#386: Ken Burns — A Master Filmmaker on Creative Process, the Long Game, and the Noumenal

“There’s always the certainty that the opposite of what I might believe in might also be true.” — Ken Burns Ken Burns (@KenBurns https://twitter.com/KenBurns) has been making documentary films for more than 40 years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made http://kenburns.com/the-films/, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; The Statue of Liberty; Huey Long; Lewis & Clark; Frank Lloyd Wright; Mark Twain; Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson; The War; The National Parks: America’s Best Idea; The Roosevelts; Jackie Robinson; Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War; The Vietnam War, and The Mayo Clinic: Faith — Hope — Science. Ken’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including sixteen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and two Oscar nominations; and in September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award. His newest work is Country Music https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/country-music/. It explores the history of a uniquely American art form: country music. From its deep and tangled roots in ballads, blues, and hymns performed in small settings, to its worldwide popularity, learn how country music evolved over the course of the twentieth century, as it eventually emerged to become America’s music. Country Music https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/country-music/ features never-before-seen footage and photographs, plus interviews with more than 80 country music artists. The eight-part, 16-hour series https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/country-music/ is directed and produced by Ken Burns, written and produced by Dayton Duncan, and produced by Julie Dunfey. It debuts on PBS on Sunday, September 15th, 2019, at 8 EST/7 CST. The first four episodes will stream on station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org http://pbs.org/ and PBS apps https://www.pbs.org/pbs-video-app/, timed to coincide with the Sunday, September 15th premiere. The second four episodes will be timed alongside the broadcast of Episode 5 on Sunday, September 22nd; each episode will stream for a period of three weeks. PBS Passport members will be able to stream the entire series for a period of six months beginning Sunday, September 15th. This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you’ll get a free 20-count travel pack (valued at $79) with your first order at athleticgreens.com/tim http://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute. New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world’s best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand. Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/ is offering listeners to this show a special offer: Enter the code you heard during the Peloton ad of this episode at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. That’s onepeloton.com https://www.onepeloton.com/ and enter the code you heard during the Peloton ad of this episode to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, "If I could only take one supplement, what would it be?" The answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. I view it as, and a lot of you now view it as, all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it way back in 2010 in The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I've been using it since before that, and I use it in a lot of different ways. I travel with it to avoid getting sick, or to help mitigate the likelihood of getting sick. I take it in the morning to ensure optimal performance, and overall, it covers my bases if I can't get what I need from whole-food meals throughout the rest of the day. And if you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they're offering a free 20-count travel pack for first-time users.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  I nearly always travel with at least three or four of these one-dose bags. In other words, if you buy Athletic Greens as a first-time buyer, you now get, for a limited time, an extra $79 in free product. So check out the details at athleticgreens.com/tim. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim for your free travel pack with any purchase.

• 1:34Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peloton. I love Peloton. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. You don't have to worry about fitting classes into your schedule, making it to the studio, or dealing with some commute to the gym. I have a Peloton bike in my master bedroom at home, and it is one of the first things that I do in the morning. I wake up, meditate for 20 minutes, and then I knock out a short 20-minute ride, usually high-intensity interval training or HIIT. Then I take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's beautifully convenient and has become something that I actually look forward to. And I was skeptical in the beginning. I didn't think I would dig it. And I really do. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other Peloton riders from

• 2:17Tim Ferriss?

  across the country on the interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. I tend to use a lot of the classes on demand and have four to six of them that I've bookmarked and use over and over again. There are up to 14 new classes every day with thousands of classes on demand and there are a variety of workouts to choose from. 45-minute classes, 20-minute burns, hip-hop, rock and roll, low-impact, or high-intensity. Pick the class structure and style that works for you. Peloton has an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City. They really do have great instructors of every possible personality and style. And you can find one that you love, no matter what you're in the mood for. Personally, I use Matt Wilpers a lot, but I use a bunch of them. I'm promiscuous and enjoy classes from a lot of their instructors.

• 3:01Tim Ferriss?

  With real-time metrics, you can track your performance over time and continue to beat your personal best. I did not think the gamification would work for me, and they really hit the nail on the head. It does work, at least for me, tremendously well to keep me pushing consistently. So, discover this cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings a studio experience to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited-time offer. Go to onepeloton.com, that's spelled O-N-E-P-E-L-O-T-O-N dot com. Enter the code TIMPODCAST, all one word, at checkout and get $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. Get a great workout at home anytime you want. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIMPODCAST to get started.

• 3:49Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, people who are the best or one of the best at what they do. My guest today is certainly that Ken Burns. You can find him on Twitter @KenBurns, has been making documentary films for more than 40 years. Since the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including the Civil War. I'm going to pause at this point in the list. Because not everyone who's listening to this has seen The Civil War, or realizes just how massively popular it was.

• 4:33Tim Ferriss?

  Now, critics thought no one watched The Civil War. Why? Because it's more than 10 hours long. And, at the end of the day, it was broadcast on PBS on five consecutive nights in 1990, and almost 40 million viewers, more than actually, 40 million viewers tuned into at least one episode, and viewership averaged more than 14 million viewers each evening, making it the most-watched program ever to air on PBS. Now, this is 40 million-plus people watching something that is produced to be 10-plus hours long. This is not a five-second cat video on YouTube, so let that sink in for a second. But, back to the list.

• 5:17Tim Ferriss?

  So, The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The Statue of Liberty, Huey Long, Lewis and Clark, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, Unforgivable Blackness, subtitle "The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson." For those of you who don't know, Jack Johnson was an incredible boxer. The War, The National Parks, subtitle "America's Best Idea," The Roosevelts, Jackie Robinson Defying the Nazis, subtitle "The Sharps War, the Vietnam War," and The Mayo Clinic, subtitle "Faith, Hope, Science." Ken's films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including 16 Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and two Oscar nominations. And in September of 2008, at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award. His newest work is Country Music.

• 6:02Tim Ferriss?

  I have it here, right next to me. It explores the history of uniquely American art form, country music. From its deep, entangled roots in ballads, blues, and hymns performed in small settings, to its worldwide popularity, learn how country music evolved over the course of the 20th century, as it eventually emerged to become America's music. Country Music features never-before-seen footage and photographs, of course, this is Ken's trademark, so to speak, plus interviews with more than 80 country music artists. The eight-part and 16-hour series is directed and produced by, none other than Ken Burns, written and produced by Dayton Duncan, and produced by Julie Dunphy. It debuts on PBS on Sunday, September 15th.

• 6:45Tim Ferriss?

  At 8:00, 7:00 Central. Again, that's Sunday, September 15th at 8:00, 7:00 Central. The first four episodes will stream online on the PBS platforms, including pbs.org and PBS apps, timed to coincide with the Sunday, September 15th premiere, and the second four timed to the broadcast of episode five on Sunday, September 22nd. So each episode will stream for a period of three weeks. The simple version of that is on TV, Sunday, September 15th at 8:00 Eastern, 7:00 Central, 8:00 Eastern, 7:00 Central. And if you do not have television, if you're a cord cutter, you can go to pbs.org or use one of the PBS

• 7:26Tim Ferriss?

  apps. PBS Passport members will be able to stream the entire series for a period of six months, beginning Sunday, September 15th. So all that said, without further ado, please enjoy, and my God that I enjoy it, this wide-ranging conversation with none other than Ken Burns.

• 7:46Tim Ferriss?

  Ken, welcome to the show.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 7:49Tim Ferriss?

  I am thrilled to be having this conversation. I've been a fan of yours for effectively as long as I've been consciously aware of what I'm watching in front of me. So I can't say the first few years, but shortly thereafter. And I thought we might bounce around quite a bit in this conversation and begin with something that came up in the research I did for this podcast episode, and it relates to mementos in your pocket. Do you still carry mementos in your pocket? And whether it's past tense or current tense, present tense, can you describe what those are and why you carry them?

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Sure. I just dug into my pocket and amidst some change. I have four items, which I've had for many, many years now. They, no, no one's been retired. Um, one of them is a coin palmed me by an ex-marine who was the headmaster at the Greenwood School in tiny Putney, Vermont. The Greenwood School is equally tiny and is a school for boys with learning differences, meaning they suffer from dyslexia or uh ADHD or executive function, a host of things. The school addresses this problem head-on. It's been around for about forty years. And after Thanksgiving, when the boys come back, ages ten, eleven

• 9:17Speaker 02

  to seventeen, when they come back from Thanksgiving vacation, they are all asked to memorize the ten complicated sentences of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and then publicly recite them. A difficult task for any one of us, but if you have these learning differences, it can be a nightmare. And when the boys successfully complete that, um, they, they are given a coin by the headmaster in typical kind of military fashion, even though it's not a military school and he's anything but militaristic. But I was asked once, many, many years ago, to be a judge. I found myself in tears at the effort of these boys to, to

• 10:01Speaker 02

  do it and said, somebody's got to make a film about it. It obviously would be a cinema very tame film, which is not my style. But as the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of uh the Gettysburg Address came up in twenty thirteen, I thought, you know what, I gotta dive in and do it. So we embedded in the school with a sound man and a cameraman and an assistant and recorded three hundred and some hours. And when the whole thing was over, he, and we made the film and realized that the kids had never in the then thirty-five years history of the school been to Gettysburg. I rented two buses and took the whole school there and put them up for night and gave them a tour of the battlefield as the kind

• 10:41Speaker 02

  of coda to this film. When it was over, he, he palmed a medal in my pocket. So I have that Greenwood School thing. Um.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  The oldest thing I have is what's called a feeling heart. It's a stainless steel, uh, shape of a heart with a little indentation in it. So you can sort of hold it in palm. It's not like a coin. It, it has a little bit more dimension to that. And it's maybe, you know, much bigger than the silver dollar. And it was sent to me by a woman in upstate New York, an artist who had fashioned this. And she had written after the Civil War series was broadcast in, uh, September of nineteen ninety. And sometime in the first few weeks after that, she had, uh, sent me a heart. I then got another two hearts for my two oldest daughters. And recently got two more hearts to give to my, uh, two young daughters who are, you know,

• 11:34Speaker 02

  uh, fourteen and, and, and eight. And so it, it just, it's always there. I can feel it and sometimes I find myself just, um, you know, uh, uh, holding it in my hand. I'm, I'm sure doing exactly what she had intended the heart to do. Um, another object I have was given to me by a friend and it's a mini ball. Now polished and free of all the calcification that it tends to. The mini ball is a bullet that would have been, um, used during the Civil War. And it was found on the, on, on Gettysburg as well. And so I carry around a reminder of the time when we came closest to our near national suicide.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  When now it turns out through the work of Drew Kilp and Faust, the, uh, former president of Harvard's extraordinary scholarship, that instead of the six hundred or six hundred and twenty thousand that was generally accepted as the death toll in the Civil War, it looks like it's more like seven hundred and fifty thousand, three quarters of a million, well more than two percent of the population, an extraordinary death toll, you know, in, in as the poem Casey at the Bat says, "In this favored land." And then the fourth and final object that I've carried around for years and years is a button off a jacket of a friend of mine, uh, uh, father. Uh, his son gave it to me.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  So a friend of mine's grandfather as well, um, wore on an army uniform and he had landed, um, at D-Day, uh, at, at Normandy. And so I've just, I've kind of kept these reminders, um... Uh, in my pocket and they're comforting. Uh, I do have one object that I can't fit in my pocket, but I have next to me at my desk at home in New Hampshire. Uh, and it's leg irons, uh, that I purchased at auction. Um, heavy, weighty, horrible things. They are a human invention whose only purpose is to keep other human beings in bondage,

• 13:37Speaker 02

  which is a legacy of a very difficult part of our history and reckoning we still not have fully completed. And, um, it turns out that though I don't necessarily go looking for it in my projects, um, that, that, that question, um, is always lingering in, in, in our American story. And whether it's country music, it's there, whether it's in, uh, the national parks, it's there, in unlikely places, it's there, in likely places like a biography of Jackie Robinson or Jack Johnson or jazz. But it, it seems to this question of the fact that we know we were born under the

• 14:19Speaker 02

  sign that all men are created equal, but the guy who wrote that second sentence of the Declaration, our creed, owned more than 200 human beings when he wrote it and didn't see the contradiction or the hypocrisy and more important, didn't see fit in his lifetime to free any one of those human beings who had inalienable rights. And so, you know, if you're gonna do a deeper dive than just mere regurgitation of conventional wisdom, then you have to deal with this ever-present subject of race. And so I wish I could tell you that I could carry around, uh, those leg irons, but they don't fit in the pocket and they have a weight and a disturbing heaviness to them that, that

• 15:02Speaker 02

  is nevertheless very close to me when I'm at home.

• 15:06Tim Ferriss?

  Ken, you have a... A remarkable memory, and you also must receive, be offered, be exposed to thousands of different objects that you could keep. What you said as reminders earlier, are there particular reasons why you chose, of all the other options, let's start with the objects in your pocket? What purpose do those serve for you?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you're asking a question which requires an answer from the head, and I'm not sure the head made the decision to keep them. I think the heart did, and the heart doesn't necessarily have a rational or easily articulated response to the question, which is a good one and an obvious one, and I wish I could be truthful and honest. I mean, I do get lots of stuff, objects, and mainly these are things that are close to me. I mean, I never thought, when I received this Sealing Heart, that I would put it in my pocket, but I did instinctively, and it's never left.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  I mean, I can't tell you how many times I'd emptied it to go through TSA screenings, you know? It's really there, and there's a kind of commitment and loyalty to it that I can't explain. And the bullet was given to me by a friend, and I adore him, he's one of my closest friends, and he's a big bear of a loving man, and I just sort of felt, you know, there's something so contradictory about a bullet being anything but a bad thing, and yet it represents all of the totality of the Civil War.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  The woman who had sent this Sealing Heart wrote in her letter that she saw the series that we made on the Civil War as an American Bahagavita. You know, with this, you know, story, and you just kind of went, whoa, and I, I don't think I was, it, it was the flattery of that that stuck it in my pocket. It was the something of it. And it may have been the struggles that it took me to go through, the growth that I'd undergone. Obviously, these kids at the Greenwood School had moved me to my core. And I just presumed that some other filmmaker better equipped to do a cinema verite film, uh, would do it, but found myself having to do it and found myself with a, a crew that was really excited and,

• 17:43Speaker 02

  and was able to get a lot of fly on the wall stuff. And it meant a lot, um, to me. And, uh, the button is the button is the button. You know, the greatest, uh, invasion in human history took place on June 6th, 1944, on the northwest coast of France that, that ended, um, what Adolf Hitler had ended, began to end in, in, in 12 years, what Adolf Hitler had intended to be a thousand year Reich.

• 18:14Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's talk about, I would like to talk about the heart. And maybe that's almost a contradiction in, in terms, uh, but

• 18:24Tim Ferriss?

  I have been very hyper analytical my whole life and I think have neglected to pay attention to signals from, uh, the body. And I've been trying to cultivate this over the last few years in particular. And a woman I'm named Diana Chapman and Jim Detmer introduced me to this concept of the whole, the whole body or the full body. Yes. And I've read that, at least in response to questions like, when you start one of these big movies, what's the first step? That you talk about, uh, looking for the big, wholehearted yes, that isn't coming from your head, but your heart, kind of like falling in love.

• 19:02Tim Ferriss?

  And so what I've been trying to do is pay attention to the sensations, whether it's heart centered or gut centered, to assess whether something is a full yes for me. What, what does a full, wholehearted yes feel like to you? And, and could you give us an example of a project where that was a clear signal?

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Sure, I think the best example is the one sort of right in front of us, which is country music. I had had country music as an intellectual, didactic, expository idea, if that's what it was. On a list that I recently found from the nineteen nineties, and from another list from the aughts, meaning that I was thinking about it, right? And there might be fifty different things. You know the lottery where they've got all these ping pong balls bouncing around and then one drops down? Imagine these are all just completely arbitrary head things. Uh, just an idea, oh, we should do this, we should think about that, what about this? And so you just wanna write them down, so you don't forget them, and whatever, but nothing happens.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  And nothing did happen, and I, I, I, I had forgotten that they were even there. But I remember visiting a friend of mine in Dallas, Texas, who'd been raising money for us, wonderful, dear friend. And I came down for breakfast one day, we'd done a venture, staying at his house, and I guess we were the first people up, and he said, "You ever thought about country music?" And when he said it, it was like this huge, whole-body explosion. And I looked at him, and it was just, I could feel it in my chest, and I could feel it in my gut. And so it wasn't, I started to answer yes, and then I realized that that yes was so

• 20:49Speaker 02

  feeble and so partial, because it had to do with sort of trying to be, oh yeah, well, it's on a list, you know, like that, that I realized that my, my, like, physical, and more importantly, my emotional reaction to that, had completely obliterated what little blip it was as a kind of mental construct that had worked its way in the nineties, and later the aughts, onto a sheet of paper with ten, twenty, thirty other subjects, some of which I've done, some of which I haven't done, some of which I'll get to, some of which I will never get to. And so this was something else. And so as I, I kind of felt like I got down on one knee. I didn't physically and proposed to country music at that. It was a big yes.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Now, the, the biggest thing I knew is that this project would have to go through one of my partners, who I knew knew more about country music. And more importantly, he and I had been thinking about another big project. And we're just throwing around some ideas and doing a little research. Could we possibly pull this off? And we were not in quicksand, but we were, you know, our back rear right tire was stuck. And I went back to New Hampshire and I went to him and I said, what about, oh, look, we don't need to abandon this other thing. But what about country music? And it, it like, he looked at me like, yes. And the two of us, I mean, that, from that moment, I mean, I do remember what the other project was,

• 22:12Speaker 02

  but it, it, you know, we hadn't shot anything. We hadn't written anything. There'd been no budget raised for it. It was just early conceptual stuff. It was dropped in favor of the next eight and a half years of work. And it was, you know, you say total, this is wholeheartedness. That's what it is. It has to be the integration so that you, you physically commit to it, you, you mentally commit to it, but you emotionally commit to it. And that yes, is very similar to the chemistry we feel with others when we fall in love, either romantically or as friends. And as, um, as all the films have been, it's just been a wholehearted yes.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Because you realize that the story is fire, or the stories are firing on all cylinders, that they're complex. They represent challenge and opportunity and, uh, difficulty. You know, I once was with a group of students recently and I told them that every film that I'd done was at least a million problems. But I didn't think, but I didn't think that the word problem was necessarily pejorative. That it represented friction that needed to be overcome. It was the necessary friction of the creative process of the making progress. You know, you just, that wall won't hold itself up.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  So builder, you need to have scaffolding and false work that once you've reached a certain stage can be disassembled. So this is what we had to do. And how do you take, you're not going to be the encyclopedia, you're not going to be the reading of the telephone book. How do you take something as monstrously big as the Civil War, baseball, or jazz, or the national parks, or World War II, or the Roosevelts, or Vietnam, or now country music and say, what do we tell? Where do we start? How do we go back and pick up its ancestors? Where do we end? Um, how do we tell this story? Just really practical things that have to do with the craft and the art of filmmaking

• 24:19Speaker 02

  and larger, big question things. And all of that represents, in the case of the series, maybe millions of individual problems in quotes. But if you look at them as, as, as, as just whatever a runner takes to overcome that brain that's screaming stop as you're running a marathon, then you understand what we're engaged in. Cause people always come up and say, wow, you just spent ten and a half years on Vietnam, eight and a half years on country music? How do you do that? I said, I'm sad, I don't want to leave it. You know, it's not like, the, the, the fact I'm talking to you is one of the palliative kind of aspects of this.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  The promotional stuff permits, is the, is the airlock that permits you to move on. It's the hospice care of the creative process. It's the hospice care that permits you to, to leave the project because all of a sudden you've been attending to the stories. You lift up and you begin to share it with other people and they begin to synthesize some ideas. And, you know, they're saying, oh, you intended this. And you, and you say, no, we didn't, we just wanted to tell the story. But now that you're saying this, we realize the way in which this historical moment, say, resonates in the present. Harry Truman once said, the only thing that's really new is the history you don't know. People are so fond of saying history repeats itself. It does not.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Mark Twain is supposed to say that history is supposed to have said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And if he did say that, he's so on the mark because I believe that human nature doesn't change. Ecclesiastes put it this way, you know, there's nothing new under the sun. That's the Old Testament. And that may be the best what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. And so I think that that suggests that human nature doesn't change and that it superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events. And we begin to perceive patterns and echoes and themes, rhymes, Twain would say. And I love that.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  We attend to the storytelling part of it. I happen to work in American history the way somebody painter works in oil as opposed to watercolor. And fortunately, the word history is mostly made up with the word story plus hi. You know, you don't have to get into the binary his story or her story. It's just story plus hi, which is a wonderful greeting. And, you know, we finish it and then we look up and go, my God, it is resonating with the present. And every single film I've done, like you will look at country music and you cannot believe that we were editorially complete before the Me Too movement started. You will go, oh, no, oh, no.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  They were aware of the Me Too movement and they, and they, they just worked it in. Or I used to start my stump speech for the Vietnam War series that came out in 2017. So imagine where we'd been for the first nine months of 2017 and for the preceding election year. And I said, what if I told you that I had been working for 10 and a half years about mass demonstrations taking place all across the country against the current administration? About a White House in disarray obsessed with leaks? About a president certain the press was making up stories about him, lying? About asymmetrical warfare that confounded the mighty might of the US military?

• 27:51Speaker 02

  About huge, big document drops of stolen classified material into the public sphere that destabilized the political equation? And accusations that a political party reached out to a foreign power during the time of a national election to influence that election? You would say I'd been working on the last year and a half. But all of these things were true of the Vietnam War when I started in December of two thousand and six. And were also true when we finished, locked the picture, no more work on it. In in December of twenty fifteen, a month before the Iowa caucuses, out of which Donald Trump was not supposed to emerge as a candidate.

• 28:36Tim Ferriss?

  That's uh.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  And that's, I could take any film, any film, and do that, that I've worked on, and it's nothing that we're prepared for. It's only an after the fact kind of collection of accounting. That bittersweet period when you get a chance to, you know, finish the film, you don't want to leave it. And so you're obligated because of the shoe leather necessary to promote um public broadcasting films you do in forty cities. And you begin to construct something that talks about how you related to it. But it's true of every film, every film, including the Civil War. You know, every film I've made, it just resonates in the present and suggests that Twain is absolutely correct.

• 29:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it is a, that's one hell of a rhyme. And I have a question about motivation. You mentioned eight and a half years, ten plus years. Some people have signs in their office, these motivational quotes of various types. Uh effectively some version of go get him tiger, you can do it, etc. I have read that you have a neon sign in your editing room.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Uh. Yeah.

• 29:44Tim Ferriss?

  What does it read and how did you choose this particular sign?

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Well, you know, filmmakers are notorious uh for once something works, you don't touch it, right? You say, oh, leave that alone, it's working, right? And that may be great in Hollywood, but if you find out new and contradictory facts. You're kind of obligated to do it. And we never have a set research period followed by a set writing period, followed by a script that's now etched in stone that informs the shooting and the editing. We never stop researching, so we're always finding out stuff. And we never stop writing, so we're always corrigible and willing to be flexible in what we do. And we're often filming, interviewing before we've even written a word of a script,

• 30:36Speaker 02

  so that every time you see a talking head in our film, it's a happy accident. It's not that I've gone to you and said, "Hey, you know, Mr. Ferris, could you please get me from paragraph two to paragraph three in episode four? Uh, thank you. Uh, thank you. You know, could you say that again, but do it with a little bit more economy?" Yeah, that was it. But now could you end the way you did the first? We've never done that. We just go and have an interview. And if it doesn't work, it's our fault. If it works, it's their greatness, right? And so we have this complex process that I think serves us very well in the pursuit of a complicated story. So what's the neon sign?

• 31:20Speaker 02

  It says, "It's complicated." And it's the license to say, "Even if it's perfect, even if it's working, let's open it up and add in that complicated, conflicting, contradictory fact. And sure, it might destabilize it, but let's do it anyway." And so it just says in cursive, lowercase, "It's complicated," in a neon sign. And it's something we've said to each other for a long time. It's sometimes like a scarf or a muffler, warm gloves on a cold day. It just arms you against the scariness of going out into that unknown region. And other times, it's just like, "Yeah, this is what we do."

• 32:02Speaker 02

  And I wanted it, I finally immortalized it by putting it in neon so that we could all remember that this is what we celebrate. That's, that, I remember, I was making a film years ago on the Statue of Liberty. I interviewed the now passed statesman, Saul Linowitz. Wonderful interview, and he was quoting Judge Learned Hand. "Could there ever be a better name for a jurist than Learned Hand?" And apparently Learned Hand said, "Liberty is never being too sure you're right."

• 32:37Speaker 02

  And I'm sure he meant it in a rather narrow, political, perhaps jurisprudent sense. But I took it in a broad spiritual sense, you know? That the opposite of faith is not heresy. It's not doubt. It's just conviction, right? So faith requires doubt. It doesn't require certainty. And what we've tried to do is instill in ourselves, which is the hardest thing to do. It's much easier to try to instill it in others. This idea that we're not done. We gotta open this up again. We've learned contradictory stuff.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  And we're, you know, for a while, our Vietnam script, its footnotes were longer than the script itself. Like we would say, four regiments of Viet Cong, uh, four regiments of NVA went down the Ho Chi Minh Trail that month. And we'd have an asterisk or a footnote 117. And footnote 117 would say, you know, this scholar says this, this scholar says that, this scholar says that. Because it's in these two places, we're going with four. But later on, we found out, after we locked the film, that yet another scholar had said three. And we were beginning to feel a little bit more comfortable with that and would rather err on the conservative side. And so we changed.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  We found where the narrator had said the word three and we cannibalized it and moved it over. Sometimes we call it a Frankenbite. And we put the three in instead of the four so that we could just exhale a little bit. No one would ever, in a million years, not even a scholar, take us to task for it. But that was not acceptable for us. So we'd rather, and if we hadn't been able to find that three, we would have asked the narrator back in, Peter Coyote back in, and recorded.

• 34:39Tim Ferriss?

  I'd like to talk about the Civil War. And maybe we could start with a question about Civil War, which is do you have any idea how many people have seen, have watched the Civil War? Do you have any estimates?

• 34:52Speaker 02

  No idea. I know we reached about forty million people who watched some or all of it the first time it was broadcast about this time, twenty-nine years ago in September of nineteen ninety. And I know that in subsequent broadcasts it's done very well. It's, you know, in, worked itself into schools. Many, many other people look at it regularly. So I assume it might be, you know, a couple multiples of that original forty million as it's gone out.

• 35:26Tim Ferriss?

  Those are astronomical numbers. I mean, they're huge, huge numbers. And yet, twenty-plus years ago, television critics, at least some, thought nobody would watch the Civil War for many reasons, including that, you know, this new musical, Cop Rock, was gonna blow you out of the water. That didn't end up being the case. And what I wonder, especially given that we're just talking about faith, conviction, and so on, have you, as someone who comes across, say, in an interview like this, as completely confident and clear in focus, have you ever felt lost or had self-doubt?

• 36:10Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any stories that you can paint just to provide a, maybe a fleshed-out human picture of you? Could you talk about a difficult time, or any difficult time that you've gone through?

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Well, I am a very, very anxious person. And I now don't have too much time for anxiety because people that I love are anxious now too, and I've gotta give my attention to them. So the early- Days, the first film on the Brooklyn Bridge through the Civil War were agonizing. Every morning up at four AM, I, I remember, I asked Shelby Foote about Grant and he said, Grant, meaning US Grant, had what they call four o'clock in the morning courage. That meant that you could wake him up 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. I remember thinking, oh my God, I wish I had four o'clock in the morning courage.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  And I think I've developed it now and I've, I've learned how to harness it and turn it around, but it was debilitating, crushing anxiety about whether this would work. You know, I, I was told while I was making the Civil War that, yeah, sure, these first six films on the Brooklyn Bridge and The Shakers and Huey Long and The Statue of Liberty and Congress and Thomas H. Benton, an hour and a half, an hour in length, people will watch still photographs for that long, but they're not going to look for the five one hours that initially we proposed the Civil War to be, and it ended up being nearly 12 hours in length. And that, that was terrifying, to be told that over and over again. And I remember, I knew the film was good when it was done, but I remember arriving

• 37:47Speaker 02

  in Los Angeles for the Television Critics Association meeting, and several of the critics would say, Ken, it's terrific, but you know, nobody's going to watch it because of this cop rocks show by Steven Bochco. But more because we were in an age when people were addicted to MTV cutting and that two and a half minutes was the length of the American attention span. I remember thinking, wow, that's too bad. You know, it was, it didn't produce anxiety the way the actual making of the film did. And I'm so grateful for those loved ones and colleagues, and sometimes they were both,

• 38:26Speaker 02

  who shored me up and pretended that I was okay or, you know, covered for me if it was just too, too much. Really, really important people still in my life to this day. But I remember. Thinking that, I thought that all real meaning accrued in duration. That the work we're proudest of, that you're proudest of, I would presume, that the relationships you care the most amount have benefited from our sustained attention. And that it's okay to have both. That we do need the fast-paced, fast-cutting, two-and-a-half-minute MTV music video, just

• 39:09Speaker 02

  as today, as people were telling me during the aughts that no one would watch the National Parks or the World War II because of YouTube, which, you know, meant that kitten with the ball of yarn. Um, so, th- th- these could coexist, that, that the, that the stuff we cared about, that all meaning accrued in duration was an important thing, and what was true was that the Civil War bore it out. I mean, then, as soon as we were working on baseball, they said, geez, eighteen and a half hours, not, not even eleven hours and forty minutes of Civil War, but eighteen and a half hours, nobody's gonna watch that. And then there was a strike, and, and everybody did. And jazz, oh, man, nobody's gonna watch, you know, eighteen hours of black people, right?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  I just said, I think so, or, or the National Parks, that's not a travelogue, that's not a, you know, which lodge or inn that you should have your family stay at. And so, I just started trusting at some point along the way, and I got, I got a, I, I, it's funny that you ask this, because I've just been dealing it recently with a loved one. I developed in the early to mid-nineties, a sort of sense of three things, I call them. My, uh, one of my daughters calls them the three truths. I'm not willing to elevate them to that. I just call them the three things that I try to do as I help others, friends and, and

• 40:34Speaker 02

  loved ones with anxiety of this debilitating kind, that this will pass, you know, all things are transitory, get help from others, and be kind to yourself. And if I had to do a neon sign, another neon sign, I think I'd do the three things. And I've learned to internalize them in, in large measure, because like that alcoholic or drug addict who becomes the most effective counselor, somebody who's been through the wringer of it, ha- is, I think, a much better, um...

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Is a much more authentic spokesperson, and this goes back to country. This is at the heart of it, is the sincerity or the authenticity that is at the heart of these relatively simple songs, um, that are, as the songwriter Harlan Howard said, "Three chords and the truth." So it's acknowledging that there's a simplicity to it, doesn't have the sophistication or the complication of classical music or some forms of jazz. But that back end, the truth, it means it's dealing with universal human things. And I find the universality of those three things similar to the effectiveness of a good country song. Charlie Pride says in the introduction, "I think there's a country song for every mood you're in. It might make you cry, but you'll feel better for crying."

• 41:51Speaker 02

  So if you hear Hank Williams say, "Hear that lonesome whipper will, he sounds too blue to fly. The midnight train is winding low. I'm so lonesome, I could cry." Now, you know, if you've got music, which Wynton Marsala says in this film, in country music, not just jazz, is the art of the invisible. The only art form that's invisible is music. And you add to it poetry, which is the distillation of language, our form of communication. Then you're mainlining a completely benign form of heroin, emotional heroin, right into your bloodstream, and it gets there really quick, and it's, it's, it's, it's effects are only positive.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  This is the Hank Williams who also wrote, "I've got a hot rod Ford and a two dollar bill, and I know a place right over the hill." You know, and he goes on to talk about the joy of young love, or the possibility of new love, uh, in that, just as he speaks, you know, "The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky. And as I wonder where you are, I'm so lonesome, I can cry." You know, there's just, there's no one within the sound of my voice that has not experienced that.

• 43:06Tim Ferriss?

  I moved to Austin, Texas, a few years ago and spent a lot of time on Willie Nelson Boulevard. I saw him perform recently at Austin City Limits. And I think my memory serves me right that he was part of the pilot for that series in 1972. And it was just spectacular, just absolutely spectacular. So I'm looking forward to digging into country music. I did have a follow-up question on the three truths, as your daughter calls them. The third in particular, be kind to yourself.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the hardest.

• 43:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's the hardest for me, too. Could you describe what that looks like for you? Are there any practices or things that you now say to yourself?

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Nope. I'm still a... I can talk myself down from the first thing. I'm smart enough to surround myself with people that are willing to put up with doing what the second thing. But I'm a complete failure on that last thing, too. I can pay lip service to it only because I know it's true and it's therefore not phony. It isn't lip service. It is the truth. But I think this is the hardest thing for all of us, is how to be kind to ourselves. How do we not murder this moment?

• 44:37Speaker 02

  How do we prepare ourselves for the next moment, whatever it is? And to try to liberate ourselves from the prison of the contemplation of the past, which may promote depression, not to deny the chemical origins of that, nor anxiety, which is an anticipation of the future. Thomas Jefferson had a wonderful thing. "How much pain has caused us the evils which have never happened?" And it really surprised me that Tom, who was really good at ignoring some fundamental

• 45:16Speaker 02

  things right in front of him, like the fact that he lived in a plantation and his comfortable life was due entirely to people that he owned and did not pay, could realize too that these basic elements of the human heart are often have to do with worry. What that is, is a great late 18th century, or maybe he wrote it in the early 19th century, commentary about worry. How much pain has caused us, the evils which have never happened?

• 45:48Tim Ferriss?

  Thomas Jefferson was also a fan of Seneca the Younger and the philosophical school of Stoicism, as was George Washington, who had a play about Cato performed at Valley Forge to bolster the morale of the troops. Are there any, do you gravitate to any particular philosophies or philosophical writings? If, not that you have to, but I mean, you're very well read, clearly.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I love what Jeffrey Ward, who's my longtime writing collaborator, along with Dayton Duncan, Jeff has been writing a little bit longer, and he wrote The Roosevelt. And he was quoting Franklin Roosevelt when asked what his philosophy was. He said he was a Christian and an American, and left it at that. And, you know, at the end of the day, I'll hide behind FDR's skirts. You know, I am, I think, a Christian. I'm not a practicing Christian, but I'd like to believe that I'm a believing Christian, and that I'm an American.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  And that basically says that I do not need to hew to any one political philosophy because there's always the possibility, and in fact, it isn't a possibility, there's always the certainty that the opposite of what I might believe in might also be true. And that requires the nimbleness of human, that requires a human dexterity that the binary aspects of politics don't subscribe to. And that's why I think FDR said it exactly right. And I have friends, as close colleagues as possible, who I guess would call themselves

• 47:46Speaker 02

  atheists, and others who have other faiths in addition to Christianity, but this is what I am, I am what I am, I think Popeye said. And I like, I like both, you know, I like, I like that American part, you know, it's for all the things that we've screwed up, for all of the things we've gotten so wrong. I do believe, as Lincoln said in his message to Congress, what we'd call the State of the Union in December of 1862, that we were the last best hope of earth. That, this myth of exceptionalism poisons us and pollutes us and allows us to incubate, isolated as we are by these two magnificent oceans that

• 48:30Speaker 02

  have protected us as well, permits us to incubate so many horrible tendencies, an addiction to money and guns and suspicions of the other. You know, I, I have spent my entire professional life, um, living in a kind of space, I like to think about it, it will sound now absurd to you as I explain it, between the two-letter lowercase plural pronoun "us" and its capitalized version, "the US." That is to say, all of the intimacy and warmth of "us," along with "we" and "our," and all of the breadth, the majesty, the complexity, the contradiction,

• 49:15Speaker 02

  even the controversy of the United States. And what I've learned over forty-plus years of practicing in my professional life, telling stories in American history about "us" and the US, is that there's only "us," there's no "them."

• 49:33Speaker 02

  You know, country music has been since the very beginning, an alloy, a mixture of things. Stronger because it has constituent elements that make it stronger. And that at any time in our history, when we suggest that pulling out one aspect of it will make it pure American, you have a priori weakened the ally and made it brittle and more breakable. And I like our suppleness, I like our muttness, I like our mongrelness, which is of course abhorrent to various currents that are boiling and swirling in the United States. This is what makes us stronger.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  The banjo, one of the key instruments of country music, is from Africa. A.P. Carter of the Carter family, the original Carter family, Bill Monroe, the founder of bluegrass, the aforementioned Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash, people who deserved to be on the Mount Rushmore of early country music, all had an African-American tutor that took their chops from here to way up here to qualify them for consideration in that pantheon, on that Mount Rushmore. And Jimmy Rogers, the first superstar at the same time as the Carter family, grew up

• 50:56Speaker 02

  suffused with the blues sung by the black train crews that he worked with in southern Mississippi. So while he didn't have one mentor, the way Hank Williams did, Rufus T. Tot Pain, about whom he said, "Everything I learned about music, I got from Rufus." That's not bad for arguably the most important country singer-songwriter. It just tells you that whatever superficial thing you've got about country music in your head, whatever conventional wisdom that you think you're now gonna enjoy.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  It ain't true that it's always been a mixture. And it's always been mostly working class. This is a story of women, really strong women from the very, very beginning. It's a story of people coming out of poverty, black and white, and changing the dynamics of their lives. And if they didn't bring other people out, they gave them at least the tools to dream how to do that. It's about geographical dislocation and psychological dislocation. And at the end of the day, this extraordinary marriage of this invisible art form combined with the poetry of the words and the, for us as filmmakers, startling emotion we did not ever expect to find in a story of country music.

• 52:13Tim Ferriss?

  I'd like to ask a question about the making of Ken Burns, because you said, "I am what I am," which is true. You are what you are. I can't deny that. But my girlfriend said to me recently over dinner, she was quoting someone else, but she said that every child is born into a different family. In the sense that if you have two or three siblings, as people change over time, you're born into a different family. And likewise, I would imagine that there are certain aspects of Ken-ness that have remained the same for a long time. But you made choices that have shaped who you are today. And I wanted to ask about one in particular. And this is Hampshire College.

• 52:57Tim Ferriss?

  Could you talk about Hampshire? Describe Hampshire College and how you ended up there? Because I actually do not know.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Okay, so I am the son of an anthropologist and a mother who had an advanced degree in biology, but couldn't really use it. She raised two sons until she died of cancer in 1965, which is the dominant event of my life. Shortly afterwards, I watched my father cry at a movie and decided I wanted to be a filmmaker. I had seen the safe haven that it had provided for him, a man who I had never seen cry, not during my mother's illness, not at her death, not at her funeral. A point pointed out to me by friends, which I knew meant that was, there was an implicit criticism. And I saw my dad cry in a movie called Odd Man Out.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Anyway, I was gonna be a Hollywood director. So flash forward, I am in my senior year at high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And my best friend subscribes to a magazine, apparently, that I have never heard of called Newsweek. Our family subscribed to Time magazine. I didn't know there was anything else but Time magazine for a Newsweekly, which I devoured by that time, uh, cover to cover. And here was the description of a tiny experimental college that had just opened in the last few weeks. This is October of nineteen seventy. It had opened in September of nineteen seventy, which was, for lack of a better word, uh, a graduate school experience at an undergraduate level.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  That is to say, you were trusted to either know what you wanted to do or to find out what you wanted to do, and you proceeded in much the same fashion you would in graduate school, with a de-emphasis on classwork and more emphasis on independent study and the assembling of your own examinations, your own proposals, and the assembling of a faculty, small faculty group of two or three, who would judge it along the way and finally pass on it, pass or fail. Uh, I like falling in love with country music. It just lit me up and I said, "I wanna go there." And he said, "I'm applying." And, um, I was supposed to go to the University of Michigan, where I could get in for free or nominal stuff, cause my dad taught there. Um, I, I, Hampshire was the most expensive college on earth.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  Uh, room, board, and tuition in the fall of seventy-one, uh, the class to which I hoped to enter in was four thousand seven hundred and thirty dollars, thirty dollars more than Harvard University.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  And I basically moved all my chips. I quit school early. I had advanced placement courses that permitted me to interpret the Michigan laws that said I needed X number of credits, not four years of high school or three years of high school, and that I had that, and that I was leaving after Christmas, and the guidance counselor said, "You are making a big mistake." And I worked in a record store part-time. I now went full-time to that, saved up money. My grandmother gave me a thousand dollars. I had inherited a thousand dollars. I pushed all my chips into year one. Fully intending to come back to Michigan, just having, you know, blown it all on that, you know, uh, experiment.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  I so fell in love with Hampshire, I am so a poster boy for it, that I couldn't not do it. So I quit, I took a leave from Hampshire my second year and worked literally as an indentured servant to a dear friend still, who ran the bookstore at the college and got enough money, uh, to pay for the next two years of Hampshire. And though it took four years, I spent only three years actually, uh, matriculating there and ended up with a, a Bachelor of Arts in Film Study and Design. Uh, and I left there with this sort of naive and perhaps arrogant assumption that I could start, uh, my own film company, rather than do what everyone else was supposed to do,

• 56:53Speaker 02

  which is go to New York or LA or whatever big city and apprentice at a film company and work your way up. So I started with two other Hampshire grads, Florentine Films in 1976, the year after I graduated, though we'd been talking and thinking about it for a long time. And that's been my only employer, meaning I've got the worst boss ever, which is me.

• 57:17Tim Ferriss?

  Two, two, two quick questions.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Ham- Hampshire was central. It was central. We had two teachers, film and photography teachers, mostly still photographers, social documentaries, still photographers, Elaine Mays and Jerome Liebling. They became mentors in the best sense of the word, almost in a medieval Renaissance sense of, of a real master-student relationship. And my relationship with Jerry Liebling was complete, uh, true to the end of his life. He died in 2011. I still worship him and, uh, all that he gave me. I, if he did not exist, you would not be having this conversation. I said that, you know, once Disney Gillespie said of Louis Armstrong, know him, know me. Know Jerry Liebling, know me, period, full stop.

• 58:05Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the things that, uh, stuck with you from Jerry or were imprinted upon you that had such a tremendous impact? Or was it his care for you? I mean, how would you describe what was imparted?

• 58:17Speaker 02

  He was a, he was a curmudgeonly.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  Uh, uh, kind of tough guy. I remember I was a precocious film student all through high school, not having any formal courses to take, but studying and reading and I knew stuff and I had a sentence, which I think I can still do, from Andrew Saris, one of the great critics and proponents of the French auteur theory, that the director is the author of the film. And he was talking about Nicholas Ray, who made Rebel Without a Cause, but he also made a film called Johnny Guitar, whose screenwriter was Philip Jordan, who was eventually blacklisted, uh, uh, during those terrible Hollywood days in the fifties. And so there was a sentence that I had looked at as a perplexed, and you'll understand exactly

• 59:04Speaker 02

  why, a perplexed teenager, where it said, "Jordan set out to attack McCarthyism, but Ray was too delirious to pay any heed, as Freudian feminism and Marxist masochism prevailed over Pirandellin transcended polemics."

• 59:21Speaker 02

  And to me, that was my holy grail, right? So, I finally got up a nerve, second semester at Hampshire, to, I, I'd been in Elaine May's, his, his colleagues and younger colleagues and somebody he had imported to Hampshire the year I came, the second year, he'd come the first year. And, um, I, I, I, I showed this sentence, uh, I, I went into his office and I suddenly, like, just said, blurted it out, I was showing off, right? That not only had I memorized it, but I think I knew what it meant, and I'd like to have this discussion with him. And when I finished the sentence, he looked at me, and he got up from his desk, and he walked around the desk, and he took me by the elbow, which he always did to everybody,

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  both in affectionate ways, but this was clearly not in affectionate way. He sort of lifted me out of my chair, moved me to the door, opened the door, and pushed me out into the hallway and shut the door. And I sat out there contemplating suicide, because Jerry was known for this, to being a terrifying person, and I thought, here, I'll go in, I'll disarm him with this wonderful sentence, which I was going to attempt to deconstruct, and everything would be great, and my career, such as it is, and I rarely use the word career after that, um, would be launched. And he had reminded me, this was just... Absurd gobbledygook that Hollywood called itself the industry, which ought to be

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  warning enough. And um, we were interested in something else. He was a great, great still photographer. I urge you to Google him. Liebling, L I E B, L I N G. Extraordinary photographs, which he put up in our, in our classes, along with our photographs and, and our films, and they're stunning. He was about his, he wanted us to know history. He wanted us to know ethics. He wanted us to be humanists. He understood there was a, there was an essential reciprocity that took place. Stuff didn't occur, stuff wasn't imparted just during classes. Often he'd say, my car's broken down, can you drive into Northampton, the next town over? And I'll pick up the laundry. I said, sure. And along the way, you'd get, look at the way that angle of that light hits.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  You see the, the way that woman, uh, brushed her arm there? And he wasn't trying to say, this is a good thing or a bad thing. He was just saying, notice. As his daughters say, he would always say, go see, do, be. Go, get out into the world. See, look around you. Do, make something, you know, relate. Have an exchange with something. Be, take it in. Go see, do, be. And that to me, along with Hampshire's sort of secret sauce of how they organized it, was it. I do not recognize the person who went into Hampshire in September of nineteen seventy one and the person who left in May or June of seventy five.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  I just completely rearranged my molecules and I have always had this extraordinary devotion and affection for it. And when I lost Jerry, um, when we lost Jerry, his family, obviously, um, his teaching had reached so many people that we all still gather and collect to talk about him, what he and Elaine had, had given us over those years and how transformative that exposure to their generosity, whether it was artistic or human, it really doesn't matter. And I loved the fact that in retrospect, those lines were blurred. You know, some of the best times I've ever had in my life were at his house, you know, where we could just go and listen.

• 1:03:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, I really look back also on my own history and the mentors who had the largest impact certainly had no clear boundary between sort of work hours and off hours.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  And that's the same now true for me. That is to say, I don't distinguish. I mean, I understand that the world sort of Sunday night gets a little bit unhappy and that I know Friday afternoon is some thing that's supposed to be good. I don't have that. I don't have that. The cliche is if you love your work, you don't work a day in your life. And, you know, it is a cliche. I'm still applying one at that, but it's pretty true. The people I love are the people I work with. I work with my daughter. She's one of my

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  producers. She teaches me stuff, as does my son-in-law, all of the time. And people, I mean, my cinematographer, we barely talk to one another. We have been working together for forty-six years.

• 1:04:12Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  I mean, he was at Hampshire. And now we just, we go into situations and it's just sort of, it's almost like telepathy, where we just through hand, you know, look, a little gesture, whatever. And all of it, if you were talking to Buddy Squires, who's this extraordinary cinematographer, about Jerry, you'd be hearing different sorts of things, but the meaning would be exactly what I've imparted about Jerry Liebling, Jerome Liebling.

• 1:04:41Tim Ferriss?

  How did your, how did your father respond, if at all, to your decision to put all of your chips, push all of your chips under the table for this one thing, particularly given that you only had funds for one year? Was that a conversation?

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  No. I think a lot of it had to do with some stuff that befell him. He was not as mentally sound as he should be. I came across a few years ago a letter from my mother to his mother, her mother-in-law, in which she's saying, "I'm dying." What am I gonna do with my little boys? He can't, he can't possibly take care of them. And, uh, we muddled through. We did okay. And I think when I decided this, he knew in some respects that I needed to get out of Dodge, that I couldn't be at the scene of the crime, that is, the death, the place where my mother had died. And, uh, I think because he wasn't financially involved, he had no resources.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  He was in a kind of publisher parish, uh, situation with University of Michigan, which eventually ended up with the perishing. Uh, he was in no position to help. So it was really, I was gonna do this. And I think he was happy for me that I had found the clutch necessary to put myself in gear because he's still the most brilliant man I've ever met. Like a Maserati, my younger brother, Rick, described him as, uh, without a clutch. So, you can rev the engine in the driveway, but you can't go anywhere. And that was my dad.

• 1:06:23Tim Ferriss?

  Was the, the presenting symptom of the missing clutch depression? Or something that resembled depression? And what, if you don't mind me asking?

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I believe so. No, no, no. I, I believe, I, I think we would all generally agree that it was probably bipolar. But, uh, no significant attempt was made at a diagnosis. He was eventually, uh, ended up at a, uh, sort of tertiary level university in Western Michigan and, uh, got somebody who was supposed to help him who didn't really. And so we never really, he was never really treated for that. But it, it was, uh, you know, it, it was a sad, sad lifetime. However, he's the smartest person I've ever met. He was an amateur still photographer and a professional anthropologist.

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  And my very first memory, the first little film strip that runs through my head is him, just a couple of seconds of him building a darkroom in the basement of our tract house in Newark, Delaware, where he was the only anthropologist in the state of Delaware. And then, uh, the next clip is of me being held in his very, uh, strong left arm as he manipulated the tongs in that finished darkroom, one of the few things he finished, uh, in that eerie red light with those ghastly smells of the chemicals as I watched the miracle of a picture come out of a blank page. And if you think about what I do, there is an anthropology to it.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  And it is rooted in the DNA, my DNA of my work is a still photograph. Even if I've got all the footage in the world, I will still often default for real meaning to communicating with a single still image. And that's my dad, as much as it is Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes. It's my dad with that kind of anthropology, the story of us. Um, and so, uh, a lot of, you know, strength and I hope goodness comes, uh, came from my mother, who I had a very short time with on this earth. I mean, I, we just passed, it's past April, um, sixty, uh, fifty-five years without a

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  mother, which I have to tell you, Tom, is way too long to be without a mother. But at the same time, she is present every single day of my life in the way my father isn't. And yet I actually have to pay him the honor of having created not only me, but my brother and my mother too. And my brother Rick is much more, um, understanding of this. And we just had an interesting conversation together at the Telluride Film Festival, which was supposed to be talking about us as filmmakers. And we immediately went to this dynamic. And, uh, he spoke about him as feeling the physical love of my mother and me always

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  kind of pushing away and going out and doing things and having projects. And so the thing that I'm lacking is that sense of ultimate security, which he actually has, if not the ability to execute in quite the same way that I am. And so it was just one of the most amazing conversations I've ever had in my life, uh, with the gift of my brother, uh, speaking truth to a situation that informs.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  Every film I made, I mean, my, I was going through a crisis and my father-in-law, my late father-in-law, said to me, um, I said, I seem to be keeping my mother alive because I couldn't be present on the day she died, April twenty eighth. He was always, is always approaching and then always disappearing, but I was never aware of that day. And he said, I bet you blew out your candles as a young boy, uh, wishing she'd come back. I said, I did it my last birthday, you know? And he said, you're kidding. And he said, but look what you do for a living. And I said, what? He said, you wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? And from that moment on, I plowed towards finding a way.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  I've never not been present on, um, April twenty eighth. And for a long time, it took me going to Ann Arbor with my then small children and renting a car and making a picnic out of it and visiting a grave that we had finally established. My father had not bothered to pick up the ashes, uh, and became one of those forgotten, repressed memories of childhood. And all of a sudden, at this crisis, we, my brother and I realized, you know what? We have to, uh, to do this. And so we tracked down our ashes at some god-besaken cemetery way outside of Ann Arbor and put a plaque there. And, uh, for many, many years, I would go there every year, uh, with or without my daughters and turn it into, uh, an event.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  And, uh, my mother's name was Lila, L-Y-L-A. Um, an old nineteenth-century spelling. She was named after her mother, who was born in the nineteenth century. And when my oldest daughter, Sarah, had her first child, she named her Lila, L-Y-L-A. She was born on, uh, January eighteenth, two thousand and eleven. And, uh, I can't begin to tell you that we never said, "Lila." We still, even at this talk at Telluride Film Festival, we refer to her as mommy. Two men in their sixties, their mid-sixties, referring to mommy because that's who she was, right? Our father went from daddy to dad. Uh, our mother always was mommy.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  And I can't begin to tell you that though we never said the word "Lila," it was always draped in black crepe. From April twenty eighth nineteen sixty five until my granddaughter Lila was born, in which case, we say it twenty times a day and we talk to her and she is beautiful and she, um, you know, the birds thing and flowers doing and it's a wonderful, wonderful thing and it's helped, um, uh, measurably with what we were talking about before, anxiety and, and the burden of that.

• 1:12:32Tim Ferriss?

  That is, uh, that is really beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that and being so forthcoming. Uh, I, I think that, uh, you know, not only is your personal experience, uh, informative, I would imagine for a lot of people listening, a- as you mentioned, I mean, the, the similarity of blowing out the candles and wishing your mother to be back.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Tim Ferriss?

  I, I'm sure that transcends the, the experiences of the two of you to many people who are listening who have lost a loved one of, of one type or another. And I also think it's really important and courageous of you to talk very directly about your father's struggles with, with mental illness, with depression. I have, uh, very severe bipolar depression on both sides of my family and that applies to blood relatives, but also relatives by marriage. Uh, my aunt died of a Percocet plus alcohol overdose last year, which was certainly correlated, correlated to depression. And so this, this, this is

• 1:13:41Tim Ferriss?

  really just a way of saying thank you for talking so vulnerably.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  My, my, my late father-in-law was an eminent psychologist and I felt when he had given me this gift of saying, waking the dead, that that's what I did for a living. I realized that I was obligated in some ways to be transparent in my individual biography and life if I were going to continue doing what I was doing seemingly so successfully. That is to say, if I was going to feel the ability to talk about Abraham Lincoln, I needed also, or Jackie Robinson, I needed the ability to talk about Lila and Robert

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  and about my brother Rick and about my granddaughter Lila and my daughters Sarah, Lily, Olivia, and Willa, and do so with, you know, no differentiation. I'm sure they at times would like to have a free and separate life, which they do have. And because of the notoriety of the films, sometimes there's, people come up to me and talk to me about things that are emotional. You know, a veteran will say about the Vietnam film, "This is the best thing I've ever heard. This helps me." Or I hear from another veteran that his best friend watched it and said he thinks he's okay now.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  I mean, that's what happens. And I realize that the emotional archaeology that I have said at the very beginning of my first film, I wished to pursue. I was not interested in merely excavating the dry dates and facts and events of the past, but looking for an emotional archaeology that would sort of glue those shards, those dry brittle shards, together. And I have to, by saying the word emotional, put an asterisk. I do not mean nostalgia or sentimentality. That's the enemy of good anything. But I do believe that there are higher emotions that we are frightened of, and so we would

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  retreat to a rational world, most of the time, where one and one always equals two, when in fact what we want, out of our love, out of our sex perhaps, out of our faith, out of our art, out of maybe just something simple like a cup of tea or looking at a sunset, we want one and one to equal three. And I'm looking for that periodically, that improbable equation to obtain in the films that we are working on.

• 1:16:27Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Ken, I think that as a narrative alchemist of sorts, that you have managed with many of your films, much of your work, to create that unlikely synergy of one plus one equals three. If you look at all of the ingredients, all of the elements that you've pieced together over decades,

• 1:16:56Tim Ferriss?

  the sum is greater... I'm gonna mess up this one. I always mess this one up. What is it? The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There we go.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  But you know, Tim, that's exactly it. When we say that, let's just stop for a second and take a rational approach. Let's say the sum of the parts comes up to here, but the whole is up here. What is in there? What is in there? That's the only question there is. There's the phenomenal world that we can see and we know is reflected light, filled with colors and sounds and all of these sorts of things. And there's the numinal world, an unseen world, which is actually much more compelling if we knew how to trust and access it. And that's the big human dilemma. There's nobody gets out of this alive.

• 1:17:49Speaker 02

  No one gets out of this alive. And this is an amazingly depressing sort of thing, if you wish to take it that way. And we could be reasonably excused as a sentient species for lying in a fetal position, sucking our thumb, waiting for that inevitable end. But we do not. We raise babies and we tend gardens and we build buildings and we paint paintings and we make films and we are in conversation with each other. And we're keeping, as Whit and Marcel calls it, the wolf from the door. The wolf is the apprehension of our own mortality. And that's what storytelling is. You know, storytelling is basically,

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  "Honey, how was your day?" You know? And then you're required to edit human experience. And how you edit human experience is...

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  Really what it's all about, you know, honey, how your day, you know, it doesn't begin, I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb, unless of course, somebody T-bones you and that's exactly the way you describe it. But you say, oh, you'll never believe what an SOB my boss is. And then all of a sudden Aristotelian poetics, that's not so scary. Aristotle wrote an essay called Poetics about storytelling, beginning, middle and end, protagonist, antagonist, climax, dynamo. You begin to obey the laws of the editing of human experience. And by sharing a story, like raising a baby, like

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  tending a garden, like building a building, we ensure a kind of immortality.

• 1:19:31Tim Ferriss?

  Well said. And the editing of the human experience is also one of those ever so valuable invisible arts, right alongside music. And I want to remind people that your newest work is Country Music, explores the history of uniquely American art form, country music. And I have a long description here that I'll include in the show notes. It'll also have already been heard in the introduction. I'm holding it in my hand right here, A Story of America, one song at a time. I cannot wait to dig in. And it premieres Sunday, September

• 1:20:11Tim Ferriss?

  15th, 8/7 central. You can also stream it and it's available on the PBS video app. So you can find that on PBS.org and also on the apps. I'm very excited about this and I'm so thrilled that we were able to spend some time in conversation today. Is there anything else that you would like to say, Ken, before we wrap up?

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  I know, I think that I would let Merle Haggard, who we were very fortunate to be able to interview for this country music thing many, many years ago, six years ago, and he passed away soon afterwards. Um, he said, "It's, it's what we believe in but can't see, like dreams and songs and souls." And I love that idea that songwriting, creating songs, combining music, might be the things that we believe in but can't see. I've quoted you a couple lines from, uh, um, Hank Williams, you know, could you Johnny

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  Cash, uh, "At my door, the leaves are falling, a cold, wild wind will come. Sweethearts walk by together, and I still miss someone." I don't know, that's all unseen, and it is a com- if I sang it, it would be a combination of music and words. And it's stuff that we believe in, like dreams and songs and souls. Merle Haggard, one of the greatest of all, Emmylou Harris in our film, later on, five episodes later, this is in the introduction that he says this, but five episodes later, she said, "You wanna know what country music is? Get a Merle Haggard record, any Merle Haggard album, and put the needle," uh, just dating

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  her, "put the needle on any cut, any cut, it doesn't matter which one, and begin from there." So, I think if, if you take it from this, I always think whenever he appears on our film, he's like Zeus, and, uh, I just think if you take it from this, this god from Olympus, uh, that it's the things that we believe in but can't see, like dreams and songs and souls. You feel like you're dealing with that nominal world that I was speaking about, that, um, you are apprehending or trying to apprehend something that is just beyond our ken, no pun intended, and is...

• 1:22:47Speaker 02

  Is there for us if we expose ourselves to it. And I think that's the business of art. Leo Tolstoy said, "Art is the transfer of emotion from one person to another." Sounds pretty straightforward and simple. And I will sort of leave you with two great philosophers, Merle Haggard and Leo Tolstoy.

• 1:23:08Tim Ferriss?

  And it seems easy, but sometimes it's complicated. And it's worth the complication. Ken, thank you so much for taking this time. I had just a wonderful experience bouncing around here in the ether, having this conversation. And I highly recommend everybody check out Country Music, pbs.org/countrymusic. They can say hello, give a hand wave on the internet, @kenburns on Twitter. And this has been such a pleasure. Thank you, Ken.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  Tim, it's been my pleasure. Thank you so much.

• 1:23:46Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday? That provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:24:29Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out. And just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. I love Peloton. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. You don't have to worry about fitting classes into your schedule, making it to the studio, or dealing with some commute to the gym. I have a Peloton bike in my master bedroom at home, and it is one of the first things that I do in the morning. I wake up, meditate for 20 minutes, and then I knock out a short 20-minute ride. Usually, high-intensity interval training or HIIT.

• 1:25:13Tim Ferriss?

  Then I take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's beautifully convenient and has become something that I actually look forward to. And I was skeptical in the beginning. I didn't think I would dig it, and I really do. So, you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other Peloton riders from across the country on the interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. I tend to use a lot of the classes on demand and have four to six of them that I've bookmarked and use over and over again. There are up to 14 new classes every day with thousands of classes on demand, and there are a variety of workouts to choose from. 45-minute classes, 20-minute burns, hip-hop, rock and roll, low-impact, or high-intensity. Pick the class structure and style that works for you. Peloton has an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City.

• 1:25:59Tim Ferriss?

  They really do have great instructors of every possible personality and style. And you can find one that you love, no matter what you're in the mood for. Personally, I use Matt Wilpers a lot, but I use a bunch of them. I'm promiscuous and enjoy classes from a lot of their instructors. With real-time metrics, you can track your performance over time and continue to be your personal best. I did not think the gamification would work for me, and they really hit the nail on the head. It does work, at least for me, tremendously well to keep me pushing consistently. So, discover this cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings a studio experience to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited-time offer. Go to onepeloton.com, that's spelled O-N-E-P-E-L-O-T-O-N dot com.

• 1:26:44Tim Ferriss?

  Enter the code TIMPODCAST, all one word, at checkout and get $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. Get a great workout at home anytime you want. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIMPODCAST to get started.

• 1:27:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, "If I could only take one supplement, what would it be?" The answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. I view it as, and a lot of you now view it as, all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it way back in 2010 in The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I've been using it since before that, and I use it in a lot of different ways. I travel with it to avoid getting sick, or to help mitigate the likelihood of getting sick. I take it in the morning to ensure optimal performance, and overall, it covers my bases if I can't get what I need from whole-food meals throughout the rest of the day. And if you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they're offering a free 20-count travel pack for first-time users.

• 1:27:44Tim Ferriss?

  I nearly always travel with at least three or four of these one-dose bags. In other words, if you buy Athletic Greens as a first-time buyer, you now get, for a limited time, an extra $79 in free product. So check out the details at athleticgreens.com/tim. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim for your free travel pack with any purchase.