Ken Burns & Sarah Botstein on Finding Hope in America’s Brutal Beginnings

25:16And I just recently read the book about the guy who ran Virginia who was very friendly. Done war. Yeah. So the British Empire is dependent entirely on slave labor. There are 26 colonies that they have in North America. 13 in the Caribbean are hugely profitable, and they're all dependent on slave labor. We're the least profitable, only Virginia and the Carolinas are. And in Virginia, the royal governor, Dunmore, has been deposed. He's floating impotently out in the Chesapeake, and he gets this idea. I can offer freedom to only those slaves of rebels, not to slaves of loyalists who will have to remain slaves forever.

25:55And oh, by the way, I own slaves, and I'm not going to free them. But there are circumstances, as Sarah was suggesting, and it's all local. The decision, the run for daylight is dependent exactly where you are. And so a lot of enslaved people rush to Dunmore. It's a disaster. They're killed in these battles, foolish battles. They die of disease. They're not treated well. But there is a sense that the British are going to be the place. As Christopher Brown says, one side is unevenly attached to this institution. Britain, although in a global sense, they are totally attached to the institution. And that our side is 100 % for it.

26:35And so you do have that. But at the same time, there are people who hear that liberty talk. Native Americans and women and blacks who hear that. And that's where they go. We follow James Fortin, who's a kid who hears the Declaration read. The first time it's read in public in Philadelphia. And he knows that it applies to him. He knows also he's not an idiot. He knows that it means all white men of property free of debt. But for him, he wants it. He joins the patriot cause. He's captured. He refuses a kind of sweetheart deal to go to England. He ends up in the Jersey, which is a prison ship in the East River, which is, you know, a death trap.

27:13Very few people come out of it alive. He makes it home. He becomes wealthy in the merchant marines, and he starts funding the abolitionist movement. And when offered a pension, he said, no, I'm a volunteer. And I mean, it is so, it's a layup to go for the hypocrisy of it. It's totally hypocritical. But it is those people at the margins, as Maggie Blackhawk say, who give it meaning. And the real hypocrisy is that as this resistance is building up, the rhetoric increases. And so what happens, the rhetoric of people are often that the British are enslaving us. And, you know, and even Washington says, you know, hold arbitrary sway over us as we do over the Negroes, you know, in our backyard.

28:00And you go, OK, then. And they know slavery is wrong. I was sort of confused by that. I was like, wait a minute. What slavery are we talking about? That rhetoric was, anyway, yes. So, Sarah, the desire to uphold slavery also helped unify the colonies because it helped convince the southern states to support the war against the British, but it also made slavery an issue of national debate in the colonies in a way that it just wasn't before. Talk about how this issue of slavery both united and divided Americans around the time of war. When we started, my husband said to me, you know, in so many ways, the American Revolution was our Civil War and our Civil War was our revolution.

28:39I think, as Bernard Balin says beautifully at the end of the film, before the American Revolution, slavery was not a constant conversation. And after the Revolution, it was. And I think that's for a number of different reasons. most important is what we were just talking about, which is the Declaration of Independence, which is this document that everybody reads, inspires everybody, and its ironies and its complexities and its hypocrisies are not lost on anyone. So the colonies are not a monolith around slavery. People are not a monolith around slavery. And we're going to say all something. saying everyone's going to think about that in new and different ways.

29:23And the founders debated slavery themselves. And George Washington frees his slaves on his deathbed. Thomas Jefferson doesn't. Ben Franklin, they all have different records on slavery, different opinions on slavery. They are thinking about it all the time. Ken, George Washington, as Sarah was just noting, is a mythic figure, of course, in this story, as both the commander of the Continental Army and the first U.S. president. But your documentary paints a more complicated picture of him. He wasn't a particularly great general at times. He made a series of major tactical mistakes that almost lost the war for the Americans, especially in the Battle of Long Island and Brandywine.

29:56There was talk of mutiny among the ranks, the Army at one point. And yet a few of the historians in the series say the war couldn't have been won without him. Talk about his flaws as a general and why he was so integral to the victory. We wouldn't have a country without him. It's really unbelievable. He's a deeply flawed human being. He owns other people. He knows slavery is wrong. And only until his deathbed does he do something about it. He is opposed when he gets to New England that there are black troops and doesn't want any more hired. He changes his mind on that. He's persuaded, which makes him different, as Jane Kaminsky says, than any other Virginia planter of the time.

30:34So he's malleable in one respect. He's rash. He rides out on the battlefield, risking the whole cause, because if he's killed or captured, that's it. We're done. The revolution's over. He makes, as you suggest, some tactical mistakes at Long Island and at Brandywine and some would argue at Germantown that caused the war. So that's if you're trying to decide which college to go to. Those are all the negatives, right? We're not going to George Washington University because of this. But we are going to George Washington University because of this, which is he is able to inspire people, ordinary people, not at his station.

31:13He may be the richest man in America at one time, to fight in the dead of night, to when they're going to go home because they're cold and hungry, to stay longer. He picks subordinate talent, generals that are better than him, including Benedict Arnold and Nathaniel Green, and does not feel the jealousy. He defers to Congress, even though he has the moral rectitude and the kind of presence that Benjamin Rush, the only physician who signed the declaration, said would make every other ruler in Europe look like a valet de chambre next to him. And yet he defers to Congress. More importantly, he's able to convince people from Georgia and New Hampshire that they are not from these separate countries that they believe they've always been from, but are this new thing called Americans.

31:59And more important than anything, he gave up his power twice and set in motion. So for all of these reasons, he didn't know he was George Washington. He didn't know there's a dollar bill or a quarter or a big spiky monument in the national capital named after him or a state on the other side of it. Yeah, that might be going soon, but go ahead. You know, the state on the other side of the country and every state has a Washington county or a Washington town. He's central to this. Annette Gordon-Reed, the historian, says, you know, he's the glue that held it together. And Christopher Brown, a younger historian, you know, breaks the fourth wall for the only time in our 12 hours and just sort of, I can't believe I'm saying this because I don't believe in the great man theory of history or interpretation of history.

32:44that we don't have a country without his leadership. One thing you do note is he fired the first shot of the actual war, which was in the French and Indian War. Right. Well, we think he did. Native allies suggest that this 22-year-old militia commander from Virginia fired into a French encampment that began the Seven Years' War. He has very mixed results there, but he distinguishes himself and asks for a commission in the British Army and doesn't get it, and they turn him down, and that begins a kind of, wait a second, you don't want me? I didn't know that. You don't want me? Yeah, I didn't know that.

33:18Yeah. So we have an idealized notion of all these men, though, who fought in the war as these noble patriots fully committed to the cause of American freedom and liberty. But as the war drags on, the ranks of the Continental Army are eventually made up of the poorest of the poor, jobless laborers, second and third sons who weren't going to inherit anything, British deserters, felons hoping to win pardons, immigrants from Ireland and Germany. There's no nationwide draft to force men to insolence, and some states did implement drafts, but why did they stay along, Sarah, from your perspective to win the war?

33:47No other choices? I mean, I don't want to speak for them, but I think this is, you know, part of the history of our country and of wars and who fights them versus who leads them. You know, I think they fought the war for all the reasons that are inherent in your question. It was their chance at something. It was for financial reasons, for family reasons. They didn't have any other choice for the hope of a better life. They were promised things that were better than the station that they started in. And I think class is at the center of our history as much as race. We don't talk about it as much.

34:26And this happens in war, and it happened during the American Revolution. And it's so great because they're also—everybody's drawn to these ideas, the animating spirit of it. And plus, many of them are in the revenge business. They are after the fact that the British came through and occupied your New Jersey town and stole your crops and raped your daughter and, you know, stole all of your possessions. And so cause animated by fury is a great motivator. So what we can say is that democracy is not the intention of the American Revolution by no stretch of the imagination. The ruling elites, we'd call them today, believed in forming some non-monarchical Republican small R form of government.

35:13But in order to win the war, you've got to begin to promise things to the people who are fighting the war for you. And it is fought not just by this dirty landowning militiamen. They're often unreliable, leaving to plant crops or to harvest crops or because they're scared. and it ends up being won by these teenagers and these new immigrants that don't own property. And it is, as Washington said, it's just nothing short of a standing miracle that they were able against all this odds over six and a half years to pull it off. It's just, it's incredible. So I'm going to jump for a second to present day in the ways we talk about history now.

35:51This is airing at a particularly fraught time to be telling these kinds of nuanced stories. It's become a political act, whether you want it to be or not. The Trump administration is demanding a return to telling a more patriotic version of the country's history. Trump wanted to purge the Smithsonian of what he called divisive race-based ideology. He's ordered any material that disparages Americans to be stripped from the national parks. You've got a lot of that in there. Like, you're telling the story, right, which is the factual story. So how has that been in working on it over these 10 years?

36:20Because you started in a different time. Look, I have two children. I see history as our great teacher, history as a warning, history as inspiration, history as essential to understanding where we are and where we might go. And I think to teach complicated, good history is at the heart of this country. Our founders wanted us to be educated. Curiosity, education. Ken talks a lot about this. virtue are all about trying to understand the good and the bad. It's like making a hero perfect. No hero is perfect. No person is perfect. You need to make somebody truly heroic. You need to understand the things they're not good at, at least for me.

37:07Because then you can tell your son or your daughter, look at that incredible person who wasn't perfect and look what they achieved, right? Whatever it is, like you want to give people complication and nuance, and we have a really complicated, I don't really love the word nuanced, but it's appropriate, nuanced history where, you know, Ken says this a lot. As soon as you're sure you're really right, you better peel back and let somebody tell you why you might not be right. That is at the heart of, I think, what makes a human experience worth living through. So I think the film in the end, for me, is a deeply patriotic film.

37:48I feel very proud to be an American at the end of this film, Not because we did everything right or we've done everything right in the last 250 years, but because this is such an unlikely and surprising story. Citizenship is the highest form of office. Citizenship to me is at the heart of any film we make, actually. And I want to inspire young people to care about their local school board and their local election. And you can only do that if you understand who your neighbor is and that their beliefs might be different than yours. So, Ken, do you think, you know, you talked about getting history right, and you've definitely gotten more nuanced over the years, right, in terms of who you pick and choose and the perspectives.

38:28I don't think so. I was looking at Civil War, and I thought it had, you know, it's pretty nuanced in terms of the voices that you hear from and all the various people who contribute to it. Do you feel pressure to include even more voices that you may not agree with? No, not at all. Tell me about that. You know, what's so nice, they take a long time. So people don't have the attention spans to like sort of oversee us. But let me just say something. This nuance is not the province of progressives. This nuance is the province of human beings and storytelling. So let's just take what is considered a kind of bellwether of the conservatives, supposedly, which is the series I love called Yellowstone, right?

39:15Its patriarch, it's George Washington, is a very wise person who happens to murder people and dump their bodies in a ravine, right? His strong daughter, right, is— She's a hot mess. She's a hot mess and is incredibly wise and smart and also kills people and dumps their bodies in ravines. There are two sons, one of whom is married to a Native American and conflicted throughout the whole film. The other is Benedict Arnold. The daughter is in love with the foreman who has a crew of young and old, white and black people, right? And surrounding them is a Native American sense that this is their land.

39:53And overlaid on that is the American story of taking over land and greed. So this is the, this is a complicated thing. I could be describing a Shakespeare play, for all you know. This is what people want. They are hungry. And Sarah and I were on Washington Journal and C-SPAN, you know, where they call in in the morning over the headlines and they got a Democratic line and a Republican line and an Independent line. And I'm used to being on it. And you're dodging arrows and bullets and spears that are coming at you from every one of them. Each caller said, oh, we really love your stuff. So what it means is that we're hungry for good stories and good stories are always complicated.

40:34No matter what the state might want to impose, it doesn't work for anybody. It doesn't work for a conservative. It doesn't work for a progressive. I mean, look what the left has done in sort of editing out people off the Politburo or this thing or whatever it is. It's all in the interest of authoritarians to make this a single-note story because that keeps you a subject dedicated to conspiracies and mythology, not what's really called it. Let me push back. You say nuance is not progressive, but let's not both sides. Trump and MAG are interested in not in complicated nuance portrayals of American history, correct?

41:16No, totally. But what I'm saying is that they don't necessarily represent even conservatives in the United States. Fair. What we have is a good story is a good story. The novelist Richard Powers said, you know, the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do is argue, won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that, he said, is a good story. That's true. So good stories remind us that it isn't a binary. Right, right. But, Sarah, I'm just curious. Can stories of history ever be neutral, and is it wrong to present them as such? They still hold a point of view, right?

41:50Look, I think the way I think about this is facts, as close to a fact as you can get, and then how you interpret those facts is where I think the heart of your question is. So what we tried to do, both in Vietnam and this, and I think we've talked a lot about the scholarship in both series. They may seem so different. They took place a long time apart, but they're like upside down versions of each other. In Vietnam, we're looking at the war from four different perspectives, and the scholars are behind the camera. In this film, the scholars are on camera helping the American people understand the facts on the ground as we're putting them forward.

42:29And the historians have different expertise and different points of view and think different things are important. And we want to put them in conversation with each other to give our audiences the tools to think for themselves and have questions and get to the heart of some of what you're saying, which is what we've done well, what we haven't done well, and how to think about our origin story. So truthful but not neutral necessarily. No, we say calling balls and strikes. That's the phrase we like to use. You do know that Chief Justice John Roberts also talks about calling balls and strikes. Yeah, but he's a different balls and strikes.

43:05that he's misusing it in a different way. Let me ask you the last sort of Trump question. In addition to this docuseries, you've made films on Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin in Congress itself. Based on your decades of research about this era, what does Trump's rapid consolidation of power tell us about the gap between the founders' visions of checks and balances and the reality of what we're seeing today? And what would they make of Congress's abdication of its own constitutional powers as a check on the executive? Because it's sort of the opposite of what your story is telling. Yeah, so we were with Yuval Levin a few weeks ago in Philadelphia taping something that will air after the broadcast of our film with Jeffrey Rosen at the National Constitution Center and Melody Barnes, Sarah and me.

43:48It was a wonderful conversation, and Yuval was saying, you know, the founders aren't going to be, they wouldn't be surprised if somebody was seeking, you know, monarchical power. They'd be surprised that Article I is not the executive. Article 1 is the legislative and that they had abdicated. That would be the huge, stunning shock to them, that there had been any kind of abdication of powers. He said it in a wonderful way having to do with tense. He said that the legislative was in the future tense. You'll do this. The executive was in the present tense. I am doing what you told me to do. And the Supreme Court is in the past tense judging that.

44:29And so they saw this almost in that temporal way. The founders I'm talking about, and this is through Yuval Levin, who knows a lot more about it than I do, even though we, I'm sure, find ourselves on opposite sides about any number of things. but it was an interesting way to understand that. And it took me back to what I carry around, which is the Constitution and the Declaration and the Bill of Rights, and to read just how extensive Article I is and how much less extensive II and III are and the other sort of parts of it before we get to the Bill of Rights. It's unprecedented times, and yet I made a film on Huey Long, which every sentence is rhyming with today.

45:14Every sentence of that song is rhyming with today. He had a different outcome. Different outcome.

45:22We'll be back in a minute.

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47:30GL CLOSEDGE Right, nice. It doesn't feel like Steuern. Steuern erledigt? Safe. With Visa Steuer. Now test it free. Alright, every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours. Hi, I'm Garrett Graff, a journalist and historian. And my big question for Ken Burns is about his documentary Civil War. Ever since that documentary came out in 1990 and helped re-inspire and re-interest America in that seminal conflict. We've also seen the Civil War become a flashpoint in our politics again. We've seen the Confederate flag removed from the Statehouse lawn in South Carolina after that infamous church shooting in Charleston.

48:18We've seen Confederate statues removed across the country in the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020. And now we're living in another moment where Confederate statues are going back up in Washington, D.C. I wonder, Ken, how your view of that war's legacy has changed since 1990 and what you have learned about how we remember that war as a nation. Well, the Civil War, that's a really great question. The Civil War, once we started our country, is the most important event. And let's remember that Confederate flag was not the Confederate flag. The flag of the Confederacy is a different flag altogether.

48:58That was one battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia that was just adopted by the Ku Klux Klan. So that use of the flag is in itself even more specious than being the flag. So they're just stupid. Yeah, and so it's constantly doing that. I've got photographs in many other films of Klansmen marching by the tens of thousands in Washington, D.C., unfurling gigantic American flags on the steps of the Capitol. We've had periods in which we have romanticized this, and part of the attempt to simplify our history, to go back to something that's more manageable and simple, whether it's moving women back into the position where they should be, making it a lily white story is, of course, to elevate the aspirations of the Confederacy, which itself was not only bankrupt, but varied in and of itself.

49:49There are 9 million people in the South, 4 million of whom are owned by the other people in the South. So you have 45 % of the population that doesn't give a damn about slavery. They want it to end as fast as possible. And so we've got a really complex that the Civil War will always resonate. There's no different way that I'd treat it. Our film, after a prologue and an introduction, begins with a quote that says, when thinking about America, I admire her bright blue stars. This is an approximation of it. Her beautiful mounds, her star-crossed field, blah, blah, blah. But then my rapture is soon checked when I realize it is filled with slaveholding and wrong.

50:29The tears of my brethren flow to the sea, that the soil drinks daily of the blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing. Frederick Douglass. That's how our series begins. I don't have, after the prologue and introduction, I don't have any problem with that today, yesterday, 35 years ago when it came out, or 35 years from now, which, God willing, we still got a republic thinking about the centrality of the Civil War and the excellent question that was just posed. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're not going to be able to run the Smithsonian, Ken, but that's okay. Not this week.

51:06The Civil War is actually a good segue to finishing up and talking about the legacy of the Revolutionary War and what came after. Sarah, Ken has said that democracy was not the intention of the American Revolution but a consequence of it. You see the tension with the founding fathers themselves, as you both noted. 250 years later, we're still trying to live up to the values they champion, even if they didn't live up to them in personhood. So if the challenge for every generation is to try to live up to those ideals and create a more perfect union, as the preamble of the Constitution says, how do you think that legacy is going?

51:36And what are the unique challenges? Are they the same challenges from your perspective? I don't think they're the same challenges, although there's probably some similarities just to the human experience. I do think citizenship and your responsibility in a democracy are just essential elements to try to inspire in our young people to actually be civically minded, civically engaged. I think there are a lot of deeply important principles at our founding, the freedom of speech, the freedom to practice your own religion, the separation of church and state and a balance of power, free and fair elections.

52:22I think some of our founding principles are deeply inspirational and really, really important. And when we lose our way, we need to go back to those principles, kind of strip back and reassess and sort of, I hope, actually come together around this pretty surprising, it's a great underdog story. It's very unlikely that we were going to win. We didn't win alone. So it's, I mean, at the heart of your question, I think, are some of the things the founders were debating themselves and fighting for and declared and then tried to figure out, right, there's 10 years between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

53:03It takes a while to form a government. George Washington steps away from power because he wants to show an example of a peaceful transfer of power. There's a lot to our beginnings that might help us right now. So, Kent, what do you hope particularly young people will take away from the docuseries? According to the recent PBS News, Maris Paul Neal, a third of Americans right now say people may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back. So what do you hope people will take away? Yeah, no. The study of war is always fraught because you are essentially re-examining and re-presenting violence that is part of the human story.

53:45In fact, one of our episodes of the Vietnam War was called The History of the World, meaning that's what human beings do is they kill each other. and you know regardless of what a poll says on thursday or whatever it doesn't matter you don't want in any way glorify uh war it is really horrible there's a woman there's a line in a document we have rebecca tanner lost five sons fighting for the patriot cause rebecca tanner was a mogegan indian from we presume connecticut ultimately we have an ability to tell the story because it's so dramatic and so part of the human condition. But the idea is that what emerges are these free electrons, the free electrons that Sarah's been talking about and citizenship and education, that pursuit of happiness doesn't mean stuff, it means knowledge.

54:34And that the word that is most commonly used throughout our film is virtue, which is an old-fashioned word. And this period has as much venality as it has virtue, maybe more venality, just as our period does. And to your earlier question to Sarah, you're going to always take steps forwards and steps backwards. And I think the chicken little in us at any moment says our moment's the most important. And of course, it's the worst it's ever been. And so you can either chicken little it, you know, sit in the room with your, you know, sucking your thumb in a fetal position and go, the sky is falling.

55:09Or you go out and vote. I want you to address young people specifically. So I think they're the ones that are most sophisticated about stories. They're the ones who are getting our stuff now in school and come up where nobody knew me from Adam when the Civil War came out. Now all of them have seen it and they come up and they want to talk about it. We were yesterday at the Trinity Church in Manhattan doing stuff on the revolution with Lin-Manuel Miranda. And there were all school kids, 400 school kids from all over New York. And there was this one kid who like he knew everything about me, every film I'd made, every, you know, stuff.

55:44And I just kind of went, holy Toledo. And then he gets up and he's one of the performers of a scene from Hamilton as this rap, which he does perfectly with Lin-Manuel going, oh, my God, because we've got it. To me, it's the easiest group to do. It's the people who have permitted their beliefs to become so encrusted and they're so certain. Learn at hand. There cannot be a better name for a judge than learn at hand. So they're not more doubtful? No, no, no, no. They're more open. They're persuadable. They went with the democratic socialists, you know? Democratic socialists don't kill Jews. National socialists kill Jews.

56:25Many of our allies are, have been or are democratic socialists. I'm not worried about democratic socialists. I'm worried about dictators. That's what I'm worried about. And so are they because they told us which way they wanted to go. So you've got, this is complicated. It's that learned handset liberty is never being too sure you're right. And that you have to understand there is a fluidity. And that this question that has animated my work, who are we? is in fact a mirror that has to hold up to herself and say, who am I? And I think good stories do that. And so if people give us our attention, I don't care if you voted for Trump.

57:05I don't care if you voted for Kamala Harris. I literally want you to do it. And we've been out in the country. Sarah and I have been traveling all across the country. And we've said the same thing to Joe Rogan as to kids everywhere, and inner city kids in Charleston and Detroit and Chicago and suburban kids and general audiences in every part of the country. Same story. Same fastball down the center of the pipe there. I could give you another baseball story. Thank you for that. And what you find is a curiosity and a hunger and the best thing we ever hear, which is, I didn't know that. So this is my last question.

57:40Despite all of the hypocrisies inherent in the origin story in the country and its founding documents, it's hard not to come away from your series feeling patriotic, as Sarah noted. So even though the story of America's founding was brutal and messy and ugly, right now, each of you, why don't you start, Sarah? What things are worth celebrating and taking pride? And then can you finish up? I mean, you know, I think the 4th of July is worth celebrating because we did turn the world upside down. We changed the way governments function. We changed the way people could participate and have a voice, even if that voice was for a very small segment.

58:19In 250 years, we've pressed the levers of power, right? It took 144 years for you and me to have the right to vote, but we did it. And those women fought hard for us. So I want to stand on their shoulders and fight hard for the next generation. I think optimism gets lost, and I want to be optimistic. You know, I don't think I have a deeply sophisticated answer for that other than going back to some of the debates that they had themselves. I find very helpful to understand where we are now and where I think it would be helpful to go. I think we frame this always in binaries. No matter what question we're asking of ourselves, we have to say, despite the hypocrisy or despite the that, the actual human experience is much less defined.

59:10It's more shades of gray than the black and white that our computer systems of one and zeros and our media system of my way or the highway, red state or blue state, would suggest. And I think that if we can, and this is where good stories come in, then we have the idea to go, and I could amplify Sarah, that optimism is not a naive and pejorative condition. Cynicism is a luxury for jaded journalists and jet setters, not for the rest of us. We all have to say, yep, there's a lot of bad stuff behind us and there's a lot of good stuff behind us. But in fact, none of that matters. It just matters what I do.

59:48So what I do is I vote. I go to my school board meeting. I go to my city council. I run for dog catcher. I clean up my dog's poop. I find out what my neighbor needs. I shovel their walk if they're infirmed. I do the things that the civic engagement that the revolution suggested was possible. that for the first time in human history, and I'll repeat myself, human beings are no longer subjects willfully dedicated to being ignorant, susceptible to superstitions, but educated and now citizens exercising, as Washington felt when he resigned the presidency, the highest office in the land. Great. Perfect.

1:00:29Thank you so much, Sarah Botstein and Ken Burns. It's a wonderful documentary. Thank you. Thank you. Great to be with you.

1:00:41Today's show was produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Michelle Alloy, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner and Eamon Whalen. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're only following the show, you're a patriot, but not the Mel Gibson kind. If not, go read some history books. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

1:01:16We'll be back on Thursday with more.