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Mixed Signals from Semafor Media: Episode Summary
Episode Title
Ken Burns on the Future of PBS, the New Age of Media, and Why Documentaries Will Outlast TikTok
Hosts
- Max Tani - Media Editor at Semafor
- Ben Smith - Editor-in-Chief of Semafor
Guest
- Ken Burns - Renowned American filmmaker and documentarian known for his historical documentaries.
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Episode Overview
In this episode, hosts Max Tani and Ben Smith engage in a conversation with Ken Burns, discussing his latest documentary series on the American Revolution, the current state of PBS amidst funding cuts, and the evolving landscape of media. The discussion delves into historical narratives, the significance of documentaries in a fast-paced media environment, and the parallels between historical events and contemporary issues.
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Key Discussions
Ken Burns' Documentary Work
- Career Highlights: Ken Burns has created significant works about American history, including documentaries on the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and baseball.
- Latest Series: His new series focuses on the American Revolution, exploring its historical relevance and drawing connections to today's media landscape.
- Creative Process: Burns emphasizes the importance of storytelling and the nuanced portrayal of historical events, avoiding simplistic narratives.
Historical Parallels
- Media and Revolution: Burns discusses the role of newspapers during the American Revolution, likening it to the current media environment where misinformation spreads rapidly.
- Themes of Division: He notes that America has always been divided, drawing parallels between past conflicts and present-day political divisions.
PBS Funding Cuts
- Impact of Funding Cuts: Burns expresses disappointment over the Trump administration's cuts to PBS funding, highlighting the detrimental effects on rural stations and educational programming.
- PBS as a Cultural Institution: He argues for the importance of PBS in providing quality educational content and its role in preserving public history.
The Future of Media
- Long-Form vs. Short-Form Content: Burns counters the notion that short-form content (like TikTok) diminishes attention spans, citing the endurance of long-form narratives.
- Medium of Documentaries: He believes that documentaries will continue to thrive as audiences seek deeper engagement with historical topics.
Reflection on American History
- Teaching History: Burns advocates for a balanced view of American history that acknowledges both its triumphs and its shortcomings.
- Historical Legacy: He emphasizes the significance of understanding historical context in shaping the future, suggesting that knowledge of history is crucial for informed citizenship.
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Key Takeaways
- Enduring Importance of Documentaries: Ken Burns asserts that documentaries serve an essential role in educating the public and providing in-depth perspectives on complex historical events.
- Historical Rhymes: The idea that history doesn't repeat but rhymes suggests that today's events can be understood through the lessons of the past.
- Civic Responsibility: Burns stresses the importance of active citizenship and engagement with history as a means to navigate contemporary challenges.
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Conclusion
This episode of *Mixed Signals* provides insightful reflections from Ken Burns on the importance of historical narratives, the challenges facing PBS, and the evolving media landscape. His commitment to long-form storytelling and historical accuracy underscores the need for a deeper understanding of our past to inform our future.
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Additional Resources
- Sign up for Semafor Media’s Sunday newsletter: [Semafor Newsletter](https://www.semafor.com/newsletters/media)
- Follow Semafor on X: [@semaforben](https://x.com/semaforben), [@maxwelltani](https://x.com/maxwelltani)
- Email Feedback: mixedsignals@semafor.com
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:08Ken Burns:Welcome to another episode of Mixed Signals from Semaphore, where we are talking to all the most interesting people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tani. I'm a media editor here at Semaphore. And with me, as always, is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. How's it going, Ben? Good. Excited to be here this week. You know, I'm excited, too, because I've been spending the entire weekend binging the new documentary by our guest this week, which is the documentarian Ken Burns, who has a new series out about the American Revolution. We'll ask him about his career, the historical parallels between this moment and the beginning of America, his reaction to the Trump administration and congressional Republicans' decision to rescind funding for PBS, and why he doesn't think that the Internet is actually ruining our attention spans.
0:58Ken Burns:Yeah, I mean, this is a 12-hour bet that it is not. That's true. I guess Ken's work actually kind of proves that. But anyway, we'll ask him about that and a lot more right after this.
1:10Thank you.
1:40Ben Smith:agency legends, brand visionaries, and brilliant thinkers. Search for Frontier CMO from Think with Google wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.
2:02Ken Burns:So Ben, are you a history buff? Are you like taking, you know, the best new nonfiction to the beach or upstate when you're taking some time off. Yeah, I'm honestly kind of a news guy who
2:12Ben Smith:reads fiction.
2:13Ken Burns:Oh, interesting. I kind of would have assumed that you were like a guy who knows a lot about World War II or something like that.
2:20Ben Smith:Who thinks about the Roman Empire all the time? No.
2:22Ken Burns:Yes, the Roman Empire.
2:23Ben Smith:I prefer to be surprised by history.
2:26Ken Burns:Well, you have, I think, the opposite ethos of our guest this week, which is Ken Burns. Ken, Ken, I think, famously believes that we can maybe learn a thing or two about our present by being students of history. Actually, you know, being in the media, maybe it's better to not share that viewpoint because then everything is new and interesting and exciting and has never happened before, which I don't think is a viewpoint that Ken has.
2:49Ben Smith:No, I mean, and honestly, to the degree I know anything about history or grew up knowing much, a lot of it is from his films. You know, the Civil War, the 1990 epic, I think shaped how my whole generation, how Lots of people understand that conflict. And he's just made this series of films taking on huge American subjects, baseball, jazz, prohibition, and the Vietnam War in 2017, which really was, I don't know, maybe it was almost, it had just finally been long enough that people could really step back and consider it as a whole, but just a stunning piece of work.
3:20Ken Burns:Yeah, it's a really unbelievable series. It was actually, I didn't grow up watching Ken Burns, but I did watch Vietnam, and I think that prompted me to down a bunch of those series. I think I did Jazz and Prohibition afterwards. I don't have the stomach for baseball. It's just not for me, unfortunately. But, you know, I'm really excited and interested to talk to Ken for a few different reasons. One, obviously, Ken has done all of his work since the 80s with PBS, which has just gone through this actual real historic moment of being defunded, having its funding clawed back by congressional Republicans and the Trump administration.
3:54Ken Burns:I'm really curious to get his reaction to that and how that's going to impact projects that he currently has in the works. And also, you know, I want to step back with him and think about where he sees his work in this short-form media moment in which everybody is obsessed with short-form videos and things of that nature. How he feels like a, you know, six-part, 12-hour series on the American Revolution fits into a media environment like that.
4:25Ben Smith:Yeah, he is really profoundly going against the trends from, you know, both obviously and yes, in the 12-hour, but also, you know, at a moment when history itself is, you know, you basically have the Trump administration demanding patriotic history, a kind of radical left looking for this sort of very dark revision of American history. And he's, I think, you know, doing neither. He's telling stories.
4:48Ken Burns:Well, Ken is waiting for us. So why don't we bring him in right now to talk about it?
4:54Ben Smith:Thank you so much for joining us, Ken.
4:56Max Tani:My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
4:58Ben Smith:You've been making historical films longer than I've been watching them, starting with the Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, baseball, the Civil War, Vietnam. I think I and many others have consumed many, many hours of this stuff. But I guess it occurred to me to wonder why it took you this long to kind of get back to the beginning.
5:16Max Tani:Well, I think it's a combination of things, Ben. And a lot of it is just chops. You know, there's no photographs or newsreel of the American Revolution. It's sort of encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia. It's kind of drowning in play syndrome, treacle. And I don't choose the subjects with any kind of, you know, focus group attention. I'm drawn to one thing. I chose the Civil War because it had somehow influenced the six previous films that I'd done before in just fundamental ways. You went, wow, this is the most important event once the United States had started. And then after that, somehow we got to World War II.
5:57Max Tani:And before World War II, the ink was dry on that. It was Vietnam. And literally when the ink was drying on Vietnam in December of 2015, I just looked and said, we've got to do revolution. But it was more this intimate thing. I was looking at a map that we'd done, a kind of 3D map of the Yadrang Valley in the Central Highlands and sort of moving in on American and Viet Cong and North Vietnamese positions. I went, whoa, this could be the British moving west over the Gowanus Heights towards Brooklyn Heights. It was not thought out in that sense. It was felt, and I just had to do it. So there was no, I mean, I'm happy to say that there's no real rhyme, but I'm very thrilled retrospectively to say I'm glad that I had all the other films, you know, under my belt, that the scholarship has just been first rate over the last 30 years.
6:48Max Tani:And so 30, 40 years, and we could avail ourselves of new questions about how we understand this hugely important founding moment. So it couldn't be better timing, and it turns out it couldn't be better timing.
7:03Ben Smith:You know, you've kind of developed this style that I think people recognize of using stills, making stills feel like they're moving. As you said, no stills of the American Revolution. And you used reenactors, which when you mentioned sort of like treacly fife and drum stuff, that's what comes to my mind. I'm curious what you found working with this kind of like uniquely strange American subculture of people who reenact revolutionary war battles.
7:27Max Tani:I think that's a kind of cliche. They're really dedicated. I think they're wearing the underwear that's correct. they work really hard whether they're dressed in French uniforms or Native American uniforms or their black regiments or their continentals or their militias or their British or their Hessian and we weren't interested in having them recreate a thing we collected over six or seven years them doing their stuff and so we were not interested in faces but into movements and and the kind of tells in an intimate way, kind of God is in detail way that would reveal the war and provide evocative stuff in the way that a motion picture would be able to do.
8:11Max Tani:And we still treat the drawings and the paintings as if they're live and the live as if they're paintings, which we've always done. In this case, we don't have a photographic record, but I've been now out on the road with this thing for seven or eight months and the response has been really terrific and people are riveted by a combination. You know, you see a volley of British muskets go off and then it cuts to a painting where there's a volley of British muskets going off and pans through the painting and the combination of all of that and a complex sound effects track. And it's the same thing, all of them.
8:45Max Tani:It's the same process as you just want to wake that moment up. And how you do it just depends on the resources and degrees of creativity that you do. So the degree of difficulty is higher here, but I don't want to pay any attention to that. The whole point is to tell a story. And that was true back with my first film, Brooklyn Bridge, and it's true today with the American Revolution. And what you want is what we found people saying everywhere, I had no idea. Because that was my experience. I didn't go in to tell you what I knew about the American Revolution. I went in to discover it. And every day was like, whoa, I had no idea.
9:20Max Tani:And now we're finding that in audiences all around the country, from Seattle to Atlanta, from, you know, Austin, Texas to Boston. So that's exciting to me, not just people who might have a vested interest in the 13 colonies, former colonies, but Americans who ought to, and particularly now, be intensely curious about their founding moments, the ideals, the ultimate questions, you know, which side would you have been on? You know, we don't make the loyalists. It's a civil war, like more than a civil war than our civil war is. And we don't make the loyalists bad guys. We just make them people. We call balls and strikes.
10:01Max Tani:And so it really raises the question, what would I be had I been there? You know, would I have been willing to die for a cause? Would I have been willing to kill someone else for a cause?
10:09Ken Burns:Yeah, it's such a, it really is so fascinating. And that's one of the many revelations in your documentary that I thought was quite striking was the strong contingent of loyalists. That's just not something that, you know, you learned in Southern California high school when I was taking U.S. history. But I'm really curious, you know, you talk a lot in the documentary about the role of newspapers and how essential the media and the press was. I'm really curious how you felt that the media of the Revolutionary War era compared to the media of today and if you saw any parallels.
10:40Max Tani:Oh, of course. I mean, you know, Mark Twain is supposed to have said, History doesn't repeat itself. And of course, he's right. No event has happened twice, but it rhymes. So I've never worked on a film where it hasn't been rhyming spectacularly in the present because human nature doesn't change. That's the key. And so you can find unscrupulous newspaper people. Samuel Adams, who's a failure as a brewer, he says his job is to keep his fellow colonists alive to their grievances. So when the British retreat on something and the Sons of Liberty disband and everybody's sort of going back, shoo, we dodged that bullet.
11:16Max Tani:He goes, no, you haven't. It's going to get worse and worse and worse. You'll see. You'll see. And in fact, one of the causes of the war, besides the specific things that you can get an A on the test if I tell you what they are from, you know, this thing and that thing and the Boston Tea Party and Lexington Green and taxes and representation and taking Native American land. And all of those things are right. But it's also escalating rhetoric. The more you tell the crown it's tyrannical, the more tyrannical they act. The more you tell the colonists how radical they are, the more radical they act.
11:48Max Tani:And as you're saying and as you weren't taught, this is a civil war. And it's not only a civil war. It's a global war. And we don't like to say that. Wait, our independence has come – it was us, everybody in the 13 colonies against Britain across the sea that didn't understand us. And in the meantime, we're going to create this new form of government that's better than any other. That's true. That's what happened. But it was a global war. We don't do it without French and Spanish and even Dutch help. And it took a while to get that support. And it's a civil war. There's some battles. There's one in North Carolina called Kings Mountain, in which the loyalists are led by a British officer, a Scots named Ferguson, who's killed in the battle.
12:31Max Tani:Everyone else who's killed in the battle on either side is an American. Every single one. It's Americans killing Americans. And there's guerrilla warfare, really down and dirty, terroristic stuff in which there are loyalist bands that are terrorist organizations killing patriots and vice versa. And Benjamin Franklin's own son, William, was the royal governor of New Jersey, deposed, sent to prison in Connecticut, finally let go, presuming that he would go to England. And he didn't. And he started a terrorist organization hunting down patriots. It's, it's, this is, this is pretty, um, I mean, I hate to say it.
13:07Max Tani:It's cool because it sounds so familiar. So with regard to media, you have people that are satirists, right? Who get into big trouble. Sound familiar? There are people that are unbelievably poetic in their writing. And there are people that are just throwing stuff off. Lies are passed around. There's a German wife of a German general who's delayed coming over to join her husband in what she thinks will be the triumph for Burgoyne's army at Saratoga. It's a defeat, and that's what brings the French in. She doesn't know that. She's waited for the third of three daughters to be born, finally makes a treacherous crossing.
13:43Max Tani:She's very anxious because she hears that Americans eat cats. That's interesting. I've heard that one before. There is a failed invasion of Canada. We wanted to make Canada the 14th state. There's a continent-wide pandemic and huge arguments over inoculation and their efficacy. Wow. There's a total eclipse. Do I need to go on?
14:04Ben Smith:Yeah. Wow, we haven't gotten anywhere. Another source of real domestic conflict right now, and I think always, are these wars over history itself. And I mean, I think, you know, in the Vietnam doc, you obviously stepped into the most contested piece of modern history. But the founding also obviously very contested. You know, the New York Times angered a lot of people with this package suggesting that 1619, when the first slave arrived, was America's true founding. You have a 1776 commission established to, I think, basically reverse that idea by Trump. And there's pressure from the federal government to take stuff that's sort of too negative, that's seen as anti-American, out of federally funded museums.
14:45Ben Smith:Where do you land this documentary in that very intense dispute about American history?
14:51Max Tani:We're on the side of it. We don't care about it. I mean, there's always theories of history, and they don't mean anything. None of them. Left, right, or center. They don't mean anything. It's called the big,$2 word. It's called historiography. There's lots of interpretations. But if you call balls and strikes, this is already an amazing story. You don't have to do anything. You can talk about one of the key figures of the 1619 understanding, which is Lord Dunmore, a deposed royal governor of Virginia, who decides to free only those, not his own, not the enslaved people of loyalists, but enslaved people of rebels.
15:29Max Tani:as the British uniform called us. So it's just, you just, you call balls and strikes and that's all you do. You don't sort of superimpose an interpretation on the history. You just tell what happened. Babe Ruth comes up only once every nine times at bat. He strikes out a lot. He also hits a lot of home runs.
15:47Ben Smith:I feel like various, like, I don't know how widely listened to we are in history departments, but they're all tearing their hair out right now, as you say, this balls and strikes thing. But to put it a little differently, I think the Trump administration, A lot of conservatives see history as almost an instructional tool. We need to have this usable past full of heroes whom we can emulate and learn from. There's a strong strand of the left, which is we have to stare at our own sins and learn from them in American history. And it's full of these horrors that America committed and have been covered up.
Read the full transcript
16:18Ben Smith:Do you see yourself doing either of those or do you not care?
16:20Max Tani:Yeah, both. I mean, do you just want to tell, call a ball? I'm sorry. Balls and Strikes is it. Does that mean that Babe Ruth strikes out? Are there horrible things? Yes. Does that mean he hits home run? They're wonderful things? Yes. Does that mean him coming up only once at every nine times at bat mean that there are other people involved, a kind of bottom-up middle infielder who's hitting a buck 75 maybe up at the critical moment of a game? These are the untold stories of these things. Yeah, this is it. But the problem only comes when you say that's the only version that there is. If you call balls and strikes, then it isn't a highlight game, nor is it this involvement of just sins.
17:04Max Tani:It's a complicated story that's both inspiring and at times disappointing and exalting and real and sad because you lose people and sad because it's violent and happy because some of the best ideas in the history of humankind came out of this. I can't think of an event since the birth of Christ that's more important than the American Revolution. Please tell me. I'm happy to engage in a conversation about it. But, you know, before the revolution, everybody on earth was a subject. and afterwards there were people clinging to the eastern seaboard of the united states who were citizens that's brand new and a big effing deal that has for 249 years worked really well with lots of people left out and lots of people added on and and so it's not pollyanna-ish it's not morning again in america it's just complicated story of of who we've been and that's all i've
18:00Ken Burns:Well, we have a lot more that we want to ask Ken, but we need to take a short break. So we'll be right back right after this.
18:13Ben Smith:In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I spoke with Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about what he saw at CES. So, Josh, you were at CES at the beginning of this year. Why does that event matter for CMOs? So CES gives us a real view into how people are going to be living their lives and spending their money in two, five, even 10 years time. I know from the outside, it looks like a giant toy show. There's smart rings and foldable laundry robots and flying cars. But I was chatting with Shelley Palmer, who I interviewed for my new podcast. He's an AI visionary and tech leader.
18:52Ben Smith:And he swears by, and I agree with him, that the ability to see patterns amongst all the gadgets is actually really, really compelling for near term and into the future. So what did you learn from that conversation? Well, the gadgets aren't really the thing. Stuff gets announced. Some of it launches. Some of it doesn't launch. What you're really looking for are business model changes, the new paradigms that are emerging. So two that I saw and we spoke about, one is around agentic commerce. Google announced during CES and just after CES a whole bunch of partnerships with Shopify, with Walmart, with Target around agentic commerce.
19:31Ben Smith:Super interesting building the new protocols for machines doing the shopping for you where appropriate. And then separately, I also saw a lot of expansion of what you might call intelligent ecosystems. These are technologies from different companies coming together, meshing together to enable you to do more interesting and engaging things. And again, with Google and Gemini leading the way, they're really fascinating forerunners of where we're all going to be in the near and medium term. And where can people listen to the whole thing? You can listen to my conversation with Shelley Palmer in my new podcast, Frontier CMO, on YouTube or wherever you download podcasts, or you can sign up for my weekly newsletter over on LinkedIn.
20:13Ben Smith:Great. Thanks, Josh.
20:27Ken Burns:I'm curious, you know, throughout the course of your career, I imagine, you know, you have people coming up to fans, friends, maybe people who've participated in history who are like, oh, you know, Ken, you've got to do XYZ thing. How do you navigate kind of people pushing you, trying to get you to focus on, you know, one certain area or topic or moment from history or the other?
20:48Max Tani:I'm usually and am working on three or four films at once, and they extend six or seven years. And so when people tell me they know what my next film should be, I go, yeah, I know what my next film is going to be. And we're halfway through it or three quarters of the way through it. People ask me all the time, it's sort of an interesting barometer. After a while, I started making counts of it. And railroads is number one, and labor is number two, and education is number three. And then my great-great-grandfather, who didn't do anything in the Civil War, but was happily safe in Maine, wrote a three-volume memoir, which I'm sure you'll want to make into a major series.
21:24Max Tani:Basically, the glib answer is that they choose me, because it's not rational. There's lots of ideas. There's 50 ideas. And when something drops down to your heart, or maybe your gut is the better way to say it, then you sort of commit to. And I've had people whisper stuff into me. I had a guy once tell me that I should do something on Huey Long, And I said, no, no, no, you do it, you blah, blah, blah. And finally, I started getting involved in some of the footage of Huey Long. And I said, yeah, and I'll do it, but you're not going to like it because I'm going to do it and you can't be the boss.
21:57Max Tani:And he kind of went, fine. my country music series a friend of mine in texas i was walking i was staying at his house we were raising money uh for the films and he said you know you ever thought about country music and at that moment every fiber of my being said country music and i went back to my producing partner dayton duncan he and i were thrashing about with another idea which he and i claimed not to remember what it was but i said we won't leave this other one i promise but what about country and from then on we forgot the other one and we just worked on country for six or seven years, whatever it took to make that.
22:29Max Tani:And all of the, because it's PBS, all of the films get to take the time. I mean, I could go to any streaming service or, or premium cable and get everything I need, you know, for a film except the time to do it. So the Vietnam series that I mentioned took 10 and a half years to make and it cost$30 million. I spent 10 of those 10 and a half years raising that money. I could have gone into a meeting and in one pitch gotten the 30 million, but I would have never gotten 10 and a half years. I would have gotten a year, year and a half. And I couldn't make the film. I couldn't be the kind of film it is.
23:02Max Tani:It came out in the fall of 17 and it is still eight years later, probably even within the scholarly world, the one-stop shopping for the most recent scholarship across 23 or 25 different disciplines of the study of the Vietnam War. And I'm proud of that. We're not looking to break those kinds of records but it still endures and still has a kind of force. And I think it saves some lives among the veterans who you know, whose lives are often fragile when they return from a war, particularly one that was so contentious back at home and didn't have the kind of unanimous support that World War II, a subject of another film I've done.
23:41Max Tani:So it's, I mean, only PBS has permitted me to tell you that each one of the films is a director cut. And so if you don't like it, it's all my fault.
23:50Ken Burns:So you mentioned PBS. I'm really curious, you know, as you've watched what's played out with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting being defunded, you know, what your reaction has been?
24:02Max Tani:Just incredible disappointment and sadness and the sense of short-sightedness, too. You know, PBS is the largest network in the country. It's got 338 individual stations. And this will hurt mostly the small rural stations that will go out of business, you know. And that's sad. Sometimes the only signal that they have is a PBS signal. Sometimes, you know, they get not only our good children's and primetime stuff, but they get classroom of the air and continuing education, homeland security reports, emergency signal things. And so it just seems so stupid to focus on a couple of things. I mean, and William F.
24:41Max Tani:Buckley, the leading conservative for decades, had a show on PBS for 32 years. I mean, it's just completely short-sighted. It's punitive, and it will only hurt people who don't deserve to be hurt, who need to not live in a news desert. That's a sad thing. It hurt us. It hurt PBS Central. It hurt NPR, I assume. I don't know much about that. But it's going to mostly hurt those smaller rural stations.
25:09Ben Smith:You've been on the road promoting this film from Joe Rogan to Theo Vaughn to places like The Atlantic. I mean, do you think you can kind of save PBS or make this case to people through the tour, through the film?
25:20Max Tani:Of course I can make the case for it. My entire professional life, I think, is one case for PBS. I don't think I can save it. But the important thing is I'm saying exactly the same thing to The Atlantic that I said at Simi Valley at the Reagan Library, as I said the night before at the Academy in Hollywood, as I said the night before that at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, as I said before that in Portland and Seattle, and as I've said at Colonial Williamsburg and to Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn. I mean, I don't vary the message. We have a story. We share this story. It's a bottom-up as well as top-down story, and that's what we tried to tell.
26:00Ken Burns:You're honestly a podcast expert at this point. I was trying to listen to as many interviews with you before we did this, and I was like, all right, so I got to do an hour and a half of How Long Gone. I got to go do three hours of Joe Rogan. I was like, this guy.
26:13Max Tani:Yeah, expert's not the word, just a prisoner.
26:16Ken Burns:A prisoner of podcasting, yes.
26:18Max Tani:My every day is like 18 and a half hours a day of doing this, you know?
26:22Ben Smith:What do you make of it as like a filmmaker, I guess, of being on this side of the camera in this sort of crude way?
26:28Max Tani:It's so funny how little, how we're consumed just by talk that doesn't, I mean, you really want to put, I mean, I spend nearly 10 years working on this, you know, meaning every sentence has been very carefully calibrated and stuff like that. There's something kind of ultimately disposable about it, and it's just accumulating like a sorcerer's apprentice over and over again.
26:54Ben Smith:Yeah, we spent minutes on this. It's terrible.
26:57Ken Burns:Hey, hey, I spent hours. Don't sell me short. I spent some hours. I locked in for as many hours.
27:02Ben Smith:You spent hours watching Ken's work, which took thousands of hours. Yes, that's true. There's an asymmetry.
27:07Max Tani:Almost 250. Oh, my God.
27:10Ben Smith:It's still a lot.
27:10Ken Burns:Do you feel like you, you know, going on some of these places, I thought, you know, I listened to a lot of the Joe Rogan interview, you know, and it seems like he kind of, as he's wont to do in many of these situations, he agreed with you. Do you feel like you're a good messenger because you've kind of tried to stay, while being interested in history, you've tried to stay out of the kind of political fray? Do you feel like you've been an effective messenger to the right, which is at the moment, you know, the Trump administration is the one that's pushing these cuts? I don't know.
27:40Max Tani:I've enjoyed the conversations I've had. I like the fact that people often say, wow, I didn't know that, which is exactly my experience over the last 10 years working on this film. And I'm glad at least the film itself sort of provokes that in folks who aren't first in it. I don't have an agenda other than to get as many eyeballs watching this as possible. I do think that having a really strong sense of what actually took place in our revolution with nuance and undertow and complexity and extraordinary inspiration gives us a chance to sort of move back together in which we've all gotten into different things.
28:19Max Tani:The whole idea of union is that as the Conestatega, the spokesman for the Six Nations says at the opening of our film, admonishing us, if you're going to borrow our system, this is the Iroquois Confederacy, never fall out one with the other. Now, we find ourselves in divided times. We were super divided then. Half the films I've made is about how divided we've been at any given period that we've had, sometimes divided in half, sometimes divided in many, many different parts, where it's Vietnam or Prohibition or the Depression or whatever it might be, the Civil War certainly, and our revolution.
28:54Max Tani:So being divided is not a new thing, and getting out of being divided is not a new thing. But one of the things you do is you find and remind people that they share a common past. There is nobody more important to our founding than George Washington. There are people out there who are willing to cancel him for a variety of things. We are not in that crowd, nor are we willing to edit it to just George Washington. He doesn't win the war unless he He has teenagers and disaffected people and felons and second and third sons unable to get inheritance. And recent immigrants fight the war from him. That's the Continental Army.
29:34Max Tani:It's not the sturdy militia. They're there, but they run home to plant their crops and run home to reap their crops. And they're not as reliable as soldiers as these other guys are. And so it's a pretty fascinating story. Democracy is not the intention of the revolution. It is a consequence of it. It is originally what you'd call in today's language an elitist program that ultimately realized in order for us to succeed, we have to use and then therefore extend to these people wider rights. And that's what happens. We begin to take these arguments between British citizens and we blow them out into natural rights in which involve the most essential qualities of human philosophy that you could possibly have.
30:24And that means everybody hears it.
30:26Max Tani:By the time everybody is talking about liberty and freedom and independence, the people who are serving them are hearing it too. They are not dumb. And the liberty talk, as Jane Kaminsky, a historian, says in our film, it's very leaky. It gets out everywhere. And the second the revolution starts and the word slavery is batted around not with regard to enslaved people, but in regard to how the British were treating people, slavery's done. It may take four score and nine years, but it's done. And women, they're going to get the votes. It may take 144 years, but they're going to get the vote. And so it's just the cat is out of the bag.
31:04Max Tani:And this is the story of how the cat gets out of the bag.
31:07Ken Burns:You strike me as a very effective messenger for PBS in these venues. And I'm just curious, you know, if they asked you in this moment, you know, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was up for being defunded, if they asked you to go and speak on Rogan and Theovan and these places where they have these broad audiences.
31:24Max Tani:No, no, no. No, and Theovan happened well after the rescission that defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The recession clawed back two years of money that was already authorized and appropriate, including$4 million for a project that I've been working on that now is poof, dust, gone. And the Joe Rogan was well before the vote was coming up. No, no, no. This is who I've always been. And I've been talking to people and very interested in always reaching out to everybody as possible. But I certainly, when the vote was happening in mid-July, I made as many phone calls as I thought to be helpful to try to speak to people, to encourage them to vote against this, what I've said is really short-sighted rescission.
32:10Ben Smith:Meaning no slight to PBS and their reach, particularly through broadcast. I'm curious, do you watch video on your phone?
32:16Max Tani:I don't watch. Well, I watch video when my editor sends me a little version of the scene we're cutting and whatever. I'd rather get to a big laptop to enjoy it, but I don't. Not for entertainment. I don't watch anything on my phone. PBS has an app, and you're talking to a Luddite who's 72 years old with four grandchildren and four daughters. So I don't use it the way a lot of people use the PBS app, and PBS, just as Signal alone, reaches 97 % of households.
32:46Ben Smith:How do you think about making these sort of horizontal films built, obviously, for a reasonable-sized screen in a world where most of the consumption of moving images is vertical? It's not always short, but it's in a totally different environment.
33:01Max Tani:How old were you in 1990, Ben?
33:04Ben Smith:I was 14.
33:06Max Tani:Okay, so in 1990, I finished my film, my sixth or seventh film, I can't remember which, on the Civil War. And I went to the press tour that happened twice a year in Los Angeles. And we were at the Century Plaza Hotel. And the critics said, this is really, really good and no one will watch it again. Because Stephen Bochco has just come out with a cop show that is a singing musical thing called Cop Rocks. And by the way, everybody is addicted to MTV music videos. We're sorry, but no one's going to watch it. And I went, oh, it's still the highest rated program in PBS. They said the same thing four years later about baseball, said the same thing about jazz in 2001, said the same thing in 2007 about the war, and 2009 about the national parks.
33:52Max Tani:And by now, it had gravitated from MTV to YouTube and kittens playing with balls of yarn. Nobody's going to do that, and they're doing it on their phones, and that's all it is. And these films consistently outperform other programs, but that's not the point. The point is they've stopped doing it because what do people do in the midst of tsunami of choices that they have? They self-curate. And self-curate involves binging. And binging for my kids and my grandkids, they'll watch three or four seasons in one weekend of something. That's longer than any film I've ever made. And people are willing to focus their attention.
34:28Max Tani:And, oh, we've lost our attention span. I don't see that. What the hell are you doing? Well, I'm watching season four of The Good Place. Okay? Right. And how far are you along? Well, I started this morning and I'm hoping to finish it this afternoon. So tell me now what the problem is. And I'll tell you that back in the 1850s, everybody said exactly the same thing when the telegraph came along. Death of writing, death of letters. Nobody's going to communicate in long form anymore. It's the erosion of our attention. Everything is over. The sky is falling. Let's just get in the fetal position and give up.
35:04Max Tani:All meaning accrues in duration, period.
35:08Ben Smith:That's really inspiring. And I'm going to absolutely repeat that riff to the next person who tells me about kids these days.
35:13Max Tani:Yeah. I mean, come on. They've been saying it about me. I was a long-haired hippie and doing, oh, this is the problem, right? And they said it about you probably, Ben, and Max, you know, this is the history of the world, you know?
35:25Ben Smith:Is there anything, any other documentarians right now, anything you've seen lately that you love?
35:30Max Tani:I love almost everything. To make a film and get it done, opposed to being able to talk about anything is an extraordinary accomplishment. It takes so many years of effort and hard work to make that happen that I see all sorts of stuff, a whole variety. And the word documentary is such a tiny, narrow word. And it comes from stuff that is nearly feature films, nearly that, to cinema verite of Fred Wiseman and everything in between. And it all has one word, documentary. And so you have lots of people that are doing amazing things. Morgan Neville, you know, Werner Herzog, you know, Errol Morris. All these people do films that are totally different than what I do.
36:16Max Tani:But you look at them in amazement because they're wonderful. They're harder to do than feature films because the feature film, you have a script, you know what you're shooting today. and you've got many, many tens of millions more dollars at your disposal to be able to do the kinds of things you do. I think documentaries are little miracles all the time. Yeah, it's a terrifically open field and it's been a golden age for decades now. I remember Vincent Canby, who was then the New York Times chief film critic, said that in 1985 and it's only gotten better because we've had more people wake up to the fact that nonfiction has a kind of viability and we have to put up with a lot of crap, like, you know, reality television, which isn't reality.
36:57Max Tani:Nobody proposes to somebody else in front of millions of people. Nobody eats bugs in front of millions of people. But the legitimate documentaries that go on are, I think, fantastic, and people are drawn to them. You know, people over, like the way the industry, and remember, they call it the industry, they'll play it out. They'll do 18 billion crime dramas until somebody says no mas, and then they'll stop them, and they'll do 18 billion of some other sort of things. But we've been, you know, just poking along for 50 years at PBS, you know, as an independent producer. You know, I own all my films.
37:34Max Tani:I raise all the money, which is why I get the 10 and a half years. And it's a good deal. I have a director's cut every single time.
37:44Ken Burns:You said on Joe Rogan's show that, you know, history can tell us where we're going. And you mentioned earlier that, you know, history doesn't repeat itself. It rhymes, which may or may not have been something that Mark Twain said. Being a student of history, where do you think we're going?
37:57Max Tani:I don't know where we're going. I know that if we know where we've been, we have a better chance of going to a better place. We have a better chance, first of all, being able to interpret the complicated dynamics of the present. And these are as complicated as they've ever been. This is as existential a threat to this American moment as any that I've ever covered. And I've covered the Civil War and the Depression and World War II. So this is a big deal. But I know that the better are you informed about where we come, accurately informed, the better you're able to deal with the present and then also begin to imagine and dream and work with others to forge a future.
38:34Max Tani:That's the only thing you can't do. You can do. You can't make stuff up. You can't wring your hands and sit in a fetal position hoping someone else will do the work for you. We are citizens, and that means we have the highest office in the land, but it has to be active. And pursuit of happiness did not mean lifelong accumulation of wealth in a marketplace of things, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. That's what every founder met. And they felt that by improving yourself education-wise, it made you more virtuous. and all the things that came with virtue would make you a better citizen.
39:10Max Tani:That sounds like corny stuff, and I know you guys can just throw it away, but it's really accurate to the heart of the situation right now. It has to do with truth. It has to do with honesty. It has to do with generosity and things that are about character, and character is always destiny. And anything that reminds you of the complexity of character in everybody, Nobody's perfectly good. George Washington is deeply flawed, but without him, we don't have a country. And that foot soldier that you've just rescued from obscurity and made a part of the Battle of Long Island isn't perfect either. and their wisdom and their misunderstanding of things becomes part of an equation which, mixed together, permits you to endure.
39:57Max Tani:And all you want is for the American experiment, as flawed as it may be, as more perfect as it could become, to endure. And I hardly sign up for that project.
40:10Ken Burns:Well, thank you so much, Ken. And congratulations.
40:13Max Tani:Thank you.
40:43Ben Smith:Thank you.
40:49Ben Smith:You can read all that and more at thinkwithgoogle.com.
41:01Ken Burns:So Ben, what did you think about Ken Burns and what he had to say about his work, PBS, this media moment? What did you think?
41:07Ben Smith:I mean, I guess I think that in order to make the kind of 10-year-long project that he makes, you have to have a kind of confidence and, like, perhaps, like, disdain for shorter term, you know, mere feature films, much less podcasts. Like, I did get the sense that he didn't really view the exercise that we were engaged in of interviewing him as quite on the same level as spending 10 years, you know, going so deep, crafting every word, which is totally fair, honestly.
41:37Ken Burns:He didn't seem to hold podcasters in a particularly high regard, though. I mean, who does? Certain people do. I think I hold some podcasters in high regard. I heard others in low regard. But I think that it seems like Ken, at the very least, even if he is convinced of the disposability of this medium, he's generous enough to engage a lot with different podcasts because he's done a bunch.
42:01Ben Smith:Yeah, I mean, I guess this is a guy who's been doing media tours for 30 years and watched them go from you talk to the five correspondents for the five newspapers to like, oh my God, what podcast am I on now? Right. But I think in a way, I mean, I thought it was really interesting to hear him say that is, you know, in some ways probably more like the media of the early republic than it is like the media that he came up in. I also love his just accurate statement that, you know, adults forever have been denouncing the end of kids' attention spans forever. and he has been, you know, proving them wrong for his entire career.
42:36Ben Smith:I think that's like just a good note, right? That there's this kind of rolling moral panic about the kids can't pay attention anymore that we should be pretty skeptical of.
42:43Ken Burns:It is really interesting, too, you know, that he, I think, was pretty reserved and analytical about a lot of the stuff that he was working on and tried to stay apolitical about a lot. And it's not expressly critical of the, you know, new administration or anything like that. But obviously was not pleased with the cuts to PBS and hasn't been afraid to talk about it. I mean, to the point that it wasn't anybody's idea for him to go out and talk about these things on Rogan or whatnot. But he made it a major priority, which I thought was really interesting.
43:17Ben Smith:Yeah, I mean, he is, you know, he's an American treasure. It was pretty fun to have him on. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks, Ben, for setting it up.
43:23Ken Burns:It was really great. Well, that is it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Mixed Signals from us here at Semaphore. Our show is produced by Sheena Ozaki with special thanks to Josh Billinson, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tori Kaur. Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Billy Libby. Our public editor this week is the CEO of PBS, Paula Kerger. Paula, let us know what you thought about the show or tell us in person.
43:56Ben Smith:And if you like Mixed Signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Feel free to review us, give us five stars, and like and subscribe on YouTube.
44:03Ken Burns:And if you still want more, you can always sign up for Semaphore's media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.
From the publisher
Ken Burns has been telling the story of America through his entire career with genre-defining documentaries on the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and now the American Revolution. This week, Ben and Max bring on the renowned documentarian to talk about his latest series, the parallels he sees between America’s founding moment and today’s media environment, and what we can learn from our history. They also discuss what he makes of the Trump administration’s cuts on PBS, and – after spending 10 meticulous years making a 12-hour documentary – his take on short form video and talk podcasts like this one.
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