EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,139 words- 0:00 – 4:37
Why Ken Burns stayed with PBS: autonomy, reach, and time to marinate ideas
- 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-
- 4:37 – 6:06
Early life, tragedy, and the moment that made him want to make films
- KBKen Burns
... 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
... 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.
- 6:06 – 7:26
From aspiring director to historian: documentary’s drama and the question 'Who are we?'
- KBKen Burns
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- 7:26 – 12:08
Making education engrossing: emotional testimony and why war films demand patience
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- KBKen Burns
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- KBKen Burns
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... w- was it 18 hours?
- KBKen Burns
18 hours.
- JRJoe Rogan
18 hours.
- KBKen Burns
10, 10 episodes, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- KBKen Burns
And you don't get it from churning it out either, so I-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- KBKen Burns
... 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
... 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- KBKen Burns
... 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- KBKen Burns
... 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."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- 12:08 – 16:14
Building The American Revolution: it was violent, global, and deeply human
- KBKen Burns
... 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.
- 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.
- 16:14 – 17:35
PBS in classrooms—and what civic education has lost
- 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.
- 17:35 – 18:56
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- JRJoe Rogan
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- KBKen Burns
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 18:56 – 29:31
Founding ideas, checks and balances, and why stories change minds
- 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.
- KBKen Burns
... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
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-
- NANarrator
Right.
- KBKen Burns
... 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.
- NANarrator
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
Right? (laughs) They didn't-
- NANarrator
Right.
- KBKen Burns
... 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.
- NANarrator
And it's also the incredibly complex system of checks and balances they devised to prevent tyranny.
- KBKen Burns
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."
- NANarrator
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
'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
- 29:31 – 34:51
Hidden meanings in famous moments: Boston Tea Party, Common Sense, and the Declaration’s wording
- KBKen Burns
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."
- 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."
- 34:51 – 44:04
Where the system came from: British governance, Enlightenment, and Native influence (Albany Plan)
- 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.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- KBKen Burns
Isn't that great? So you're-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's amazing.
- KBKen Burns
... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. It's terrible, but it's the best one out there.
- KBKen Burns
It is the best one out there, yeah. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) .
- KBKen Burns
That's exactly right.
- 44:04 – 1:09:48
How Burns discovers history: humility, Washington’s flaws, Benedict Arnold, and production craft
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- KBKen Burns
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)
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- 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.
- 1:09:48 – 1:44:03
Isolation, nature, and meaning: resisting careerism and building transformational work
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Seven days a week?
- KBKen Burns
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
What do you mean by rut?
- KBKen Burns
By, by just, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
A path? A carved path?
- KBKen Burns
... 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-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
"... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- KBKen Burns
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- KBKen Burns
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's just amazing that-
- KBKen Burns
Does that make sense?
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- KBKen Burns
My best friend once said-
- JRJoe Rogan
... and you're so fortunate to experience it.
- KBKen Burns
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)
- 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.
Episode duration: 2:45:22
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