EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,139 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- KBKen Burns
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- NANarrator
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays) All right, we're up. Mr. Burns, pleasure to meet you.
- KBKen Burns
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- KBKen Burns
Right, all of it, all of it. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is also extraordinary.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- KBKen Burns
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
What would be the-
- KBKen Burns
But they wouldn't, they wouldn't give me the 10 and a half years it took me to take.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- KBKen Burns
You see what I mean?
- JRJoe Rogan
It's the time.
- KBKen Burns
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
How early on did you realize that the only way to get this, like, full autonomy was to, to do it with PBS?
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
American Buffalo.
- KBKen Burns
American Buffalo-
- JRJoe Rogan
Love that.
- KBKen Burns
... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
So was this sort of a fortuitous sort of a thing that you came to be-
- KBKen Burns
I think so. I mean-
- 15:00 – 30:00
Mm. …
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- KBKen Burns
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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."
- KBKen Burns
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
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- KBKen Burns
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- KBKen Burns
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."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
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."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
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."
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- KBKen Burns
Proclaiming the unalienable rights of all people. Now let's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 30:00 – 45:00
Really? …
- KBKen Burns
country anymore."
- NANarrator
Really?
- KBKen Burns
"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.
- NANarrator
Right.
- KBKen Burns
They are saying, "We are aboriginal." This is what the scholar, uh-
- NANarrator
Wow.
- KBKen Burns
... Phil Deloria says. So yeah, wow, and then you get-
- NANarrator
Newly adopted aboriginal.
- KBKen Burns
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-
- NANarrator
How did you figure that out?
- KBKen Burns
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?
- NANarrator
Right.
- KBKen Burns
(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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- KBKen Burns
(laughs) ... what was the, uh, how did they make it to the point where even today we marvel at it? Yeah. We, it-
- JRJoe Rogan
250 years later, people go back and, like, "Look what they did."
- KBKen Burns
Look what they did.
- JRJoe Rogan
"This is extraordinary."
- KBKen Burns
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."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
What... It's just... I- it's so hard for people to recognize that that was a civil war.
- KBKen Burns
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause I don't, I think most people think it was the United States colonists against the British.
- KBKen Burns
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
But the separatists and the loyalists battling it out together, I, I think most people are completely unaware of that.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Wow. …
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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...
- KBKen Burns
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... extraordinary circumstances, unusual character...
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- KBKen Burns
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- KBKen Burns
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."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's such a fascinating...
- KBKen Burns
But isn't it nice to know that he's that great...
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
... a general before he becomes Benedict Arnold?
- JRJoe Rogan
That term, when I was a child, when I was in school, a Benedict Arnold was a traitor.
- KBKen Burns
Meant a... A traitor.
- JRJoe Rogan
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?"
- KBKen Burns
Oh, God. They'd, they'd say it was a mixture of, uh...
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) It's like an Arnold Palmer.
- KBKen Burns
It's like an Arnold Palmer. (laughs) It's a mixture of iced tea and lemonade, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- KBKen Burns
And you know what? That's so terrifying to me.
- JRJoe Rogan
Weird, right?
- KBKen Burns
And I'm... No. It's, it's what happens when you atrophy this interest in American history, or you think...
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Yes. …
- KBKen Burns
of what we know now, uh, you can apply them, and then you end up with what I called that unforgiving revisionism-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- KBKen Burns
... 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."
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- KBKen Burns
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
... 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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- KBKen Burns
No one passes the test.
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- KBKen Burns
Certainly.
- JRJoe Rogan
... fail, figure out why you failed kind of succeed, but then also do it-
- KBKen Burns
Take a few steps back. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. It's consistent. And I think in this process of this, unfortunately you have performative virtue.
- KBKen Burns
That's correct.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- KBKen Burns
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- KBKen Burns
... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- KBKen Burns
Can you have it next Thursday? Well, no-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- KBKen Burns
... you can't have it next Thursday.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- KBKen Burns
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- KBKen Burns
... 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- 1:15:00 – 1:21:57
(laughs) …
- KBKen Burns
um, "There's only one center of the universe and you're not it." (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- KBKen Burns
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
... that there's no center of the universe.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, you also get to see the stars too.
- KBKen Burns
Yeah, out there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
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."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- KBKen Burns
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- KBKen Burns
... 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?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- KBKen Burns
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- KBKen Burns
Like, we are so religiously intolerant today-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
Oh, well, I know that if I had been born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, I'd still be a born again Christian.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- KBKen Burns
No, you wouldn't.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- KBKen Burns
You'd be a Shiite.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. (laughs)
- KBKen Burns
You know? (laughs) I mean, a Sunni.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
... and, and that all of them, all the great religions have the same thing in mind. And it's still-
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
Episode duration: 2:45:22
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