Ken Burns and the Art of Telling the Whole Story

22:53And this is a war of attrition. And by the time you get in a powerful ally that's going to spend the equivalent of 30 billion dollars to help you, the French. And by that time, the Spanish come in and the Dutch come in and they're challenging the British property, not just the 13 colonies. They have 13 much richer, more important colonies to them based on slave labor in the Caribbean. and the French and the Spanish are challenging that, and Gibraltar, and then in the subcontinent, and then what's now in the Philippines. So it's a global war that is over the prize of North America, but also the fight between empires in which somebody has to win.

23:28Simon Sinek:This is passion versus metrics, right? It's the banker who tells the CEO what to do versus the startup who's driven by idealism and passion. And I don't care that I'm in my garage. I don't care that I'm in my garage, and I will overcome all odds because I have to. I'm in New Hampshire because I was told not to go there, but I needed to go someplace where I could live for nothing 47 years ago. And then when the first film was nominated for an Academy Award, people said, oh, you'll go back to New York, you'll go to LA. And I said, no, I'm staying here, which is that decision, that second one is the most important, this kind of professional decision I've made.

24:05Simon Sinek:And Jopp, you know this better than I do, but I read Jopp's little treatise, The People's War, and he understood he couldn't beat America militarily. He couldn't beat America financially, but he could beat them socially. Right. So the question should have been not from McNamara to his counterpart, but from his counterpart to McNamara. Like, what was your number? Yeah. What was your number? They had a number and we finally figured out what it was. You know, Nixon and Kissinger tie themselves into knots. Yeah. You know, if they'd accepted the peace terms that were available in January of 69, when they came into office, they would have been, you know, better than the terms they accepted before.

24:47And there'd be 25 ,000 more Americans alive and hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million Vietnamese and Laotians and Cambodians still alive. And if we'd gone with Ho Chi Minh and said, let them have their election, we believe in free elections. And done that, there'd be six or seven million people still alive or their descendants still alive. But we didn't. We went to a place, we had some numbers that we needed. And finally, Nixon and Kissinger say, okay, well, we can just pretend this. They reach out to the South Vietnamese government to bypass the talks, right, that are making progress, thinking that that will keep Humphrey from overtaking him.

25:24Humphrey was 20 points down and then he loses by 0.7 percentage points. If the election had happened a week later, Humphrey would have won in 68. And instead, they had this idea of the decent interval. And we've got Kissinger on tape saying, Mr. President, this is just paraphrasing, Mr. President, the South Vietnamese are weak and corrupt and they're going to fall. and goes, oh yeah, they've been sucking at the teat too long, our president says. And then he goes, but if we give them enough material, enough money, they will be able to hold out. And when they do collapse, which they will collapse, no one will remember and no one will blame us.

25:59So tell that to the mother of the 25 ,000 Americans who were killed during that indecent interval.

26:08Simon Sinek:Like I said, it's the reason I'm enamored by Kars' work because I see it everywhere. I see it in business all the time, where you have an infinite game where people are playing with finite mindsets. And invariably, when that happens, trust is destroyed, cooperation is destroyed, and innovation is destroyed. Question for you, why America? Like, why not British history? Why not the Plantagenets? Why not the Tudors? Well, because I'm so parochial. I mean, I'm Guam. I'm Samoa. I'm an American possession. It's my country. I'm interested in how it works. and every film, I mean, I made the same film over and over again.

26:43Every single one is the same film. It's just asking this question, who are we? And you never answer that question. You just deepen it. I think with each successive project, you get, you know, a little bit more. Not to say that the early stuff isn't good. That first film, Brooklyn Bridge was, I thought, still, I can look at it. And what's so great is that it's just practice. You know what I mean? It's like when the film is done, it's yours. But up until that time, we're just, it's the process of doing it. And now I'm into other, I'm working on a history of reconstruction called Emancipation to Exodus.

27:14I'm doing something on LBJ and the Great Society, his domestic thing, as opposed to his foreign policy failures. I mean, he went to McNamara and Rusk and Bundy and Ball and said, I need you more than he needed you. Meaning I'm not an internationalist. I just want to be the second coming of FDR. Just please go take care of this. Now, he's responsible. He's the guy who waited until his landslide victory against Goldwater to put boots on the ground in March of 65. He went into it. he's culpable. And we only spent one sentence in 18 hours and 10 episodes talking about his domestic agenda. But the din of the war began to affect the effectiveness of his domestic program.

27:52So we just want to go back and sort of understand his complicated and tragic existence.

27:58Simon Sinek:So from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Vietnam War, to baseball, to the revolution, and everything in between and after. And I appreciate that you can't, quote unquote, answer the question, but who are we? Who is America relative to the world? Who is America relative? What does it mean to be an American based on what you've learned? I can't answer that. I can give you little feelings and parts of feelings. It's ephemeral. Lincoln gives a wonderful speech, what we now call the State of the Union speech, But it's in December of 62. Things have been going bad. But we did have the stalemate at Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history.

28:40And he's able to give the Emancipation Proclamation. And he's like, he's going both directions. So this is who we are. And because he's the greatest poet president and who gets us in a way, in a timeless way, I can quote this. He says, first, fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. okay so we're prisoners of this history we've got to be mindful of what it is and we say we're against slavery and what we got to act it and and act then a few sentences later he says the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present as our case is new we must think anew we must act anew we must disenthrall ourselves and then we can save our country the end of this thing is that we calls us the last best hope of birth all three of those i agree with and look at his

29:34Simon Sinek:second inauguration, just before he's murdered, there is a part in the penultimate moment in which he is Old Testament. I mean, he has got a lightning bolt. He said, okay, you want to continue this thing and that every drop of blood drawn by the lash, meaning slavery, will be met by one drawn by the sword. We'll do this for as long as you motherfuckers want to do this, right? He knows the war is going to end very shortly, but he is It has got unbelievable fury. And then he pivots. Next sentence, practically, he goes, with malice towards none, with charity. I mean, it goes completely New Testament.

30:16And it's all about forgiveness and embracing and taking care of the widow and the orphan and those who have borne the battle. I mean, it is amazing. And that is us. And that's as close as I can get for you.

30:29Simon Sinek:I'm going to push you because what makes us not French? What makes us not English? What makes us not Italian? Geography. No, no, there's something to be an American. Yeah. I mean, we invented this thing. I think the revolution is the most significant event in world history since the birth of Christ. I'm happy to have conversations, not debates, but conversations about somebody else's favorite. And so that makes us the inventors of putting into practice enlightenment thinking that had come out of the Renaissance, that borrowed from antiquity, ideas about virtue. Pursuit of happiness is not acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.

31:12It's about increasing your virtue because you've now had bestowed on you this thing that had never happened. Everybody was a subject under authoritarian rule. Now you were a citizen. What were you going to do? And everybody and the founders were freaked out about, you know, John Adams says, there's so much ambition and average, so much love, lust for profit? Is there virtue enough to maintain a republic? The key word in the phrase that I quoted was not from Adams, but from the declaration is pursuit. We're a nation in the process of becoming 11 years later in Philadelphia in the same place. They say I'm more perfect union.

31:45There is a kind of striving. There is a kind of improvisational genius. Interesting that I said improvisational because at the opening of my baseball series, the scholar and writer Gerald early, said, when they study our American civilization 2 ,000 years from now, and think about how long that is, because go back 2 ,000 years and look at civilization. He said, when they study the American civilization 2 ,000 years from now, we'll be known for only three things, the Constitution, baseball, and jazz music. And at the heart of these, the Constitution is still the shortest Constitution on earth, four pieces of parchment amended.

32:24It's able to adjudicate, for the most part, the most complicated problems from the American story. And then baseball's got infinite chess-like combinations. And of course, at the heart of the art form that we've given to the world is this idea that you don't play the notes on the page, but you listen to what someone else plays. And then you interpret this and do something which everyone else can only dream of, which is create art on the spot.

32:49Simon Sinek:I think we're moving down the field here a little bit. One of my favorite things about America is we celebrate our quote-unquote independence on July 4th, 1776, which of course is nonsense. That's just simply the date we signed the Declaration of Independence. And the war didn't end and we weren't recognized as an independent nation until a treaty of Paris. Right. And we won the Battle of Yorktown on October 17th, 1781, but the British didn't disoccupy New York City until November 25th, 1783. That's two years and a month plus later. So a full seven years after the declaration, do we actually have it?

33:23Simon Sinek:And then what is it? 1789 is the beginning of the United States government, the constitution and the first president is the summer of 87. And then George Washington assumes office in 1789. Okay, so we have a constitution in 1787 and president in 1789. I love how we celebrate our independence in 1776. But this to me captures one of the essential qualities of America, which is we don't celebrate the day we had it. We celebrate the day we would like to have it. We started, we wanted it. Yeah. No, it's fantastic. It's fantastic. It's the naive optimism, and the, I think these are, but these are very interesting.

33:57Simon Sinek:The naive optimism and the quality of improvisation to your point, which I'd never thought about before, are very American qualities. And if you go to like Europe, for example, it's much more structured. It's much more, you know, you go to parts of Asia, it's much more do as you're told, follow the rules, paint inside the lines. It's just important not to paint this with broad strokes, because you can go to the front lines in Ukraine right now, and I will show you people who are as dedicated and as open and improvising and ideas as the Americans were at Brandywine or Valley Forge. But of course, and I can find strict elements in the United States that seem to defy this, because we do know that New York and Los Angeles belong in America, the cultures there don't belong in France, we do know there is something called American.

34:44Simon Sinek:And it is hard to define, but because we can recognize it, we should be able to put some things. And in general, of course, we can find examples of all these things everywhere. Well, I have 265 hours of films, which I can, you know, if you want to extrapolate from those 265 hours, what it is, historically, they're mostly all histories. I think you could do that. I'm less in for the distinction because does that not play into the binary? We're Americans and we're better in this way. I didn't say it was better. I didn't say it was better. And I think the important thing is, the important thing is it's like people, right?

35:23Simon Sinek:Which is the character of a nation is like the character of a person. You are who you are. So how do you square that, these particular cultural, linguistic, religious, geographic differences, and the accumulation of them over time with the fact of Ecclesiastes, which says there's nothing new under the sun? That I can point out behaviors of French noblemen and Russian peasants and Americans that is exactly the same manifestation of the human being. But there is a difference between the behaviors of a person or a small group and the culture of a nation. You choose to live in New Hampshire because there's a culture there that you like, you feel like you belong, you feel seen, you feel heard.

36:14Simon Sinek:It's not necessarily political. there's a there's a thing in the air that you are drawn to and we know that there's an americanness because people immigrate here because i'm kind of the black sheep of where i grew up there's i'm the improviser i'm the idealist i'm the crazy optimist i don't feel like i belong here you know where i'm gonna go i'm gonna go to america so we know that you're tired you're poor you're huddled masses, the teeming refuse of your shores, right? I mean, so we're basically, our thing is we'll take anybody who is there and some people are lazy and some people are fruitful and some people have bad luck and some people have good luck and some people have both.

36:59I'm just pushing back a little bit only because characterizations breed, like if we're exceptional. And I told you already, I believe the last best hope of birth, right? That was part of that same address of Lincoln in December of 62, not delivered by him. It was delivered in writing to Congress. I believe that. But the trap of exceptionalism, the trap of distinction is a huge one. And almost all of our flaws come from that because that's a finite thing in your infinite world, right? I mean, that is where we have gotten into trouble and where we have committed horrible sins, thinking that we are a priori right.

37:43Simon Sinek:I think the nuance here is not the exceptionalism part, which is we can be different. And it goes right back to the beginning of this conversation, which is empathy, which is I can be me and I can recognize the qualities that I have. And I can recognize the qualities you have, or sometimes I understand you and sometimes I don't. and the rub, the empathy part is, and I don't think I'm better than you. I just think I'm different. And so I want to know what makes America different, not what makes America better. Yeah. A lot of them are accidental stuff. A lot of them are some of the ideas that you've promoted.

38:18I think at our best, we often believe that everybody's equal and there's no communication except among equals. If I somehow feel I'm better than you or you feel you're better than me or worse that, and still you feel you're lesser than me, and I feel that I'm lesser than you, and some sort of sequest kind of kowtowing has to take place. Nothing happens. So the communication happens in that free exchange. But I think that's human behavior. It's not just purely American

38:53Simon Sinek:behavior. And I appreciate that back then they were English, but why is it these colonists, Why is it that our founding fathers, what was about the conditions and the men at the time that allowed for these people to write that document and pursue that revolution, which you say is, you know, the most important thing since the birth of Jesus? Why did that group of people not rise up, you know, from York against the king? Well, they have not necessarily in York, but certainly in Ireland and Scotland. And it was brutally. What was it about these people in these times in this place? So it's complicated, Simon.

39:34And what happens is that they have enjoyed about 150 years of what somebody in Britain called salutary neglect. They're the least taxed people on earth. They're incredibly literate. They're very healthy. They now own land. And they pay about one shilling a year in taxes to local legislators. And the British win with our help what we call the French and Indian War, but the rest of the world sees as a global war called the Seven Years War. But the British are depleted. They can no longer defend us. And what Americans want to do more than anything else is go over and take Indian land in the Ohio Valley.

40:08Like a normal guy whose family has worked in Wales or Scotland or Ireland or England, dependent land for a thousand years, never owned something, now wants something. And the Brits say, we can't protect you. You can't cross over the Appalachians. So they're going, wait a second, you promised. And then there are big land speculators like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, who decided that they own, because they've surveyed it, 25 ,000 acres in the Ohio Valley, which then they want to resell at a huge profit. George Washington may at this time be the richest man in the country. So they're pissed off at the British.

40:41And then the British say, well, if we're protecting them and we can't afford to protect them, we need to tax them. And they go, no, that's taxation without representation. So you have all of these arguments that are just the arguments that people do everywhere against and impose stuff. And then all of a sudden, as I suggested before, this clash between Englishmen breaks out into an argument about natural rights. Why? Because we're in the Enlightenment and we are using the big argument. So you have people who enslave people saying that what Britain is doing to us is like slavery, right? And it's not like slavery at all.

41:16But they're using that as an argument. And so what you have is an increasing rhetoric that the more tyrannical they accuse the government of George III, the more tyrannical they act, the more radical they accuse us of being, the more radical we act. And then we happen. And then after Lexington and Concord, which is April of 75, it isn't for 15 months before anybody gets up the courage to say, well, maybe we should be independent. Right. We've already had the Battle of Bunker Hill. The British have 40 percent casualties. It's a pure victory for them. They take the hill, but they're still boxed in by the Americans and they won't have 40 percent casualties till 1916, the first day of the sum.

41:54Right. I mean, it's that bad, that bloody. But it still takes us another year to say, and actually, we want to be independent. So why? An Englishman comes in and writes this thing called Common Sense that comes out in January of 76. At that time, you know, they want the king to come to their aid. And he goes, it's the king who's the problem. So the answer is so complicated. And people are loyalists here. And you may be a loyalist starting off. But when the occupying army rapes your daughter or steals your crops, suddenly you're a patriot and you're a patriot until they suddenly take away your farm or they won this battle and now you're not so sure and your chance of winning at Lexington and Concord is zero and you're going to keep going.

42:39What's amazing and gets to the heart of your question is that there are lots of people who are animated by this new idea. For the first time, Jefferson writes a few phrases after pursuit of happiness, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. It just means that people are put up with the autocrat's boot on their back, right? On their neck. And that we're creating a new thing called citizens, and that's going to require more energy. It's going to require more virtue. It's going to require more civic engagement than has ever taken place before.

43:13And we don't know that human beings can do that. But a few people hold to that and they come to that a lot out of anger. Even Adam says it's unbelievable how much anger does as well as cause fuels these sorts of things.

43:30Simon Sinek:Your passion is, is, uh, contagious. What I'm saying is it's, it's, it's complicated and there's no, you can't bottle that thing and go, this is American and not, I can't go into the lab and go, Oh, I see a little bit of French here and I see a little bit of German as well. And there's a lot of Native American. And by the way, there's lots of enslaved people in this story too, who get nothing out of this, but they're, you know what I mean? That when you do a lab analysis, the purity test falls apart. From somebody who's made a career of trying to simplify the world, I so appreciate your adherence to the complexity of it.

44:10Yeah.

44:11Simon Sinek:And I don't disagree about the complexity. I know you don't. What I so love about your point of view, your perspective, your work, is that they are snippets of time. They're merely arbitrary captures of a moment, maybe because something big happened, you know? But there's a lot that came before and there's a lot that will come after. and sure you can tell the story of Vietnam sure you can just tell the story of the revolution sure you can tell the story of any of the stories you tell and you would be making films forever to explain all the little pieces and things and you know nuances and things that seem inconsequential become huge and huge things that become inconsequential and all these little ripples that make something happen in this way on this day and by the way that thing will then have ripples beyond it Exactly.

45:05Simon Sinek:I think there's a duality here that's really important, which is I don't know anybody on the planet that has your recall, your ability to keep in your head the organization, the dates, the people, you know, and your ability to comprehend the complexity and the complicatedness of it all in a moment. and and so i think the reason to try to simplify and i'm the first to admit in my own work that i simplify for understanding fully acknowledging that i'm leaving things out that makes it technically wrong like i know that the chemicals in the body dopamine and endorphins you know serotonin and oxytocin they don't release neatly like i write about them it's messy and complicated but to understand it i need to simplify it just so you'll understand it and and i think there's this duality that has to exist where i do crave simplicity i want to know why the sun comes up at the morning and why it goes down at the end of the day i need i need an explanation because otherwise i will either feel lost or stupid or dumb which you know that at dawn or sunset a switch doesn't flip and it goes from darkness to light or light to darkness there's this gradual thing that takes place, which we call dawn and dusk, that has the ability to overpower or short circuit the tendency to go, flick, light is gone, right?

46:34Flick, light came on again.

46:35Simon Sinek:Where I'm trying to get to, which is, and if I make any conclusion about the world we live in today, and I do not want to go down that rabbit hole as to how we got here. But the duality matters. It is okay to try and simplify the world so that we can understand it and feel like we matter in it. And we have to accept that whatever simplicity that we latch onto, that there is complexity that sometimes we understand and sometimes we don't, that those things have to live together. And you have to be cognizant of both, that I am simplifying the complexity, but I appreciate that there is complexity.

47:11Well, you know, we make films and they're not additive. You don't build a film, you subtract a film. We have 500 hours of footage and materiel and we get down to 12. And it's to do what you're talking about, to kind of simplify in a way. But we also want to leave open, particularly in the ability of long form. You know, we always say we want the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. Yeah. And and yet we never ask, what's that difference? Right. It's you know, if you build a bridge or a house, one and one has to equal two. But if you're creating art, if you're pursuing ideas, the power of ideas, you want one and one to equal three.

47:48And you don't necessarily and in faith as well. That's in art. That's part of it. And you don't necessarily know or have even the apparatus to be able to even possibly begin to describe, which is why I dodged your. what makes the American different, that difference between the sum of the parts, which is just addition, duality, adding up, and the whole. And you have to just, this is the mystery of life that we have been handed.

48:15Simon Sinek:I think what I'm concluding, and I'm sort of realizing this in the moment as I'm talking to you, I'm sort of learning as I'm talking to you, which is to understand the duality of subtraction to get to the ability to tell the story, but to recognize that the 500 hours became seven, just to know that, that is where empathy exists. That's right. That's the space. It's not the note, it's the intervals between the notes that make music. Exactly. And it's the cut between the shots that make film. Exactly. It's all of these things. And so what I mean by that is, I can work with someone and I'd be like, oh, they're lazy.

48:53Simon Sinek:I've now simplified the world around me to make it easy for me to understand and easy to understand their behavior or they're an asshole, you know. But if I simply understand the complexity and say, well, I don't know what they're going through or maybe they had a bad night's sleep or maybe they're in a job that they don't understand or nobody's given them any training or, you know, they have a bad leader. All of a sudden, the appreciation for complexity, even if I'm simplifying the world, helps me have empathy. That's correct. That's correct. Simplification is an understandable way. When somebody says, how was your day, dear?

49:21You don't say, I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb. You just don't do that. You edit human experience. Unless, of course, you get T-boned at that moment, and that's exactly the way you do it. But what happens is we edit it, but we go way too far in the editing, where we get so reductionist that we get to a place where we think it's black and white and nothing is black and white.

49:42Simon Sinek:that is a perfect place to end. I have a couple of questions here that I'm supposed to ask you. By the way, I could talk to you forever, maybe 500 hours. I agree. We'll do this again. You're too fun. It is. All of this is fun. What's your favorite book and why? Wow. I like, in a novel, it's a sort of toss-up. Well, I'll just say I like A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which is often called magical realism because in the midst of what is a then and then and then, stuff happens that just don't happen on earth, like made a sense to heaven as she's hanging up the laundry. There's just that stuff.

50:20I remember weeping at the end of that book and slowing down my reading when I was a hundred pages out. Beautiful.

50:26Simon Sinek:And just because I can't help myself, when you do a subject, when you decide to go down a rabbit hole, I mean, you can spend a decade of your life on a thing. Yeah. Well, in that 10 years that I made, the American Revolution 10 and a half. I made, I released a film a year, sometimes two films a year. So I've got other different groups that are working and I can move when I can give some stuff and then I can come back. And then at the last year, it's pretty intensely that thing. So there's, you know, you would, you're helped by doing other things because it's like, you know, rubbing your tummy and patting your head.

51:00You can learn something about separating and you come back to the revolution, the next cut and you go, you're free and liberated from all of the stuff.

51:10Simon Sinek:When you choose a subject, do you take a deep breath and go, here we go? Or are you like, no, this is worth spending the next decade of my life studying? Both. You go, yikes. There's a thing on my office door that says from Tyrone Guthrie who had a theater in Minneapolis, the Globe Theater. But he said, we were looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of. It's not a very well-written sentence, but I like that idea of biting off more than you can chew and learning how to chew it. And at the same time, you go into it, people say, you must 10 years, you must get so bored. You go, no, I actually enjoy the promotion only because it's this airlock that mitigates the grief of letting it go.

51:46Because the second this thing is out, it's yours. It's not mine. And people say, what did you intend here? I said, whatever you felt. Right? nature. So there is this thing of letting it go. And so the evangelical, I call it the evangelical part of it, of going out and proselytizing about the American Revolution or Muhammad Ali or Jackie Robinson or this Central Park Five or the Civil War is the way in which you mitigate the grief of having to let it go.

52:10Simon Sinek:I want to keep talking. It's so unfair. This is the exact same thing as to why I think corporations aren't innovative. Small companies are innovative. Big companies buy innovative small companies. And it's not size or scale that makes you lose innovation. I mean, you have all the money, you have all the people, you have all the market conditions, why aren't you innovative? And I think it's this point, which is small companies, their ambitions or their vision is larger than the resources they have available to achieve it. That's right. Whereas large companies, they moderate the vision to be very achievable, to make sure they can afford it.

52:43Simon Sinek:And I think what keeps you interested for 10 years or in in the case of a company forever. We're operating on the same seat of the pants thing up here as we did when I first came up. Exactly. And we as a nation say, all men are created equal, which is clearly an ideal we will never get to. But we should die trying. And that's kind of the point. And the ambition is so much bigger than our ability and our resources. That's the reason to keep at it. And everything imposes itself in front of that because you want to make it certain. And so that's the authoritarian's imprint. Let's just make it certain.

53:18We're happy to have the trends running. That's the finite player's Achilles heel. Yes.

53:23Simon Sinek:Yeah. Certainty. And there's nothing certain. The opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. Amen. Ken Burns, you are wonderful. This has been great, Simon. I really enjoyed talking to you. You're the best. I hope to meet you in person one day soon. Look forward to it. If you're ever on the West Coast, please let me know. Thank you so, so much. This was a thrill. Great. Thank you. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. Lovingly produced by our team, Lindsay Garbenius, Phoebe Bradford, and Devin Johnson. Subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts.

54:03Simon Sinek:And if you want even more cool stuff, visit simonsynic.com. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.