of how we acquire virtue, and they used that word all the time. They imported it from the classical, they went over the Dark Ages, over the Middle Ages, over the medieval period and pulled back from classical times this idea of virtue, of temperance, of tolerance, and all of that. There's a wonderful moment when John Adams, who's the big worrier of The Revolution, he's always worrying, he's saying, "I just don't know if there's, i- if there's enough virtue to have a republic. Everybody's so ambitious and, and so greedy and so out to do this." And so for him, if we were gonna create this new thing, something new under the sun, you know, the world started over again, um, as Thomas Paine is suggesting, "An asylum for mankind," he called it, um, then maybe you had to figure out how to educate your stuff. And so when you go back and say, "What have we lost?" Whether we're just, we're now just repeating, we, are we trying to get to the test or are we trying to make a well-rounded human being? So if I tell you in 1838, there is this lawyer in Springfield, Illinois who is just a few days short of his 29th birthday who is addressing the Young Men's Lyceum on an afternoon, and the topic is foreign policy, and he says, "Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us with a blow?" Then he answered his own question, "Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track in the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a m- nation of free men, we shall live through all time, or die by suicide."

Joe Rogan 22:04 Whoa.

Ken Burns 22:05 You know who said that? That's Abraham Lincoln. He would come the closest to overseeing our near national suicide in the Civil War, but he understood, here you got these two magnificent oceans, big, relatively benign neighbors, north and south, and so what we've been able to do is incubate so many extraordinary things. But we've also been able to incubate lots of less than extraordinary things, and he was saying it's those less than extraordinary things are gonna trip us up or we'll live forever.

Joe Rogan 22:36 Mm.

Ken Burns 22:36 Because if you think about it, the greatest naval invasion in history, you know, June 6th, 1944, D-Day, Normandy, nobody can do that for us. (laughs) Nobody's gonna land at Montauk. Nobody's gonna land at, you know, St. Augustine. Nobody's gonna land at Galveston and, and help us, right? We'll sink or swim by the extent to which we are knowledgeable of and adhere to the blessings that we received from that founding generation. The sacrifice made not by those boldface names, but by the people you've never heard of that we are trying to, to tell you about, the John Greenwood, the 14-year-old fifer, Joseph Plumb Martin, the 15-year-old kid from Connecticut, Betsy Ambler, you know, loyalists too. I mean, we're, we're, we're umpires, you know, we, we call balls and strikes.

Joe Rogan 23:28 Mm-hmm.

Ken Burns 23:28 You know it, being, being a loyalist in the revolution is, is what, what it'd be like saying, "Well, you're conservative, right? Well, you, you think I, I live under the greatest, um, political system, the British constitutional monarchy? Why would I wanna change this great life, this great prosperity I have for this idea that, A, sounds foolhardily and radical, but also B, has zero chance of working out?" Zero chance of working out, right? At Lexington, 250 years ago on April 19th, the chances of the patriots prevailing are zero. And to tell the story of how it went from zero to 100% is scary, violent, complicated, lots of undertow, and as exhilarating as you could possibly imagine.

Joe Rogan 24:19 There's a great line in the, uh, trailer for this piece on the Revolutionary War, we say it's the first war that was fought in history for the unalienable rights.

Ken Burns 24:31 Proclaiming the unalienable rights of all people. Now let's-

Joe Rogan 24:34 Yeah.

Ken Burns 24:34 ... let's be honest, Thomas Jefferson meant all white men of property free of debt, but the words are beautiful, the words are vague, and the door got opened a crack and everybody else put their foot in it.

Joe Rogan 24:45 Mm.

Ken Burns 24:45 Women put their foot in it, the poor, the not l- landed people, the folks, the craftsmen who just had a regular job, Black people, nat- you know, so, and it, it has sponsored revolutions all around the world, democratic revolutions, that...... the greatest thing that we invented was the idea that we could govern ourselves, that we would no longer be under the boot of a, an authoritarian master who had just set himself up, like King George, you know, uh, uh, because of hereditary privilege, you know? He has-

Narrator 25:16 Right.

Ken Burns 25:17 ... his grandfather, and this grandfather, and his father, and his uncle, and, uh, going back. And, and, and, on what basis? Is it talent? Is it, is it, um, showing the things? And so, all these people that we consider the boldface names of our, of our revolution, the Washingtons, and the Jeffersons, and the Patrick Henrys, and the John Adams, and the... They didn't know they were those people.

Narrator 25:42 Mm.

Ken Burns 25:42 Right? (laughs) They didn't-

Narrator 25:43 Right.

Ken Burns 25:43 ... they didn't know there, they were a planter, and they were a businessman, and they were a lawyer, and they were this guy, and a planter, or a scientist. And they were just risking their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for something much bigger than anything else.

Narrator 25:58 And it's also the incredibly complex system of checks and balances they devised to prevent tyranny.

Ken Burns 26:05 Oh, it's so unbelievably beautiful. I can't believe you brought that up. So, y- we have a, a technical problem, which I'll share with you, or I thought it was a technical problem, which is the climax... Uh, if you're making a film called The American Revolution, the climax is the Battle of Yorktown. Happens in October of 1781. The British don't leave New York in, for two more years, until 1783. They're occupying New York, which they took over in the summer of '76. And our Articles of Convention are doing nothing. Y- our Articles of Confederation are doing nothing. They're toothless. They can't be a government. And so in 1787, we have this Constitutional Convention that happens in Philadelphia, four months. They hammer together the shortest Constitution in the world, and it is exactly that. Jefferson's writing in to, from Paris, who, representing the, our interests, going, "But what about this? What about..." They're trying to check the possibility of somebody being, um, a w- somebody who would try to take advantage of the system, and, and rig it to their own benefit. And so all of those elaborately beautiful checks and balances. Article I is the legislative. Article II is the executive. It delineates... Article III, the judicial. It delineates what the responsibilities are, and the way in which the system has worked in fits and starts with lots of problems. And, and, and you know, there's something encouraging about seeing how divided Americans were back then, 'cause we're always wringing our hands, "Oh, we're so divided." Okay, human beings are divided. And, and my, my feeling is that if you s- s- succumb to argument, right, which is what we do. The novelist Richard Powers said, "The best arguments in the world..." And that's all we do is argue, "The best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that," that is to say, change somebody's point of view, "is a good story."

Narrator 28:00 Mm.

Ken Burns 28:01 'Cause a good story allows contradiction and undertow. You can have a George Washington who is complex, flawed, rash, makes terrible tactical decisions on the battlefield. And yet, without him, historian after historian after historian says, "Without him, we don't have a country." And you can take that and put that in the bank, and at the same time understand the dimensions of, we all have feet of clay. We're all flawed in, in some way. And to, to try to design a narrative that isn't, you know, filled with that kind of morning and again, sanitized Madison Avenue kind of view of American history, nor is it that unforgiving revisionism what, that wants to sh- thr- throw out anybody who did something bad back then. You, you then permit a world to exist in which they suddenly seem familiar to you. Like, you can argue with other people and see that you get nowhere. But you also know if you're married, or you have kids, or you have friends, or you're in business, that you actually are more engaged in story, and tolerance, and understanding, and listening. And so part of our job as filmmakers, strangely enough, is not to impose ourselves on the material. As I said before, we're umpires calling balls and strikes. It's to listen to the material. What it, what is it telling us? What is it saying about this circumstances of, say, the resistance in Boston in the early days leading up to the

Ken Burns 29:31 Revolution? To try to understand nuance. Every school kid knows that when the 60 or 70 people, white, uh, all white males, both rich and poor in Boston dumped its 40 tons of tea, 40 tons of tea in the harbor, they were dressed crudely as Native Americans. And if you ask a kid, "Why were they dressed that way?" They'll go, "Well, you know, just to disguise to put the blame on somebody else." It was to say, "We're not part of the mother country anymore."

Narrator 30:01 Really?

Ken Burns 30:02 "We're, we're, we're here. We're aboriginal. We are Americans. We are distinct. We've been having complaints about British citizenship. We're arguing British law. But all of a sudden, those laws have been broken out into natural laws. And we're telling you that we're not trying to blame it on anyone else." Nobody would for a second have thought that the Native Americans would've dumped the tea. They, they weren't burdened by the tea tax. What they were doing was saying, "We are..." And it's so ironic given the history of our relationship to the dispossession of native lands.

Narrator 30:34 Right.

Ken Burns 30:35 They are saying, "We are aboriginal." This is what the scholar, uh-

Narrator 30:38 Wow.

Ken Burns 30:38 ... Phil Deloria says. So yeah, wow, and then you get-

Narrator 30:41 Newly adopted aboriginal.

Ken Burns 30:43 Right. We're saying we're not of the mother country. We're, we're, in essence, kind of filing divorce papers by dressing as the people who originally inhabited this country dressed. Nobody's fooled. Nobody's trying to blame-

Narrator 30:57 How did you figure that out?

Ken Burns 30:58 It, it, it's listening to scholarship. It's thinking w- uh, of course, that you're not going to have... Um, no one in their r- in their right mind is gonna say, "Oh, the Native Americans did it because they're protesting the tea tax." They're not paying the tea tax, right?

Narrator 31:13 Right.

Ken Burns 31:13 (laughs) So it's like...... it's— you then go and then you talk to a scholar, in this case Phil Deloria, who's been studying native stuff, and he goes, "Just think about it. You're dressed crudely as this. You're making a statement to Britain that we are no longer, we're s- we're severing ties." Now this is well before, this is, um, December of 1773. The guns are gonna fire in about 18 months at Lexington, a little bit less than 18 months, at Lexington and Concord on April 19th. But it's, it is all of these little moments that, that lead up to boycott of British goods, women take a huge part of the role of the resistance. You've got people like Samuel Adams, who is a failure as a brewer and a tax collector, it's sort of interesting, you can't make this shit up, um, who is, his whole job is to keep his fellow colonists alive to their grievances. When things calm down, the Brit- Brits sort of retreat, he goes, "Oh, no, no, no. It's just gonna get worse. It's gonna get worse." And so you meet these characters that sound an awful lot like characters that occupy our large media space.

Joe Rogan 32:20 Mm-hmm.

Ken Burns 32:20 And it was occupying the large media space of the colonists from New Hampshire. Uh, I live in a tiny village, the Walpole Gazette was read all the way in Georgia. People exchanged ideas and thought about things and were trying to figure out even as l- late as the, uh, even after, even after Lexington and Concord, even after the Battle of Bunker Hill, which is June of '75, e- even after the, uh, other things that were happening, by early '76, nobody's absolutely, not nobody, but there's not a majority will for independence, independency as they called it. And then Thomas Paine comes in and writes this pamphlet, Common Sense. And all of a sudden people are going, "Oh, yeah." And by June, there's a committee of the Second Continental Congress and Franklin's in charge of it, and there's John Adams is on the committee, and there's a 32-year-old lawyer from Virginia named Thomas Jefferson who's given the first crack at, at, at doing this thing. And what does he write? He writes, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable." And Franklin, who's the old man, the chairman, if you will, of this little committee goes, "Uh-uh. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Joe, there is nothing in the world less self-evident than the idea that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But as someone pointed out, it's the old lawyer's dodge. You know? (laughs) You just, you just tell them (laughs) that it's self-evident, not just sacred and undeniable, lovely phrasing on Jefferson's part. But if you say self-evident, then we're not arguing about this thing. We're saying that everything that you're about to hear is without argument, which is a, like, really in your face bold move. And the intimacy, the human intimacy that gets communicated when you spend even a little amount of time trying to parse this, trying to get at the heart of the dynamics of dumping tea and dressed as Indians or writing these words, um, you know, that mankind are disposed to suffer while evils are suffe- sufferable, meaning, yeah, we've taken it, all this through human history, and guess what? We're not gonna take it anymore.

Joe Rogan 34:31 When they first devised this system of government, what, what were they basing it on? I know part of it was on the Greeks, but, like-

Ken Burns 34:40 (laughs) ... what was the, uh, how did they make it to the point where even today we marvel at it? Yeah. We, it-

Joe Rogan 34:47 250 years later, people go back and, like, "Look what they did."

Ken Burns 34:50 Look what they did.

Joe Rogan 34:50 "This is extraordinary."

Ken Burns 34:51 It's extraordinary. So lots of factors. First of all, it was true what I said. They're, they have experienced at a, at a, at a reserve and at sort of, as somebody said, salutary neglect. There, uh, people didn't pay attention to the colonists and they had learned suddenly they were more literate than their British compatriots, they paid less taxes, uh, and they paid it to local stuff, and they were, um, had land. And, um, most folks in England and Wales and Scotland and Ireland were living dependent lives. They'd worked the land of somebody else for 1,000 years. So they've got this British constitutional monarchy, which is a really strong thing, and King George is not a bad guy. He really does believe that Parliament has this role to play and the House of Lords and the House of Commons, they're, they're, they're kind of the checks and balances that we'd think of. But they're also in the middle of The Enlightenment where they're beginning to say that there are certain rights that are natural. That's the word that I think Jefferson would use. That is to say they are not bestowed by a monarch, they're natural, that all men are created equal. This is big stuff and this is distilling, in Jefferson's words in the Declaration, "a century of enlightenment thinking," and the enlightenment has been a kind of philosophical and human and kind of governmental dynamic that's coming out of the Renaissance, right? We know what the Renaissance is in art, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, you know, all of this stuff, some music. But, but what it's doing on a social scene is it- and a philosophical scene is it's doing that, and they're reaching back to antiquity as you say, and they're pulling back some of the best ideas of, of self-discipline, of, of temperance, of virtue, all of these sorts of things. But then because they've experienced all these years of this misuse and distrust from the mother country 3,000 miles away, takes, you know, at least a month for information to get there. Um, the, the Britain wins with our help what we call the French and Indian War, which was a global war called the Seven Years' War. And they've got now the far- the biggest, most far-flung empire on Earth, but they can't protect its own colonists who are trying to pore over the Appalachians to take Native American land and it's causing......uprisings. And so they say, "You can't go over." 1763. "You can't go over that. And, oh, by the way, we're broke, so we need you to help us to pay for this stuff. But we don't have any representation there." So, native lands, taxation, representation become this thing. And it goes on for so long, they've watched the ineffectiveness of their government while they're prosecuting the Revolution and the ineffectiveness of the Articles of Confederation that emerges from fighting the war and is trying to figure out how to make it work, that they go into that Constitutional Convention and they are determined to figure out every possible angle to forestall authoritarianism, to balance their relationships between the states, to have the checks and balances between the three forms of, of government, the j- judicial, the legislative, and the executive. It, it is a beautiful thing. And what was so incredible is that it fostered one of the greatest public debates ever in human history because they had emerged from this bloody, bloody costly civil war. Civil war means lots of deaths of civilians. That didn't happen in our Civil War except in Missouri and, and a little bit of Kansas. Y- you know, six people died at the Siege of Vicksburg, less than 20 at Atlanta, two in Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in, in North America. But the American Revolution, lots of... There are battles in the South in which you might have one British officer leading loyalist troops. Every person on each side is an American and they're killing each other. And they're doing it not just in set battles but in little guerrilla actions, almost like the Viet Cong attacking patrols in, in South Vietnam. I mean, it is really bad stuff. And so they say, "We're gonna ratify this but we want a Bill of Rights too. We want to enshrine these things that we fought for." And so you have no establishment of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to assemble and, and, and redress w- grievances, uh, right to bear arms, you know, free and fair trial, uh, e- end of cruel and unusual punishment. All these things become the set pieces of... I, I made a film a couple years ago on, um, the US and the Holocaust, what we knew, when we knew it, what we did, what we didn't do, what we, perhaps what we should've done. And I was at some event and somebody raised their hand and said, "Is the Holocaust the most important event since the birth of Jesus Christ in world history?" And I just immediately said, "No. It's the American Revolution." It's the American Revolution. I mean, this is a sea change in the course of human events and, man, we don't know enough about it, we don't know enough of the interiors of it that are complicated. I have in my editing room a neon sign, I've had it for a decade and a half, in cursive, lowercase cursive, it says, "It's complicated."

Joe Rogan 40:04 (laughs)

Ken Burns 40:04 You know? Because there's not a filmmaker on Earth that if, you know, if the scene's working, you don't touch it. But we have, we have spent the last 50 years touching those scenes, right? You know what I mean? Going in, maybe it's lesser but it's truer and it's got more dynamism and it's got more contours. It feels like it's accurate to what actually happened which is more complicated than our sort of simple binary discussions of what history is.

Joe Rogan 40:34 What... It's just... I- it's so hard for people to recognize that that was a civil war.

Ken Burns 40:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:40 'Cause I don't, I think most people think it was the United States colonists against the British.

Ken Burns 40:44 No.

Joe Rogan 40:44 But the separatists and the loyalists battling it out together, I, I think most people are completely unaware of that.

Ken Burns 40:51 Completely unaware. We, we wrote a, for lack of a better word, a topic sentence e- early in the film is that, and I'll, um, might get this slightly wrong, but the am- the American Revolution was not just a dispute between Englishmen over Indian land, taxation, and representation, but a bloody struggle that involved more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American, that somehow came still to represent some of the highest aspirations of humankind.

Joe Rogan 41:22 Mm.

Ken Burns 41:23 So, so our, ours is like, the fourth global war over the prize of North America and they're na- and we're treating native nations not as them but as distinct entities. The, the Shawnee, for example, in the middle of the 18th Century, 1750, are as important an entity on the world trading stage with French or British or others as, say, the State of Virgin- or the Colony of Virginia is at that time.

Joe Rogan 41:50 Really?

Ken Burns 41:50 And that they're different from the Delawares, their allies, and they're different from the Haudenosaunee, the I- Iroquois Confederacy, the six, five and then it was six tribes, the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Tuscarora, the Oneida, and the Mohawk. And I've just walked from west, western New York State all the way into New England, right? And up into Canada. And they had formed a union of their own that had operated, a democracy that had operated for centuries that had allowed the independence of each of these separate nations, states, and yet yielded to the larger thing when their interests were threatened, so essentially with regard to foreign policy. And Franklin looks at this and goes, 1754 he goes, "Wow, this is a great idea. We should be doing this." He's been the postmaster, he's tra- he's the only person who's been to New Hampshire and he's been to, to Georgia and all the places in between. He said, "We should do this." And he calls a conference in Albany and he's got a picture of a cut up snake above the dire warning, "Join or die." And they pass, seven of the thirteen colonies attend and they pass this thing called The Albany Plan of Union in 1754 and then they go home to try to sell it.

Joe Rogan 43:08 Wow.

Ken Burns 43:08 And none of the states take it 'cause no one wants to, uh, none of the colonies take it 'cause no one wants to give up their autonomy, so the plan dies. But 20 years later, "Join or die" is the war cry in the most consequential revolution in, in, in history.

Joe Rogan 43:22 Wow.

Ken Burns 43:22 Isn't that great? So you're-

Joe Rogan 43:24 That's amazing.

Ken Burns 43:24 ... you're taking the Native American riffing on that and then as you're form-... forming this, you're bringing in what you've had and inherited for dec- uh, centuries of British constitutional monarchy, and you're borrowing from the new Enlightenment things. And you've got biblical references and classical references having to do with the conduct of individuals and personal responsibility. All of these just utterly American, but, but also been out there forever. And we end up with what we have, which is this, you know, glorious, wonderful, but also dysfunctional (laughs) republic.

Joe Rogan 43:59 Yeah. It's terrible, but it's the best one out there.

Ken Burns 44:01 It is the best one out there, yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:03 (laughs) .

Ken Burns 44:03 That's exactly right.

Joe Rogan 44:04 When you, when you started this project, so you have this idea to start this project, what was your understanding of the Revolutionary War, uh, versus what is it like when you really delve into the material and you start to formulate a, a plan for this documentary series? Like, how much did you know about it when you first started?

Ken Burns 44:25 I'm pretty well-versed in American history, but nothing. I mean, like I, I, I've worked on two films where I made the mistake of thinking, "Oh, I know about this subject." Uh, baseball and Vietnam, 'cause I was a R- I was grow, grew up in the '60s and I went through it. I lived on a college campus. I knew all the stuff, I thought. Was at college as the war was winding down, and I love baseball. Every day of both those productions were daily humiliations of what I didn't know. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:52 Wow.

Ken Burns 44:52 And so what happens is you come in with a humility that I wish to know. And rather than tell you what I know, the last time I checked that's called homework, we would rather share with you our process of discovery. "Joe, you cannot believe what we just found out. Can I just s- uh, can I use these, these, these mugs to tell you how Daniel Morgan won the Battle of Cowpens against Banastre Tarleton in, in, in South Carolina just below the North Carolina border? And he trusts th- his militia who are unreliable. 'Please just fire twice,' the first line of militia, 'and then you can retreat, then you can run, but please promise me you'll fire twice.' And the second line of militia, my more inex- inexperience, 'Please just fire twice and then run behind the third line,' which are these scraggly kids, teenagers, felons, ne'er-do-wells, second and third sons without the chance of, uh, of a, um, of an inheritance, um, recent immigrants from Ireland and, and Germany, and they stopped the British." So Tarleton goes, "Oh, they're f- they're doing what all the militias do. They're retreating, they're retreating, they're retreating." And then the third line comes up and, uh, and they go after them and they, h- the, the Americans actually attack, which is very rare, an attacking, uh, thing to drive into the British line. Tarleton gets away, but a huge part of Cornwallis' army has been diminished. And they're uttering this war cry that they have, um, adapted from the Cherokee, from Native American tribes, which is a yell that will reverberate in Southern battlefields for decades.

Joe Rogan 46:26 Wow.

Ken Burns 46:27 Wow is right. And like, I can take... I mean, look, there's Lexington and Concord, and then maybe somebody says Bunker Hill, which is really Breed's Hill, Bunker Hill too, and then maybe Trenton, he takes over, he surprises them on Christmas night. And then maybe some people know that Saratoga is the surrender of an entire British army that f- gives the French the confidence to come in on our side and give us, uh, the equivalent of $30 billion plus Navy and, and soldiers. Um, and then there's Yorktown. But there are dozens of battles that we don't tell you about. Like, Germantown is a wonderful thing. The Battle of Brandywine. What's the largest battle in the entire... The largest battle is the Battle of Long Island. George Washington makes a terrible blunder, a tactical blunder. He leaves his left flank exposed, and the British see it and they completely surround him. And then a year later at Brandywine, he leaves his right flank s- uh, exposed, and they go around. He's not the greatest tactician, but he is f- the man of the time. This leadership, this ability to understand subordinate talent, this, this, this reserve, this kind of confidence. I mean, you cannot come away from this without extraordinary admiration for this person, without whom we don't have a country. We just literally don't have a country.

Joe Rogan 47:47 Which is so crazy when you think of, like, pivotal figures in human history, that this one person, were they not born, were they not in that position at that time...

Ken Burns 47:56 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 47:56 ... extraordinary circumstances, unusual character...

Ken Burns 47:59 We have w- a historian. The only time really in the film that any of our talking heads break the fourth wall. You know, we don't have, we don't have first person voices. I mean, we don't have w- witnesses.

Joe Rogan 48:09 Right.

Ken Burns 48:09 We have f- hundreds of first person voices, but we have some scholars and writers who are on the thing, and there's, uh, one Christopher Brown who just shakes his head and he goes, like, "Uh, I, I'm not a, you know, big fan of the great man theory of history or interpretation of history, but let's put it this way. I don't see how the United States survives without Washington's leadership." And it's this wonderful moment in which you go, "Right, we don't have to throw out the heroes in order to do that." More often than not, we sort of elevated these people to a supernatural position that they don't really necessarily deserve. He deserves it (laughs) , and yet he's also deeply flawed, f- feets of clay as I said, and that's to me what makes a good story. Like, how is it that he can be tactically so wrong in two extraordinary places? He's also very rational. He runs out at Kips Bay, which is halfway up Manhattan. After he's lost the Battle of Long Island, he's now abandoning, uh, New York, uh, or he's taking a good number of, uh, of his men up to Harlem. And at Kips Bay, which is sort of Midtown on the East River, there's a battle and, and we're just being rolled up. And he comes charging onto the battlefield, and his aides are going crazy and they're grabbing the reins of his horse. He's gonna be killed. If he's killed, that's it, right? And then later on at the Battle of Princeton, he does the same thing and, and one aide puts his hands over his face thinking, "I cannot watch my commander in chief be killed." And in the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse in New Jersey, he rides out and just his very presence turns what is a retreat of, of, of Continental soldiers and militiamen...... into s- steading their lines and, and basically holding their own against the prime, the elite of the British army. And it's, where does that come from? Where... Who, who does that? How did we do... And from the very beginning, everybody knew you needed a Virginian. The New Englanders, where the war start... The war is a, is a symphony in three movements, right? The, the New England is the first movement, central states, and then the southern states. And there is a sense early on when after Lexington and Concord, where we've driven the British back into Boston, and they've got w- ways to get in but they can't get out, um, besides by ship, um, that we need a real army. And an army is formed, and it is very obvious from the very start that there could be no other person than George Washington. The New Englanders want a, a Virginian. It's the most populous, it's the richest state. Um, and they know this person has been around since he's a 22-year-old militia officer who probably fires the first shot in the French and Indian War.

Joe Rogan 50:50 Wow.

Ken Burns 50:50 That starts the global conflict that everyone else on Earth calls the Seven Years' War that will set the stage for the American Revolution. And then, he acts bravely in many other situations, and he is denied a commission in the British Army. And he's like, "F you." You know?

Joe Rogan 51:07 Wow.

Ken Burns 51:07 And then he go... And then if... A- and he's a speculator in Native American land that he doesn't own. He wants to sell to new colonists. And when the British put the line of demarcation in 1763 that separates, says, "You can't go over 'cause we can't afford to protect you," he's now pissed again. And then, he's still this voice of reason that arrives in Philadelphia, just poised, and people look to him for leadership. He's very good at picking out, you know, that guy has got great... He's got great executive, uh, function and great ability to pick subordinates without fear of being overshadowed. One of his great generals, Nathanael Greene. Another great general, Benedict Arnold. And we introduce Benedict Arnold in the opening seconds of our first, uh, uh, our second episode, and it isn't until you're a third of the way through the sixth and last episode that you go, "Uh-oh."

Joe Rogan 51:57 (laughs)

Ken Burns 51:57 You know? But he's a hero at, at Quebec City. He's a hero at the Battle of, of Saratoga. He's been painted out of most of the paintings because he became Benedict Arnold.

Joe Rogan 52:07 It's such a fascinating...

Ken Burns 52:07 But isn't it nice to know that he's that great...

Joe Rogan 52:09 Yeah.

Ken Burns 52:10 ... a general before he becomes Benedict Arnold?

Joe Rogan 52:12 That term, when I was a child, when I was in school, a Benedict Arnold was a traitor.

Ken Burns 52:17 Meant a... A traitor.

Joe Rogan 52:18 I think that's gone now. I think if I brought that up to my children, and I said, "Do you know what a Benedict Arnold is?"

Ken Burns 52:23 Oh, God. They'd, they'd say it was a mixture of, uh...

Joe Rogan 52:26 (laughs) It's like an Arnold Palmer.

Ken Burns 52:27 It's like an Arnold Palmer. (laughs) It's a mixture of iced tea and lemonade, yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:30 (laughs)

Ken Burns 52:30 And you know what? That's so terrifying to me.

Joe Rogan 52:32 Weird, right?

Ken Burns 52:32 And I'm... No. It's, it's what happens when you atrophy this interest in American history, or you think...

Joe Rogan 52:38 Yeah.

Ken Burns 52:38 ... that it can be so simplified that you don't have to do anything. I'm... That's my job.

Joe Rogan 52:43 Yeah.

Ken Burns 52:43 I mean, I love it, and I love the fact that we can bring back these things for people and they can, they can experience... And there isn't a person in the country that's listening to me now or that we're going, you know, 35 different cities all around the country talking about this. We made it for everybody. This is not made for the eighth grader taking American history or the eleventh grader making this.

Joe Rogan 53:05 Right.

Ken Burns 53:05 It's for you.

Joe Rogan 53:06 Right, right.

Ken Burns 53:07 It's for anybody who cares about where their country came from and is willing to say, "I probably don't know the full dimensions of this."

Joe Rogan 53:17 It's probably impossible to teach it in the way that you can in a documentary. I think it's the most effective form of expressing these things. I mean, obviously there's some things that can be documented in books, numbers, dates, history, that, that would be kind of cumbersome to certain documentaries because it would interfere with the flow of the entertainment aspect of it. But in terms of absorption, in terms of stimulation and absorption, human beings are much more inclined to, uh, take it through one of your long pieces, like the Vietnam one, the 18-hour piece.

Ken Burns 53:52 That's exactly right. I think what happens is that... It's so interesting 'cause we understand, as, as you're referencing, the power of a book, still the greatest mechanical, uh, invention there is, that it, it, it can go into some depths that documentary do. But a documentary can hold lots of different opposing points of view. Not make them arguments, but allow people to have different points of view and sort of collect, almost like spokes in the wheel. You want to get to the hub. That's the, that's what, whatever it is that you're after. But the wheel is much stronger by all those spokes, and unfortunately, the... Too often in history or in teaching, we subscribe to one particular theory of history, right? That it's gotta be this or it's gotta be that. Um, and what we've done is we've, we've found the documentary and the storytelling aspects of it hugely, hugely valuable in communicating the complexity of the subject...

Joe Rogan 54:45 Mmm.

Ken Burns 54:46 ... without putting your thumb on the scale and making a political point.

Joe Rogan 54:49 Right.

Ken Burns 54:50 We're just... You know, look, I, I will be totally honest. Uh, history doesn't repeat itself. No event has ever happened twice. But Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "Uh, history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes."

Joe Rogan 55:02 (laughs)

Ken Burns 55:02 If he did say that, he's exactly right because human nature doesn't change.

Joe Rogan 55:06 Right.

Ken Burns 55:06 And so you watch these events, and when we finished working on it... And I told you, we began this when Barack Obama had a year and a half to go in his presidency, or a year, year and a month to go in his presidency. It's a totally different world but... And we know that it rhymes, but we never once have concentrated on saying, "Oh, we're gonna put our thumb on the scale here." We want everybody to watch. We have no ax to grind. We're just, as I'm saying, calling balls and strikes. And when I mean that, it would be like saying, "Let me tell you about Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson. They struck out a lot. Thanks, thanks so much."

Joe Rogan 55:42 (laughs)

Ken Burns 55:42 Right? Right? I mean, and I'm true... I have not told you anything that is not true, correct?

Joe Rogan 55:46 Right, right. Sure.

Ken Burns 55:47 They also hit a hell of a lot of home runs. And so calling balls and strikes is saying...... that what happens is the way we teach history is the way ESPN does sports highlights. It's always-

Joe Rogan 55:59 Hmm.

Ken Burns 56:00 ... the home run.

Joe Rogan 56:01 Yeah.

Ken Burns 56:01 It's never the guy turned the double play, or he doubled some guy off, or there was some other thing. It's always the home run. And so nobody takes a strike in the, in these highlights. And what we're trying to say is, isn't it better to watch the game-

Joe Rogan 56:17 Yeah.

Ken Burns 56:18 ... and see that even Babe Ruth can only come up to bat every nine times, and even Babe Ruth fails seven times out of 10? He's a .300 hitter.

Joe Rogan 56:30 Hmm.

Ken Burns 56:30 A little bit more than .300 hitter. That's the great beauty of it. And so I think that we don't ever now think that he is a failure. We understand that the dynamics of life, the dynamics of this particular game mean that the people who fail seven times out of 10, and do it significantly, are in the Hall of Fame.

Joe Rogan 56:51 Hmm.

Ken Burns 56:52 I mean, and that's, that's the beauty of, of these storytellings. See, I'm not taking anything away from George Washington by, by making it complex. We're making him human. He's not, he's not a statue out in the park collecting bird shit.

Joe Rogan 57:05 Right.

Ken Burns 57:05 He's a real, breathing human being. He's one of the richest people in America. He marries one of the richest people in the, uh, uh, uh, America, a widow. Um, he's ... And, and, like, he's away. He makes one visit home, I think to Monticello during the whole ... I mean, to, to, to Mount Vernon during the whole war. He's dedicated to this thing. I mean, he doesn't have to do this, right? He's, he's committed to this project of us, and that's the ultimate point I want to make about not just this film or Vietnam or the, all the things we've been talking about, is that I've had the great privilege of making films about the US for nearly 50 years, Joe. But I've also made films about us, that is to say, the lowercase, two-letter, plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our, and all of the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and even the controversy of the US. And that is a privileged space to be operating in. To be having been given the permission to do this for nearly 50 years is, is just great. I think I have the best job in the country, and I'm always happy to meet somebody who's willing to contradict me, but it's only because you have a chance to work hard at telling the story. I mean, we lock the picture back in January. That means you're not gonna do any more work on it. We've unlocked it hundreds of times just to make it better. At some ... A historian said, "I'm, I'm not sure if, if you can be that categorical," and then we put in a perhaps, right?

Joe Rogan 58:36 Hmm.

Ken Burns 58:36 Or you, you find out that image isn't as, as stunning as we thought it could be. Could we swap that out? Oh, yeah. That works better than before, even after we were done-done.

Joe Rogan 58:46 Hmm.

Ken Burns 58:46 And I like the ability that by the time we're letting it go, it's like your kid. You're still, you know, licking the smudge off their face, and-

Joe Rogan 58:53 Yeah.

Ken Burns 58:53 ... you know, making sure that their, their hair is, is tied up in a nice bow, and, you know, "Have a good day, sweetie," you know?

Joe Rogan 58:59 Yeah. Well, I think that gratitude that you have towards your work and this dedication to truth, um, because there's a ... One of the problems with problematic historical figures is we tend to use modern ideological perspectives when we describe these people. And th- uh, uh, you know, we try to show that we have a, a disdain for the way they lived their lives and the choices they made in perspective with how we do today, you know? And the, the problem with that is it comes off political or ideological or-

Ken Burns 59:38 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 59:38 And you lose the real understanding of the complexities of history-

Ken Burns 59:43 That's right.

Joe Rogan 59:43 ... and of these human beings that lived in a very different time. 1776, even though it's only three people ago, is a very, you know ... People live to be 100. It's three people ago. So it's a very different time.

Ken Burns 59:55 It's a very different time, and you make a really, really good point. When you take the judgments of what we know now, uh, you can apply them, and then you end up with what I called that unforgiving revisionism-

Joe Rogan 1:00:06 Yes.

Ken Burns 1:00:06 ... where you throw out some significant people with the bathwater of r- revisionism. But let me just tell you, they all knew slavery was wrong. They all knew it was wrong, and they still did it. And there's a historian in it, Annette Gordon-Reed, who just says, you know, found- slavery's foundational to Thomas Jefferson, and he knew all his life it was wrong and said it and wrote about it and tried to put in something to end the slave trade in, in the Declaration of Independence, which no, no one would have. And she goes, "Well, how could s- how could somebody do something they knew was wrong?" She goes, "Well, that's a question for all of us."

Joe Rogan 1:00:40 Hmm.

Ken Burns 1:00:40 And so Jefferson's n- uh, neighbor freed all his slaves and urged him to do it, and he didn't, and his cousin freed all his slaves. So there's, there's already that. The question is if you are just taking the judgments of today to cancel somebody, you've just missed the possibility of getting to know George Washington-

Joe Rogan 1:01:00 Yeah.

Ken Burns 1:01:00 ... or getting to know Thomas Jefferson. And if you only do people who are, um, perfect, you're either lying about them or you're ... you've got very few characters, (laughs) you know?

Joe Rogan 1:01:14 Yeah.

Ken Burns 1:01:15 I mean, 'cause I don't know about you. I'm not. I presume you're not. I don't think you know anybody who's perfect. I don't know anybody who's perfect. And so then it's like history becomes, "Honey, how was your day?" Uh, you d- it doesn't begin, "I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb," you know, unless you get T-boned. In which case, that's exactly when you do it. You edit human experience, and you tolerate the vast experiences that human beings are, are, are so complex. And it's the, it's the interest. It was very interesting. We did an update of our baseball series called The Tenth Inning-And I, and it, and being, uh, from New England and being a Red Sox fan, the whole thing was just a disguise to be able to do the Red Sox comeback in 2004. But we were dealing with a great Atlanta team in, in the '90s, and the great Joe Torre-led Yankees, and, and then, uh, Sosa and McGwire, and then Bonds, and then steroids and whatever. At the end of it, we're really trying to come to some thing about steroids and try to figure out how to deal with it. And Thomas Boswell, now retired, is a great sports writer for The Washington Post said, um, I think it's Keats writing about William Shakespeare, who's a pretty good playwright, um, said that Shakespeare had negative capability. That means he could hold intention, the positive and negative aspects of a character, for as long as you possibly could without making that quick and facile and easy judgment that we make all the time in our lives. When the guy cuts us off, we give him the finger. You know, we yell, "F you." What- whatever that is, we make judgments about it. And Shakespeare had that ability, even with the darkest characters, you know, the, uh, Iagos and, and the, uh, Richard III, you know, people who are deep and dark. He c- had negative capability. He said that's what we need to grow in order to understand, uh, the steroid era, in order to understand how to, to deal with all of that. And I, I think that h- that in a way all of us have to kind of grow that negative capability, that ability to distinguish that nobody's perfect, and that if you, i- i- if you superimpose this kind of abstract sets of judgment, nobody passes the test.

Joe Rogan 1:03:32 Right.

Ken Burns 1:03:32 No one passes the test.

Joe Rogan 1:03:34 That sort of performative purity test too, I, it, I think it's a real problem with our current culture where I, I think this is a sort of a natural progression of an improvement of society 'cause we could all agree that society is far more just today than it was in 1776. And we know we're on this path, but it's a very bumbling, stumbling-

Ken Burns 1:04:00 Certainly.

Joe Rogan 1:04:00 ... fail, figure out why you failed kind of succeed, but then also do it-

Ken Burns 1:04:05 Take a few steps back. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:06 Yeah. It's consistent. And I think in this process of this, unfortunately you have performative virtue.

Ken Burns 1:04:16 That's correct.

Joe Rogan 1:04:17 And this is a lot of people that wanna tear down statues and throw paint on, you know, paintings and, and do things where they're trying to show that I am better than the people who came before me. And the problem with doing that in regards to history is we don't learn anything if you're not truthful. If we don't give this sort of, like, a really objective analysis of all the factors that were taking place with these extraordinary human beings who were experiencing this thing that was wholly unique on this new continent and with this new idea of forming this experiment in self-government that hadn't existed before, and that you're gonna, y- y- you, you have to say it, you have to do it the way you do it. It's really the only way.

Ken Burns 1:04:59 I think it's the only way, and it takes time. And I am very... I have to acknowledge that there's no other place on the dial that dates me, (laughs) you know, than PBS, right-

Joe Rogan 1:05:10 Mm-hmm.

Ken Burns 1:05:10 ... where I have the time to do it. It's, it's sort of like an NIH grant. Like, here, we'd like you to explore the possible cure to this disease.

Joe Rogan 1:05:17 Mm-hmm.

Ken Burns 1:05:18 Can you have it next Thursday? Well, no-

Joe Rogan 1:05:19 (laughs)

Ken Burns 1:05:19 ... you can't have it next Thursday.

Joe Rogan 1:05:21 Right.

Ken Burns 1:05:21 That's what Hollywood says. "I need it out because the other Marvel thing is coming out at the same time." What you need is, "We want to set you up with a certain set of circumstances that are going to permit you to have the best possibility of, of, of doing this." And so, we've always hit our marks. We've always come... I- i- if, if we haven't been in budget, it's because we've expanded the film and then I've gone out and raised the money. So no one else was responsible for the fact that we decided Vietnam is not gonna be seven episodes, it's gonna be eight, and, oh, you know what? It's gonna be 10, and that's 18 hours, and that's, you know, the way that Vietnam... And it had to do with listening to the material, understanding how it spoke to us, you know, m- committing ourselves to recording Vietnamese voices, not just South Vietnamese soldiers and South Vietnamese civilians, but Viet Cong guerrillas, North Vietnamese soldiers, North Vietnamese civilians, as well as the range of Americans. And so, one of my favorite scenes is, is a North Vietnamese soldier and a Viet Cong soldier and an American all saying exactly the same thing about the same moment-

Joe Rogan 1:06:22 Wow.

Ken Burns 1:06:22 ... in, in a battle, early battle. Before there were technically boots on the ground. This was an advisor, an American advisor, but they're, they're all talking about a helicopter flying over this one hedge, and the Viet, and the Viet Cong guy's behind the hedge. The South Vietnamese officer is, is, you know, next to the American guy, and they all have an experience of war that is exactly the same. And I-

Joe Rogan 1:06:46 Mm.

Ken Burns 1:06:46 ... love that.

Joe Rogan 1:06:48 Yeah.

Ken Burns 1:06:48 I love that.

Joe Rogan 1:06:50 W- what was your first piece?

Ken Burns 1:06:52 Brooklyn Bridge. I had, um, I'd started-

Joe Rogan 1:06:55 What year was this?

Ken Burns 1:06:56 So it came out, it was first broadcast in, uh, '81 or '82. I'd been working on it since '77. I look 12 years old when I was trying to-

Joe Rogan 1:07:04 (laughs)

Ken Burns 1:07:04 ... sell people The Brooklyn Bridge.

Joe Rogan 1:07:05 (laughs)

Ken Burns 1:07:06 And they, and people, people, people were, you know, telling me, "Oh, this child is trying to sell me The Brooklyn Bridge." No. And I used to keep these two big thick three-ring binders on my desk all filled with rejections for that one film. I mean, literally hundreds of rejections. But I had read David McCullough's, um, uh, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge. And I went out to my partners. We'd just founded our c- uh, company. We were ch- called Florentine Films. We were starving. We'd, like, maybe get, get a day's work or two days work a month as cinematographers and sound men and grips, and we were paying the rent and that was that. And I said, "We're gonna do this, and I'll raise all the money." And, uh, and I did, and it got... I moved up to New Hampshire so I could live on nothing in '79 and, and '80, and I, I... Both those years I made less than 2,500 bucks.

Joe Rogan 1:07:52 Wow.

Ken Burns 1:07:53 And, um, chopped all the wood for my stove, split it, carried it, kept the stoves going. You wake up in the middle of, of the night and, you know, 4:00 AM in, in February and, and you go-... I just heard the heater kick on. I gotta go down and, and feed the stove." But it came out, it got nominated for an Academy Award, and that, that was the sign to me that, like, I needed to, um... I'd hit a fork in the road and like Yogi Berra said, "You take it." It was to not go back to New York, to not go back to LA, but to say, "I'm gonna be staying here because this is labor-intensive. We're gonna have to raise grants to do this stuff." I'm not looking for investors. We're looking for underwriting so that we are liberated from the suits that would come in and give the notes and say, "Oh, you need to be less sexy, or more sexy, or longer, or shorter, or more violent, or less violent." I can sit here and tell you with a great deal of pride, and not just for me but on behalf of the extraordinary people that work with me, and some of them have been for 50 years, and some of them for 30 years, and some of them for 40 and f-... you know, a, a lot of people that these are director's cuts, that we haven't let it go. And they're... The way the country has responded to them, like, the Civil War series is still 35 years old. It's still the highest-rated program in the history of public television.

Joe Rogan 1:09:14 That's incredible.

Ken Burns 1:09:15 (coughs)

Joe Rogan 1:09:15 How did you have that clarity of vision as a young man to recognize that working in isolation in a small town was the best option? 'Cause I would imagine if you had aspirations to being a filmmaker when you were younger, the, the, the call of Hollywood, just the, the call of being a part of a, an enormous organization, like, being respected by your peers in this enormous or-... Like, that had to be at least somewhat attractive, but how did you have the clarity to realize that that was not the correct path for you?

Ken Burns 1:09:48 I can't take credit for it. You know, I went to Hampshire College. My teachers were social documentary still photographers. I had a mentor named Jerome Liebling, and he was so firmly rooted in a kind of... You know, another word, we've been talking about virtue, another word is honor or honorable that I- is not engaged, and people don't really use it in ordinary conversation. He just instilled in all of us, I believe, all of his students, a sense of, of honor. So, there was this responsibility to follow it through, to work really hard. I mean, I don't know anybody that works harder than us. You know, we really work seven days a week. We love it. I put my head on the pillow, I wanna know that my girls are okay, my daughters, and I wanna know that I've made a film better, you know, in some way, shape, or form.

Joe Rogan 1:10:35 Seven days a week?

Ken Burns 1:10:36 Seven days a week, and it's not that you can't take a day off and you can't do something, but you're always thinking about this stuff, and you wanna make them better, and it was... It's very funny. We're out on the road and we're showing the clips and, you know, we've seen these clips a gazillion times and, and I'm talking to Sarah Botstein, the co-director, and, and we just look at each other simultaneously and say, "Gotta get rid of that. We have to change that shot." And so suddenly, we're working with an editor who happens to be in Paris this semester (laughs) and the editor that's in New York, and we're changing things, and I love the fact that we did that, you know? I'm actually embarrassed that I'm telling you about it because I feel like in some ways I'm advertising the fact that that's what we do. I'm just trying to say that somewhere along the line, I have made the opposite of decision of what was sort of career-wise supposed to be what I was supposed to do. In fact, Robert Penn Warren, the, the, the poet and novelist told me that... H- he looked at me once and he just said, "Careerism is death." And I've never used the worry- word career. I've always said my professional life, 'cause careerism suggests that you're f- that you're following some sort of rut, and that's not what I wanted to do. And so, by not-

Joe Rogan 1:11:46 What do you mean by rut?

Ken Burns 1:11:47 By, by just, you know-

Joe Rogan 1:11:49 A path? A carved path?

Ken Burns 1:11:50 ... a p- a, a, a pa- a carved path that's already well-worn. I mean, look, if you wanna be a doctor or a lawyer, you, you've gotta follow some well-worn paths just by virtue of that. Everybody that I know that's working in documentary that has been working at it for a long time and makes their living from it have come from completely unique paths. It's been their own way, and I like the fact that I made this... "No, I'm not gonna go back to New York. Um, no. Why would I move to LA? I'm gonna be here in this little town in New Hampshire where any number of Oscar nominations and Grammys and Emmys means zero-"

Joe Rogan 1:12:28 Mm.

Ken Burns 1:12:29 "... to the people that I live with." It's like, "Did you shovel the lawn o- the, the walk of the, of the lady next door who's not doing so well? Did you do this? Are you a good neighbor?" That's, that's the stuff that matters, and it's a good place to raise kids as well. And then the splendid isolation. Um, there's a great tradition, as you know, in American history, of the way in which wildness, nature becomes part of the American catechism. That it's possible, Walt Whitman is saying, that you can worship God more closely in nature than in cathedrals made by man. This is the American catechism of being out in nature, and it, it manifests itself in different people who are aware of the power of nature. It, it, it, th- the nature reminds you of your insignificance.

Joe Rogan 1:13:16 Yes.

Ken Burns 1:13:17 And, and that is inspiriting. This is paradoxical, right? That's inspiriting. Even though it, you're ex- feeling insignificant, it's inspiriting, just as the egotist in our midst is divin- is diminished by his or her self-regard, right?

Joe Rogan 1:13:32 Right.

Ken Burns 1:13:33 So, anybody who says, "Oh, I'm this," it's actually diminished. The person who is humble is humiliated by their atomic insignificance, as one person said about Mount Denali in Alaska in the 19-teens, uh, a reporter, um, is actually inspirited by that. And I wish to be inspirited, 'cause I think that's the only condition in which we're then able to make the kinds of decisions, the creative decisions, the personnel decisions, the sort of, the thoughtfulness or to have that regard for not necessarily following the well-worn path.

Joe Rogan 1:14:09 It's just amazing that-

Ken Burns 1:14:10 Does that make sense?

Joe Rogan 1:14:11 It does. It does make sense, it resonates. It, it resonates completely. The, the natural art of nature, the, the true majesty of experiencing the vastness of the mountains and of the woods and of the... It, it, it humbles you in a way that nothing else does and it grounds you in a way of recognizing... And I, I don't wanna say your insignificance, your relative insignificance, but it puts... Like, it's not just you. This whole thing is massive-

Ken Burns 1:14:47 My best friend once said-

Joe Rogan 1:14:48 ... and you're so fortunate to experience it.

Ken Burns 1:14:49 Oh, you know how I fortunate... I feel so grateful, Joe. You know, my best friend once said to me, um, when we were much, much younger, we've been friends for more than 50 years. He said, um, um, "There's only one center of the universe and you're not it." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:15:05 (laughs)

Ken Burns 1:15:06 It was a great gift. It was a really great gift. And I don't know what I was doing or whether I was even doing anything that was inviting it, but he just wanted me to remember-

Joe Rogan 1:15:16 Yeah.

Ken Burns 1:15:16 ... that there's no center of the universe.

Joe Rogan 1:15:19 Well, you also get to see the stars too.

Ken Burns 1:15:21 Yeah, out there.

Joe Rogan 1:15:22 Yeah.

Ken Burns 1:15:22 And that's another thing. I was thinking, you know, there is that, the beauty. Emily Dickinson called sunsets and sunrises, "The far theatricals of day."

Joe Rogan 1:15:31 Yes.

Ken Burns 1:15:31 It's like a perfect description of it. But when you go out and it's 10 below zero in my town, and I'm up in, uh, um, a mile and a half out of town, which has five or six street lights so there's no glare and you see the Milky Way. And you s- just, uh, you are just... What, what can you do but just be humbled-

Joe Rogan 1:15:53 Right.

Ken Burns 1:15:53 ... by the vastness of the universe and how relatively insignificant our lives are? But that in itself compels you, drives you to try to do something that would have not significance, but just would add something. So, so I live in a, a state, um, uh, and politics comes through all the time. P- everybody's got a lawn sign, right?

Joe Rogan 1:16:17 (laughs)

Ken Burns 1:16:18 Left, right, center. My lawn sign says, "Love multiplies." It's the only functioning theory of the entire universe. It is what it's all about, right? It doesn't matter what religion, what philosophy you might subscribe to or not. Thomas Jefferson says in our film, "If my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no god at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg," right?

Joe Rogan 1:16:44 (laughs)

Ken Burns 1:16:45 Like, we are so religiously intolerant today-

Joe Rogan 1:16:47 Yeah.

Ken Burns 1:16:47 Oh, well, I know that if I had been born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, I'd still be a born again Christian.

Joe Rogan 1:16:53 Right.

Ken Burns 1:16:53 No, you wouldn't.

Joe Rogan 1:16:53 Right.

Ken Burns 1:16:54 You'd be a Shiite.

Joe Rogan 1:16:54 Yeah. (laughs)

Ken Burns 1:16:55 You know? (laughs) I mean, a Sunni.

Joe Rogan 1:16:56 Yeah.

Ken Burns 1:16:57 And, and you'd be at war with the, with the Shiites across the border in Iran. You know, uh, I'm sorry to break the news to you-

Joe Rogan 1:17:04 Yeah.

Ken Burns 1:17:04 ... and, and that all of them, all the great religions have the same thing in mind. And it's still-

Joe Rogan 1:17:10 It's also that problem that people have with this rigid perspective that they would be so arrogant as to believe that they would be unique in that environment.

Ken Burns 1:17:17 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:17:18 Uh, that, "No, I would get it. I would understand it." Like, no.

Ken Burns 1:17:21 No, you wouldn't.

Joe Rogan 1:17:21 That's crazy.

Ken Burns 1:17:22 And, and who's to say... I mean, what was essential about the founders, particularly Jefferson, is that they were deists. And while they all had their own particular, mostly, Protestant denominations that they were, had come out of, and, and I think still to some extent in some cases practiced, less so Jefferson, is that they believed that there was a supreme being who was disinterested in the affairs of man and did not distinguish between faith. So that, you know, you see the baseball player who hits a home run and crosses home base and looks up and thanks. They never do that when they hit into a, uh, g- uh, game-ending double play in the ninth inning, right?

Joe Rogan 1:18:05 (laughs)

Ken Burns 1:18:05 They don't say, "Oh, thank you, God-

Joe Rogan 1:18:08 Right.

Ken Burns 1:18:08 ... for giving me that." I've only seen that once. Pedro Martinez had given up a, a fairly significant lead, not the entire lead, to the Yankees in, in one of those great playoffs. And as he walked off and was pulled by the manager, he walked off and looked up and I wa- I spoke to him about it. I said, "I've never seen anything like that." But this idea that all of our affairs are governed in that way is not what many of the founders believed in, that it is our obligation to lead that virtuous life. Don't-

Joe Rogan 1:18:34 Mm-hmm.

Ken Burns 1:18:35 ... mean to keep bringing you back there.

Joe Rogan 1:18:36 Yes.

Ken Burns 1:18:37 Moves you closer up the stairway to heaven, up the ray of creation-

Joe Rogan 1:18:41 Yeah.

Ken Burns 1:18:42 ... to God. And that, that you're... It's, it's your movement, not that supreme being's movement towards you. "Oh, let's make sure that's a ground root double. Oh, let's..." You know, that's not happening.

Joe Rogan 1:18:54 Right.

Ken Burns 1:18:55 It is the ongoing chaos of the sequence of events and human nature, and we've got to, A, be aware of the sort of incredible current, the force of the current of that human nature. But also the way in which my individuality, my will, the discipline, the virtue that I might be able to have could, in some ways, be singular and do something significant. Not because of that, but in order to be closer to that higher-

Joe Rogan 1:19:26 Yes.

Ken Burns 1:19:27 ... thing. And that's where they're all talking about it, that they want the founders' higher emotions. As I said, not sentimentality, not nostalgia. Those are the enemies of anything, but the higher emotions. Sometimes we say that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. What is the difference between that? If you've added up all the sum of the parts and it comes here, what's that?

Joe Rogan 1:19:51 Right.

Ken Burns 1:19:51 And what it means is that as much as to build a table, to build a bridge or a highway, one and one always has to equal two. The things that matter in our lives are where one and one equals three, where we are able to see something that's bigger. That this something is produced by the collision of two musical notes, by two images in a documentary, by a conversation between two human beings. Whatever in which something is possible. I'm interested in whatever energy that creates. And-... w- with whom? I mean, you- you just don't know that that person at the convenience store that you just kinda, like, don't even look and don't even think about has a life as important as yours. You're driving on the highway, we're coming down from Dallas this morning on 35, you know, and thousands, thousands of cars going out of the direction. The person in that car is looking, and their life is as full as what I'm seeing out of my eyes, and I know, sitting here, that you're seeing something totally different than what I'm seeing. And that- that life is as full. And- and s- I think good history, good friendship, good storytelling, good conversation all have, at its base, the respect for the other point of view, the ability to listen, and that kind of desire to be better. And in our country, we've actually got lots of blueprints for it. We got lots of plans. They're- they're out there. It's in the Declaration. It's in the Constitution. It's in the Bill of Rights. It's here. It's in that speech. It's in the, you know, the- the Lincoln speech, you know? "We're gonna live forever or die by suicide," all right? Or then he's got two speeches, Lincoln does. One's a message to Congress in