#2336 - Ken Burns

Ken Burns is an award-winning documentary filmmaker known for “The Civil War,” “The Vietnam War,” "Jazz,” "Country Music," among many others. His next project, “The American Revolution,” a six-part series, will premiere November 16, 2025 on PBS.www.kenburns.com https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-revolution Try ZipRecruiter for FREE at https://ziprecruiter.com/rogan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:10Joe Rogan?

  All right, we're up. Mr. Brenn, pleasure to meet you.

• 0:14Speaker 03

  It's my pleasure, thank you.

• 0:16Joe 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?

• 0:35Speaker 03

  Right, all of it, all of it.

• 0:36Joe Rogan?

  Which is also extraordinary.

• 0:38Speaker 03

  You know, it's the public broadcasting service. It's 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 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 headed for the hills out of New York, you know, 46 years ago, because I thought I was taking a vow of anonymity and poverty to do this stuff. 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 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,

• 1:23Speaker 03

  I'm staying here. It's so labor-intensive. And 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 going to sit here and give you an excuse, 'Well, that one, they wouldn't let me do this, or they didn't give me this amount of time.'" And so, 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.

• 1:48Joe Rogan?

  What would be the...

• 1:49Speaker 03

  But they wouldn't give me the 10 and 1/2 years it took me to take.

• 1:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  You see what I mean?

• 1:53Joe Rogan?

  It's the time.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  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 want to find a way in which you can... Kind of, if not average them out, you can find a way in which you can understand them and you can have a conversation, 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.

• 2:25Joe Rogan?

  How early on did you realize that the only way to get this like full autonomy was to do with PBS?

• 2:34Speaker 03

  I'd like to attribute some consciousness to it and I honestly can't do it. I realized 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 Humanities, or this, all required me to give it for free, as I still do, to PBS. And we had foundations 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 the communion of strangers in dark rooms, the cinematic experiences, 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,

• 3:17Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:36Joe Rogan?

  American Buffalo?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  American Buffalo, most, most recently. And Leonardo da Vinci, the first non-American topic, or just finishing the American Revolution. It's just, it was right for me. It was right for me. And I like the fact that they have, PBS, has one foot in the marketplace and the, and the other out. You know, that foot is tentatively there. And so it also reaches all parts of the country. It's the largest network in the country. It's 330 stations. And they really serve rural stations, mostly. It's not this Upper West Side, Nob Hill, snobby kind of thing. It's Homeland Security and crop reports and weather and...

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Continuing education and Classroom of the Air, as well as children's programming, and what I think is a pretty damn good prime time schedule. So it works in the context of all of America, not just some of America.

• 4:31Joe Rogan?

  So this is sort of a fortuitous sort of a thing that you came to be

• 4:36Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 4:36Joe Rogan?

  Cooperative with them?

• 4:37Speaker 03

  The filmmaking thing was born in tragedy. My mom got cancer when I was two years old. There's never a moment when she wasn't dying that I was aware. She died when I was 11, a few months short of my 12th birthday. And 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 a.m. on a school night, a school night. Or he'd take me out to the Cinnamon Sea, like, Old Silence, or French New Wave that was happening 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.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  But we were watching this movie called Odd Man Out by Sir Carol Reed, about the Irish troubles in the 19-teens and 20s. James Mason, you know, very tragic. And I saw him cry, and I got it immediately. That provided him with his safe haven 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. And I said, "That's what I want to do." 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.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  It's that you would just get closer, be more virtuous. And so 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?

• 6:35Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  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 don't know how to describe it, love of my country and its history. I mean, where everybody else, growing up, were reading novels 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,

• 7:21Speaker 03

  which is the great gift of history. It's the best teacher we have, as you know.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  One of the more- I'm pro-football Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins, and I lived for a long time with something I did not know the name of: major depressive disorder. I carry sadness and anger because I thought I could handle it alone, but I couldn't. Now I want to make sure others know that that support is out there. If you're experiencing similar symptoms, talk to a healthcare professional. Visit MDDAllies.com to watch my story.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  Paid partnership with Johnson & Johnson. Brian Dawkins has not prescribed Caprola Lutetron.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  I needed more from my antidepressant. So my doctor added Caplyta, lumateperone. Proven to provide greater relief from depression symptoms than an antidepressant alone. Building on my progress without starting over. Caplyta is for adults with major depressive disorder when used with an antidepressant and is available by prescription only. Individual results may vary. In clinical trials, weight gain was not common.

• 8:24Speaker 05

  Elderly dementia patients have increased risk of death or stroke. Caplyta is not approved for dementia-related psychosis. Call your doctor about new or sudden mood changes, behaviors, or suicidal thoughts right away. Antidepressants may increase these risks. Report fever, confusion, stiff muscles, which may be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High cholesterol and weight gain may occur, as can high blood sugar, which may be fatal. Monitoring is recommended. Common side effects are sleepiness, dizziness, nausea, dry mouth, feeling tired, and diarrhea. These aren't all the side effects.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Ask your doctor about Caplyta. Learn more at caplyta.com or call 888-252-4824.

• 8:57Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight, and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change? Your phone. The smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone. It's a better wireless plan. Switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. That means keeping the phone you already have, ditching your overpriced phone bill, and pocketing some savings for yourself. All the perks of big wireless for half the cost. Switch today at visible.com. The Visible plan starts at just $25 a month.

• 9:42Joe Rogan?

  Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code ROGEN. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. This episode is brought to you by the Mosquito Bowl. Here's a story that's pretty incredible. After Pearl Harbor, four of the best college football players in America walk away from promising NFL careers to enlist in the Marines and fight in World War II. And the craziest part? It's a true story. These guys had their whole lives ahead of them, but traded the glory of the gridiron for the brutal reality of combat, where the stakes were life and death.

• 10:23Joe Rogan?

  Directed by Peter Berg, the guy behind Friday Night Lights, and starring Nicholas Galatzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson, and Tom Francis. The Mosquito Bowl, now playing in theaters. 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 there's recreations of these scenes, and it makes becoming educated fascinating.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:02Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 11:13Joe Rogan?

  Was it 18 hours?

• 11:14Speaker 03

  18 hours, 10 episodes.

• 11:16Joe Rogan?

  18 hours. I mean, that piece on Vietnam is so fascinating, it's so incredible, and to see those, the people that survived it, express, like, there's this one moment where one of the guys is realizing that they're about, and it's just, it's a very simple statement, he goes, "Okay, here we go, we're going to war." And you could 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.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  And you don't get it from churning it out either. So I 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 Civil War helped to promote the use of. The second film on the celibate religious sect, The Shakers, 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 soul. Survival in the in the intensity that it had before the Civil War. Next film I made was on the Statue of Liberty.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  And it was originally a gift 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, refused to secede from the Union. They saw the Confederacy, the ownership of slaves, as a rich man's cause. And so they became a hotbed of radicalism and populism and later would spawn this swamp thing called Huey Long. 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 Washington, obviously, one in Montgomery, and then later Richmond. And so I began to see the centrality.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  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, here we go. Like, 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, 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 going to 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,

• 13:58Speaker 03

  we were working on lots of things, baseball and jazz and biographies on Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis and Clark 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 a diploma, think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War. And 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

• 14:28Speaker 03

  We're losing them, 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 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 dry on the World War II film, I said, "We're doing Vietnam." And before the ink was dry, meaning we're locking it and we're mixing it and doing all the stuff we have to do, ten and a half years on Vietnam. It came out in September of seventeen. In December of fifteen, Barack Obama still has thirteen months left in his presidency. I said, "We're doing the revolution."

• 15:10Speaker 03

  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 onlineing some stuff. But what it allowed us to do in all of the cases of all of the wars, 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 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 don't.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  It obviously brings out the worst. We're the most dangerous species on this planet, clearly. But it brings out the best, right? And it's worth pursuing. And I think particularly when you take, most recently, we've spent so many years studying the American Revolution. 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 breeches and they're 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...

• 16:42Speaker 03

  We were forged in violence. And it's okay. Those ideas, those big ideas that we seemingly want to protect by like putting in a bug in amber, you know, guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts. It doesn't in any way get diminished. In fact, 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. And I agree with that. Human nature doesn't change.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  But for a few minutes, right here, we started something that was brand new. Thomas Paine said, like, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance 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 John Adams, but also the people you've never heard of, right? Point zero one percent 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 it got handed down.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  And so we could bring to life a 14-year-old kid who joins 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, 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. And who are the native players? Who are the black players? Who are the Germans, the hired soldiers? You know, they're real people. Who are the Irish and Scottish and Welsh grunts of the British Army? Who are the generals? Who are the diplomats?

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Who are the French? And then if you charge yourself with that, you can't turn that out in a year and a half. You have to spend a decade marinating that stuff, finding out what's too... Much, you know, you don't want to make an encyclopedia. I mean, you started off by talking about entertainment, 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 hi, which is really, which is a really good way to begin a story, right?

• 19:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Hi, 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 the 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.

• 19:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 20:01Joe Rogan?

  That's amazing. It really is. 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 gives them a pathway to 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.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 20:46Joe Rogan?

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• 22:06Speaker 03

  Exactly, 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? And Jefferson says a few phrases 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 going to be under the abut of an authoritarian.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  I just, you know, that's my lot, I'm just going to accept it. And he's going, no. Central to the success of this new thing you were creating, citizens, was the responsibility to educate and to be educated and to do that your lifelong. In fact, He could have said, Jefferson could have said, "life, liberty, and property." He didn't. He said, "the pursuit of happiness." That was not 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 use that word all the time. They imported it from the classical. They went over the Dark Ages, over the Middle Ages,

• 23:33Speaker 03

  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 warrior of the revolution, he's always worrying. He's saying, "I just don't know if there's enough virtue to have a republic. Everybody is so ambitious, and so greedy, and so out to do this." And so for him, if we were going to create this new thing, something new under the sun, you know, the world started over again, as Thomas Paine is suggesting, "an asylum for mankind," he called it, then maybe you had to figure out how to educate your stuff. And so when you go back and say, "What are we lost?

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Whether we're now just repeating, 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.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we shall live through all time." Or die by suicide. Whoa. 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've 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 thou's less than extraordinary things are gonna trip us up or we'll live forever.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Because if you think about it, the greatest naval invasion in history, you know, June 6, 1944, D-Day, Normandy, nobody can do that for us. Nobody's gonna land at Montauk. Nobody's gonna land at, you know, St. Augustine. Nobody's gonna land in 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've received from that founding generation. The sacrifice made not by those bold-faced names, but by the people that you've never heard of, that we are trying to, to tell you about. John Greenwood, the 14-year-old piper.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Joseph Plumb Martin, the 15-year-old kid from Connecticut. Betsy Ambler. You know, loyalists, too. I mean, we're, we're umpires, Joe. We, we call balls and strikes. You know what? Being, being a loyalist in the revolution is, is what it'd be like saying, well, you're conservative, right? Well, you, you think I, I live under the greatest 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 foolhardy 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.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  And to tell the story of how it went from zero to 100% is...

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Scary, violent, complicated, lots of undertow, and as exhilarating as you could possibly imagine.

• 27:29Joe Rogan?

  There's a great line in the trailer for this piece on the Revolutionary War. We say it's the first war that was fought in history for the unalienable rights.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Proclaiming the unalienable rights of all people. Now, 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. Women put their foot in it, the poor, the not landed people, the folks, the craftsmen, who just had a regular job, black people, native, you know, so. And 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 an authoritarian master, who had just set himself up, like King George, you know, because of hereditary privilege,

• 28:25Speaker 03

  you know, his grandfather, and his grandfather, and his father, and his uncle, and going back. And on what basis? Is it talent? Is it showing the things? And so, all of these people that we consider the bold-faced names of our revolution, the Washingtons, and the Jeffersons, and the Patrick Henrys, and the John Adams, and they didn't know they were those people.

• 28:51Joe Rogan?

  Mm, right.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  They didn't know 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.

• 29:08Joe Rogan?

  And it's also the incredibly complex system of checks and balances that they divide to prevent tyranny.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Oh, it's so unbelievably beautiful. I can't believe you brought that up. So we have a technical problem, which I'll share with you, or I thought it was a technical problem, which is the climax, 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 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. 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,

• 29:56Speaker 03

  four months, they hammer together the shortest constitution in the world, and it is exactly that. Jefferson's writing in from Paris, who representing our interests, going, but what about this? What about, they're trying to check the possibility of somebody being, somebody who would try to take advantage of the system and rig it to their own benefit. And so all of those elaborately beautiful checks and balances. Article one is the legislative. Article two is the executive. It delineates, Article three, the judicial, it delineates what the responsibilities are and the way in which the system has worked and fits and starts with lots of problems. And, you know, there's something encouraging about seeing how divided Americans were back

• 30:41Speaker 03

  then, because we're always wringing our hands, oh, we're so divided. Okay, human beings are divided. And my feeling is that if you 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." Hmm. Because a good story allows contradiction and undertow. You can have a George Washington who is complex, flawed, rash, makes terrible tactical decisions

• 31:22Speaker 03

  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 some way. And 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 that wants to throw out anybody who did something bad back then. 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

• 32:07Speaker 03

  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 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 revolution? To try to understand nuance. Every school kid knows that when the sixty or seventy people, all white males, both

• 32:51Speaker 03

  rich and poor in Boston dumped the forty tons of tea, forty 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." Really? We're here, we're Aboriginal. We are Americans, we are distinct. We've been having complaints about British and 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 have dumped the tea. They weren't burdened by the tea tax.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  What they were doing was saying, and it's so ironic, given the history of our relationship to the dispossession of native lands. Right. They are saying, "We are Aboriginal." This is what the scholar, Phil Deloria, says. So, yeah, wow. Newly adopted Aboriginal. Right. We're saying, "We're not of the mother country." We're, in essence, kind of filing divorce papers by dressing as the people who originally inhabited this country dressed. Nobody's fooled. How did you figure that out? It's listening to scholarship. It's thinking, of course, that you're not going to have... No one in their right mind is going to say, "Oh, the Native Americans did it because they're protesting the tea tax."

• 34:20Speaker 03

  They're not paying the tea tax, right? Right. So, it's like, 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 severing ties." Now, this is well before... This is December of 1773. The guns are going to fire in about 18 months at Lexington, a little bit less than 18 months, at Lexington and Concord on April 19th. But it is all of these little moments that lead up to boycott of British goods. Women take a huge part of the role of the resistance.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  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. Who is... His whole job is to keep his fellow colonists alive to their grievances. When things calm down, the Brits sort of retreat. He goes, "Oh, no, no, no. It's just going to get worse. It's going to get worse." And so, you meet these characters that sound an awful lot like characters that occupy our large media space. And it was occupying the large media space of the colonists from New Hampshire. 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

• 35:44Speaker 03

  as late as the, even after Lexington conquered, even after the Battle of Bunker Hill, which is June of 75, even after the 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 Pegg comes in and writes this pamphlet, Common Sense. And all of a sudden, people 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 doing this thing. And what does he write?

• 36:26Speaker 03

  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, you just, you just tell them 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

• 37:11Speaker 03

  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, you know, that mankind are disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, meaning, yeah, we've taken it, all this through human history, and guess what? We're not going to take it anymore.

• 37:41Joe Rogan?

  When they first devised this system of government, what were they basing it on? I know part of it was on the Greeks, but like, what was the, how did they make it? To the point where even today, we marvel at it.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:57Joe Rogan?

  Two hundred and fifty years later, people go back and like, "Look what they did. This is extraordinary."

• 38:01Speaker 03

  It's extraordinary. So, lots of factors. First of all, it is true what I said. They have experienced at a reserve and at sort of, as somebody said, salutary neglect. 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, and they paid it to local stuff, and they had land. And most folks in England and Wales and Scotland and Ireland were living dependent lives. They'd worked the land of somebody else for a thousand 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,

• 38:44Speaker 03

  and the House of Carments, 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,

• 39:29Speaker 03

  some music. But what it's doing on a social scene and a philosophical scene is doing that. And they're reaching back to antiquity, as you say, and they're pulling back some of the best ideas of self-discipline, 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, three thousand miles away, takes, you know, at least a month for information to get there. The Briton 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 biggest, most far-flung empire on earth, but they can't protect its

• 40:12Speaker 03

  own colonists, who are trying to pour over the Appalachians to take Native American land, and it's causing...

• 40:19Speaker 03

  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 the relationships between the states, to

• 41:02Speaker 03

  have the checks and balances between the three forms of government, the judicial, the legislative, and the executive. 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'd 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 a little bit of Kansas. You know, six people died at the Siege of Vicksburg, less than 20 at Atlanta, two in Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America. But the American Revolution, lots of their battles in the South in which you might have

• 41:45Speaker 03

  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 South Vietnam. And it is really bad stuff. And so they say, "We're going to 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 redress grievances, right to bear arms, you know, free and fair trial, end of cruel and unusual punishment. All these things become the set pieces of...

• 42:30Speaker 03

  I made a film a couple of years ago on 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 have 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."

• 43:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 43:44Joe Rogan?

  It's just, it's so hard for people to recognize that that was a civil war. Because I think most people think it was the United States colonists against the British. But the separatists and the loyalists battling it out together, I think most people are completely unaware of that.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  Completely unaware. We, we wrote a, for lack of a better word, a topic sentence early in the film is that, I might get this slightly wrong, but the, "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." So our, ours is like the fourth global war over the prize of North America. And they're, and we're treating native nations not as them, but as distinct entities.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  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 Virginia or the colony of Virginia is at that time. And that they're different from the Delawares, they're allies. And they're different from the Hoda Nochone, the 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 western New York State all the way into New England, right, and up into Canada.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  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 the only person who's been to New Hampshire, and he's been 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."

• 46:08Speaker 03

  And they pass, seven of the 13 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. And none of the states take it because no one wants to, none of the colonies take it because 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 history.

• 46:31Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Isn't that great? So you're taking the Native American riffing on that, and then as you're forming this, you're bringing in what you've had and inherited for decades, 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 also been out there forever. And we end up with what we have, which is this, you know, glorious, wonderful, but also dysfunctional republic.

• 47:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's terrible, but it's the best one out there.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  It's the best one out there, yeah. That's exactly right.

• 47:14Joe Rogan?

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

• 47:35Speaker 03

  I'm pretty well-versed in American history, but nothing. I mean, like, I've worked on two films where I made the mistake of thinking, "Ah, I know about this subject, baseball and Vietnam." Because I 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 loved baseball. Every day of both those productions were daily humiliations of what I didn't know. 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.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Can I just say, can I use these mugs to tell you how Daniel Morgan won the Battle of Calpens against Bannister Tarleton in South Carolina, just below the North Carolina border, and he trusts to 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're fired twice. And the second line of militia, my more inexperienced, 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 an inheritance, recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany, and they stop the British."

• 49:03Speaker 03

  So Tarleton goes, "Oh, 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 they go after them, and the Americans actually attack, which is very rare, an attacking thing to drive into the British line. Tarleton gets away, but a huge part of Cornwallis's army has been diminished, and they're uttering this war cry that they have adapted from the Cherokee, from Native American tribes, which is a yell that will reverberate in southern battlefields for decades.

• 49:36Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  "Wow" is right. And like, I can take, I mean, look...

• 49:43Speaker 03

  There's Lexington and Concord, and then maybe somebody says Bunker Hill, which is really Breed's Hill, Barker 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 gives the French the confidence to come in on our side and give us the equivalent of $30 billion plus Navy and soldiers. And then New York Town. But there are dozens of battles that we'll 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.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  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 exposed, and they go around. He's not the greatest tactician, but he is the man of the time. This leadership, this ability to understand subordinate talent, 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.

• 50:57Joe Rogan?

  Which is so crazy, when you think of like pivotal figures in human history, this one person, were they not born, weren't they not in that position at that time? Extraordinary circumstances, unusual character.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  We have 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 witnesses. We have hundreds of first-person voices. But we have some scholars and writers who are on the thing, and there's one, Christopher Brown, who just shakes his head, and he goes, like, "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've sort of elevated these people to a supernatural position that they don't really necessarily deserve.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  He deserves it, and yet he's also deeply flawed, feats 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 rash, Joe. He runs out at Kips Bay, which is halfway up Manhattan. After he's lost the Battle of Long Island, he's now abandoning New York, or he's taking a good number of his men up to Harlem. And at Kips Bay, which is sort of midtown on the East River, there's a battle 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 going to be killed. If he's killed, that's it, right? And then later on, at the Battle of Princeton, he does the same thing.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  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 rise out and just is very present, turns what is a retreat of Continental soldiers and militiamen into steading their lines and basically holding their own against the prime, the elite of the British Army. And it's, where does that come from? Where, who does that? How did we do? And for the very beginning, everybody knew you needed a Virginian. The New Englanders, where the war started. The war is a symphony in three movements, right? The New England is the first movement, central states, and then the southern states.

• 53:22Speaker 03

  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 ways to get in, but they can't get out, besides by ship, that we need a real army. And the army is formed, and it is very obvious from the very start that there can be no other person than George Washington. The New Englanders want a Virginian. It's the most populous, it's the richest state. 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. That starts the global conflict that everyone else on Earth calls the Seven Years' War, that will set the stage for the American Revolution.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  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? And then he go, and then if, 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 because 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 function and great

• 54:48Speaker 03

  ability to pick subordinates without fear of being overshadowed. One of his great generals, Nathaniel Greene, another great general, Benedict Arnold. And we introduced Benedict Arnold in the opening seconds of our first, 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, you know? But he's a hero at Quebec City, he's a hero at the Battle of Saratoga. He's been painted out of most of the paintings because he became Benedict Arnold. But isn't it nice to know that he's that great, a general, before he becomes Benedict Arnold?

• 55:22Joe Rogan?

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• 56:08Joe Rogan?

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• 57:11Joe Rogan?

  That term, when I was a child, when I was in school, a Benedict Arnold was a traitor.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  A traitor.

• 57:17Joe Rogan?

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

• 57:22Speaker 03

  Oh, God, they'd say it was a mixture of...

• 57:25Joe Rogan?

  It's like an Arnold Palmer.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  It's like an Arnold Palmer. It's a mixture of iced tea and lemonade, yeah. You know what? That's so terrifying to me.

• 57:30Joe Rogan?

  Weird, right?

• 57:31Speaker 03

  And I'm... No, it's what happens when you atrophy this interest in American history, or you think that it can be so simplified that you don't have to do anything. I'm... That's my job. I mean, I love it. And I love the fact that we can bring back these things for people, and they can... They can experience... And there isn't a person in the country that's listening to me now, or that we're going, you know, 35 different cities all around the country, talking about this. We made it for everybody. This is not made for the 8th grader taking American history, or the 11th grader making this. It's for you.

• 58:05Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 58:05Speaker 03

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

• 58:15Joe Rogan?

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

• 58:51Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. I think what happens is that, it's so interesting because we understand, as you're referencing the power of a book, still the greatest mechanical invention there is, that it can go into some depths, a documentary do. But a documentary can hold lots of different opposing points of view, not make them arguments, but allow people to have different points of view and sort of collect, almost like spokes in the wheel. You want to get to the hub, that's whatever it is that you're after. But the wheel is much stronger by all those spokes. And unfortunately, too often, in history or in teaching, we subscribe to one particular theory of history, right? That it's got to be this, or it's got to be that.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  And what we've done is we've found the documentary and the storytelling aspects of it hugely, hugely valuable in communicating the complexity of the subject without putting your thumb on the scale and making a political point.

• 59:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  We're just, you know, look, I will be totally honest, history doesn't repeat itself. No event has ever happened twice. But Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." If he did say that, he's exactly right, because human nature doesn't change.

• 1:00:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  And so you watch these events, and when we finished working on it, and I told you, we began this when Barack Obama had a year and a half to go in his presidency, or a year and a month to go in his presidency. It's a totally different world, and we know that it rhymes, but we never once have concentrated in saying, "Oh, we're going to put our thumb on the scale here. We want everybody to watch. We have no axe to grind. We're just, as I'm saying, calling balls and strikes." And when I mean that, it would be like saying, "Let me tell you about Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson. They struck out a lot. Thanks so much." [laughing] And I'm true, I have not told you anything that is not true, correct? Right, sure. They also hit a hell of a lot of home runs. And so, calling balls and strikes is

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  saying that what happens is, the way we teach history is the way ESPN does sports highlights. It's always the homerun. Yeah. It's never, "The guy turned the double play," or "He doubled some guy off," or "There was some other thing." It's always the homerun. And so, nobody takes a strike in these highlights. And what we're trying to say is, isn't it better to watch the game? Yeah. And see that even Babe Ruth can only come up to bat every nine times. And even Babe Ruth fails seven times out of 10. He's a 300 hitter, a little bit more than 300

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  hitter. That's the great beauty of it. And so, I think that we don't ever now think that he is a failure. We understand that the dynamics of life, the dynamics of this particular game, mean that the people who fail seven times out of 10 and do it significantly are in the Hall of Fame. Mmm. I mean, and that's the beauty of these story tellings. See, I'm not taking anything away from George Washington by making it complex, making him human. He's not a statue out in the park collecting bird shit. He's a real, breathing human being. He's one of the richest people in America. He marries one of the richest people in America, a widow.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  And like, he's away. He makes one visit home, I think to Monticello during the whole, I mean, to Mount Vernon during the whole war. He's dedicated to this thing. I mean, he doesn't have to do this, right? He's committed to this project of us. And that's the ultimate point I want to make about not just this film, or Vietnam, or all the things we've been talking about, is that I've had The great privilege of making films about the US for nearly fifty years, Joe. But I've also made films about us. That is to say, the lowercase, two-letter, plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty and the complexity

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  and the contradiction and even the controversy of the US. And that is a privileged space to be operating in, to be having been given the permission to do this for nearly fifty years is just great. I think I have the best job in the country. And I'm always happy to meet somebody who's willing to contradict me. But it's only because you have a chance to work hard at telling the story. I mean, we lock the picture back in January. That means you're not going to do any more work on it. We've unlocked it hundreds of times just to make it better. Some historians said, I'm not sure if you can be that categorical. And then we put in a perhaps, right? Or you find out that image isn't as stunning as we thought it could be. Could we swap that out?

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that works better than before, even after we were done, done. And I like the ability that by the time we're letting it go, it's like your kid, you're still licking the smudge off their face and making sure that their hair is tied up in a nice bow and have a good day, sweetie.

• 1:03:57Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:04:38Joe Rogan?

  And you lose the real understanding of the complexities of history.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:04:43Joe Rogan?

  And of these human beings that lived in a very different time. Seventeen seventy-six, even though it's only three people ago, is a very, you know, people lived to be a hundred, three people ago. So it's a very different time.

• 1:04:54Speaker 03

  It's a very different time, and you make a really, really good point. When you take the judgments of what we know now. You can apply them and then you end up with what I call that unforgiving revisionism. Yes. Where you throw out some significant people with the bathwater revisionism. But let me just tell you, they all knew slavery was wrong. They all knew it was wrong and they still did it. And there's a historian in it, Net Gordon Reed, who just says, you know, slavery's foundational to Thomas Jefferson and he knew all his life it was wrong and said it and wrote about it and tried to put in something to end the slave trade and in the Declaration of Independence, which no one would have. And she goes, well, how could somebody do something they knew was wrong? She goes, well, that's a question for all of us.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  And so Jefferson's neighbor freed all his slaves and urged him to do it and he didn't. And his cousin freed all his slaves. So there's already that. The question is, if you are just taking the judgments of today to cancel somebody, you've just missed the possibility of getting to know George Washington or getting to know Thomas Jefferson. And if you only do people who are perfect, you're either lying about them or you've got very few characters, you know? I mean, because I don't know about you. I'm not. I presume you're not. I don't think you know anybody who's perfect. I don't know anybody who's perfect.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  And so then it's like history becomes, honey, how was your day? It doesn't begin, I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb, you know? Unless you get T-boned, in case that's exactly the way to do it. You edit human experience and you tolerate the vast experiences that human beings are so complex. And it's the interest, it was very interesting. We did an update of our baseball series called The Tenth Innings. And being from New England and being a Red Sox fan, the whole thing was just a disguise to be able to do the Red Sox comeback in 2004. But we were dealing with the great Atlanta

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  team in the 90s and the great Joe Torre led Yankees and then Sosa and Maguire and then Bonds and then steroids and whatever. At the end of it, we're really trying to come to something about steroids and try to figure out how to deal with it. And Thomas Boswell, now retired as a great sports writer for the Washington Post, said, I think it's Keith's, writing about William Shakespeare, who's a pretty good playwright, said that Shakespeare had negative capability. That means he could hold intention, the positive and negative aspects of a character for as long as you possibly could without making that quick and facile and easy judgment that we make all the time in our lives. When the guy cuts

• 1:07:49Speaker 03

  us off, we give him the finger, you know, we yell, "F you," whatever that is, we make judgments about it. And Shakespeare had that ability, even with the darkest characters, you know, the Iago's and the Richard III, you know, people who are deep and dark. He had negative capability. He said, "That's what we need to grow in order to understand the steroid era, in order to understand how to deal with all of that." And I think that in a way, all of us have to kind of grow that negative capability, that ability to distinguish that nobody's perfect and that if you superimpose this kind of abstract sets of judgment, nobody passes the test.

• 1:08:30Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  No one passes the test.

• 1:08:32Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Certainly.

• 1:08:59Joe Rogan?

  Fail, figure out why you failed, kind of succeed, but then also do it.

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  Take a few steps back.

• 1:09:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's consistent. And I think in this process of this, unfortunately...

• 1:09:12Joe Rogan?

  You have performative virtue.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  That's correct.

• 1:09:15Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  I think it's the only way and it takes time and I am very, I have to acknowledge that there's no other place on the dial that dates me, you know, than PBS where I have the time to do it. It's sort of like an NIH grant, like here we'd like you to explore the possible cure to this disease. Can you have it next Thursday? Well, no, you can't have it next Thursday. That's what Hollywood says. I need it out because the other Marvel thing is coming out at the same time. What you need is, we want to set you up with a certain set of circumstances that are going to permit you to have the best possibility of doing this. And so, we've always hit our marks. We've always come, if we haven't been in budget, it's because we've expanded the film and then I've gone out and raised the money.

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  So, no one else was responsible for the fact that we decided Vietnam is not going to be seven episodes, it's going to be eight and, oh, you know what? It's going to be 10. And that's 18 hours and that's, you know, the way that Vietnam, and it had to do with listening to the material, understanding how it spoke to us, you know, committing ourselves to recording Vietnamese voices, not just South Vietnamese soldiers and South Vietnamese civilians, but Vietcong guerrillas, North Vietnamese soldiers, North Vietnamese civilians, as well as the range of Americans. And so, one of my favorite scenes is, is a North Vietnamese soldier and a Vietcong soldier and an American all saying exactly the same thing about the same moment in a battle. Early battle, before there were technically boots on the ground, this was an advisor, an American advisor.

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  But they're, they're all talking about a helicopter flying over this one hedge. And the Viet, and the Vietcong guys behind the hedge, the South Vietnamese officer is, is, you know, next to the American guy, and they all have an experience of war that is exactly the same. And I love that. I love that.

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  What was your first piece? Brooklyn Bridge. I had, I'd started- What year was this? So it came out, it was first broadcast in eighty-one or eighty-two. I had been working on it since seventy-seven. I looked twelve years old and I was trying to sell people the Brooklyn Bridge. And people, people, people were, you know, telling me, "Oh, this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. No." And I used to keep these two big, thick, three-way binders on my desk, all filled with rejections for that one film. I mean, literally, hundreds of rejections. But I had read David McCullough's The Great Bridge, The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge. And I went out to my partners, we just founded our company, we're called Florentine Films.

• 1:12:29Speaker 03

  We were starving. We'd like maybe get a day's work or two days' work a month as cinematographers and soundmen and grips. And we were paying the rent. And that was that. And I said, "We're gonna do this, and I'll raise all the money." And, and I did. And it got, I moved up to New Hampshire so I could live on nothing in seventy-nine and eighty. And I, both those years, I made less than twenty-five-hundred bucks. And chopped all the wood for my stove, split it, carried it, kept the stoves going. You wake up in the middle of, of the night and, you know, four AM in, in February, and, and you go, "I just heard the heater kick on. I gotta go down and, and feed the stove." But it came out, I got nominated for an Academy Award.

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  And that, that was the sign to me that like I needed to, I'd hit a fork in the road. And like Yogi Berra said, "You take it." It was to not go back to New York, to not go back to LA, but to say, "I'm gonna be staying here because this is labor-intensive. We're gonna have to raise grants to do this stuff. I'm not looking for investors." Looking for underwriting so that we are liberated from the suits that would come in and give the notes and say, oh, you needed to be less sexy or more sexy or longer or shorter or more violent or less violent. I can sit here and tell you with a great deal of pride and not just for me, but on behalf of the extraordinary people that work with me and some of them have been for 50

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  years and some of them for 30 years and some of them for 40 and, you know, a lot of people that these are director's cuts, that we haven't let it go. And they're, the way the country has responded to them, like the Civil War series, still 35 years old, it's still the highest rated program in the history of public television.

• 1:14:12Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Believe it or not, the holiday season is here again and that means you might need to fill some seasonal roles, fast. Maybe you need extra cashiers or stalkers or maybe something more unique like a lead elf or an expert gift wrapper or a Zamboni driver. Whoever you're looking for, whatever skills you need to power through the rest of the year, ZipRecruiter is one of the best places to start your search because you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. And because ZipRecruiter helps sort through thousands of resumes and applications showing you the most qualified and interesting ones first.

• 1:14:55Joe Rogan?

  There's even an option for candidates to explain why they want the job. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. This episode is brought to you by Traeger. Thanksgiving is around the corner and nobody wants to spend hours cooking only to end up with a dry bird. Traeger is here to change that. Their grills run on real hardwood pellets and use convection heat so your turkey gets an incredible wood-fired flavor and comes out juicy, tender and absolutely mouth-watering.

• 1:15:40Joe Rogan?

  I've actually cooked a turkey. On the Traeger and it turned out fantastic. It was so juicy and delicious and it has like a smoky taste to it. It was amazing. And the crazy part is how simple it all is. You set your temperature, put the turkey on and let the Traeger handle the rest. Plus, having a Traeger is basically like having a second oven. Saving you space to cook everything else from the sides to the pie. Do the holidays right this season with Traeger grills. Incredible. How did you have that clarity of vision as a young man to recognize that working in isolation in a small town was the best option? Because I would imagine if you had aspirations to being a filmmaker when you were younger,

• 1:16:22Joe Rogan?

  the call of Hollywood, just the call of being a part of an enormous organization, like being respected by your peers in this enormous, like that had to be at least somewhat attractive. But how did you have the clarity to realize that that was not the correct path for you?

• 1:16:41Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:16:52Speaker 03

  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 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 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 want to know that my girls are okay, my daughters, and I want to know that I've made a film better, you know, in some way.

• 1:17:27Joe Rogan?

  Seven days a week.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  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 want to 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 Bossstein, the co-director and, and we just look at each other simultaneously and say, got to get rid of that. We have to change that shot. And so suddenly we're working with an editor who happened To be in Paris this semester 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've made the opposite of decision

• 1:18:13Speaker 03

  of what was sort of career-wise supposed to be what I was supposed to do. In fact, Robert Penn Warren, the poet and novelist, told me that, he looked at me once and he just said, "Careerism is death." And I've never used the word "career." I've always said my professional life. Because careerism suggests that you're following some sort of rut and that's not what I wanted to do. And so by not-

• 1:18:39Joe Rogan?

  What do you mean by rut?

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  By just-

• 1:18:41Joe Rogan?

  A path? A carved path?

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  A carved path that's already well-worn. I mean, look, if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, you've got to 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 going to go back to New York. No, why would I move to LA? I'm going to be here in this little town in New Hampshire where any number of Oscar nominations and Grammys and Emmys means zero to the people that I live with."

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  It's like, "Did you shovel the lawn, the walk of the lady next door who's not doing so well? Did you do this? Are you a good neighbor?" That's the stuff that matters and it's a good place to raise kids as well. And then the splendid isolation. 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 manifests itself in different people who are aware of the power of nature.

• 1:20:06Speaker 03

  Nature reminds you of your insignificance.

• 1:20:09Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:20:10Speaker 03

  And that is inspiriting. This is paradoxical, right? That's inspiriting. Even though you're feeling insignificant, it's inspiriting, just as the egotist in our midst- Is diminished by his or her self-regard, right?

• 1:20:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  So, anybody who says, "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, a reporter, is actually inspirited by that. And I wish to be inspirited, because 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.

• 1:21:02Joe Rogan?

  It's just amazing.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  Does that make sense?

• 1:21:04Joe Rogan?

  It does. It does make sense. It resonates. It resonates completely. The natural art of nature, the true majesty of experiencing the vastness of the mountains and of the woods and of the... It humbles you in a way that nothing else does, and it grounds you in a way of recognizing... I don't want to say your insignificance, your relative insignificance, but it puts, like, it's not just you. This whole thing is massive.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  My best friend once said-

• 1:21:40Joe Rogan?

  And you're so fortunate to experience it.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  Oh, you know, I feel so grateful, Joe. You know, my best friend once said to me, when we were much, much younger, we'd been friends for more than 50 years, he said, "There's only one center of the universe, and you're not it."

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  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 that there's no center of the universe.

• 1:22:11Joe Rogan?

  Well, you also get to see the stars, too.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, out there. 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. 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 a mile and a half out of town, which has five or six streetlights, so there's no glare, and you see the Milky Way, and you just...

• 1:22:41Speaker 03

  You are just, what can you do but just be humbled by the vastness of the universe and how relatively insignificant our lives are? But that in itself compels you, drives you to try to do something that would have, not significance, but just would add something. So I live in a state, and politics comes through all the time. Everybody's got a law in sign, right? Left, right, center. My law in sign says love multiplies. It's the only functioning theory of the entire universe. It is what it's all about, right?

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  It doesn't matter what religion, what philosophy you might subscribe to or not. Thomas Jefferson says in our film, "If my neighbor believes in twenty gods or no god at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Right? Like, we are so religiously intolerant today. "Oh, well, I know that if I had been born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, I'd still be a born again Christian." No, you wouldn't. You'd be a Shiite. You know? I mean, a Sunni. And you'd be at war with the Shiites across the border in Iran. You know, I'm sorry to break the news to you. And that all of them, all the great religions, have the same thing in mind.

• 1:24:01Joe Rogan?

  It's also that problem that people have with this rigid perspective, that they would be so arrogant as to believe that they would be unique in that environment.

• 1:24:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:24:11Joe Rogan?

  That, "No, I would get it. I would understand it." Like, that's crazy.

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

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

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  They don't say, "Oh, thank you, God, for giving me that." I've only seen that once. Pedro Marsina had given up a fairly significant lead, not the entire lead, to the Yankees in one of those great playoffs. And as he walked off and was pulled by the manager, he walked off and looked up. And I spoke to him about it. I said, "I've never seen anything like that." But this idea that all of our affairs are governed in that way is not what many of the founders believed in, that it is our obligation to lead that virtuous life. Don't mean to keep bringing you back there. Moves you closer up the stairway to heaven, up the ray of creation to God. And that that your, it's your movement, not that supreme being's movement towards you.

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  "Oh, let's make sure that's a ground root double." Oh, let's, you know, that's not happening.

• 1:25:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  It is the ongoing chaos of the sequence of events and human nature. And we've got to A, be aware of the sort of incredible current, the force of the current of that human nature, but also the way in which my individuality, my will, the discipline, the virtue that I might be able to have could in some ways be singular and do something significant, not because of that, but in order to be closer to that higher thing. And that's where they're all talking about it, that they want the founders' higher emotions. As I said, not sentimentality, not nostalgia. Those are the enemies of anything, but the higher emotions.

• 1:26:32Speaker 03

  Sometimes we say that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. What is the difference between that? If you've added up all the sum of the parts and it comes here, what's that? And what it means is that as much as to build a table, to build a bridge or a highway, one and one always has to equal two. The things that matter in our lives are where one and one equals three, where we are able to see something that's bigger, that something is produced by the collision of two musical notes, by two images in a documentary, by the conversation between two human beings, whatever in which something is possible. I'm interested in whatever energy that creates.

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  With whom? I mean, you just don't know that that person at the convenience store that you just kind of like, don't even look and don't even think about has a life as important as yours. You're driving on the highway, we're coming down from Dallas this morning on 35, you know, and thousands, thousands of cars going in that direction. The person in that car is looking and their life is as full as what I'm seeing out of my eyes, and I know, sitting here, that you're seeing something totally different than what I'm seeing, and that, that life is as full. And I think, good history, good friendship, good storytelling, good conversation, all have, at its base, the respect for the other point of view, the ability to listen, and

• 1:28:03Speaker 03

  that kind of desire to be better. And in our country, we've actually got lots of blueprints for it. We've got lots of plans. They're out there, it's in the Declaration, it's in the Constitution, it's in the Bill of Rights, it's here, it's in that speech, it's in the, you know, the Lincoln Speech, you know? "We're gonna live forever or die by suicide," all right? Or then he's got two speeches, Lincoln does. One's a message to Congress in 62, what we'd call the State of the Union Address, and he says, "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." And then a few seconds later, he goes, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  As our cases knew, let us think anew." He's both those things, right? Yeah. We cannot escape history, and, guess what, the dogmas of the past. He's, in his second inaugural, one of the most famous addresses of all time, he's got Old Testament righteousness, you know? If, if, if we have to spend another 500 years drawing with the sword the blood that is drawn with a lash, meaning fighting to end slavery, we'll do it. And then he stops, very Old Testament, he stops on a dime and turns to this New Testament ending, the paroration, which says, "With malice towards none, with charity for all," you know? And then it has that kind of unbelievable generosity in it, and this ability to say, a second ago...

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  I'm willing to keep this going for however long it takes to end this scourge of slavery. Whatever drawn by the lash, drawn by the sword, we will do. It's just an amazing ability to understand us. And he took, he's the one who reached back over the Constitution and plucked Jefferson back into significance. And so, when he gives the Gettysburg Address, fourscore and seven years after the, eighty-seven years after the signing of the Declaration, he's creating the 2.0 operating system that we have now. Saying, we really do mean it, that all men are created equal. And that now, because of the sacrifices, not a proper word in that entire address.

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  You know, the guy before him, Edward Everett, noted orator, spoke for more than two hours. And he spoke for two minutes. And Everett wrote him, and he said, "Mr. President, I should flatter myself if I thought I came to the heart of the matter in two hours as you did in two minutes."

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:30:30Speaker 03

  It is, there's so many whows in the work that we have. And people say, "Well, what'd you, what'd you learn differently?" And you go, "Oh, my God, are you kidding? Every day is this revelation, this sort of tsunami that breaks over you of new information." And then it's just, what is it that I can save? You'd assume, you'd presume completely understandably, that making a documentary film on the American Revolution is additive, right? You're building this thing. It's not. I live in New Hampshire, we make maple syrup. It takes forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. And so, it's all reductive.

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  We will, we have twelve hours in this six-part series, and we've got more than 500 hours of material. Filming reenactors for years, some of them dressed in French uniforms, some of them dressed in militias, some of them in British, some of them in, you know, Continentals, some of them German Hessian, some of them Native, all of that stuff. And then we're using it to help the building blocks of doing it. At the same time, we've collected more than 12,000 paintings and drawings.

• 1:31:42Speaker 03

  We've taken maps, we've got more maps in this than in all the other films we've made combined. Sometimes we're just taking an old archival map and leaving it alone. Sometimes we're taking an old archival map and just putting red and blue lines showing the movement of British and Continental soldiers. Sometimes we're taking maps and sort of making our own hybrid map that gives us a little bit more control, but all of these things, we're just practicing. I mean, I looked at something earlier today, which was just a minute change on a map that we highlight where a British admiral wanted to attack all these seaport towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and Maine. And the last one is Machias, which is up near the Canadian border, and we weren't seeing it.

• 1:32:27Speaker 03

  So we were trying to figure out how to light up Marblehead and Cape Anne and Gloucester and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Saco, Maine was then the Maine Department of Massachusetts, and then Falmouth, which is now Portland, Maine, and Machias. And so we'll spend months trying to just get that one thing right. No one, if we hadn't done it, no one would care, except for us.

• 1:32:50Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  Except for us, right?

• 1:32:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  It's that little thing, you know, I have friends who are woodworkers, and they'd never hide a mistake, right?

• 1:33:01Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  They'd never hide a mistake. It always, there's a, there's a kind of craftsmanship to all of that. You know, out in the woods by yourself, just how you relate to nature, a kind of purity, a kind of intention that you have in relationship to it. I know you, you know all of that.

• 1:33:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I think one of the things that's fascinating is that the isolation in which you work and the environment in which you live, which does highlight the majesty of nature and the humility of it all. It, you're, in the expression of your work, you're giving this vision to people that a lot of them are living in this world that creates uniquely anxious and disconnected people because we're living in these urban environments without nature, because we're of light pollution, we see no stars. It's, I think it's one of the reasons why we're one of the most confused societies ever. And...

• 1:34:04Joe Rogan?

  Art, and I think documentary film work is clearly art, especially art in providing an understanding of like the true events of history. Yes. It gives people a sense of what it really means to be a human being in a different way. It illuminates these aspects of humanity in a different way that allows people just this kind of glimpse into like, what are we made out of? Like, what is it about us that makes us who we are and why do we do what we do? This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. Here's a fun fact. Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight.

• 1:34:49Joe Rogan?

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• 1:35:31Joe Rogan?

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• 1:35:55Speaker 01

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• 1:36:25Speaker 03

  I can't imagine any human being could say it better than that, Joe. I think that's exactly right. This disconnection that we feel has come from the fact that we have become transactional beings. Yes. Nothing is transformational. Right. And that we yearn nonetheless for that kind of transformation that takes place in our lives. And as Americans, those of us fortunate enough to be Americans with all the problems that are attendant to that statement, we have this glorious past that has the ability to take us out of that stupor, that take us out of that rut, to be able to say... And with the exception of the film on Leonardo, the forty or so films that I've done,

• 1:37:10Speaker 03

  some of them are hour-long, some of them are twenty hours-long, are all about us, right? All about us. And the thing that I was describing about the US and us is that I realize there's only us. There's no them. All of our world is about them, of creating a them. The artificiality that despots or autocrats always have to make of them. There's gotta be an enemy out there in order to do that. There's only us. Right. And the important obligation that we have is to tell our stories to everybody.

• 1:37:50Speaker 03

  That is to say, I do not wish to preach to the congregation, whatever my congregation is. I do not wish to preach to the choir. I wish to say, we have an extraordinary country. I mean, I'm interested in its voices, I realize. I'm interested in its complicated voices, the true, honest, complicated voices of American history that's unafraid of controversy and tragedy. But equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit, and particularly the remarkable role this republic plays in the positive progress of mankind.

• 1:38:32Speaker 03

  That's my play, that's my sandbox. Wow, that's a great sandbox. It's a great sandbox. It's really, it's great, and, you know, there's implied discipline in that, you know, work with people, I mean, for decades and decades, and we work really hard, and we want to do a good job, and it's sincere in that regard, and because, as I said, it's PBS with one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out, you can make decisions that don't have to do whether with, you know, whether it's going to enrich your bank account. I mean, there are so many ways to measure richness that don't have to do with the bottom line. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that Americans have done, we've incubated lots of great ideas because of those two oceans and those two relatively benign, one of the

• 1:39:17Speaker 03

  things, and De Tocqueville noticed this when he came here in the 1830s, were so into money and the almighty dollar, he called it, that was the religion of America. Yeah. And that has its cost. It obviously has some nice attributes, but it- It has a spiritual cost. It has a spiritual cost that is profound. You know, the Old Testament again said, "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to reach the kingdom of heaven." Hmm, yeah. And that's, that's tough for Americans to hear. It is so tough for Americans to hear, particularly since we have so many preachers who are certain

• 1:40:01Speaker 03

  that it's okay to be both, you know? And then at some point you have to realize, you know, something is lost, and there is richness in relationships, there's richness in children, there's richness in art, in associations, in knowledge, in, I mean, your curiosity is so palpable. You know, I was listening to you speaking to my friend Elliot West, who's written about the buffalo and native peoples and the sort of prehistory of the American West, and you can just hear there is this preternatural sort of interest in curiosity and like-

• 1:40:41Speaker 03

  How does it work? We're all given a really short period of time. And the bad news is, maybe it's the bad news, maybe it's also the good news, is none of us are getting out of here alive. None of us. And then it comes back to us. What are we gonna do?

• 1:40:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  What are we gonna do? And it doesn't matter. You don't have to make documentary films. You don't have to have radio shows. You just, you can raise a child. You can tend a garden. You can build a bridge. You know, all of these things are legitimate. It just requires your full attention.

• 1:41:15Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:41:16Speaker 03

  And willingness to engage in that, whatever it might be.

• 1:41:20Joe Rogan?

  Whatever it is.

• 1:41:21Speaker 03

  I've got a friend in my little town. I've known him for 40 years. I think we probably have opposite political views. I don't know. But I adore this man. He builds stone walls. He's like, if you come to my house and you see the walls that he's built, it's like, you know, you don't need to go to Chartres or Notre Dame. You just say, whoa, Dougie did this really great job here.

• 1:41:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:46Speaker 03

  You know, and you just love him for that dedication to saying, I can just do this in this moment to the best of my ability. People always say, do you ever go back to your earlier films and want to change it? And I go, no. Right? It's like, it's like a photo album where you go back and you're wearing a paisley shirt with a big collar. And you go, who the hell thought that was a good look? But you don't tear that picture out of the album. You say, that's who I was.

• 1:42:14Joe Rogan?

  That's the time.

• 1:42:15Speaker 03

  That's the time. That's who I was.

• 1:42:17Joe Rogan?

  What an extraordinary hypocrisy to have a rich preacher. I was thinking that while you were saying that. You know, based upon that biblical quote. What a bizarre, like blatant, in-your-face hypocrisy to have a rich preacher.

• 1:42:37Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ did not intend to start a religion.

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  Other people who liked what he said started a religion long after he was crucified. So religions themselves, it's so interesting that all of them that have at the root of their their philosophy, the exact same thing, exact same thing, all of them, you know, about doing to others, it's essentially about love. And yet religions seem to be sometimes the cause of most of the pain in there. It means that somewhere along the line, from the original message to the expression, stuff gets corrupted and you can convince yourself that having as a guru in Oregon, 52 Rolls Royces.

• 1:43:24Joe Rogan?

  Or a giant arena that you have your congregation meet you at every Sunday. It's just such a uniquely American thing, the megachurch pastor. And uniquely sort of adapted to this bizarre society where the bottom line is numbers. It's ones and zeros on a ledger.

• 1:43:46Speaker 03

  It's important, you know, let's not downplay it.

• 1:43:49Joe Rogan?

  Oh yeah, it's better than not having any money, for sure.

• 1:43:51Speaker 03

  It's better than not having any money.

• 1:43:52Joe Rogan?

  But it shouldn't be your god.

• 1:43:53Speaker 03

  Shelby Foote, who was our talking head in the Civil War, said that money, the only thing it could buy you is privacy and service. Meaning, you know, you can get somebody to mow your lawn if you need that to happen and you can be a little bit private, but if you think it's going to be doing a lot, lot more than that, you've already begun to atrophy those, that awareness of being alive that I think everybody wants to feel that sense of vivifying oneness.

• 1:44:21Joe Rogan?

  It's also a foolish pursuit to try to be better than people by just having more numbers. It's a really crazy thing that people do.

• 1:44:30Speaker 03

  Do you know the poor in the United States, the studies have shown, give away well more of their disposable income. You know, if you've got a hundred bucks and your friend comes up and says, hey, man, I need a hundred bucks, you give a hundred bucks. If you've got a thousand bucks and somebody goes up and says, hey, I want a hundred bucks, you go, well, then I will not have a thousand, I will have only nine hundred. And this works all the way up to a hundred billion. You're right, I know, I know that is. It's, it's, it's so interesting that, that somehow, this is what we think is, or, or even the folks who are dedicated to spending, prolonging their lives with these, these other things.

• 1:45:12Speaker 03

  It really is, the quality of life is the much more important thing.

• 1:45:17Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:45:18Speaker 03

  How generous you are, you know, I always tell my girls when they're in trouble, I say the three things, and, and one is, this won't last, get help from others, and be kind to yourself. You know, just, there's no yes buts to those. I mean, which is where, when you're a teenager, anxious, there's, there's always, or an adult, there's always a kind of a yes but, but, you know, just, things will change, it always does, there's always change, maybe it gets worse, maybe it gets better, probably gets better. And it's no harm in reaching out to other people, and, and the hardest thing of all is to be kind to yourself.

• 1:45:55Joe Rogan?

  Yes, I say the same things, and I also say, find something that you love, not that people love you for.

• 1:46:02Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:46:03Joe Rogan?

  Find the thing that you, whatever it is, like, that you're uniquely drawn to, and let that change over time. If you don't want, if you don't love that anymore, and there's a new thing that you love, pursue that, but find the thing that really calls to you.

• 1:46:17Speaker 03

  This is what Robert Penn Warren meant when he said to me, careerism is death. He just was saying, you gotta find that thing, and people, when I talk to students, they wanna know, how, you know, what the secret is. I go, there's only two secrets. One is to know yourself, and that may be, understanding that, I thought I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I don't have anything to say. And, and it's perfectly legitimate to do something else, to change that thing, if, if you do it, and the other is to persevere, because there's, in every single situation, much more, many more people wanting to be in front of a mic, every day, than there are

• 1:46:55Speaker 03

  Are the possibility of being in front of the mic every day.

• 1:46:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:46:59Speaker 03

  You have to work at it really hard. You can't make assumptions about it. Sometimes you have to do, you know, I sort of felt like moving to New Hampshire was in The Godfather, going to the mattresses. You know, it's like, okay, I got handed a job, I needed a job, and I was just so worried that I was gonna put the film that I had shot for this first film in the Brooklyn Bridge on top of my refrigerator, and I would just wake up and I'd be 45 years old, and I would have, you know, not, not finished it. And so I got offered a job, which was like, you know, being offered $800,000 a year today. And I, I said, no. And I moved to New Hampshire where I could live for nothing and finish the film.

• 1:47:36Joe Rogan?

  How did you choose New Hampshire?

• 1:47:37Speaker 03

  I had a lot of friends, I'd gone to school in western Massachusetts and had a lot of friends, sort of hippies and others that sort of after, sort of alternative stuff, that after, they had not, some had gone to New York and pursued sort of traditional professional lives, but others had become book salesmen, or opened a natural food store, or were a weaver, or whatever it might be. And so a lot of them gravitated in southern Vermont and southern New Hampshire. Little kind of nice little nook. And so I ended up going to this town and had literally, I mean, I walked in, I rented the house for the first two years, first few years, and bought it after my daughters were born. And I've lived, I've been in the same bedroom for 46 years.

• 1:48:20Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:48:20Speaker 03

  And it's, and I don't feel cut off or starved. I know every part of the country. My films have covered every part of the country, and part of the shoe leather that we have to do with PBS, you know, because they don't have the big budgets to smother the, the American Revolution coming November 16th over every bus and subway and billboard, is you go out and you talk to people. And, and that puts you in touch, and at the same time, you, you have this place to retreat and restore. And every morning, I take a three mile walk with my dog into the, into the, you know, what looks like 18th century America.

• 1:48:59Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:48:59Speaker 03

  You know, I mean, how, talk about rich, that's pretty rich, right?

• 1:49:03Joe Rogan?

  Right, you can't buy that.

• 1:49:04Speaker 03

  You cannot.

• 1:49:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's really so important. Really, because it's like, it's the greatest perspective enhancer ever.

• 1:49:12Speaker 03

  It is.

• 1:49:12Joe Rogan?

  I always say that about going to the mountains. There's, there's nothing different. There's nothing, there's nothing about it that you can recreate.

• 1:49:24Joe Rogan?

  Artificially, you have to go to the actual source of nature, the true source of nature, to really appreciate that. I think it's like a vitamin. I think, just like you get vitamin D from the sun, I think you get something from actual pure nature.

• 1:49:43Speaker 03

  I agree, capital N, nature. I agree completely.

• 1:49:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, real nature.

• 1:49:46Speaker 03

  I think, you know, Americans, you know, manifest destiny basically says, see that, you know, that river, let's dam it. See that forest, let's calculate the board feet. See that canyon, what minerals can be extracted? And that's okay. And we've done that with 98% of the continental United States. But we also, in the midst of all of that, set aside these places that were so spectacularly beautiful, like Yosemite, or Yellowstone, or the Grand Canyon, or Zion, or Bryce, or Kenya, or the Everglades, or Acadia, or Smokies, and just said, I want my children and my children's children's children to be able to see these.

• 1:50:26Joe Rogan?

  That's one of the most extraordinary things about this country, is what Teddy Roosevelt did with national lands.

• 1:50:31Speaker 03

  We, for the, that's why I said it's the Declaration applied to the, no other countries, we invented national parks. Every other country has, every other country has followed suit. Because we were saying, land does not belong to a monarch, or to the nobleman, or to the very rich. And just, just reverse engineer that for a second and say, okay, we don't have national parks. So Yosemite and Zion are gated communities. You can't, you maybe have one little observational place along the Grand Canyon to look. The Everglades was long ago drained in his golf courses and strip malls and apartments. It's one of the most diverse ecological environments on earth, as flat as it is, it's just spectacularly diverse.

• 1:51:15Joe Rogan?

  It's kind of a mess now.

• 1:51:17Speaker 03

  And Yellowstone would be a down-on-its-luck heyday in the 1950s amusement place called Geyser World.

• 1:51:26Joe Rogan?

  [laughing]

• 1:51:28Speaker 03

  But it's not that. You and I, and everyone within the sound of my voice, own.

• 1:51:37Speaker 03

  The most beautiful spots on the continent, and I would argue in many cases, the most beautiful spots on the earth.

• 1:51:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:43Speaker 03

  Is pretty great. And it gives us that unfettered ability to go into nature, to get off the trail, which 90% we can admit it, there's nothing wrong with that, 90% of the people stay within 100 yards of any trail, but to get off the trail and go out and see the magnificence of this planet.

• 1:52:02Joe Rogan?

  It's very humbling.

• 1:52:03Speaker 03

  You know, the Colorado River, yeah, you stand, and you know, the thing I like about the parks is that it isn't just what you see, it's who you see it with. Like, you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, and the Colorado River exposes pre-Cambrian Vishnu Shist that is 1.7 billion years old, that's almost half the age of the planet itself. But the Grand Canyon works if you also are holding somebody's hand, right? It's like who you see it with becomes central to the experience of it. Miracle to the Grand Geological Library, all of the strata, it was like a library of telling stories of what was going on.

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

  It's why I love American sports, I really love them, but I focus on baseball because in football, the description is, oh, you know, Joe Montana threw to Jerry Rice with a few seconds left, and we scored a touchdown, and we won. Or Michael Jordan hit the three-pointer at the buzzer, tongue wagging, and we won. But the baseball story always begins, my mom or my dad took me to this game, and I remember walking out and seeing the green of the thing, and then Babe Ruth hit a homerun, or Hank Aaron hit a homerun, or somebody pitched a perfect game. It's all gauged with who you see it with, as well as what the thing is.

• 1:53:27Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Yeah. Baseball is a unique American pastime, because it's boring.

• 1:53:33Speaker 03

  It, it...

• 1:53:34Joe Rogan?

  Because, you know, it's exciting.

• 1:53:37Speaker 03

  It's not, it's not for those of us...

• 1:53:38Joe Rogan?

  In its moments, yeah.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  It's not for those of us who love it, and it was always the national pastime. It's had competition, I think one of the reasons why we sort of relegate it to this thing is that it, most of the other forms of entertainment, particularly in sports, are a little bit more fast-moving.

• 1:53:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:54Speaker 03

  George Will said to me, though, who's a big football fan, he says, "Football has two of the worst features of American life: violence punctuated by frequent committee meetings."

• 1:54:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:07Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:54:08Joe Rogan?

  What a great quote.

• 1:54:09Speaker 03

  Isn't that fantastic? Yeah, no, but, but baseball has this thing, it's the only, it's the only sport in which the defense has the ball, right? The person scores, not the ball.

• 1:54:19Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:54:19Speaker 03

  And where do you go? Home.

• 1:54:21Joe Rogan?

  Home.

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And statistics matter. Like, maybe you know how many yards Tom Brady has, the greatest of all time. Probably you don't. But you know how many home runs Babe Ruth hit, and how many home runs Hank Aaron hit, and you know these are things that matter. And if you look up the 1919 World Series, it says that the Cincinnati Red Stockings won the 1919 World Series. There's no asterisk. But then those numbers require you to tell a story about the Chicago White Sox, known to us forever as the Black Sox, who took money from Arnold Rothstein and other gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series and give it to the much lesser team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings.

• 1:55:07Speaker 03

  It is great that the statistics matter. A 300 hitter means the same thing to my dad as it does to my grandfather, and my great-great-grandfather, and my great-great-great-great-grandfather. But you still have to tell stories.

• 1:55:20Joe Rogan?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's, I mean, the stories are so important to people, too. I mean, it does, it just, it's something that is a part of their life that they tune into to give their life more meaning. And that's the something that I never understood about team sports when I was younger, because I never liked them. Because I was always in, I always felt like I don't like team sports because I don't want to lose because Billy drops the ball in the back, in the outfield. Like, I don't want to be a loser because somebody else fucked up. I wanted to be entirely dependent upon me. Then... After a while, I started realizing like, no, this, there's a richness to being a fan.

• 1:56:02Joe Rogan?

  There's a, there's a quality of life that comes, there's an experience that comes from you, everyone being united in this thing, like wanting the team to win. That doesn't exist in individual sports.

• 1:56:15Speaker 03

  It doesn't. I, I agree with you completely. There's something wonderful. I was just talking to my best friend about this the other day, that, that, that I, my daughter was at school and she was the co-captain, my oldest daughter of the, of her softball game. And 25, 30 years ago, we went to some misty Saturday morning game and it was like they were winning three to two in the bottom of whatever the last inning was. And the other team had the bases loaded and no outs. And we got three force outs. And it was like, the girls just immediately burst into tears. But it was just an amazing thing. Or just, you're driving in a, in a, you know, a suburban or, or a city area and there's a ball, ball game going

• 1:56:58Speaker 03

  on. And you're kind of slow. You lift your foot off the accelerator as the, as the pitch goes, you know, as it goes. There's something suspended as the pitch is heading from the pitcher to the bat or something. Everything stops and possibility is suddenly there in front of you. It's why I love the game so much.

• 1:57:14Joe Rogan?

  It's just a game that if you try to introduce it today, it would be very difficult to sell.

• 1:57:18Speaker 03

  You know, it's so funny. I, I get to more often than not, and haven't been in a while because I'm such a dull boy and working so much, to Fenway Park. And it's always just filled with people. And it's always got lots of kids. And they're always there because they want to be. My screensaver of, of my phone are my two daughters at a Reds, my two youngest daughters at a Red Sox game. You know, 10 or 15 years ago, I haven't been taking it off the thing. You know, this one's now a sophomore at Georgetown University and this one is going into, into ninth grade. And, but they were like eight and, and, and 13 then. And it's, look at the expressions on their face. It's just pure joy. Pure joy.

• 1:58:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It's, um, I mean, it really is uniquely American.

• 1:58:06Speaker 03

  And it's accompanied nearly every decade of our national narrative. Even into the 17th century, there are bits and pieces in which there seems to be some stick and ball game. And then after, before the Civil War, in the decades before the Civil War, they begin to combine rounders, sort of a British schoolyard game, with cricket and do something that's a lot better than both, called baseball. And you know what? There was a guy in 1858 named Pete O'Brien, he said, "You know, they don't play baseball the way they used to when I was a kid." This is 1858. "I don't mean they don't play it with the same rules or the same..." They just lost the spirit of it.

• 1:58:48Speaker 03

  So we've always been saying, "Something's wrong, something's gone out of the game, it's not quite right." And there's always, "Not true." And it continues on.

• 1:59:00Joe Rogan?

  The steroid era, to me, was really fascinating because one of the things about baseball being so uniquely American is that the idea of someone cheating at this uniquely American thing was particularly offensive. Whereas at the same time, people were 100% taking steroids for football.

• 1:59:22Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Bill Romanowski was, you know, there was bottom of the fold of the New York Times, but as soon as a baseball player was implicated, it was the top of the fold. And that told you, even though the NFL had long overtaken baseball as kind of the national pastime, or football had done that. And I think it has to do with the sense that it, I mean, it does allow stealing of bases, but you're absolutely right.

• 1:59:46Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's a strategy.

• 1:59:48Speaker 03

  There is that wonderful thing about baseball, that it seems kind of pure, it seems American.

• 1:59:55Joe Rogan?

  And to cheat at that is offensive.

• 1:59:56Speaker 03

  And to cheat is that. And that's why, you know, I used to say, out of some, I'm embarrassed by the kind of arrogance of it. I used to say, "Well, they should not..." They should let Pete Rose in after, to the Hall of Fame, after he dies. Now he's died, and I'm still, I sort of feel like, who am I to say that? Certainly, the Hall of Fame isn't like a list of angels.

• 2:00:21Speaker 03

  But I also still am not sure he should go in. Or Shoeless Joe Jackson. As much as you want to resurrect the great story of the most promising of the Chicago White Stockings in 1919 that threw the World Series, the Black Stockings. I don't know. I mean, it's very complicated. Will Roger Clemens? Will some of these other people that we know were juicing? Barry Bonds?

• 2:00:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:47Speaker 03

  He was, Barry Bonds, doing interviews, is clearly, or arguably, the greatest player that's ever played baseball. And you could even say, to the moment he decides, he looks at McGuire and says, so he knows he's got tons more talent than them, and they're getting all the attention, and he says, "I can do this." He's still got, he's, right then, he's a first-ballot Hall of Famer, and would arguably, if he just stopped right then and just quit and said, "Whatever." But decisions are made, and then it becomes back to Shakespeare.

• 2:01:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:22Speaker 03

  Negative capability. And can you hold intention, the great prodigious gifts, and the, in this case, the sort of shortcut of the way in which these gifts were corrupted?

• 2:01:35Joe Rogan?

  Well, it was so uniquely American, there was congressional hearings on steroid use in a sport.

• 2:01:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:42Joe Rogan?

  Which was very strange. And again, while simultaneously, it's ubiquitously used in football.

• 2:01:48Speaker 03

  And you also live in a society in which you take a pill to deal with erections, you take a pill for this, you take a pill-

• 2:01:56Joe Rogan?

  Go to sleep.

• 2:01:57Speaker 03

  You take a pill to sleep, to wake up. We are all drugged. And one person made in our 10th inning, the update to the series on baseball that came out in 94, 10th inning came out in 2010, they said, "Look, you know, what if you're scraping, you know, middle infielder, second baseman, shortstop, and everybody's taking steroids in the clubhouse? Everybody knows about it. The baseball has no rules against it right now." And it's the difference between you getting that four-year, $28 million contract, in which your family is set for life, you're from the Dominican Republic, you're from, you know, wherever you're from, and maybe ending up in AAA, and that's it.

• 2:02:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:39Speaker 03

  And then you realize, and you're being told by every signal of society, take something to be better.

• 2:02:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:46Speaker 03

  This then complicates the entire dynamic of our judgments, of the facility of saying, oh, I'm really absolutist, I know this. You know, and I realize, the more I go, the more disappointed I am in the arrogance of my certainty before. You know, I think one of the big things is, you know, we think that the opposite of faith is doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty, which destroys the mystery of the unknown. And so I'm always taken aback, sometimes more often in retrospect than in the moment, when I could possibly do something about it,

• 2:03:28Speaker 03

  that I have been more certain about something. And less trying to see it from another person's point of view, or from the other side of the coin, or whatever it might be. Or maybe there's many different facets to these things. As we were talking about with regard to the revolution and slavery, and how, what responsibility of imposing the morality of this moment on the previous moment? How much did that previous moment already understand the morality of it? Which they did. What's the right answer? And I think staying open to the questions I know in filmmaking has made us better filmmakers. And it's not a royal we, I don't do this alone. There are a lot of people that I work with.

• 2:04:12Speaker 03

  They're handmaids, it's a small little nucleus of people, but they deserve credits, writers and co-directors and co-producers and people who are digging in the archive cinematographer I've worked with for 52 years.

• 2:04:25Joe Rogan?

  I think this is so important for people to hear, because I think this very unique and noble perspective that you have is why your work resonates so much with people.

• 2:04:36Speaker 03

  I agree. I think what it is, is that whatever...

• 2:04:43Speaker 03

  I don't want to say sacrifices, but whatever discipline has been imposed on the process of whatever it is we do, people recognize that.

• 2:04:51Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:52Speaker 03

  And they know that they can see something. They may not like all the aspects of it because it is complicated and you do see not just the intimacy of the us, but you also see the complexity and the contradiction and the controversy along with the majesty of the US. It's all there. But I do think that they know that we have earned their attention. That's the biggest thing we have. Like, you know this.

• 2:05:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:23Speaker 03

  You're asking an extraordinary amount of people right this second. You're asking them to devote their attention. I mean, my, the longest episode I've ever done is like in two hours and 20 minutes, two hours and 30 minutes. That's, that required every skill I had to be able to make that over 10 years, an episode, the fourth episode of World War II, a film called The War. But mostly it's two hours and it is a supreme compliment if somebody will give me their attention for that amount of time and then maybe for 10 episodes or nine episodes, or in the case of the American Revolution, just six for a total of 12 hours. That is a huge, huge responsibility of trying to keep, trying to earn someone's attention.

• 2:06:08Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:06:09Speaker 03

  And that, that's our job is really just making sure that that person who does not know, who's ignorant but curious, which is of course perfectly fine. If you're willfully ignorant, I really can't help you. But if you're curious and ignorant, then we want to make sure that if you've given us your attention for this two hours of the first episode of the Revolution and then stay for all 12 hours, that... You know, we want to make sure that we've earned it in the simplest way, that the equation is not at all above. There's no communication in this world, you already know this, except among equals. Like, if I look up or down, already I've dislocated the possibility.

• 2:06:53Speaker 03

  And the only communication is among equals.

• 2:06:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:56Speaker 03

  And that's, you treat your audience like they know something. Not that they're familiar with this subject, but they're not stupid. And they don't have to be added some sort of pablum. You don't have to simplify it. It can be complex. Because if it is, they'll recognize either themselves or they'll recognize somebody that they know that's very close to them. And that's the essence of good story, is it's human beings telling stories about other human beings and what they do that has a resonance, that accrues like the layers of a pearl imperceptibly. You can't identify, but you know. And of course, a pearl is based on an irritant, a grain of sand that's bothering the hell out of that, you know, oyster, right?

• 2:07:40Speaker 03

  You've created this gem out of the friction and irritation and resistance and perseverance of having to do something.

• 2:07:51Joe Rogan?

  I think one of the most uniquely American stories that you've told is the story of Jack Johnson.

• 2:07:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's, you know, it's interesting because one of the great themes in American history is race. I mean, it's obvious because we were founded on the ideal that all men are created equal. And the guy who wrote that sentence owned hundreds of human beings and didn't see fit in his lifetime to free them. But you also have individuality. And what is with Jack Johnson, like a good back boxing match, you have a black man who also just wants to be a man, wants to be fully himself. Now, the society doesn't really want him to do that, and they're gonna put lots of constraints, and he's gonna overcome those constraints, and then when he does, they're gonna find another way to box him in. But James Earl Jones was really great on this.

• 2:08:40Speaker 03

  He was almost saying, "Do not just be constantly distracted by the question of race." This is somebody who wanted to be a man, his own person. And that a great deal of Jack Johnson, and all the travails, and all the things that he went through, and all the great, great, great, great skill. I mean, Muhammad Ali, we made a film on Ali too, which I'm really, really proud of, but he's clearly studied Jack Johnson. He knew, they would watch those films. Robidope is Jack Johnson. A lot of that making, wearing your opponent out, is Jack Johnson from, you know, an earlier century. And this is a time, I mean, his heyday is between 1905 and 1915, when more African-Americans

• 2:09:24Speaker 03

  were lynched for looking sideways at somebody. And he's openly defeating every great white hope that came at him. And dating white women. Dating white women, and marrying white women. Yeah. And so, you know, we called the film, mostly we like to have, kind of boring things, like the American Revolution, Brooklyn Bridge, Vietnam War. But we called that film, "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson." And I did that because the great black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, at the turn of the 20th century, said, "Boxing is in great disfavor.

• 2:10:04Speaker 03

  Jack Johnson seems to be the cause, but Jack Dunson did nothing that no other boxer, or sportsman, or even senator has done. Why then has it come to him? It all comes down then to his unforgivable blackness." That by taking the crown, by defeating all comers, it was an unacceptable situation, when in those days, being the heavyweight champion was, there was a sense of this was the supreme masculinity of the world, and that everyone went out of their way, from John Sullivan to... Others to avoid fighting a black man. And finally, somebody paid Tommy Burns guaranteed $30,000 to fight Jack Johnson on Boxing Day. What was that worth today?

• 2:10:49Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Millions and millions of dollars. Jack only got $5,000, but he was happy to do it. He's been going after Tommy Burns, no relation. And Tommy Burns was a pseudonym. A guy, I can't remember his name, a Canadian. Anyway, in Australia, they fight on the day after Christmas, 1908. And Jack Johnson just toyed with it. He probably could have taken care of him in the first inning, and he just keeps it going. They finally cut the newsreels off. They actually stop the fight because they do not want the public to see this. And when, after having digested, I think is a good word, all of the white hopes that were thrown at him in the intervening year and a half, they finally convinced Jim Jeffries,

• 2:11:31Speaker 03

  the guy who'd retired undefeated, the previous champion before Tommy Burns, to come out. And in Reno on July 4, 1910, the fight of the century, Jack Johnson defeated at, you know, no one thought it would happen, Jim Jeffries. And there were riots all across the country, all across the country, white-on-black riots. The Los Angeles Times wrote, their lead editorial was, "A word to the black man. Do not lift your chest up too high. Do not put your face up to the sun. Do not, you are still the same lowly person you were yesterday just because Jack Johnson."

• 2:12:12Speaker 03

  And, I mean, the idea that, you know, it goes back to this issue. Washington knew it was wrong. Jefferson knew it was wrong. They made so much money, it was really hard to do this. I mean, Jefferson himself said, "Slavery is like holding a wolf by the ears. You don't like it, but you don't dare let it go." Oh. And so what happens is that somebody like an Abraham Lincoln is born anti-slavery, right? But they're also a developing abolitionist movement. So now they want to abolish slavery. They're not just against it and understand that it's a moral, God never, nowhere does

• 2:12:57Speaker 03

  God say that black people are inferior to white people.

• 2:13:02Speaker 03

  But what happens is, even though most of the slavers know that it's wrong, but there's so many good profits to make, what happens when the abolitionists come along, that they begin to make arguments that slavery is actually good and that black people are, in fact, inferior. And so, one of the reasons why the Civil War happens is this sense of threat to their economic power, which are the 4 million people in the 9 million populated South that are owned by other human beings. And it's an extraordinary dynamic. We face it today, the reverberations. And Jack Johnson, I think, is one of those magnificent cases where he defies your ability to put it in a neat cubbyhole.

• 2:13:46Speaker 03

  He defies your ability to make it binary. Like, we live in this media culture, right? We live in a computer world. Everything's a one or a zero. Everything's a red state or a blue state. Everything's young or old, gay or straight. It's not that way. And so, to tell a complex story of history, particularly of Jack Johnson, is just to have your molecules rearranged. You know, it really is exhilarating. I probably said that word too many times. It's exhilarating.

• 2:14:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I think he's also one of the rare cultural figures where a sports figure defines a time, much like Muhammad Ali defined the Vietnam era. Like Muhammad Ali, when I was a child, my parents were hippies, and they never cared about sports at all, except when Muhammad Ali lost to Leon Spinks and then had the rematch. We all watched. I remember this, being a child, thinking how strange it was that my parents were so invested in Muhammad Ali. But what they were invested in is this man that risked his entire career and livelihood. They took his livelihood for three years for protesting the Vietnam War and refusing to go fight.

• 2:15:00Joe Rogan?

  And it was a big thing because he was a cultural hero.

• 2:15:03Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:15:03Joe Rogan?

  It wasn't just that he was the best boxer ever. He was also this guy that said, "I'm not doing this. The Vietnamese people didn't do anything to me. I'm not participating in this. I'm not gonna go kill anybody. I'm not doing this." And we were all like, "Yes." And then they took his livelihood away and he became a martyr. He became a hero. And, you know, spoke out against the war. And then it was three solid years in his prime before he came back.

• 2:15:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's an amazing story. And we told it just a few years ago in a four-part, eight-hour series. I, I, I agree with you 100%. I'm a little bit older. I remember when Sonny Liston and, and, and then Cassius Clay fought in Miami. And he was such a new commodity. He was rocking the boat with a, with this verbal onslaught.

• 2:15:55Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:15:55Speaker 03

  That we were, for a nanosecond, sorry that Sonny Liston lost because he was the person that we were familiar with. We knew this kind of black man. And we did not know this other scarier verbal person. And almost instantly, and my dad was an anthropologist. I mean, this was boxing. He was not doing the thing. But from then on, we became just loyal. We watched all the stuff through the 60s and then saw his opposition in the war. And then he said, you know, "You could come and mow me down with a machine gun. I'm not going to go." And, and, and the ABC did some interviews with black soldiers in Vietnam. And they all, to a person, said, "This is why I'm fighting. This is why I'm here.

• 2:16:40Speaker 03

  I'm fighting for him to say, 'I don't want to be here.'"

• 2:16:42Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:16:43Speaker 03

  And I just, I just thought it was great. And I also wanted to do this because nobody, people had done certain fights. People had done his fight with the government. I wanted to do Soup the Nuts. We wanted to do Soup the Nuts. My daughter, oldest daughter Sarah, and my son-in-law David McMahon, we made the film From Birth to the Death. This guy is, in the late 60s, the most hated man in America for that stance that you were describing about the drug. And he dies the most beloved person on the planet.

• 2:17:11Joe Rogan?

  Mmm.

• 2:17:11Speaker 03

  And I really loved the idea. I loved the opportunity of being able to show how that happened in the midst of, you know, they call it the sweet science, but there are some fights. The three fights with Frazier are like as brutal as anything you could ever possibly imagine. And what they went through and what he ultimately, clearly, in retrospect, lost as a result of winning two of the three of the fights is one of those miraculous stories. And I agree, like Jack Johnson, is defining an age and so interesting that it's in a marginalized activity, even back then, like heavyweight boxing.

• 2:17:55Joe Rogan?

  Well, marginalized but still elevated. The heavyweight champion of the world was still the baddest man on the planet, and people still wanted to watch it, but it was thought to be a backroom, sort of darkly lit, dingy pursuit. You learned it in the dangerous gyms. It's not something that you learn on a college campus with educated professors and analysts that have reviewed proper technique, which is how they teach in Russia, you know. Russia has a very, like, technical version of it. And what they do in America as well too now, but not back then. Back then it was dark, dingy gyms, mob-run businesses.

• 2:18:40Speaker 03

  The sporting world, and you were there, there were gamblers, there were women of the night, it was, you know, money was being exchanged.

• 2:18:46Joe Rogan?

  Lot of mob stuff.

• 2:18:47Speaker 03

  Lots of throne fights, and it was in the interest. It was so interesting that emerged this person who was so resolutely himself, just as Muhammad Ali would be decades later. It's why I'm drawn to it. I'm not a big fan of boxing, but it's irresistible. You can't take your eyes away from these two men when they're fighting. They're, first of all, spectacular specimens, and they are.

• 2:19:12Speaker 03

  Amazing fighters. They changed the whole dynamic. And as you said, there's no greater boxer than Muhammad Ali.

• 2:19:19Joe Rogan?

  Well, the really terrible thing is Muhammad Ali's best years were taken from him.

• 2:19:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:24Joe Rogan?

  Because if you go to 1967, I've talked about this numerous times on the podcast, when he fought Cleveland Big Cat Williams.

• 2:19:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:31Joe Rogan?

  That fight was one of the most extraordinary performances of any heavyweight ever. It was, Cleveland was a dangerous guy. Like vicious knockout puncher. He was a real specimen himself.

• 2:19:42Speaker 03

  Yes, he was.

• 2:19:43Joe Rogan?

  And Ali toyed with him. I mean, toyed with him. Just boxed his face off, knocked him out, moving backwards. Just, just picked him apart, popped him, and showed movement and speed and agility and technique that we had never seen from a heavyweight, ever.

• 2:20:00Speaker 03

  He was the greatest.

• 2:20:01Joe Rogan?

  The greatest.

• 2:20:02Speaker 03

  The greatest.

• 2:20:02Joe Rogan?

  And then three solid years of inactivity.

• 2:20:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think this is what makes him so great. This is like Ted Williams, only much bigger. Because Ted Williams loses a lot of time to World War II and to Korea. And comes back and, you know, still hits, you know, 350 or whatever it is he hits for the Red Sox. Having lost what you'd consider the prime of his career in his early days in World War II. And then, and as a fighter, this is not like the goodwill ambassador. He's flying fighter bombing runs. You know what I mean? He's like, really, it's every time he can not come back and he's, he's a magnificent stuff. But it's not denying it, as they did in both Jack Johnson. They took away his title. And he, and he was fallow from 1912 to 1915.

• 2:20:50Speaker 03

  And then finally they put him in the ring in Havana with Jess Willard, who's a younger guy, is 105 degrees, 110 degrees on the canvas. They're going to go 40 rounds. After the 26th, this guy who's got 10 years on Jess Willard, he's 37, Willard's 27. You know, Willard finally gets in a thing and it's like, oh, thank God. And they would not let another black man fight for a heavyweight champion until he was not Jack Johnson. That is to say, until he was Joe Louis, light skinned, couldn't be seen with a white. Couldn't smile at his victories and Louis agreed to all of this. It was the unspoken unwritten rule that you couldn't be an in-your-face black man. And that sort of obtained for a couple of decades.

• 2:21:34Speaker 03

  And then Ali came and he said.

• 2:21:36Joe Rogan?

  Broke the mold.

• 2:21:37Speaker 03

  Broke the mold and essentially based it, they used to say when he was training, Ali was training, there'd be ghost in the house, ghost in the house. And that meant that Jack Johnson was there.

• 2:21:50Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:21:50Speaker 03

  And that Ali had to be that much better.

• 2:21:52Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:21:53Speaker 03

  Ghost in the house.

• 2:21:54Joe Rogan?

  Wow. The Ali of three years later was a completely different fighter, unfortunately. Physically, he didn't look the same because he didn't train for three years. He didn't do anything and he lost everything. I mean, he still was one of the greatest. I mean, still was able to beat Joe Louis, still was able to beat George Foreman. But he is a different fighter. He didn't move the same way. He didn't have the same physical build. He didn't look as good. He'd lost three solid years in his prime of training.

• 2:22:22Speaker 03

  And it makes those post Vietnam years even more spectacular. The fact that he could prevail over Frazier and over, I mean, that the rumble in the jungle is just.

• 2:22:36Joe Rogan?

  Crazy.

• 2:22:37Speaker 03

  Crazy.

• 2:22:38Joe Rogan?

  Crazy.

• 2:22:39Speaker 03

  What he did.

• 2:22:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:40Speaker 03

  What he did.

• 2:22:40Joe Rogan?

  Well, nobody thought he was gonna win.

• 2:22:42Speaker 03

  No one thought he was.

• 2:22:43Joe Rogan?

  Including Hunter S. Thompson, who famously sabotaged his career by not covering the fight. He was sent over there to cover the fight and instead decided to just swim in the pool and drink.

• 2:22:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:52Joe Rogan?

  Because he didn't want to watch Ali get destroyed.

• 2:22:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:22:55Joe Rogan?

  Meanwhile, he missed.

• 2:22:56Speaker 03

  One of the greatest fights of all. I remember, I was in college still and we got soundless, black and white footage of the fight, some of it in slow motion. And my film teacher showed it to us and none of us were interested. I was like, whoa, this is stuff I did with my dad 10 years before. And it was him delivering a blow to Foreman and seeing in slow motion this halo of sweat coming off the afro of George Foreman.

• 2:23:33Speaker 03

  I mean, I will never forget just the specta- almost the beauty of this incredibly brutal sport.

• 2:23:42Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, yeah, incredibly brutal, brutal, but.

• 2:23:47Joe Rogan?

  In those moments, it elevated everybody who watched it. That's the crazy irony of it all. It's like in this brutality, this beat down of another man, everybody who watched it was elevated.

• 2:23:57Speaker 03

  It's, it's um.

• 2:23:59Joe Rogan?

  Cause someone did something that we thought was impossible.

• 2:24:00Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:24:01Joe Rogan?

  And it was that person who did it, this guy who stood up against the Vietnam War. And, you know, at the time, we didn't realize how bad the Vietnam War would look retrospectively.

• 2:24:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, he, he did not enjoy any benefit of the doubt.

• 2:24:17Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 2:24:18Speaker 03

  It was really.

• 2:24:19Joe Rogan?

  He was a traitor.

• 2:24:20Speaker 03

  Another time of division and people exploiting division.

• 2:24:24Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:24:25Speaker 03

  And making them, he was the worst them that there possibly could be. And I think the fact that he was able to stick to his guns, I mean, he could have said, okay, I will go and do goodwill stuff and it would have been all over.

• 2:24:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:24:39Speaker 03

  And he said, no, I'm not going to.

• 2:24:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:24:41Speaker 03

  Famously, no Vietnamese ever called me the N-word.

• 2:24:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and just the fact that at the time, we didn't understand, we were still locked into this perception of military conflict being like World War II.

• 2:24:54Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:24:55Joe Rogan?

  Where it was imperative to save the world from communism and that there was a real problem, there's a real threat to the American way of life and America as a whole that was going on in Vietnam, which now seems absurd.

• 2:25:08Speaker 03

  It seems absurd. There's a wonderful parallel. I mean, when I, when, when, when I said that, Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, like, we have a failed invasion of Canada in, in the, in the American Revolution. There's a big debate over inoculation. There's an eclipse that takes place, you know, all of this sort of stuff. And there's always an interesting thing is that particularly in New Jersey and South Carolina, the British are always talking about, we have now pacified New Jersey, the province of New Jersey. We have now pacified the province of South Carolina and then all of a sudden they have to admit that it's un-pacified because the Patriots have taken over and done all this guerrilla warfare that has made it un-pacified. And at one point, George III and many others within the British government are worried about what we would call the domino theory.

• 2:25:53Speaker 03

  If we lose them, then we're gonna lose Ireland. And if we lose Ireland, we're gonna lose Gibraltar and we're gonna lose the, the subcontinent of India and we're gonna lose, and so you go. There's nothing new under the sun.

• 2:26:04Joe Rogan?

  Nothing new under the sun. Yeah. The Vietnam War and your 18-hour piece on the Vietnam War is one of the more confusing aspects of the United States history because like, looking at it today, it doesn't make any sense how we sold this.

• 2:26:23Speaker 03

  No, and every president from Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, even Ford, never told us the complete truth about it.

• 2:26:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:26:33Speaker 03

  And did stuff that got Americans killed and lots of other people killed over what would have been, there was the Geneva Convention in 54 that basically said we could separate into two places and in two years we had an election which everyone knew Ho Chi Minh would win. If he left it at that, we'd be talking about 3 million people still walking the earth at least.

• 2:26:57Joe Rogan?

  Crazy.

• 2:26:58Speaker 03

  Crazy. And the communists, Chinese and the Soviets, were very suspicious of Ho Chi Minh. They thought, he's not a communist, he's just a nationalist. And he knew, I'll tell you, the day that the Japanese surrendered in Tokyo Bay officially was September 2nd, 1945. That same day, in Badin Square in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence and he quoted Thomas Jefferson.

• 2:27:32Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:27:33Speaker 03

  And standing next to him were OSS guys. By the end of September, the State Department having realized, oh, this World War II is over but we're going to be in a new, they didn't call it a Cold War yet, but we're going to be in an epic struggle all around the world with communism and this guy has been to Moscow and whatever, so he must be a communist. And so all of a sudden, the State Department, the OSS, had saved his life. They'd parachuted into northern Vietnam, looking for people that could mobilize in their help against the Japanese, and found a sick and dying Ho Chi Minh, we don't know what his malaria, whatever, treated him and brought him back. And he was, he didn't see us as the enemy.

• 2:28:17Speaker 03

  And yet, we, in those two years, in 56, when they should have held an election, we had already decided to place our bets with Nodin Ziem, who was a corrupt South Vietnamese politician, who would eventually be assassinated by, you know, a general, who would be one in a series of generals, until we got Chu and Key, and those were the people who took us out of it, or were on their watch when the North Vietnamese, you know, finally united their country. It's just, and the lying, you know, we have the tapes of Johnson and of Nixon, and it just, you know, there's an arrogance to record yourself for posterity, you know, and you

• 2:29:02Speaker 03

  be careful what you say, that some of the things that, not all of them have been listened to, they haven't all been transcribed, and we were fortunate to spend a lot of time just listening and listening and finding just some stuff that, you know, if Nixon and Kissinger had walked into the peace talks that were already started in January of 69, and taken the terms that the North Vietnamese were offering, they would have had better terms than what they had in 73, and there would be fewer Americans, a lot more Americans alive, 25,000 more Americans alive, something like that, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians. But they didn't want to be the first president to lose a war. In fact, they'd already soured the South Vietnamese, they said, as Humphrey was coming

• 2:29:44Speaker 03

  up in the polls, he only lost by .7 points of a percentage in the election. He'd been way behind, it was making a lot of speed, a lot of it had to do with what people perceived as progress in Paris. And the Nixon administration, or not administration, the Republican Party, the Nixon's election campaign, reached out through An intermediary to the South Vietnamese government and said boycott the talks in Paris. And, and if you'd had another week or two to the election, you would have had Hubert Humphrey as president, or, or if they hadn't reached out to the South Vietnamese. And, and Johnson got it on tape. They were taping the, the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington and

• 2:30:27Speaker 03

  the palace in Saigon. And he knew it. And he called up Nixon, there's a tape. And he goes, and he goes, oh, I would never do anything like that. And Johnson either pissed off at Humphrey, because he's not as much as a hawk as Johnson had become, or more than likely unwilling to admit to your allies that you had been taping them in their own embassy in Washington and their own palace in Saigon, did not tell the truth of what he knew, that Richard Nixon had essentially reached out to a foreign power at the time of a national election to try to influence that election.

• 2:31:01Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:31:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's just endless.

• 2:31:05Joe Rogan?

  And the reverberations, like the, the one thing that it did that I think is like so pivotal is it destroyed the faith that the United States citizens had.

• 2:31:15Speaker 03

  In its government, telling them the truth.

• 2:31:17Joe Rogan?

  And in engaging in military activities. Because we had always thought we were a just government. We were a just society. And then if we got into World War II, it was to save the world. If we got into Vietnam, it was to save the world. Oh, no, it wasn't. Not only that, we got in on a lie. We got, literally got into the war on a false flag.

• 2:31:35Speaker 03

  That's exactly right.

• 2:31:36Joe Rogan?

  So it was entirely engineered. And then there was also the heroin production, which was a big part of the whole thing. There's the heroin trade. There was money that was being allocated to various individuals through the heroin trade that was facilitating a lot of it. It's very confusing stuff. When you look at it over time, and you look back at it, you're like. What would the United States look like had clear heads prevailed?

• 2:32:03Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 2:32:03Joe Rogan?

  What would we look like today?

• 2:32:05Speaker 03

  The counterfactual, well, I think we'd be less divided. I think a good deal of the divisions now were sort of born in there.

• 2:32:10Joe Rogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:32:11Speaker 03

  The entrenched positions that people take now. I think there's also a sense, you know, the Pentagon Papers were McNamara going to a gentleman that we interviewed, Robert Garden, and saying, "I need to find out all the decisions." And he learned, not only was he lying at times, you know, going and getting battlefield reports and then coming back and saying it's all rosy, but everybody had been lying back to the Truman administration about what was going on. And it was just a series of lies. And that's what, when they asked the Rand Corporation to sort of analyze some of the data, that's when Daniel Ellsberg, who worked for the Rand Corporation surreptitiously,

• 2:32:51Speaker 03

  illegally copied them and then released them to various newspapers. And they became, you know, what we call the Pentagon Papers, but they were always the Pentagon Papers. And they detail exactly what you just described, just a complete, you know, presence of both parties, a military-industrial, I mean, you know, when Eisenhower leaves, just before he leaves, he warns of the military-industrial complex.

• 2:33:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:19Speaker 03

  He's not saying this is something that happened last Thursday.

• 2:33:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:33:22Speaker 03

  He's saying this happened the second World War II was over.

• 2:33:26Joe Rogan?

  Well, even before that. Smedley Butler talked about it in '33.

• 2:33:29Speaker 03

  People, there was so much money to be made that nobody wanted to ramp down the armaments. And so you end up having these proxy wars. You end up having, you know, these places where you're going to not have a hot war, because that means the end of the world in a world of nuclear weapons, but you're going to fight these proxy wars in different places. And in Kennedy, it's a doctrine that Eisenhower and Kennedy, and they all sort of embrace and figure out that they can do it. And then, of course, Johnson, who, you know, Kennedy inherits 700 advisers from Eisenhower. Johnson inherits 17,000 advisers now, in quotes, when he comes in.

• 2:34:13Speaker 03

  And he still has to wait until he wins reelection overwhelmingly. A year later, and it's only into the following March of sixty-five that he commits ground forces, first Army and first Marines and then Army, to Vietnam. And then we have the boots on the ground, even though we'd had boots on the ground for a long time and engaged in combat, these advisors were very much engaged in that sort of stuff. And then it just escalates, you know, at the peak, it's well over five-hundred-and-fifty-thousand soldiers, American soldiers in country.

• 2:34:45Joe Rogan?

  It's insane, insane. It's also, you know, the coming to fruition of Eisenhower's warnings. And then this inspires this counterculture of the nineteen-sixties that sort of reshapes art, reshapes culture, reshapes rock and roll.

• 2:35:02Speaker 03

  Politics.

• 2:35:03Joe Rogan?

  Politics, everything, everything changes. And then, you know, Nixon comes along and to stop the anti-war movement, to stop the civil rights movement, puts these sweeping Schedule One drug acts on all these different, you know, psilocybin, all these LSD, all these different things that they believe these people were involved in, so that they could start arresting people and sort of throw water on the entire movement. And it's effective.

• 2:35:31Speaker 03

  It is so interesting to look, and I've got in my office this wonderful, two-framed maps, if you will, and they're the intertwining of the various two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, over time. So the Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party of emancipation of whatever, and the party that invented progressivism in the first part of the twentieth century. Democrats had been not that place, but in the sixties it began to change, thanks to Lyndon Johnson of Austin, Texas, who understood that it was the right thing to do, to put in those Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and other things that we call part of his great society. A film, by the way, that we're working on now,

• 2:36:15Speaker 03

  will be out in a few years, but...

• 2:36:19Speaker 03

  He knew that the bargain would be to give up the solid South. I mean, you woke up on election day, if you're a Democrat, and you had every one of the states of the former Confederacy, all of them, all of them, in your tally. And that slipped. And now you wake up on election day and you more or less have had all the states of the former Confederacy. On the Republican side, who abandoned what they were about. And it's interesting to see in which, for self-interest, for whatever, I mean, Nixon begins it. Jackie Robinson is a Lincoln Republican, didn't go over as many black people did to FDR during the New Deal. He was supporting Nixon for president, but Nixon wouldn't come to the Carlin campaign.

• 2:37:03Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:37:04Speaker 03

  So he ended up voting for Kennedy. And Goldwater fully understood that we're just going to now switch the Republican Party and go after just white voters who are disaffected with changes in civil rights. And so it's an interesting story of the way in which parties can change places and be the very opposite of the thing they were.

• 2:37:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:29Speaker 03

  Just a few years before.

• 2:37:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, because they're all gross.

• 2:37:32Speaker 03

  Well, I just find, the thing is, you know, the bad word is progressive today. And this is, you know, the Republican Party invented progressivism. And they joined forces with some more liberal Democrats in the big cities, right? But the opposition to the civil rights bill is coming from Southern Democrats. And it's Lyndon Johnson, knowing that he will have to use every bit of his powers of persuasion to get it over, and he will require lots of Republican votes, and he does. So you do have something positive happening in American history, where the two parties are coming together and not just lockstep, where every single Republican votes for something

• 2:38:16Speaker 03

  and every single Democrat votes against it. And you just feel like somebody's, they're from two different planets.

• 2:38:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:25Joe Rogan?

  The other thing about the Vietnam War that's so crazy is like, we've kind of accepted the fact that the United States military does things overseas that we don't want them to do. Because after that war, it's sort of set the stage for Afghanistan, Iraq, all, all, those, especially Afghanistan, like this prolonged 20-year, completely, complete failure, especially in how we withdrew from it. It's like we've, we've lost a lot of faith in the decisions that are made.

• 2:38:57Speaker 03

  I actually think you have young officers like Colin Powell, who are learning the lessons of Vietnam. And so what you find is extraordinary reticence in the late 70s and the 80s and the early 90s. So the first Gulf War is very much a, a reflection of Vietnam chastened by the excesses of Vietnam. We're gonna do it with a coalition, you know, we're gonna do it with one arm tied behind our back, we're gonna stop a little bit sooner, we're not gonna have the full destruction of this. All these sorts of things are Vietnam inherited. But then, real politik comes in. And then all of a sudden, you realize, we're in Afghanistan because of, of 9/11, we're

• 2:39:40Speaker 03

  pursuing this person, it's not, we had a chance to get him, we missed him, it was not our fault, and we then switched the focus to Iraq, and then ended up in both places in a kind of, you know, terrific stalemate that, as you say, just was, I think, back to being Vietnam. I mean, I always say this, that if we, you know, we made our film on Vietnam, it came out in 2017. If I had done the film 10 years, and this is why history requires perspective, if I had done it 10 years after the fall of Saigon in, in 1985, there's a recession going on in the United States, not big, but we talk about the Pacific Rim, Japan is ascendant,

• 2:40:24Speaker 03

  we think Japan is gonna be the best thing. Vietnam would be this ball and chain that we'd be dragging around us forever. If I'd waited 20 years to 1995, we're the sole superpower, we're in the middle of a... The largest, to that point, largest peacetime economic expansion in the history of our country. And Vietnam would always be important, but it wouldn't be this symbol of our decline, right? If I'd waited thirty years to 2005, when we are bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people are beginning to use the language of the Vietnam and getting stuck in these unwanted, perpetual, never-ending wars, you'd have another view.

• 2:41:08Speaker 03

  And so, to do good history is to actually get some distance and perspective, so you can look at the Vietnam War from the mountaintop of eighty-five and ninety-five and two thousand and five, and then realize, I've still got other experiences. New scholarship has come. Classified material has been released. More of those tapes have been listened to. There's been a mellowing among the veterans and a willingness to speak. Gold Star Mothers realize they can't hide their grief. We have one in the film. She knows that by telling her story, she will help thousands of other people who've lost their children. We can interview soldiers from other sides of the conflict that seem to speak exactly

• 2:41:51Speaker 03

  like our soldiers, and that you begin to develop a way to see it more holistically than in just a kind of journalistic and almost political response. So that was bad. We did that badly. We did this poorly. You can see it for this hugely, hugely complex machine that it was, that just ate up human beings and ate up credibility, as you're saying, that the United States had built up as the greatest power on earth and certainly the good guy in what we euphemistically call the good war, that good war is the worst war ever. More than sixty million people's lives were extinguished in World War II. But as we said it in our film about World War II, Cold War, one of our pilots said

• 2:42:36Speaker 03

  it was a necessary war. And that's what we should be thinking about fighting, necessary ones, not the ones that are going to, you know, have all these ulterior things that you described.

• 2:42:47Joe Rogan?

  And it's also like unwinding all that bad and sort of reshaping America's perspective and the way the world perceives us takes so much time. And I think we lost so much of that post nine eleven. I think nine eleven had the entire world... In our sympathies.

• 2:43:06Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 2:43:06Joe Rogan?

  We were, we had been attacked, the whole world thought of us as being like this shining light, like wow, we have to stand against this. Then we go and invade Iraq and everyone's like, what are you doing?

• 2:43:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43:18Joe Rogan?

  Like, what is this? There's really no weapons of mass destruction, it's all a lie.

• 2:43:22Speaker 03

  The, the thing that the depression did is it got used to Americans doing without. And it made it very easy for Americans to segue into the Second World War because it was about shared sacrifice, something they'd learned on a domestic level, they could now learn it on an international level.

• 2:43:44Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:43:45Speaker 03

  And they did that. We had an opportunity at nine eleven, it seems to me, and I haven't made a film about it, and I imagine once we get enough years out, it might be interesting to sort of look at that. We had an opportunity to collectively turn the energy that we had, the grief and the, and the sense of purpose, even anger of that moment, as well as the world's unabashed symphony, sympathy for what we'd done, and turn it into something productive. And yet we didn't. We then, as you were saying, we moved into sort of rationales and justifications for Iraq that were, as we know in retrospect, completely fraudulent.

• 2:44:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. From the outside, like me looking at your work, I get anxiety just thinking about the daunting task of taking on these subjects.

• 2:44:40Speaker 03

  And I-

• 2:44:40Joe Rogan?

  And I know you have ten years for some of them to like really ruminate and really figure it out, but what is your process like? How do you begin? Like you said, you're gonna do something on Lyndon Johnson, or if you're gonna do something on Vietnam, like, how do you, what does day one look like?

• 2:44:55Speaker 03

  Day one is making sure that you're looking yourself in the mirror and you're gonna commit to that, because I'm now off like a congressman trying to raise money from foundations and corporations and individuals of wealth and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and things like that. But you're immediately reading, you're immediately talking to scholars who spent their life maybe on this aspect or that aspect of Vietnam. We had, I think it was twenty-three scholars, all who knew one aspect, and I knew we were on to something when we'd have these screenings, and- A scholar would comment and all the other 22 would like whip over like they hadn't heard that. And so the film would do that. It's daunting. I asked Shelby Foote about US Grant and he said, "Grant had what they call four o'clock in the morning courage.

• 2:45:40Speaker 03

  That meant you could tell, wake him at four o'clock in the morning and tell him the enemy had turned his left flank and he'd be as cool as a cucumber." And so what you develop is four o'clock in the morning courage. You wake up and go, "And we're still doing it. I'm still waking up. I didn't like the way that sounded. Why didn't we trail that a step?" So you just put one foot in the other. You trust a process. Process is a really important thing. We're all impatient and impatience kills process. Just like comparison is the thief of joy. If you're impatient, then process is squandered. And process teaches you really important things of how to relate to a subject, how to collect the material and then how to figure out how to digest that material into something

• 2:46:23Speaker 03

  that's a cohesive story that I can give to you, who may be ignorant of that story. But it's daunting, it's terrifying, and I wouldn't have it any other way. And I think I'm speaking for the people who work with me because there's something, everybody responds at three in the morning. Everybody says, "Yeah, what do we do that? We can fix this. We'll find an alternative to that to make it better." And sometimes it's the niggling tiny things or sometimes it's really big to have the courage to take out an entire scene that really is working really well, but destabilizes the film a half an hour later. And I did that in our Mark Twain film. I took out this beautiful prose thing from Life on the Mississippi called "White Town

• 2:47:05Speaker 03

  Drowsing" about Hannibal, this disguised Hannibal, sort of waking up from its slumbers as it sees the puff of smoke north as the steamboats coming down and the whole town is industry and activity and loading and unloading and whatever. And then by the time the puff of smoke is around the bend south, everybody's back asleep again. It was just fantastic and written, it was so beautifully. Mark Twain has like never wrote a bad word. And...

• 2:47:34Speaker 03

  And I just realized we weren't getting out of the early biographical stuff soon enough. And I said to my partner on the film, the co-producer and the writer, who'd found that quote from Life on the Mississippi, I said, "We're taking it out." And he looked so hurt and so pained. I said, "Look, I'll put it back in if you want it." So we left it out, and I thought it worked, Brian. He came to me, looked sad. I said, "I'll put it back in." And for about six months, we went back and forth. And then finally, he came to me and he said, "You were right." And I said, "You can put it in the book. We'll put it in the DVD extras. We'll do all the things that you need to do, but that's the kind of four o'clock in the morning courage you need to do, is take out something that like..."

• 2:48:15Speaker 03

  Joe, it worked so well, and yet, you remember the movie Amadeus? Too many notes, too many notes.

• 2:48:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:24Speaker 03

  And you just go, "You gotta, you gotta do that." I'd rather... The reason why we have it, it's complicated, is because there's not a filmmaker on earth that doesn't want to change a scene that's working. But we have spent our entire professional lives changing scenes that were working when we found out new compromising, sort of contradictory information. And maybe it made the scene less, maybe the scene disappeared, but it actually serves the honor and the virtue of whatever that story requires. And this is true of so many things in the American Revolution that are close to me, because we're just coming off the months and months of these unbelievable sacrifices of having to take out one phrase of a sentence, or changing one little thing just to help fine tune it.

• 2:49:09Speaker 03

  Nobody would notice. If I left it in and you looked at it twice, and then I took it out the second time, I don't think you'd notice it, but I'd notice it. So I'd want it to be... And that's the beauty of public broadcasting, too, is that it gives you that chance to do that. There's not a suit-

• 2:49:25Joe Rogan?

  It might be the only platform that would allow you to do it that way.

• 2:49:27Speaker 03

  I don't think there is another platform. I assume that A-list directors in Hollywood who have, you know, the final say, enjoy that. There's Steven Spielberg, who is, you know, one of the great directors of all times, I'm sure. But there's still suits that are coming in. There's still people who are giving him notes.

• 2:49:45Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:49:45Speaker 03

  We get notes from scholars. We get notes that are sort of like this. You've got lots of voices of loyalists in there, and that's really good because people tend to ignore the loyalists. They're just de facto bad people, and you don't make them bad people. But you don't have a loyalist who goes through several episodes, that you follow throughout the film. So we had this loyalist quote in our fourth episode, in the Battle of Bennington, where this guy named John Peters, who's been in Vermont, been driven out by the Patriots, he's gone to Canada, he's formed a revolution, the family, his wife and small infant kids are driven out, they find a British patrol boat somehow on Lake Champlain, they reunite, he starts a regiment, a loyalist regiment,

• 2:50:29Speaker 03

  his 15-year-old son, they find themselves with Burgoyne's army around Bennington, where they've been told there's great loyalist sympathies and not that many Patriots. It's the opposite. There's no loyalist sympathies, or none that anybody's speaking up for, and there are lots of Patriots. And they're defeated, but at one moment, this man, John Peters, is on a parapet of a quickly made redoubt of a force that you, they've put up to try to repel the attacking Americans. And he hears the voice of a man named Jeremiah Post, who is saying, "Peters, you damn Tory," which is the other insult that you would give to a loyalist. And he recognizes the voice of his best friend growing up and cousin

• 2:51:12Speaker 03

  of his sister. And at that moment, Jeremiah Post, the rebel, the patriot, stabs him with the bayonet into his, into his bone, but it's deflected by the bone of the rib cage. At that moment, as Peter said, "I was obliged to destroy him," and he kills him with his pistol. Wow. That's the American Revolution. So we had that quote, and it was like, "Wah!" But why don't we go and put John Peters in episode one, in episode two, in episode three, in episode four, and then episode six, when he's leaving and moving to Nova Scotia permanently and not going to be a part of this New Deal. But you want to know what

• 2:51:53Speaker 03

  the American Revolution's about it? Killing your best friend on a hill west of Bennington, Vermont.

• 2:52:02Speaker 03

  Right? Oof. You know what I mean? I mean, we say, kind of without thinking about the Civil War, brother against brother. You know? And it's, I guess it's true a few times. But the Revolution is like that. Henry Knox, who's this sort of big, amiable bookseller who Washington somehow figures out, picks out of a crowd, and he said, "Oh, go to Ticonderoga and get those cannon recaptures earlier in the year and bring them back here. I gotta drive the British out of Boston." And Knox does. Sleds, impossible, hundreds of miles, over land and over Lake George and, you know, terrible weather, and he gets it there. But he's married to this young woman named Lucy, whose parents are loyalists.

• 2:52:43Speaker 03

  And so she loses, in the Revolution, her father, her mother, her brother, and her sisters. That's the choice she made by marrying Henry Knox, this sweetheart of a bookseller, who learned most of his stuff about artillery and gun emplacements from the books in his bookstore and from serving as, you know, in the local militia. And he puts the guns, he gets the guns up top, and the British wake up and go, "Uh-oh, we're out of here." And they go to, they go up to Nova Scotia to regroup. Massachusetts thinks the war's over. They thank General Washington for his service and enjoy his retirement. He goes, "Are you kidding me? I'm going to New York." Which is exactly right, because that's where the British will attack next.

• 2:53:25Speaker 03

  And the largest battle of the American Revolution is the Battle of Long Island. And I won't spoil it for you what happens.

• 2:53:32Joe Rogan?

  Please don't. Ken Burns, your national treasure. Thank you so much.

• 2:53:37Speaker 03

  Thank you, Joe.

• 2:53:38Joe Rogan?

  Really appreciate you being here. I really enjoyed it. And like I said, I've been a giant fan of your work for a long time, so this is a huge treat for me.

• 2:53:45Speaker 03

  You as well.

• 2:53:46Joe Rogan?

  Thank you. Bye, everybody.

• 2:54:03Joe Rogan?

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• 2:54:47Joe Rogan?

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