Simon SinekThe Real Goal of Storytelling (Hint: It’s Not Being Right) | A Bit of Optimism Podcast
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
55 min read · 10,522 words- 0:00 – 0:38
Simplicity vs. complexity: the core tension in meaning-making
- SSSimon Sinek
It is okay to try and simplify the world so that we can understand it and feel like we matter in it. And we have to accept that there's complexity that sometimes we understand and sometimes we don't. Those things have to live together.
- KBKen Burns
You know, we make films, and they're not additive. You don't build a film, you subtract a film. We have 500 hours of footage-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah, that's a brilliant way to put it
- KBKen Burns
... and we get down to 12. And it's, it's to do what you're talking about, to kind of-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... simplify in a way, but we also want to leave open, this is the mystery-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... of, of life that we have been handed. It's not the notes, it's the intervals between the notes that make music, and it's the cut between the shots that make film.
- 0:38 – 3:00
Why Ken Burns’ documentaries feel different: perspective, bias, and trust
- SSSimon Sinek
It's complicated. These are the words that hang on the wall of Ken Burns's editing room. These are the words that also capture how he understands history. It's complicated. There are few people whose work has actually shaped how we understand things, and Ken Burns is definitely one of those people. Whether it's our understanding of the Vietnam War, the origins of baseball, or even the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, Ken always tries to build his documentaries to tell the story from other angles, multiple perspectives, including ones we've never heard before, all of which challenge our understanding of what may have actually happened. His newest documentary, a six-part PBS series, explores the American Revolution in a way that reveals so much more depth and complexity than most of us are even aware of. To sit down with him was insane. He is so smart, and his ability to recall entire lines, paragraphs from his own work and the work of others
- KBKen Burns
"Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation."
- SSSimon Sinek
I mean, it was crazy. I just sat back and at times [chuckles] felt a little stupid, but my God, he's fascinating. So get comfy because this is a detailed love letter to storytelling and an invitation to consider what history can teach us about who we are and who we're still becoming. This is A Bit of Optimism. [upbeat music] Your work feels more important to me now than ever because I think television is a large part of where we get our opinions, not just our information, but our opinions. We already know that people don't know what to trust or who to trust, and even documentaries are biased. And your work seems to stand out from those where you are willing to, I think, start with what you believe is a blank slate in your head and say, "Let's see where the story goes." How did you get to that? Because you, you're a documentarian. You can't help but have an opinion. How do you make sure that you stay even when you're telling a story?
- 3:00 – 4:01
There is no objectivity—only degrees of subjectivity
- KBKen Burns
That's a really wonderful, um, question, Simon. I remember the first day of film class in college at Hampshire College, a brand-new experimental school in its second year when I arrived in September of '71. The first day was, uh, just this question about objectivity and subjectivity. There's nothing objective, no matter what a documentary may claim. Even those proponents of cinema verité aren't. They're pointing their camera in one direction, not looking in the other. So what you have are degrees of subjectivity, and I think that that's where we've tried to be, uh, free, as you said, a blank slate when we begin. We're not trying to impose our own beliefs on the material, nor are we buying into any particular set of historiographies, that is to say, the way in which you engage the past. Maybe it's Marxist, maybe it's Freudian, maybe it's semiotics, deconstruction, queer studies, Afrocentrism. I mean, there's lots of fashions of historiography. You know, I
- 4:01 – 5:36
“It’s complicated”: destabilizing neat scenes to tell the truer story
- KBKen Burns
resort to a baseball metaphor, calling balls and strikes. Um, we have in our main editing room a neon sign that says, in lowercase cursive, "It's complicated," and it works on many levels. One is, you know, if you've got a scene and it's working, and no filmmaker wants to touch a good scene, right? It's working. Leave that alone. But if you find new contradictory information that would destabilize this perfectly working scene, you're making it perhaps less perfect, less better, and we're always willing to do that. So that's the first line of it. But a lot of it gets to the larger questions that, you know, uh, we live in a media culture, in a computer culture in which everything is a one or a zero or a good or a bad-
- SSSimon Sinek
Mm-hmm
- KBKen Burns
... a yes or a no, a- and there are no binaries, actually, in life. We know this from our friendships. We know it if we look in the mirror. So there's complicated things. So the tendency to say, in the case of the American Revolution, something I've been thinking about for the last 10 years and worked on a film about, you know, you can throw George Washington out because he was an owner of slaves. As the writer Rick Atkinson says, "You can't square that circle morally."
- SSSimon Sinek
Mm-hmm.
- KBKen Burns
In lots of ways, it's indefensible, and yet we don't have a country without him. Babe Ruth, if I go back to baseball, strikes out many, many more times than he gets a hit or a home run. But all in our highlight reel superficial world, that's all we show is Babe Ruth hitting a home run. He also comes up only once every nine times at bat, so it means that we're s- also obligated not just to focus on all of the things, his strikeouts, his game-ending double plays, as well as his walk-off homers. You have to
- 5:36 – 9:59
The real goal of storytelling: not winning arguments, but expanding empathy
- KBKen Burns
look at the other people, and that's what we've tried to do in that. And so if you go in without an ax to grind, and I don't have one, you're telling a story. The novelist Richard Powers says, "The best arguments in the world," and that's all we do, and that's all your question is implying, "The best arguments in the world won't change anybody's point of view. The only thing that can do it is a good story."
- SSSimon Sinek
Mm-hmm.
- KBKen Burns
Which means you're not force-feeding what that change is.
- SSSimon Sinek
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
You're just offering them the range of complexity that allows them to sit in that contradiction, to sit in that undertow, to sit in what Wynton Marsalis said in our jazz thing. "Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time."And we can hold that with the people we love. We can have to hold it with ourselves, otherwise we go crazy. And so we've tried to extend that to the work. And so what happens is that amongst a sea of stuff, we come out having spent 10 years trying to get it right, staying up at night over, you know, everything is footnoted, and it says, I'll make this up, 16 dead, 16 battleships, 16 months, and there are two scholars that have said this. And then all of a sudden, we've locked the thing. The narrator's gone home. It's it. And then we learn that a third scholar believes that it may not be true.
- SSSimon Sinek
Right.
- KBKen Burns
So we go scanning all of the stuff that's been read, and we find a perhaps six episodes ahead, take the perhaps, copy it, and move it back and say perhaps 16th-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... months.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
Battles.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
Yes, and then we sleep better at night. Now, even if we had left it alone, even that scholar would never have given us a hard time.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
But if you do that a million times, and literally a million times in every film project, particularly the series are more than that-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... a million problems that you have to sort of overcome and adjudicate and worry about, then you have something which can generally speak to everybody without feeling like it's pabulum, without being some sort of amorphous thing that, that doesn't really do things.
- SSSimon Sinek
Right.
- KBKen Burns
This is a very dynamic, in the case of the American Revolution, film with new information-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... that sort of shatters the myth of a bloodless, gallant, uh, story of just guys in Philadelphia thinking, uh, great thoughts. Those great thoughts are not diminished, but we've got a much more complicated dynamic.
- SSSimon Sinek
People who set out to make a documentary, when I talk to them, at s- at some point they will say, "I felt this story needed to be told."
- KBKen Burns
Right.
- SSSimon Sinek
And usually there's some sense of, and this is where the bias comes in, or not, I guess, but there's some sense of injustice or there's something just wildly interesting and uncovered, but it's always, "This story needs to be told." I'm very curious, for you, w- how do you come to this story needs to be told?
- KBKen Burns
Yeah. [laughs] Well, let's take the this out. I'd feel more comfortable. I mean, it is, for me, truly a this story needs to be told. I remember looking at a map of the Ia Drang Valley, which is in the Central Highlands, a map we'd made, uh, showing American and NVA, uh, North Vietnamese forces and Viet Cong forces, and I suddenly went, "Wow, this could be the British moving west on Long Island towards Brooklyn." And I went, "We're doing the, the American Revolution." So that story needed to be told, but I didn't know how much it needed to be told. So stories need to be told, Simon. If you just think about Shakespeare alone, all of the major characters are deeply flawed, and some of them are more flawed than they are good. But Keats wrote a letter about him, uh, saying that Shakespeare had negative capability, this ability to hold in tension people's strengths and weaknesses and not decide. W- the moralist in us, uh, wants to decide. But if you don't, then you've got a much more interesting plot, and you can follow Iago, you can follow Henry V, you can follow Macbeth, you can follow Hamlet, you can follow Shylock. These are not just primary, but secondary and tertiary characters. For example, Shylock is essentially a negative force in The Merchant of Venice, but he has one of the greatest speeches of all times. "Am I not human? Have I not organs, senses, affections, dimensions, passions fed by the same food, subject to the same diseases? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?" You've got this, this, um, plea for the understanding of his humanity.
- SSSimon Sinek
Mm.
- KBKen Burns
And that's one of the great contributions, one of the great moments, the Rialto scene in The Merchant of Venice, to me, for all its tropes and, and incipient antisemitism, it's Shylock who shines. [laughs]
- 9:59 – 12:35
Why we demand binaries (and why good stories resist them)
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah. Was there a time that we were ever not binary? We know that we're super binary now. You said right and wrong, good or bad. I'm right, you're wrong. Is it worse now, or are we romanticizing the past?
- KBKen Burns
We're always romanticizing the past, and we're always Chicken Littles making our present so bad. So, so bad. I think the first communication between people, it was a lie. This binary thing doesn't exist. It's what we superimpose on it and what we say, and that's why stories become the incredible, um, powerful way in which we, again, Wynton Marsalis, keep the wolf from the door, I think is our own mortality. Nobody's getting out of this alive.
- SSSimon Sinek
But why do we make things binary? I mean, like, uh, y- I don't know if you ever were a Game of Thrones fan.
- KBKen Burns
No, I, I don't think that every show women have to show their breasts.
- SSSimon Sinek
There's a Saturday Night Live parody that the creative director was a, was a 15-year-old boy.
- KBKen Burns
[laughs] Yeah. Well, that, that I find hilarious-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... and wonderful. Yeah.
- SSSimon Sinek
So, so that explains everything, right?
- KBKen Burns
It does. And it... But it's everything. It's Sopranos. I mean, I like The Sopranos better than Game of Thrones.
- SSSimon Sinek
Putting that aside-
- KBKen Burns
Yeah
- SSSimon Sinek
... notwithstanding, the thing that was both infuriating and wonderful about Game of Thrones was the good guys, quote unquote, the, the characters we like, the ones who stood for truth and honor and all of that stuff, did horrible things.
- KBKen Burns
Yeah.
- SSSimon Sinek
And the bad guys, who were evil and all of this stuff, had virtue.
- KBKen Burns
It's called a good story.
- SSSimon Sinek
Human beings and human relationships, you said it right at the beginning, it's complicated. It's messy. Do we default to binary because we're not that smart, we want things to be simple, we want explanation?
- KBKen Burns
Well, I think it's funny because we accept that complexity in almost every aspect of our life, including on our cable TV choices. I shouldn't have said that. It really ages me. In our streaming choices.
- SSSimon Sinek
[laughs]
- KBKen Burns
But in our politics, we want everything to be binary for simplicity.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
You know, I, I've been making films about the US for 50 years, but I've also been making films about us. That is to say, the lowercase two-letter plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US. And the only thing I've learned 50 years is that there's only us. There's no them. It is in the interests-Of authoritarians, if you're speaking politically, or in the interests of news media who just want the simplest way to conflict, which is of course the driver of good stories, to just make it a binary thing.
- 12:35 – 16:40
History’s repeating patterns: human nature, reputation, and avoidable wars
- SSSimon Sinek
This is actually a great segue, which is you studied America from every angle. You went deep into the Vietnam War. What are the mistakes we keep making? Why are we not studying our history? Because it seems that we keep making the same mistake. Are there the big three that we keep making?
- KBKen Burns
[laughs] Yeah. Well, I don't know if there's a big three, but I like to quote Ecclesiastes, which is, as you know, the Old Testament, which has filled of, of, of, you know, lots of wisdom in addition to some pretty old-fashioned kind of eye for eye, tooth for tooth, which has gotten us into trouble. There's one of your three, you know. But it says, "What has been will be again. What has been done will be, will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun." Which means that human nature doesn't change, and it doesn't. You can go back into the Revolution and be stunned at the way-- I mean, Mark Twain riffed on this. He didn't know it was Ecclesiastes, but he said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." If he did say that, and I think he did, and I did a film on Twain, we just couldn't find two sources that agreed. He didn't write it down. He just said it, and it was recorded by a reporter. No event has ever happened twice, but human behavior never changes, and that human behavior superimposes itself. All the venality and virtue, all the generosity and greed, all the selfishness and self-sacrifice, all of those pairs that you can create, human beings do, and not just one person to the next, but within somebody, right?
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah, yeah.
- KBKen Burns
I mean, so it's Whitman asked, "Do I contradict myself? I contradict myself." So there's, there's that going on. So human beings are always doing that, and there is also this huge thing that we understand on a human basic level. Like, if you go to the ball, and 99 people tell you that your gown, Simon, looks beautiful, and one person tells you that it doesn't, that's all you remember.
- SSSimon Sinek
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- KBKen Burns
That's all you remember. And so we are prisoners of the opinions of others. And when this gets to a state level, then you're looking weak if you don't do this, or you're looking this if you don't do that. The biggest war in history is World War II, and we're pretty clear about it in lots of ways, and it, there's, there's kind of... It's, it's easy. It's not a good war. There's no such thing as a good war. But it is, as we called in our film on World War II called Just the War, the first episode is called "A Necessary War."
- SSSimon Sinek
Mm-hmm.
- KBKen Burns
So I think you can make arguments, as we didn't say that, m- the, the people commentating in our film made that thing, but World War I is completely avoidable-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... and it's the most important war in world history. W- Second World War is the biggest-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... but the most important. Like, it's ca- it's why we're having trouble from the stands back to Israel, the Mediterranean, right? It's all, it's all coming out of, of what World War I-
- SSSimon Sinek
World War II came out of World War I. [laughs]
- KBKen Burns
And World War II, though bigger, came out of World War I. And so there's, you know, if you can go back to that, and then you can just see on display, you know, the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... sets in motion these dominoes. Sometimes you say, "This is unavoidable," and you can see if, you know, you take over Ethiopia, and then you take over this, and then you, uh, in-invade, uh, the Sudetenland, and then Austria, and then you invade Poland, y- and you've got people have a pact with Poland, you've started a war. And then the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and then Hitler did the greatest favor ever done for the United States, which is he declared war on the United States, so that Franklin Roosevelt could not only declare war on Japan but declare war on Germany as well a few days later because that's where he knew the real problem was.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
So you've got just people doing these things all the time through history, and it's always, it makes mistakes.
- SSSimon Sinek
I've, I've had these conversations with folks in the military, in the intelligence community, in an evening after dinner with a whiskey kind of thing, you know-
- KBKen Burns
Yeah
- SSSimon Sinek
... how-
- KBKen Burns
Me too.
- 16:40 – 19:02
Finite vs. infinite games: why leaders misread conflict
- SSSimon Sinek
And I don't know if you know James Carse's work, uh, of, of, of The Infinite Game, Finite and Infinite Games.
- KBKen Burns
No, but I'm sure I will get to it because one of our projects, you know, we've got Stalinistic 10-year plans. He actually worked in five-year plans, but one of them is a history of the CIA.
- SSSimon Sinek
So Jim Carse, uh, was a theologian and philosopher in the mid-1980s. Well, this idea came from the mid-1980s. He died during COVID. And he defined these two types of games, finite games and infinite games. A finite game is defined as known players, fixed rules, and agreed-upon objectives. Football, baseball, even conventional warfare, if you have a winner, necessarily there has to be a loser or losers, and there's always a beginning, middle, and end. And then you have infinite games. Infinite games are defined as known and unknown players, which means you don't necessarily know who all the players are, and new players can join at any time. The rules are changeable, which means every player can play however they want. And the objective is to perpetuate the game, to stay in the game as long as possible.
- KBKen Burns
Right.
- SSSimon Sinek
And I was so struck by Carse's work because we are players in infinite games every day of our lives. Nobody wins-
- KBKen Burns
That's right.
- SSSimon Sinek
Nobody's gonna win global politics. It doesn't exist.
- KBKen Burns
Right.
- SSSimon Sinek
Nobody wins health. Nobody wins career. Nobody wins business. There's no, there's no d- winner in business. You know, when Circuit City went bankrupt, Best Buy didn't win anything. But when we listen to the language of CEOs, of politicians, they talk about being number one, being the best, or beating their competition based on what agreed-upon metrics, objectives, and timeframes.
- KBKen Burns
So maybe you've now added number two, right, of these truths, that, that there's, there's parsing between these, the toggling between these absurdities.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yes. And when we look at Vietnam, and these, these are the conversations we would have, which is, which is a finite war exists when you have a, a, a declared end state. Upon when it's reached, the war concludes. When we eject... uh, Iraq from Kuwait, the war will end.
- KBKen Burns
Right.
- SSSimon Sinek
Right? And it did. No moving goalposts.
- KBKen Burns
Right.
- SSSimon Sinek
And w- Vietnam, when you play with a finite mindset, when the other player's playing, you've seen a, a, a fog of war.
- KBKen Burns
Yes.
- SSSimon Sinek
When McNamara sits down with his counterpart from the Vietnam War, th- and he said, "What was the number? How many were you willing to lose before you would, uh, surrender?" And, and his North Vietnamese counterpart looks at him and goes, "What are you talking about?"
- 19:02 – 22:14
Vietnam as a case study: metrics vs. nationalism and social endurance
- KBKen Burns
What are you talking about? So let me, let me add a little, because of w- I spent a l- many years, 10 and a half years on Vietnam. Let me tell you just a few little benchmarks.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
One, in January of '45, OSS parachute into northern Vietnam and save the life of an insurgent leader, hoping that he'll fight a rearguard action against the Japanese. His name is Ho Chi Minh, who's had some disease which they were able to treat and help him. That September 2nd, that day is really important in world history because the Japanese were surrendering unconditionally, you're finite, on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor. He declared Vietnamese independence in Ba Đình square to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, and standing next to him are OSS officers, who are a month later told to get the hell out of there 'cause he's a commie, he's a bad guy, we don't wanna be a part of him. Then, you know, the French later on come to us and threaten us. De Gaulle says he'd be forced to go into the Soviet orbit if we don't help him with his bill. So by the time of Dien Bien Phu, their devastating loss, the Americans are basically bankrolling 80% of the French military budget. Still can't stop the, the Vietnamese and General Giáp from, from triumphing. So then there's a Geneva Accords that are agreed upon in which they divide the t- the country into half, and the, the Catholics, they wanna go south, and, you know, revolutionaries and other people wanna go north. And then the, in two years there'll be an election. So in '56 there should be like, everyone knew that Ho Chi Minh would be elected. The communists, the Soviets and the Chinese, were very suspicious of him. They saw him more as a nationalist than a, than a communist. He would've been elected overwhelmingly, maybe not huge, uh, majorities in the south, but certainly in the north. And instead we went with Ngo Dinh Diem, a corrupt politician in South Vietnam, and then the die was cast.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
So then all that sort of stuff, and that a metrics guy, McNamara, coming from Ford, thinks you can figure everything out-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... with some figure, and doesn't understand-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yep
- KBKen Burns
... the passions of love of country, of, of, of freedom.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
I mean, when Ho Chi Minh, uh, declared independence with those OSS guys, guess who he's quoting? Thomas Jefferson.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
That all men are created equal.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
That they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. He's using our catechism. We're the first original anti-colonial movement, right? He's not the last, he's not the second, you know, but it's an important moment that the most significant revolution, ours, engendered all these other things, first in Europe, and then Latin and South America, and then in Asia and Africa, and it's all the same idea. This genie let out of the bag where this British complaints between Englishmen suddenly get broken out into natural laws. And even though it's not about freeing enslaved people or extending votes to women, that's gonna happen. Because once you've said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," slavery's done, women have suffrage. It's just gonna be an impossible long time for the very reason that human beings, as we've cited, have these kind of unexplainable behaviors.
- 22:14 – 26:07
Insurgency logic across revolutions: Washington, Paine, and the ‘drawn game’
- SSSimon Sinek
This to me is the most insidious of the r- of the repeating behaviors that we don't, that we don't learn, where you cannot fight finite versus infinite. The player who plays to win versus the player who's playing to survive. The player who's playing to win will always find themselves in quagmire, and-
- KBKen Burns
Yeah, this is the British, right? I mean, George Washington-
- SSSimon Sinek
This is the British. They f- they're playing-
- KBKen Burns
... suddenly learns he's the head of an insurgency.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
He doesn't have to win. He makes terrible battlefield mistakes at Long Island and at Brandywine-
- SSSimon Sinek
Exactly
- KBKen Burns
... protecting his left and then his right flank, but then he gets away, and they suddenly realize, "I don't have to win." Thomas Paine said, "We conquer by the drawn game," meaning you are screwed, Britain, because you have to win, and we don't have to win, and this is a war of attrition. And by the time you get in a powerful ally that's gonna spend the equivalent of $30 billion to help you, the French, and by the, that time, the Spanish come in and the Dutch come in, and they're challenging the British property, uh, not just the 13 colonies. They have 13 much richer, more important colonies to them based on slave labor in the Caribbean, that the French and the Spanish are challenging that, and Gibraltar, and, and then in the subcontinent, and then what's now the Philippines. So it's a global war that is over the prize of North America, but also the fight between empires in which somebody has to win.
- SSSimon Sinek
This is passion versus metrics, right?
- KBKen Burns
Yeah.
- SSSimon Sinek
It's the banker who r- who, who, who tells the CEO what to do versus the startup who's driven by idealism and passion.
- KBKen Burns
And I'm gonna, I don't care that I'm in my garage.
- SSSimon Sinek
I don't care that I'm in my b- garage, and I will overcome all odds because I have to.
- KBKen Burns
I'm in [chuckles] New Hampshire because I was told not to go there, but I need to g- go someplace where I could live for nothing 47 years ago. And then when the first film was nominated for an Academy Award, people said, "Oh, you'll go back to New York, you'll go to LA." And I said, "No, I'm staying here," which is, that that decision, that second one, is the s- most important, is kind of professional decision I made.
- SSSimon Sinek
And Giáp, you know this better than I do, but I read Giáp's little treatise, The People's War, and he understood he couldn't beat America militarily, he couldn't beat America financially, but he could beat them socially.
- KBKen Burns
Right. So with the other, the question should have been not from McNamara to his counterpart, but from his counterpart to McNamara. Like, what was your number?
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah. What was your number?
- KBKen Burns
They had a number, and we finally figured out what it was. You know, g- uh, Nixon and Kissinger tie themselves into knots.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
They, you know, if they'd accepted the peace terms that were available in January of '69 when they came into office, they would've been, you know-Better than the terms they accepted before, and there'd be 25,000 more Americans alive and hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million Vietnamese and Laotians and Cambodians still alive. And, and if we'd gone with Ho Chi Minh and said, "Let them have their election. We, we believe in free elections," and done that, there'd be six or seven million people still alive or their descendants still alive. Uh, but we didn't. We went to a place. We had some numbers that, that we needed, and finally, Nixon and Kissinger say, "Okay, well we can just pretend this." They reach out to the South Vietnamese government to bypass the talks, right, that are making progress, thinking that that will keep Humphrey from overtaking him. Humphrey was 20 points down, and then he loses by .7 percentage points. If the election had happened a week later, Humphrey would've won in '68, and instead they had this idea of the decent interval. And we've got Kissinger on tape saying, "Mr. President," this is just paraphrasing, "Mr. President, the V- South Vietnamese are weak and corrupt, and they're gonna fall." And he goes, "Oh, yeah, they've been sucking at the teat too long," our president says. And then he goes, "But if we give them enough material, enough money, they will be able to hold out, and when they do collapse, which they will collapse, no one will remember and no one will blame us." So tell that to the, to the mother-
- SSSimon Sinek
Wow
- KBKen Burns
... of, of the 25,000 Americans who are killed during that indecent interval.
- 26:07 – 27:58
Why Burns keeps returning to America: the lifelong question ‘Who are we?’
- SSSimon Sinek
Uh, it's, it's the, it's the, like I said, it's the reason I'm enamored by Carse's work because I see it everywhere. I see it in business all the time, where you have an infinite game where people are playing with finite mindsets, and invariably when that happens, trust is destroyed, cooperation is destroyed, and innovation is destroyed. Question for you, why America? Like, why not British history? Why not the Plantagenets? Why not the Tudors?
- KBKen Burns
Well, 'cause I'm so parochial. I, I, I'm, I mean-
- SSSimon Sinek
[laughs]
- KBKen Burns
... I'm Guam. I'm Samoa. I'm an American possession. It's my country. I'm interested in how it works, and every film, I mean, every ... I made the same film over and over again. Every single one is the same film. It's just asking this question, who are we? And you never answer that question. You just deepen it, I think, with each successive project. You get, you know a little bit more. Not to say that the early stuff isn't good. That first film, Brooklyn Bridge, was, I thought, still I can, I can look at it. And what's so great is that it's just practice. You know what I mean? It's like when the film is done, it's yours, but up until that time, we're just w- it's the process of doing it. And now I'm into other pr- I'm working on a history of Reconstruction called Emancipation to Exodus. I'm doing something on LBJ and the Great Society, his domestic thing as opposed to his, his foreign policy failures. I mean, he went to McNamara and Rusk and Bundy and Ball and said, "I need you more than he needed you," meaning, "I'm not an internationalist. I just want to be the second coming of FDR. Just please go take care of this." Now, he's responsible. He's the guy who waited until his landslide victory against Goldwater to put boots on the ground in March of '65. He went into it. He's culpable. And, and we only spent one sentence in 18 hours and 10 episodes talking about his domestic agenda. But-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... the din of the war began to affect the effectiveness of his domestic program. So we just wanted to go back and, and sort of understand his complicated and tragic, uh, existence.
- 27:58 – 39:32
Defining America without exceptionalism: Lincoln, striving, and improvisation
- SSSimon Sinek
So from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Vietnam War to baseball to the Revolution, you know, and everything in between and after, [laughs] uh, a- and I appreciate that you can't, quote-unquote, "answer the question," but who are we? Who is America relative to the world? Who is America relative to... What does it mean to be an American based on what you've learned?
- KBKen Burns
I can't answer that. I can give you little feelings and, a- and, and parts of feelings. It's ephemeral. Lincoln gives a wonderful speech, what we'd now call the, the State of the Union speech, but it's in, in December of '62. Things have been going bad, but we did have the stalemate at Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history, and he's able to, uh, um, give the Emancipation Proclamation. And he's, he's like, he's going both directions, so this is who we are. And because he's the greatest poet president and who gets us in a way, in a timeless way, I can quote this. He says, first, "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation." Okay? So we're prisoners of this history. We've got to be mindful of what it is, and we say we're against slavery and what- we gotta act it and, and enact it. Then f- a few sentences later he says, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, we must think anew. We must act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we can save our country." The end of this thing is th- he calls us the last best hope of Earth. All three of those I agree with. And look at his second, uh, inauguration just before he's murdered. There is a part in the penultimate moment in which he is Old Testament fu- I mean, he has got a lightning bolt, and he said, "Okay, you want to continue this thing?" And that every drop of blood drawn by the lash, meaning slavery, will be met by one drawn by the sword. We'll do this for as long as you motherfuckers want to do this, right? He knows the war's gonna end very shortly, but he is, it has got unbelievable fury.
- SSSimon Sinek
Hmm.
- KBKen Burns
And then he pivots, next sentence p- practically, he goes, "With malice towards none, with charity," I mean, goes completely New Testament.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
And it's all about forgiveness and, and embracing and taking care of the widow and the orphan and, you know, those who have borne the ba- I mean, it is amazing, and that is us, and that's as close as I can get for you.
- SSSimon Sinek
Ah. I'm gonna push you because w- w- what makes us not French? What makes us not English? What makes us not Italian?
- KBKen Burns
Geography to a certain extent
- SSSimon Sinek
No. No, there's something to be an American
- KBKen Burns
Yeah. I mean, we invented this thing. I think the Revolution is the most significant event in world history since the birth of Christ. I'm happy to have conversations, not debates, but conversations about somebody else's favorite. And so that makes us the inventors of putting into practice enlightenment thinking that had come out of the Renaissance, that borrowed from antiquity ideas about virtue. Pursuit of happiness is not acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. It's about increasing your virtue because you've now had bestowed on you this thing that had never happened. Everybody was a subject under authoritarian rule. Now you were a citizen. What were you gonna do? And everybody, and the founders were freaked out about... You know, John, John Adams says, "There's so much ambition and avarice, so much love, lust for profit. Is there virtue enough to maintain a republic?" The key word in the phrase that I quoted was, uh, not from Adams, but from the declaration, is pursuit. We're a nation in the process of becoming. 11 years later in Philadelphia in the same place, they say a more perfect union. There is a kind of striving. There is a kind of improvisational genius. Interesting, uh, that I said improvisational, because at the opening of my baseball series, um, the scholar and writer Gerald Early, um, said, "When they study our American civilization 2,000 years from now," and think about how long that is.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
Because go back 2,000 years and look at civilization. He said, "When they study the American civilization 2,000 years from now, we'll be known for only three things: the Constitution, baseball, and jazz music." And at the heart of these, the, you know, the Constitution is still the shortest constitution on Earth, four pieces of parchment, amended, that's able to adjudicate, [chuckles] for the most part, the most complicated-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... problems, uh, from the, uh, uh, uh, of the American story. And then baseball's got infinite chess-like combinations. And of course, at the heart of the art form that we've given to the world is this idea that you don't play the notes on the page, but you listen to what someone else plays, and then you interpret this and cr- do something which everyone else can only dream of, which is create art on the spot.
- SSSimon Sinek
I think, I think we're moving down the field here a little bit. L- One of my favorite things about America is we celebrate our, quote-unquote, "independence" on July 4th, 1776, which of course is nonsense. That's just simply the date we signed the Declaration of Independence.
- KBKen Burns
Yeah.
- SSSimon Sinek
And the war didn't end, and we weren't recognized as an independent nation till the Treaty of Paris.
- KBKen Burns
Right.
- SSSimon Sinek
Uh-
- KBKen Burns
And we won the Battle of Yorktown on October 17, 1781, but the British didn't disoccupy New York City until November 25th, 1783. That's two years and a month plus later.
- SSSimon Sinek
So a full seven years after the declaration do we actually have it. And then what is it, 1789 is, uh, is the, the Const-
- KBKen Burns
The beginning of the United States government
- SSSimon Sinek
... the Constitution and the, and the first president.
- KBKen Burns
Constitution is the summer of '87, and then George Washington assumes office in 1789.
- SSSimon Sinek
Okay. So we have a Constitution in 1787 and president in 1789. I love how we celebrate our independence in 1776, but this to me captures one of the essential qualities of America-
- KBKen Burns
Yeah
- SSSimon Sinek
... which is we don't celebrate the day we had it.
- KBKen Burns
No.
- SSSimon Sinek
We celebrate the day we would like to have had it.
- KBKen Burns
We celebrated we wanted it.
- 39:32 – 44:01
Origins of the Revolution: ‘salutary neglect,’ land hunger, and Enlightenment language
- KBKen Burns
So, so it's complicated, Simon.
- SSSimon Sinek
[laughs]
- KBKen Burns
And what happens is that they have enjoyed about 150 years of what somebody in Britain called salutary neglect. They're the least taxed people on Earth. They're incredibly literate. They're very healthy. They now own land. And they pay about one shilling a year in taxes to local legislators, and the British win, with our help, what we call the French and Indian War, but the rest of the world sees as a global war called the Seven Years' War. But the British is, are depleted. They can no longer defend us. And what Americans wanna do more than anything else is go over and take Indian land in the Ohio Valley. Like a normal guy whose family has worked in Wales or Scotland or Ireland or England, dependent land for a thousand years, never owned something, now wants something. And the Brits say, "We can't protect you. You can't cross over the Appalachians." So they're going, "Wait a second. You promised." And then there are big land speculators like, uh, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, who've decided that they own, because they've surveyed it, 25,000 acres in the Ohio Valley, which then they want to resell at a huge profit. George Washington may at this time be the richest man in the country, so they're pissed off at the British. And then the British say, "Well, if we're protecting them and we can't afford to protect them, we need to tax them." And they go, "No, that's taxation without representation." So you have all of these arguments that are just the arguments that people do everywhere-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... against im- imposed stuff. And then all of a sudden, as I suggested before, the, this clash between Englishmen breaks out into an argument about natural rights. Why? Because we're in the Enlightenment and we are using the big arguments. So you have s- people who enslave people saying that what Britain is doing to us is like slavery, right?
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
And it's not like slavery at all.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
But they're using that as an argument, and so what you have is an increasing rhetoric, that the more tyrannical they accuse the government of, of G- of George III, the more tyrannical they act. The more radical they accuse us of being, the more radical we act. And then we happen, and then after Lexington and Concord, which is April of '75, it isn't for 15 months before anybody gets up the courage to say, "Well, maybe we should be independent," right? We've already had the Battle of Bunker Hill. The British have 40% casualties. It's a Pyrrhic victory for them. They take the hill, but they're still boxed in by the Americans, and they won't have 40% casualties till 1916, the first day of the Somme, right? I mean, it's that bad, that bloody. But it still takes us another year-
- SSSimon Sinek
[laughs]
- KBKen Burns
... to say, "And actually, we wanna be independent." So why? An Englishman comes in and writes this thing called Common Sense that comes out in January of '76. At that time, you know, they want the king to come to their aid, and he goes, "It's the king who's the problem." So the answer is so complicated, and people are loyalists here. And you may be a loyalist starting off, but when the occupying army rapes your daughter or steals your crops, suddenly you're a patriot. And you're a patriot until they suddenly take away your farm or they, they've won this battle, and now you're not so sure, and your chance of winning at Lexington and Concord is zero, and, and you're gonna keep going. What's amazing, and gets to the heart of your question, is that there are lots of peopleWho are animated the, by this new idea.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
That for the first time ... Jefferson writes a few phrases after pursuit of happiness, "All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable." It just means that people have put up with the autocrat's boot on their back, right?
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
On their neck.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
And that we're creating a new thing called citizens, and that's gonna require more energy. It's gonna require more virtue. It's gonna require more civic engagement than has ever taken place before, and we don't know that human beings can do that. But a few people hold to that, and they come to that a lot out of anger. Even Adams says it's unbelievable how much anger dis- as well as cause fuels these sorts of things.
- SSSimon Sinek
Your passion is, is, uh, contagious.
- KBKen Burns
What I'm saying is it's, it's, it's complicated, and there's no ... You can't bottle that thing and go, "This is American," and not ... I can't, uh, go into the lab and go, "Oh, I see a little bit of French here, and I f- see a little bit of German as well, and there's a lot of Native American." And by the way, there's lots of enslaved people in this story too who get nothing out of this, but they're pa- ... You know what I mean? That, that when you do a lab analysis, you, you, you ... The purity test is, is, uh, falls apart.
- 44:01 – 49:55
Editing life and editing film: empathy lives in what gets left out
- SSSimon Sinek
From somebody who's made a career of trying to simplify the world, I so appreciate your, uh, adherence to the complexity of it.
- KBKen Burns
Yeah. It's the only way to go.
- SSSimon Sinek
And I don't, and I don't disagree about the complexity.
- KBKen Burns
I know you don't.
- SSSimon Sinek
What I so love about your point of view, your perspective, your work, is that they are, they are snippets of time. They're merely arbitrary captures of a moment, maybe because something big happened, you know? But there's a lot that came before, and there's a lot that will come after. And sure, you can tell the story of Vietnam. Sure, you can just tell the story of the Revolution. Sure, you can tell the story of, uh, uh, any of the stories you tell, and you, you would be making films forever to explain all the little pieces and things and, you know, nuances and things that seem inconsequential become huge, and huge things that become inconsequ- and all these little ripples that make something happen in this way on this day. And by the way, that thing will then have ripples beyond it.
- KBKen Burns
Exactly.
- SSSimon Sinek
I think there's a duality here that's really important, which is n- I, I don't know anybody on the planet that has your recall, your ability to keep in your head the organization, the dates, the people, you know, and, and your, your ability to m- m- comprehend the complexity and the complicatedness of it all in a moment. And, and so I think the reason to try to simplify, and I'm the first to admit in my own work that I simplify for understanding, fully acknowledging that I'm leaving things out-
- KBKen Burns
Yeah
- SSSimon Sinek
... that makes it technically wrong. Like, I know that the chemicals in the body, dopamine and endorphins, you know, serotonin, oxytocin, they don't release neatly like I write about them. It's messy and complicated, but to understand it, I need to simplify it just so you'll understand it. And, and I think there's this duality that has to exist where I do crave simplicity. I wanna know why the sun comes up in the morning and why it goes down at the end of the day. I need, I need an explanation because otherwise I will either feel lost or stupid or dumb.
- KBKen Burns
But you know that at, at dawn or sunset a switch doesn't flip, and it goes from darkness to light or light to darkness. There's this, this gradual thing that takes place, which we call dawn and dusk, that has the ability to, um, overpower or short-circuit the, the tendency to go flick, light is gone, right? Flick, light came on again.
- SSSimon Sinek
Where I'm trying to get to, which is ... And I, and, and if I make any conclusion about the world we live in today, and I do not wanna go down that rabbit hole as to how we got here, but it, the duality matters. It is okay to try and simplify the world so that we can understand it and feel like we matter in it. And we have to accept that whatever simplicity that we latch onto, that the, there is complexity that sometimes we understand and sometimes we don't, that, that those things have to live together. And you have to be cognizant of both, that I, I am simplifying the complexity, but I appreciate that there is complexity.
- KBKen Burns
Well, you know, we make films, and they're not additive. You don't build a film. You subtract a film. We have 500 hours of footage and material, and we get down to 12. And it's, it's to do what you're talking about-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... to kind of simplify in a way, but we also want to leave open, particularly in the ability of long form. You know, we always say we want the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
And, and m- yet we never ask what's that difference, right? It's ... You, you know, if you build a, a, a bridge or a house, one and one has to equal two. But if you're creating art, if you're pursuing ideas, the power of ideas, you want one and one to equal three.
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
And you don't necessar- And in faith as well, that's ... In art, that's part of it, and you don't necessarily know or have even the apparatus to be able to even possibly begin to describe-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... which is why I dodged your what makes the American different.
- SSSimon Sinek
[laughs]
- KBKen Burns
That, that difference between the sum of the parts-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... which is just addition, duality-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... adding up, and the whole. And you have to just ... This is the mystery-
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah
- KBKen Burns
... of, of life that we have been handed.
- SSSimon Sinek
I think what I'm concluding, and I'm thi- and I'm sort of l- I'm sort of realizing this in the moment as I'm talking to you, I'm sort of learning as I'm talking to you, which is to understand the duality of subtraction to get to the ability to tell the story but to recognize that the, the, the 500 hours became 7, you know, to just to, to know that, that's, that is where empathy exists.
- KBKen Burns
That's right.
- 49:55 – 54:12
Closing reflections: big, scary ideas; letting go of the work; certainty vs. faith
- SSSimon Sinek
What's your favorite book and why?
- KBKen Burns
Wow. I like, in a novel, it's, uh, a sort of toss-up. Well, I'll just say I like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which is often called magical realism because, in the midst of what is a then and then and then, stuff happens that just don't happen on Earth, like a maid ascends to heaven as she's hanging up the laundry, you know? There's just that stuff. I remember weeping at the end of that book and slowing down my reading when I was 100 pages out.
- SSSimon Sinek
Mm. Beautiful. And just because I can't help myself, when you ch- do a subject, when you sh- go down, when you decide to go down a rabbit hole, I mean, you can spend-
- KBKen Burns
10 years
- SSSimon Sinek
... a decade of your life-
- KBKen Burns
Yeah
- SSSimon Sinek
... on a thing.
- KBKen Burns
Yeah. Well, I'm, I, I, you know, in that 10 years that I made The American Revolution, 10 and a half, I made, I released a film a year, sometimes two films a year. So I've got other different groups that are working, and I can move when I can give some stuff, and then I can come back. And then at the last year, it's pretty intensely that thing. So there's, you know, you would, you're helped by doing other things because it's like, you know, rubbing your tummy and patting your head. You can learn something about separating, and you come back to the revolution, the next cut, and you go, you're free and liberated from all of the stuff.
- SSSimon Sinek
Do, do you, when, when you choose a subject, do you sort of like take a deep breath and go, "Here we go," or, or are you like-
- KBKen Burns
No
- SSSimon Sinek
... "No, this is worth spending the next decade of my life studying"?
- KBKen Burns
Oh, oh, both. Both. You go, "Yikes." You bite... You know, uh, uh, there's a, a thing on my office door that says, from Tyrone Guthrie, who had a theater in Minneapolis, the Globe Theatre, but he said, "We are looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of again." It's not a very well-written sentence, but I like that idea of biting off more than you can chew and learning how to chew it. And at the same time, you go into it, people say, "You must, 10 years, you must get so bored." You go, "No, I actually enjoy the promotion only because it's this airlock that mitigates the grief of letting it go." Because the second this thing is out, it's yours. It's not mine. And people say, "What did you intend here?" I said, "Whatever you felt." Right?
- SSSimon Sinek
Yeah. Yeah.
- KBKen Burns
So, so there is this thing of letting it go, and so the evangelical, I call it the evangelical part of it, of going out and proselytizing about the American Revolution or Muhammad Ali or Jackie Robinson or this Central Park Five or The Civil War is the way in which you mitigate the grief of having to let it go.
- SSSimon Sinek
Ugh, I wanna keep talking. It's so unfair. This is the exact same thing as to why I think corporations aren't innovative. You know, small companies are innovative. Big companies buy innovative small companies. And for, and it's not size or scale-
- KBKen Burns
No
- SSSimon Sinek
... that makes you lose innovation.
- KBKen Burns
No.
- SSSimon Sinek
I mean, you have all the money. You have all the people. You have all the market conditions. Why aren't you innovative? And I think it's this point, which is small companies, their ambitions or their vision is larger than the resources they have available to achieve it.
- KBKen Burns
That's right. That's right.
- SSSimon Sinek
Whereas large companies, they moderate the vision to be very achievable-
- KBKen Burns
Yeah
- SSSimon Sinek
... to make sure they can afford it. And I think what keeps you interested for 10 years or in, in, in, in the case of a company, forever-
- KBKen Burns
Is that we, we're, we're operating on the same seat of the pants thing up here as we did when I first came to Apple
- SSSimon Sinek
E- exactly. And when we, and we as a nation say, "All men are created equal," which is clearly an ideal we will never get to, but it is, we should die trying, and that's kind of the point.
- KBKen Burns
Right. That's the point.
- SSSimon Sinek
And the ambition is so much bigger than our, than our ability-
- KBKen Burns
Yeah
- SSSimon Sinek
... and our resources. That's the reason to keep at it.
- KBKen Burns
And, and everything imposes itself in front of that because you wanna make it certain. And so that's-
Episode duration: 54:12
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode w0QhnXcqiMo
