#2336 - Ken Burns

28:24They're occupying New York, which they took over in the summer of 76. And our articles of convention are doing nothing. Our articles of Confederation are doing nothing. They're toothless. They can't be a government. And so in 1787, we have this constitutional convention that happens in Philadelphia, four months, the hammer together, the shortest constitution in the world. And it is exactly that. Jefferson's writing in from Paris, who are representing our interests. But what about this? What about they're trying to check the possibility of somebody being somebody who would try to take advantage of this system and rig it to their own benefit.

29:05And so all of those elaborately beautiful checks and balances. Article one is the legislative. Article two is the executive. It delineates Article three, the judicial, it delineates what the responsibilities are and the way in which the system has worked and fits and starts with lots of problems. And you know, there's something encouraging about seeing how divided Americans were back then, because we're always ringing our hands over so divided. Okay, human beings are divided and my feeling is that if you succumb to argument, right, which is what we do. The novelist Richard Powers said, the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do, is argue.

29:48The best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that, that is to say change somebody's point of view, is a good story. Because a good story allows contradiction and undertow. You can have a George Washington who is complex, flawed, rash, makes terrible tactical decisions on the battlefield. And yet without him, historian after historian after historian says, without him, we don't have a country. And you can take that and put that in the bank. And at the same time, understand the dimensions of, we all have feet of clay. We're all flawed in some way.

30:25And to try to design a narrative that isn't, you know, filled with that kind of morning and again, sanitized Madison Avenue kind of view of American history, nor is it that unforgiving revisionism that wants to throw out anybody who did something bad back then, you then permit a world to exist in which they suddenly seem familiar to you. Like you can argue with other people and see that you get nowhere, but you also know if you're married or you have kids or you have friends or you're in business that you actually are more engaged in story and tolerance and understanding and listening. And so part of our job as filmmakers, strangely enough, is not to impose ourselves on the material.

31:14As I said before, we're umpires calling balls and strikes. It's to listen to the material. What is it telling us? What is it saying about this circumstances of say the resistance in Boston in the early days leading up to the revolution? To try to understand nuance every school kid knows that when the 60 or 70 people white, all white males, both rich and poor in Boston dump that's 40 tons of tea, 40 tons of tea in the harbor, they were dressed crudely as Native Americans. And if you ask a kid, why were they dressed that way? Well, you know, just to disguise to put the blame on somebody else, it was to say we're not part of the mother country anymore.

31:58Really? We're here. We're Aboriginal. We are Americans. We are distinct. We've been having complaints about British citizenship. We're arguing British law, but all of a sudden those laws have been broken out into natural laws. And we're telling you that we're not trying to blame it on anyone else. Nobody would for a second have thought that the Native Americans would have dumped the tea. They weren't burdened by the tea tax. What they were doing was saying we are, and it's so ironic given the history of our relationship to the dispossession of Native lands, they are saying we are Aboriginal. This is what the SCAR says.

32:37So yeah, wow. And then you adopted Aboriginal. Right. We're saying we're not of the mother country. We're in essence kind of filing divorce papers by dressing as the people who originally inhabited this country, dressed. Nobody's fooled. Nobody's trying to blame that out. It's listening to scholarship. It's thinking, of course, that you're not going to have no one in the right mind is going to say, oh, the Native Americans did it because they're protesting the tea tax. They're not paying the tea tax, right? Right. So it's like it's you then go and then you talk to a scholar in this case, Phil DeLory who's been studying Native stuff and he goes, just think about it.

33:19You dress crudely as this. You're making a statement to Britain that we are no longer we're severing ties. Now this is well before this is December of 1773. The guns are going to fire in about 18 months at Lexington a little bit less than 18 months at Lexington and conquered on April 19th. But it's it is all of these little moments that that lead up to boycott of British goods women take a huge part of the role of the resistance. You've got people like Samuel Adams who is a failure as a brewer and a tax collector. It's sort of interesting. You can't make this shit up. Who is his whole job is to keep his fellow colonists alive to their grievances when things come down the Brit, Brit sort of retreat.

34:06He goes, oh, no, no, no, it's just going to get worse. It's going to get worse. And so you beat these characters that sound an awful lot like characters that occupy our large media space. And it was occupying the large media space of the colonists from New Hampshire. I live in a tiny village. The Walpole Gazette was read all the way in Georgia. People exchanged ideas and thought about things and were trying to figure out even as late as the even after even after Lexington conquered even after the battle bunker hill, which is June of 75. Even after the other things that were happening by early 76, nobody's absolutely not nobody, but there's not a majority will for independence, independence, as they called it.

34:51And then Thomas Payne comes in and writes this pamphlet common sense and all of a sudden people are going, oh, yeah. And by June, there's a committee of the Second Continental Congress and Franklin's in charge of it. And there's John Adams is on the committee and that's a 32 -year -old lawyer from Virginia named Thomas Jefferson who's given the first crack at doing this thing. And what does he write? He writes, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. And Franklin, who's the old man that chairman of you will of this little committee, goes, uh -uh. We hold these truths to be self -evident.

35:27Joe, there is nothing in the world less self -evident than the idea that all men are created equal that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But as someone pointed out, it's the old lawyer's dodge. You know, you just, you just tell them that it's self -evident, not just sacred and undeniable, lovely phrasing on Jefferson's part, but if you say self -evident, then we're not arguing about this thing. We're saying that everything that you're about to hear is without argument, which is a, like, really in your face bold move in the intimacy, the human intimacy that gets communicated when you spend even a little amount of time trying to parse this, trying to get at the heart of the dynamics of dumping tea and dressed as Indians or writing these words.

36:16Um, you know, that mankind are disposed to suffer. Well, evils are sufferable, meaning, yeah, we've taken it all this through human history, and guess what, we're not going to take it anymore. When they first devised this system of government, what, what were they basing it on? I know part of it was on the Greeks, but like, what was the, how did they make it to the point where even today we marvel at it? Yeah, we, 250 years later, people go back and like, look what they did. This is extraordinary. It's extraordinary. So lots of factors. First of all, it was true. When I said they're, they have experienced at a reserve and at sort of, as somebody said, salutary neglect.

37:00People didn't pay attention to the colonists, and they had learned suddenly they were more literate than their British compatriots. They paid less taxes, and they paid it to local stuff, and they were, um, had land. And most folks in England and Wales and Scotland and Ireland were living dependent lives. They'd worked the land of somebody else for a thousand years. So they've got this British constitutional monarchy, which is a really strong thing. And King George is not a bad guy. He really does believe that parliament has this role to play in the House of Lords and the House of Carmans. They're, they're kind of the checks and balances that we'd think of.

37:36But they're also in the middle of the Enlightenment, where they're beginning to say that there are certain rights that are, natural. That's the word that I think Jefferson would use. That is to say, they're not bestowed by a monarch. They're natural. That all men are created equal. This is big stuff. And this is distilling in Jefferson's words in the Declaration, a century of Enlightenment thinking. And the Enlightenment has been a kind of philosophical and human and kind of governmental dynamic that's coming out of the Renaissance. We know what the Renaissance is in art, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, all of this stuff, some music.

38:18But what it's doing on a social scene is, and a philosophical scene is, is doing that. And they're reaching back to antiquity, as you say. And they're pulling back some of the best ideas of self -discipline, of temperance, of virtue, all of these sorts of things. But then, because they've experienced all these years of this misuse and distrust from the mother country, 3 ,000 miles away, takes at least a month for information to get there. The Britain wins with our help, what we call the French and Indian War, which was a global war called the Seven Years War. And they've got now the biggest, most far -flung empire on Earth.

38:58But they can't protect its own colonists who are trying to pour over the Appalachians to take Native American land, and it's causing uprisings. And so they say, you can't go over, 1763. You can't go over that. And, oh, by the way, we're broke, so we need you to help us to pay for this stuff. But we don't have any representation there, so Native lands, taxation, representation become this thing. And it goes on for so long. They've watched the ineffectiveness of their government while they're prosecuting the revolution and the ineffectiveness of the Articles of Confederation that emerges from fighting the war and is trying to figure out how to make it work.

39:38That they go into that constitutional convention, and they are determined to figure out every possible angle to forestall authoritarianism, to balance their relationships between the states, to have the checks and balances between the three forms of government that judicial, the legislative, and the executive. It is a beautiful thing, and what was so incredible is that it fostered one of the greatest public debates ever in human history, because they had emerged from this bloody, bloody, costly civil war. Civil war means lots of deaths of civilians. That didn't happen in our civil war except in Missouri and a little bit of Kansas.

40:18You know, six people died at the Siege of Experts, less than 20 at Atlanta, two in Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America. But the American Revolution, lots of their battles in the South in which you might have one British officer leading loyalist troops, every person on each side is an American and they're killing each other. And they're doing it not just in set battles, but in little guerrilla actions, almost like the Vietcong attacking patrols in South Vietnam. I mean, it is really bad stuff, and so they say, we're going to ratify this, but we want a bill of rights too.

40:54We want to enshrine these things that we fought for, and so you have no establishment of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to assemble and redress grievances. Right to bear arms, you know, free and fair trial. End of cruel and unusual punch, all these things become the set pieces of, I made a film a couple years ago on the US and the Holocaust, what we knew when we knew it, what we did, what we didn't do, what we perhaps, what we should have done. And I was at some event, and somebody raised their hand and said, is the Holocaust the most important event since the birth of Jesus Christ in world history?

41:37And I just immediately said, no, it's the American Revolution. It's the American Revolution. I mean, this is a sea change in the course of human events. And, man, we don't know enough about it. We don't know enough of the interiors of it that are complicated. I have in my editing room, a neon sign. I've had it for a decade and a half, in cursive, lowercase cursive, it says, it's complicated. You know, because there's not a filmmaker on earth that if, you know, if the scenes working, you don't touch it. But we have spent the last 50 years touching those scenes, right? You know what I mean? Going in, maybe it's lesser, but it's truer.

42:16And it's got more dynamism. It's got more contours. It feels like it's accurate to what actually happened, which is more complicated than our sort of simple binary discussions of what history is. It's just, it's so hard for people to recognize that that was a civil war, because I think most people think it was the United States colonists against the British. But the separatists and the loyalists battling it out together, I think most people are completely unaware of that. For like a better word, a topic sentence early in the film is that I might get this slightly wrong, but the American Revolution was not just a dispute between Englishmen over Indian land, taxation and representation, but a bloody struggle that involved more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American that somehow came still to represent some of the highest aspirations of humankind.

43:19So our ours is like the fourth global war over the prize of North America, and we're treating Native nations not as them, but as distinct entities. The Shawnee, for example, in the middle of the 18th century, 1750, are as important an entity on the world trading stage with French or British or others as say the state of Virginia or the colony of Virginia is at that time. And that they're different from the Delaware's, their allies, and they're different from the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, the six five, and then it was six tribes, the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Anandaga, the Tuscarora, the Anida, and the Mohawk.

44:04And I've just walked from Western New York State all the way into New England, right, and up into Canada. And they had formed a union of their own that had operated a democracy that had operated for centuries, that had allowed the independence of each of these separate nations, states, and yet yielded to the larger thing when their interests were threatened. So essentially with regard to foreign policy, and Franklin looks at this and goes, 1754, he goes, wow, this is a great idea. We should be doing this. He's been the postmaster. He's the only person who's been to New Hampshire, and he's been to Georgia, and all the places in between.

44:46He said, we should do this. And he calls a conference in Albany, and he's got a picture of a cut -up snake above the dire warning, join or die, and they pass seven of the 13 colonies attend, and they pass this thing called the Albany Plan of Union in 1754, and then they go home to try to sell it. And none of the states take it because no one wants to, none of the colonies take it because no one wants to give up their autonomy. So the plan dies, but 20 years later, join or die as the war cry in the most consequential revolution in history. Wow. Isn't that great? So you're taking the Native American riffing on that, and then as you're forming this, you're bringing in what you've had and inherited for tech of centuries of British constitutional monarchy, and you're borrowing from the new enlightenment things, and you've got biblical references and classical references, having to do with the conduct of individuals and personal responsibility, all of these just utterly American, but also been out there forever, and we end up with what we have, which is this glorious, wonderful, but also dysfunctional republic.

45:56Yeah, it's terrible, but it's the best one out there. Exactly right. When you started this project, so you have this idea to start this project, what was your understanding of the Revolutionary War versus what is it like when you really delve into the material and you start to formulate a plan for this documentary series? Like how much did you know about it when you first started? Well, I'm pretty well versed in American history, but nothing. I mean, I've worked on two films where I made the mistake of thinking, I know about this subject, baseball and Vietnam, because I grew up in the 60s, and I went through it, I lived on a college campus, I knew all the stuff I thought was it colleges, the war was winding down, and I love baseball.

46:43Every day of both those productions were daily humiliations of what I didn't know, and so what happens is you come in with a humility that I wish to know, and rather than tell you what I know, the last time I checked that's called homework, we would rather share with you our process of discovery. Joe, you cannot believe what we just found out. Can I just say, can I use these mugs to tell you how Daniel Morgan won the Battle of Cal Pens against Bannister Tarleton in South Carolina, just below the North Carolina border, and he trusts to his militia who are unreliable, please just fire twice the first line of militia.

47:24And then you can retreat, then you can run, but please promise me you're fired twice. And the second line of militia might more inexperienced, please just fire twice, and then run behind the third line, which are these scraggly kids, teenagers, felons, near duels, second and third sons without the chance of an inheritance. Recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany, and they stop the British, so the Tarleton goes, oh, they're doing what all the militias do, they're retreating, they're retreating, they're retreating, and then the third line comes up, and they go after them, and the Americans actually attack, which is very rare, an attacking thing to drive into the British line.

48:07Tarleton gets away, but a huge part of Cornwallis' army has been diminished, and they are uttering this war cry that they have adapted from the Cherokee, from Native American tribes, which is a yell that will reverberate in southern battlefields for decades. Wow, wow, is right. And like, I can take, I mean, look, there's Lexington and Concord, and then maybe somebody says Bunker Hill, which is really Breeds Hill, Bunker Hill 2, and then maybe Trenton, he takes over, he surprises them on Christmas night, and then maybe some people know that Saratoga is the surrender of an entire British army that gives the French the confidence to come in on our side and give us the equivalent of 30 billion dollars plus Navy.

48:53And, and soldiers, and then New Yorktown, but there are dozens of battles that we'll tell you about, like German town is a wonderful thing. The Battle of Brandywine, what's the largest battle in the entire, the largest battle, it's the Battle of Long Island. George Washington makes a terrible blunder, a tactical blunder, he leaves his left flank exposed, and the British see it, and they completely surround him, and then a year later at Brandywine, he leaves his right flank exposed, and they go around. He's not the greatest tactician, but he is the man of the time, this leadership, this ability to understand subordinate talent, this reserve, this kind of confidence.

49:35I mean, you cannot come away from this without extraordinary admiration for this person, without whom we don't have a country. We just literally don't have a country. Which is so crazy when you think of like pivotal figures in human history, this one person, were they not born, were they not in that position at that time, extraordinary circumstances, unusual character. We have a historian, the only time really in the film that any of our talking heads break the fourth wall, you know, we don't have, we don't have first person voices, I mean, we don't have witnesses, we have hundreds of first person voices, but we have some scholars and writers who are on the thing, and there's one Christopher Brown, who just shakes his head, and he goes, like, I'm not a big fan of the great man theory of history or interpretation of history, but let's put it this way, I don't see how the United States survives without Washington's leadership, and it's this wonderful moment in which you go right, we don't have to throw out the heroes in order to do that.

50:34But more often than not, we sort of elevated these people to a supernatural position that they don't really necessarily deserve, he deserves it, and yet he's also deeply flawed, feats of clay, as I said, and that's to me what makes a good story. Like, how is it that he can be tactically so wrong in two extraordinary places? He's also very rash, too. He runs out at Kipps Bay, which is halfway up Manhattan, after he's lost the Battle of Long Island, he's now abandoning New York, or he's taking a good number of his men up to Harlem, and at Kipps Bay, which is sort of mid down on the East River, there's a battle, and we're just being rolled up, and he comes charging onto the battlefield, and his age are going crazy, and they're grabbing the reins of his horse.

51:19He's going to be killed, if he's killed, that's it, right? And then later on at the Battle of Princeton, he does the same thing, and one aid puts his hands over his face, thinking, I cannot watch my commander -in -chief be killed, and in the Battle of Monmouth, Courthouse, and New Jersey, he rides out in just his very present, turns what is a retreative of continental soldiers and militiamen into setting their lines, and basically holding their own against the prime, the elite of the British army. And it's, where does that come from? Who does that? And for the very beginning, everybody knew you needed a Virginian, the New Englanders, where the war is a symphony in three movements, right?

52:04The New England is the first movement, central states, and then the southern states. And there is a sense early on, when after Lexington and Concord, where we've driven the British back into Boston, and they've got ways to get in, but they can't get out. Besides by ship, that we need a real army, and the army is formed, and it is very obvious from the very start that there could be no other person than George Washington. The New Englanders want a Virginian, it's the most populous, it's the richest state, and they know this person has been around since he's a 22 -year -old militia officer who probably fires the first shot in the French and Indian war.

52:46That starts the global conflict that everyone else on Earth calls the Seven Years War that will set the stage for the American Revolution. And then he acts bravely in many other situations, and he is denied a commission in the British army, and he's like, FU, you know? And then he goes, and then if he's a speculator in Native American land that he doesn't own, he wants to sell to new colonists. And when the British put the line of demarcation in 1763 that separates, says, you can't go over because we can't afford to protect you, he's now pissed again. And then he's still this voice of reason that arrives in Philadelphia, just poised, and people look to him for leadership, he's very good at picking out, you know, that guy has got great.

53:32He's got great executive function and great ability to pick subordinates without fear of being overshadowed. One of his great generals, Nathaniel Green, another great general, Benedict Arnold. And we introduced Benedict Arnold in the opening seconds of our first, our second episode. And it isn't until you're a third of the way through the sixth and last episode that you go, uh -oh, you know? But he's a hero at the Quebec City, he's a hero at the Battle of Saratoga. He's been painted out of most of the paintings because he became Benedict Arnold. But isn't it nice to know that he's that great, a general before he becomes Benedict Arnold?

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55:32Join the millions of Americans that are already using SimplySafe. They have a 60 -day money back guarantee so you can try it risk -free. Plus, you can get your first month free along with 50 % off your new SimplySafe system with professional monitoring. Just go to SimplySafe .com slash Rogan. That's 50 % off with your first month free at SimplySafe .com slash Rogan. There's no safe like SimplySafe. That term when I was a child, when I was in school, a Benedict Arnold was a traitor. What's a traitor? I think that's gone now. I think if I brought that up to my children, I said, do you know what a Benedict Arnold is?

56:12Oh, God. They say it was a mixture of... That's like an Arnold Palmer. It's like an Arnold Palmer. It's a mixture of IT and lemonade. Yeah. You know what? That's so terrifying to me. Weird, right? No. It's what happens when you atrophy this interest in American history. Or you think that it could be so simplified that you don't have to do anything. That's my job. I mean, I love it. And I love the fact that we can bring back these things for people. And they can experience. And there isn't a person in the country that's listening to me now or that we're going, you know, 35 different cities all around the country talking about this.

56:48We made it for everybody. This is not made for the eighth grader taking American history of the eleventh grader making this. It's for you. Right, right. It's for anybody who cares about where their country came from and is willing to say, I probably don't know the full dimensions of this. It's probably impossible to teach it in the way that you kind of document it. I think it's the most effective form of expressing these things. I mean, obviously, there's some things that can be documented in books, numbers, dates, history that would be kind of cumbersome to certain documentaries because it would interfere with the flow of the entertainment aspect of it.

57:27But in terms of absorption, in terms of stimulation, absorption, human beings are much more inclined to take it through one of your long pieces like the Vietnam one, the 18 -hour piece. That's exactly right. I think what happens is that it's so interesting because we understand as you're referencing the power of a book, still the greatest mechanical invention there is, that it can go into some depth to document your due. But a documentary can hold lots of different opposing points of view, not make them arguments, but allow people to have different points of view and sort of collect, almost like spokes in the wheel.

58:05You want to get to the hub. That's what whatever it is that you're after. But the wheel is much stronger by all those spokes, and unfortunately, too often in history or in teaching, we subscribe to one particular theory of history, that it's got to be this or it's got to be that. And what we've done is we've found the documentary and the storytelling aspects of it hugely, hugely valuable in communicating the complexity of the subject without putting your thumb on the scale and making a political point. We're just, you know, look, I will be totally honest. History doesn't repeat itself. No event has ever happened twice.

58:46But Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. If he did say that, he's exactly right, because human nature doesn't change. Right. And so you watch these events, and when we finished working on it, I told you, we began this when Barack Obama had a year and a half to go in his presidency, or a year and a month to go at his presidency. It's a totally different world, but we know that it rhymes, but we never once have concentrated in saying, oh, we're going to put our thumb on the scale here. We want everybody to watch. We have no axe to grind. We're just, as I'm saying, calling balls and strikes.

59:21And when I mean that, it would be like saying, let me tell you about Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson. They struck out a lot. Thanks so much. Right? I mean, and I'm true. I have not told you anything that is not true. Correct? Sure. They also hit a hell of a lot of home ones. And so calling balls and strikes is saying that what happens is the way we teach history is the way ESPN does sports highlights. It's always the home run. It's never the guy turned the double play, or he doubled some guy off, or there was some other thing. It's always the home run. And so nobody takes a strike in these highlights, and what we're trying to say is, isn't it better to watch the game?

1:00:06Yeah. And see that even Babe Ruth can only come up to bat every nine times. And even Babe Ruth fails seven times out of ten. He's a 300 hitter. A little bit more than 300 hitter. That's the great beauty of it. And so I think that we don't ever now think that he is a failure. We understand that the dynamics of life, the dynamics of this particular game, mean that the people who fail seven times out of ten and do it significantly are in the hall of fame. I mean, that's the beauty of these storytelling. See, I'm going to take anything away from George Washington by making it complex, making him human.

1:00:50He's not a statue out in the park collecting bird shit. He's a real breathing human being. He's one of the richest people in America. He marries one of the richest people in America, Widow. And like he's a way, he makes one visit home, I think, to Monticello during the whole... I mean, to Mount Vernon during the whole war, he's dedicated to this thing. I mean, he doesn't have to do this, right? He's committed to this project of us. And that's the ultimate point I want to make about not just this film or Vietnam or all the things we've been talking about. Is that I've had the great privilege of making films about the U .S.

1:01:31for nearly 50 years, Joe. But I've also made films about us. That is to say, the lower case, two -letter plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of us and we and our and all the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and even the controversy of the U .S. And that is a privileged space to be operating and to be having been given the permission to do this for nearly 50 years is just great. I think I have the best job in the country. And I'm always happy to meet somebody who's willing to contradict me. But it's only because you have a chance to work hard at telling this story. I mean, we lock the picture back in January.

1:02:13That means you're not going to do any more work on it. We've unlocked it hundreds of times just to make it better. Some historians said, I'm not sure if you can be that categorical. And then we put in a perhaps. Or you find out that image isn't as stunning as we thought it could be. Could we swap that out? Oh, yeah, that works better than before. Even after we were done, done. And I like the ability that by the time we're letting it go, it's like your kids are still looking the smudge off their face and making sure that their hair is tied up in a nice bow. And have a good day, sweetie. Yeah. Well, I think that gratitude that you have towards your work and this dedication to truth.

1:02:54Because one of the problems with problematic historical figures is we tend to use modern ideological perspectives when we describe these people. And we try to show that we have a disdain for the way they live their lives and the choices they made in perspective with how we do today. And the problem with that is it comes off political or ideological or you lose the real understanding of the complexities of history. And of these human beings that lived in a very different time, 1776, even though it's only three people ago, it's a very, you know, people lived to be 100, three people ago. So it's a very different time.

1:03:44It's a very different time and you make a really, really good point. When you take the judgments of what we know now, you can apply them and then you end up with what I called that unforgiving revisionism where you throw out some significant people with the bathwater revisionism. But let me just tell you, they all knew slavery was wrong. They all knew it was wrong and they still did it. And there's a historian in a net Gordon Reed who just says, you know, slavery is foundational to Thomas Jefferson and he knew all his life it was wrong and said it and wrote about it and tried to put in something to end the slave trade and in the Declaration of Independence, which no one would have.

1:04:22And she goes, well, how could somebody do something they knew was wrong? She goes, well, that's a question for all of us. And so Jefferson's neighbor freed all his slaves and urged him to do it and he didn't and his cousin freed all his slaves. So there's already that. The question is, if you are just taking the judgments of today to cancel somebody, you've just missed the possibility of getting to know George Washington or getting to know Thomas Jefferson. And if you only do people who are perfect, you are either lying about them or you're, you got very few characters, you know what I mean? Because I don't know about you.

1:05:06I'm not, I presume you're not. I don't think you know anybody who's perfect. I don't know anybody who's perfect. And so then it's like history becomes honey, how is your day? You didn't begin, I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb, you know? Unless you get teabot in case that's exactly the way to do it. You edit human experience and you tolerate the vast experiences that human beings are so complex. And it's the, it's the interest. It was very interesting. We did an update of our baseball series called the 10th inning and being a, from New England and being a Red Sox fan.

1:05:48The whole thing was just a disguise to be able to do the Red Sox come back in 2004. But we were dealing with the great Atlanta team in the 90s and the great Jotori led Yankees and then Sosa and McGuire and then bonds and then steroids and whatever. At the end of it, we're really trying to come to some thing about steroids and try to figure out how to deal with it. And Thomas Boswell now retired as a great sports writer for the Washington Post said, I think it's Keith's writing about William Shakespeare, who's a pretty good playwright, said that Shakespeare had negative capability. That means he could hold intention, the positive and negative aspects of a character for as long as you possibly could without making that quick and facile and easy judgements that we make all the time in our lives when the guy cuts us off, we give him the finger, you know, we yell, if you, whatever that is, we make judgements about it.

1:06:44And Shakespeare had that ability, even with the darkest characters, you know, the IAGOs and the Richard the 13 people who are deep and dark, he had negative capability said, that's what we need to grow in order to understand this right here, in order to understand how to deal with all of that. And I think that in a way, all of us have to kind of grow that negative capability, that ability to distinguish that nobody's perfect and that if you, if you superimpose this kind of abstract sets of judgment, nobody passes the test, no one passes the test. And I think that this is an improvement of society, because we could all agree that society is far more just today than it was in 1776.

1:07:44And we know we're on this path, but it's a very bumbling stumbling. Certainly. Fail, figure out why you failed, kind of succeed, but then also take a few steps back, yeah, it's consistent. And I think in this process of this, unfortunately, you have performative virtue. And this is a lot of people that want to tear down statues and throw paint on, you know, paintings and do things where they're trying to show that I am better than the people who came before me. And the problem with doing that in regards to histories, we don't learn anything if you're not truthful. If we don't give this sort of like a really objective analysis of all the factors that were taking place with these extraordinary human beings who were experiencing this thing that was wholly unique on this new continent and with this new idea of forming this experiment and self government that hadn't existed before.

1:08:41And that you're going to, you have to say, you have to do it the way you do it. It's really the only way. I think it's the only way and it takes time. And I am very, I have to acknowledge that there's no other place on the dial that dates me, you know, than PBS, where I have the time to do it. It's sort of like an NIH grant. Like here, we'd like you to explore the possible cure to this disease. Can you have it next Thursday? Well, no, you can't have it next Thursday. That's what Hollywood says. I need it out because the other Marvel thing is coming out at the same time. What you need is we want to set you up with a certain set of circumstances that are going to permit you to have the best possibility of doing this.

1:09:24And so we've always hit our marks. We've always come, if we haven't been in budget, it's because we've expanded the film and then I've gone out and raised the money. So no one else was responsible for the fact that we decided Vietnam is not going to be seven episodes. It's going to be eight. Oh, you know what? It's going to be 10. And that's 18 hours. And that's, you know, the way the Vietnam and it had to do with listening to the material, understanding how it spoke to us, you know, committing ourselves to recording Vietnamese voices, not just South Vietnamese soldiers and South Vietnamese civilians, but Vietnamese soldiers, North Vietnamese civilians as well as the range of Americans.

1:10:01And so one of my favorite scenes is a North Vietnamese soldier and a Vietnamese soldier and an American all saying exactly the same thing about the same moment in a battle, early battle before they were technically boots on the ground. This was an advisor, an American advisor. But they're, they're all talking about a helicopter flying over this one hedge and the, and the vehicle and guys behind the hedge, the South Vietnamese officer is, is, you know, next to the American guy and they all have an experience of war that is exactly the same. And I love that. I love that. What was your first piece, Brooklyn Bridge?

1:10:42I had, I started. Here was this. So it came out. It was first broadcast in 81 or 82. I had been working on it since 77. I looked 12 years old and I was trying to sell people the Brooklyn Bridge. And people, people, people were, you know, telling me, oh, this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. No, and I used to keep these two big, thick, throwing binders on my desk, all filled with rejections for that one film. I mean, literally hundreds of rejections. But I had read David McCullough's The Great Bridge, the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. And I went out to my partners.

1:11:16We just founded our company. We're called Florentine Films. We were starving. We'd like maybe get a day's work or two days work a month as cinematographers and soundmen and grips. And we were pantherant. And that was that. And I said, we're going to do this and I'll raise all the money. And, and I did. And it got, I moved up to New Hampshire. So I could live on nothing in 79 and 80. And I, I, both those years, I made less than 25 hundred bucks. And chopped all the wood for my stove, split it, carried it, kept the stoves going. You wake up in the middle of the night. And, you know, 4 a .m. in February.

1:11:52And you go, I just heard the heater kick on. I got to go down and feed the stove. But it came out. I got nominated for an Academy Award. And that, that was the sign to me that like I needed to. I'd hit a fork and road. And like Yogi Barra said, you take it. It was to not go back to New York to not go back to LA, but to say, I'm going to be staying here because this is labor intensive. We're going to have to raise grants to do this stuff. I'm not looking for investors. We're looking for underwriting so that we are liberated from the suits that would come in and give the notes and say, oh, you need to be less sexy or more sexy or longer or shorter or more violent or less violent.

1:12:34I can sit here and tell you with a great deal of pride and not just for me, but on behalf of the extraordinary people that work with me. And some of them have been for 50 years and some of them for 30 years and some of them for 40. And, you know, a lot of people that these are directors cuts that we haven't let it go. And they're the way the country has responded to them like the Civil War series still 35 years old. It's still the highest rated program in the history of public television. This episode is brought to you by Paramount Pictures new film The Naked Gun. There's comedy. And then there's The Naked Gun.

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1:14:40Because I would imagine if you had aspirations to being a filmmaker when you were younger, the call of Hollywood, being a part of an enormous organization, being respected by your peers in this enormous... That had to be at least somewhat attractive, but how did you have the clarity to realize that that was not the correct path for you? I can't take credit for it. I went to Hampshire College. My teachers were social documentary still photographers. I had a mentor named Jerome Liebling. And he was so firmly rooted in another word we've been talking about virtue. Another word is honorable, that is not engaged and people don't really use it in ordinary conversation.

1:15:28He just instilled in all of us, I believe, all of his students, a sense of honor. So there was this responsibility to follow it through to work really hard. I mean, I don't know anybody that works harder than us. We really work seven days a week. We love it. I put my head on the pillow. I want to know that my girls are okay, my daughters, and I want to know that I've made a film better. Seven days a week. And it's not that you can't take a day off and you can't do something, but you're always thinking about this stuff and you want to make them better. And it's very funny. We're out in the road and we're showing the clips, and we've seen these clips a gazillion times, and I'm talking to Sarah Bostine, the co -director.

1:16:06And we just look at each other that simultaneously say, we've got to get rid of that. We have to change that shot. And so suddenly we're working with an editor who happens to be in Paris this semester, and the editor that's in New York, and we're changing things, and I love the fact that we did that. You know, I'm actually embarrassed that I'm telling you about it because I feel like in some ways I'm advertising the fact that that's what we do. I'm trying to say that somewhere along the line, I have made the opposite of decision of what was sort of career -wise supposed to be what I was supposed to do.

1:16:42In fact, Robert Penn Warren, the poet and novelist, told me that he looked at me once and he just said, careerism is death, and I've never used the word career. I've always said my professional life, because careerism suggests that you're following some sort of rut, and that's not what I wanted to do. And so by not just a carve path that's already well -wown, I mean, look, if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, you've got to follow some well -worn paths, just by virtue of that. Everybody that I know that's working in documentary that has been working at it for a long time and makes their living from it, have come from completely unique paths.

1:17:26It's been their own way, and I like the fact that I made this—no, I'm not going to go back to New York. I know, why would I move to LA? I'm going to be here in this little town in New Hampshire where any number of Oscar nominations and Grammys and Emmys means zero to the people that I live with. It's like, did you shovel the lawn, the walk of the lady next door who's not doing so well? Did you do this? Are you a good neighbor? That's the stuff that matters, and it's a place to raise kids as well. And then the splendid isolation. There's a great tradition, as you know, an American history of the way in which wildness, nature, becomes part of the American catechism.

1:18:12That is possible, Walt Whitman is saying, that you can worship God more closely in nature than in cathedrals made by man. This is the American catechism of being out in nature, and it manifests itself in different people who are aware of the power of nature. Nature reminds you of your insignificance, and that is in spiriting. This is paradoxical, right? That's in spiriting. Even though you're feeling insignificant, it's in spiriting, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self -regard. Right? So anybody who says, it's actually diminished. The person who is humble is humiliated by their atomic insignificance, as one person said about Mount Denali in Alaska in the 19 teens, a reporter, is actually in spirited by that.

1:19:06And I wish to be in spirited, because I think that's the only condition in which we're then able to make the kinds of decisions, the creative decisions, the personnel decisions, the thoughtfulness or to have that regard for not necessarily following the well -worn path. Does that make sense? It does. It does make sense. It resonates. It resonates completely. The natural art of nature, the true majesty of experiencing the vastness of the mountains and of the woods and of the... It humbles you in a way that nothing else does, and it grounds you in a way of recognizing... I don't want to say your insignificance, your relative insignificance, but it puts...

1:19:59It's not just you. This whole thing is massive. My best friend, you're so fortunate to experience it. Oh, you know, forge, I feel so grateful, Joe. My best friend once said to me, when we were much, much younger, we've been friends for more than 50 years, he said,

1:20:17there's only one center of the universe and you're not it. It was a great gift. It was a really great gift. And I don't know what I was doing or whether I was even doing anything that was inviting it, but he just wanted me to remember that there's no center of the universe. Well, you also get to see the stars, too. Yeah, out there. And that's another thing. I was thinking, you know, there is that the beauty Emily Dickinson called Sunsets and Sunrises, the far theatricals of day. It's a perfect description of it. But when you go out and it's 10 below zero in my town, and I'm up in the mile and a half out of town, which has five or six streetlights, so there's no glare, and you see the Milky Way, and you just...

1:21:03You are just... What can you do but just be humbled by the vastness of the universe and how relatively insignificant our lives are, but that in itself compels you, drives you to try to do something that would have not significance, but just would add something. So I live in a state. Politics comes through all the time. Everybody's got a lawn sign, right? Left, right, center. My lawn sign says, love multiplies. It's the only functioning theory of the entire universe. It is what it's all about, right? It doesn't matter what religion, what philosophy you might subscribe to, or not. Thomas Jefferson says in our film, if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no god at all, it neither picks my pocket or breaks my leg.

1:22:00Right? Like we are so religiously intolerant today. Oh, well, I know that if I had been born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, I'd still be a born again Christian. No, you wouldn't. You'd be a Shiite. You know, I mean, a Sunni. And you'd be at war with the Shiites across the border in Iran. You know, I'm sorry to break the news to you, and that all of them, all the great religions, have the same thing in mind. And also that problem that people have with this rigid perspective that they would be so arrogant as to believe that they would be unique in that environment. Right. Then no, I would get it. I would understand it.

1:22:36Like, I know you, and that's crazy. And who's to say, I mean, what was essential about the founders, particularly Jefferson, is that they were deists. And while they all had their own particular, mostly Protestant denominations, that they were that come out of. And I think still to some extent in some cases practice, less so Jefferson, is that they believed that there was a supreme being who was disinterested in the affairs of man and did not distinguish between faith. So that, you know, you see the baseball player who hits the home run and crosses home bait and looks up and thanks. They never do that when they hit into a game ending double play in the ninth inning, right?

1:23:21They don't say, oh, thank you, God, for giving me that. I've only seen that once. Pedro and Marcina had given up a fairly significant lead, not the entire lead to the Yankees in one of those great playoffs. And as he walked off and was pulled by the manager, he walked off and looked up and I spoke to him about it. I said, I've never seen anything like that. But this idea that all of our affairs are governed in that way is not what many of the founders believed in, that it is our obligation to lead that virtuous life. Don't keep bringing you back there. Moves you closer up the stairway to heaven, up the ray of creation to God.

1:23:59And that your movement, not that supreme being's movement towards you, let's make sure that's a ground root double. Oh, that's not happening. It is the ongoing chaos of the sequence of events and human nature. And we've got to be aware of the sort of incredible current, the force of the current of that human nature, but also the way in which my individuality, my will, the discipline, the virtue that I might be able to have could in some ways be singular and do something significant, not because of that, but in order to be closer to that thing. And that's where they're all talking about it, that they want the founders higher emotions.

1:24:49As I said, not sentimentality, not nostalgia. Those are the enemies of anything, but the higher emotions. Sometimes we say that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. What is the difference between that? If you've added up all the sum of the parts and it comes here, what's that? And what it means is that as much as to build a table, to build a bridge or a highway, one in one always has to equal to, the things that matter in our lives are where one in one equals three, where we are able to see something that's bigger. That something is produced by the collision of two musical notes, by two images in a documentary, by the conversation between two human beings, whatever in which something is possible.

1:25:37So I'm interested in whatever energy that creates. And with whom? I mean, you just don't know that that person at the convenience store that you just kind of like don't even look and don't even think about has a life as important as yours. You're driving on the highway, we're coming down from Dallas this morning on 35, you know, thousands, thousands of cars going out of the direction. The person in that car is looking and their life is as full as what I'm seeing out of my eyes. And I know sitting here that you're seeing something totally different than what I'm seeing and that that life is as full.

1:26:13And I think good history, good friendship, good storytelling, good conversation all have at its base the respect for the other point of view, the ability to listen. And that kind of desire to be better. And in our country, we've actually got lots of blueprints for it. We've got lots of plans. They're out there. It's in the declaration. It's in the Constitution. It's in the Bill of Rights. It's here. It's in that speech. It's in the Lincoln speech. We're going to live forever or die by suicide. Or then he's got two speeches. Lincoln does. Once a message to Congress in 62, what we'd call the State of the Union address.

1:26:55And he says, fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fire trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. And then a few seconds later, he goes, the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our cases knew, let us think a new. He's both those things, right? We cannot escape history. And guess what? The dogmas of the past. He's in his second inaugural, one of the most famous addresses of all time. He's got old testament, righteousness. If we have to spend another 500 years drawing with the sword, the blood that is drawn with the lash, meaning fighting to end slavery, we'll do it.

1:27:36And then he stops very old testament. He stops on a dime and turns to this new testament ending, the parareration which says, with malice towards none, with charity for all. And then it has that kind of unbelievable generosity in it. And the stability to say, a second ago, I'm willing to keep this going for however long it takes to end this scourge of slavery. Whatever drawn by the lash, drawn by the sword, we will do. It's just an amazing ability to understand us. And he took, he's the one who reached back over the constitution and plucked Jefferson back into significance. And so when he gives the Gettysburg address for scourge and seven years after the 87 years after the signing of the declaration, he's creating the 2 .0 operating system that we have now.

1:28:31We really do mean it that all men are created equal. And that now, because of the sacrifices, not a proper word in that entire address. You know, the guy before him, Edward Everett noted order, spoke for more than two hours. And he spoke for two minutes. And Everett wrote him and he said, Mr. President, I should flatter myself if I thought I came to the heart of the matter in two hours as you did in two minutes. Wow. It is. There's so many walls in the work that we have. And people said, well, what would you learn differently? And you go, oh my God, are you kidding? Every day is this revelation, this sort of tsunami that breaks over you of new information.

1:29:08And then it's just, what is it that I can save? You'd assume, you'd presume completely understandably that making a documentary film on the American Revolution is additive. Right? You're building this thing. It's not. I live in New Hampshire. We make maple syrup. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. And so it's all reductive. We will, we have 12 hours in this six part series. And we've got more than 500 hours of material filming reenactors for years. Some of them dressed in French uniforms, some of them dressed in malicious, some of them in British, some of them in, you know, Continental, some of them German Hessian, some of them native, all of that stuff.

1:29:56And then we're using it to help the building blocks of doing it. At the same time, we've collected more than 12 ,000 of paintings and drawings. We've taken maps. We've got more maps in this than in all the other films we've made combined. Sometimes we're just taking an old archival map and leaving it alone. Sometimes we're taking an old archival map and just putting red and blue lines showing the movement of British and Continental soldiers. Sometimes we're taking maps and sort of making our own hybrid map that gives us a little bit more control. But all of these things were just practicing. I mean, I looked at something earlier today, which was just a minute change on a map that we highlight where a British admiral wanted to attack all these seaport towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and Maine.

1:30:44And the last one is Machiaz, which is up near the Canadian border. And we weren't seeing it. So we were trying to figure out how to light up marble head and Cape Ann and Gloucester and Port Smith and New Hampshire and Sacco Maine was then the main department of Massachusetts and then Falmouth, which is now Portland Maine and Machiaz. And so we'll spend months trying to just get that one thing right. No one, if we hadn't done it, no one would care except for us. It's that little thing. I have friends who are woodworkers and they'd never hide a mistake. They'd never had a mistake. There's a kind of craftsmanship to all of that.

1:31:30You know, out in the woods by yourself, just how you relate to nature, a kind of purity, a kind of intention that you have in relationship to it. I know you know all of that. I think one of the things that's fascinating is that the isolation in which you work and the environment in which you live, which does highlight the majesty of nature and the humility of it all. You know, in the expression of your work, you're giving this vision to people that a lot of them are living in this world that creates uniquely anxious and disconnected people. Because we're living in these urban environments without nature, because we're of light pollution, we see no stars.

1:32:20I think it's one of the reasons why we're one of the most confused societies ever. Art, and I think documentary film work is clearly art, especially art in providing an understanding of the true events of history. Yes. It gives people a sense of what it really means to be a human being in a different way. It illuminates these aspects of humanity in a different way that allows people just this kind of glimpse into like, what are we made out of? Like, what is it about us that makes us who we are and why do we do what we do? This episode is brought to you by Visible. I want to let you in on something.

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1:33:52Terms apply, see visible .com for planned features and network management details. I can't imagine any human being could say it better than that, Joe. I think that's exactly right. This disconnection that we feel has come from the fact that we have become transactional beings. Yes. Nothing is transformational. And that we yearn nonetheless for that kind of transformation that takes place in our lives. And as Americans, those of us fortunate enough to be Americans with all the problems that are attendant to that statement. We have this glorious past that has the ability to take us out of that stupor that take us out of that rut to be able to say.

1:34:38And with the exception of a film on Leonardo, the 40 or so films that I've done some of their hour long, some of them are 20 hours long are all about us. Right? All about us. And the thing that I was describing about the US and us is that I realize there's only us. There's no them. All of our world is about them of creating a them. The artificiality that that despots or autocrats always have to make a that there's got to be an enemy out there in order to do that. But there's only us. And the important obligation that we have is to tell our stories to everybody. That is to say, I do not wish to preach to the congregation, whatever my congregation is.

1:35:29I do not wish to preach to the choir. I wish to say we have an extraordinary country. I mean, I'm interested in its voices, I realize. I'm interested in its complicated voices, the true, honest, complicated voices of American history. That's on a freight of controversy and tragedy, but equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest a biting faith in the human spirit. And particularly the remarkable role this republic plays in the positive progress of mankind. That's my play. That's my sandbox. It's a great sandbox. It's really great. And there's implied discipline in that. Work with people.

1:36:18I mean, for decades and decades and we work really hard and we want to do a good job. And it's sincere in that regard. And because, as I said, it's PBS with one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out, you can make decisions that don't have to do whether with, you know, whether it's going to enrich your bank account. I mean, there are so many ways to measure richness that don't have to do with the bottom line. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that Americans have done it, we've incubated lots of great ideas because of those two oceans and those two relatively benign.

1:36:49One of the things, and to Tocqueville noticed this when he came here in the 1830s, which so into money and the almighty dollar, he called it, that was the religion of America. And that has its cost. It obviously has some nice attributes, but it has a spiritual cost. That is profound. You know, the Old Testament again said, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to reach the kingdom of heaven. Yeah. And that's tough for Americans to hear. It is so tough for Americans to hear, particularly since we have so many preachers who are certain that it's okay to be both.

1:37:34You know, and at some point you have to realize, you know, something is lost and there is richness in relationships. There's richness in children. There's richness in art and associations in knowledge in, I mean, your curiosity is so palpable. You know, I was listening to you speaking to my friend, Elliot West, who's written about the Buffalo native peoples and the sort of prehistory of the American West. And you can just hear, there is this preternatural sort of interest in curiosity and like, how does it work? We're all given a really short period of time. And the bad news is, maybe it's the bad news, maybe it's also the good news, is none of us are getting out of here alive, none of us.

1:38:27And then it comes back to us, what are we going to do? Yeah. What are we going to do? And it doesn't matter, you don't have to make documentary films, you don't have to have radio shows, you can raise a child, you can tend to garden, you can build a bridge. You know, all of these things are legitimate. It just requires your full attention and willingness to engage in that. Whatever it might be. Whatever it is. I've got a friend in my little town, I've known him for 40 years. I think we probably have opposite political views, I don't know. But I adore this man, he builds stone walls. He's like, if you come to my house and you see the walls that he's built, it's like, you know, you don't need to go to Charter on Notre Dame.

1:39:15You just say, whoa, Dougie did this really great job here.

1:39:27Yeah. Yeah, that's the best of my ability. People always say, do you ever go back to your earlier films and want to change it? And I go, no, right? It's like, it's like a photo album where you go back and you're wearing a paisley shirt with a big collar and you go, who the hell thought that was a good look? But you don't tear that picture out of the album and say, that's who I was. That's the time. That's the time, that's who I was. What an extraordinary hypocrisy to have a rich preacher. I was thinking that way, you're saying that, you know, based upon that biblical quote, what a bizarre, like blatant in your face, hypocrisy to have a rich preacher.

1:40:08Jesus Christ did not intend to start a religion. Other people who liked what he said started a religion long after he was crucified. So, religions themselves is so interesting that all of them that have at the root of their philosophy, the exact same thing. All of them, you know, about doing to others. It's essentially about love. And yet, religions seem to be sometimes the cause of most of the pain in there. It means that somewhere along the line from the original message to the expression, stuff gets corrupted. And you can convince yourself that having as a guru and Oregon 52 Rolls Royces. Or a giant arena where you have your congregation meet you at every Sunday.

1:41:03It's just such a uniquely American thing, the mega church pastor. And uniquely sort of adapted to this bizarre society where the bottom line is numbers. It's ones and zeros on a ledger. It's important, you know, let's not downplay it. It's better than not having any money. It's better than not having any money. But it shouldn't be the job. She'll be foot who is our talking head in the Civil War said that money, the only thing it could buy you, is privacy and service. Meaning, you know, you can get somebody to mow your lawn if you need that to happen. And you can be a little bit private. But if you think it's going to be doing a lot, lot more than that, you've already begun to atrophy those that awareness of being alive.

1:41:47That I think everybody wants to feel that sense of vivifying oneness. It's also a foolish pursuit to try to be better than people by just having more numbers. It's a really crazy thing. You know, the poor in the United States, the studies have shown give away well more of their disposable income. You know, if you've got a hundred bucks and your friend comes up and says, hey man, I need a hundred bucks and give a hundred bucks. If you've got a thousand bucks and somebody goes up and says, hey, I want a hundred bucks, you go, well then I will not have a thousand. I will have only 900. And this works all the way up to a hundred billion.

1:42:26You're right. I know that is. It's so interesting that somehow this is what we think is. Or even the folks who are dedicated to spending, prolonging their lives with these other things. It really is the quality of life is the much more important thing. Right. How generous you are. You know, I always tell my girls when they're in trouble, I say the three things. And one is this won't last. Get help from others and be kind to yourself. You know, just there's no yes buts to those. I mean, which is where when you're a teenager anxious, there's always an adult. There's always a kind of a yes but, you know, just things will change.

1:43:17It always does. There's always change. Maybe gets worse, maybe gets better, probably gets better. And it's no harm in reaching out to other people. And the hardest thing about this to be kind to yourself. Yes. I say the same things. And I also say, find something that you love, not that people love you for. That's right. Find the thing that you, whatever it is, that you're uniquely drawn to and let that change over time. If you don't want, if you don't love that anymore and there's a new thing that you love, pursue that. But find the thing that really calls to you. This is what Robert Penn Warren meant when he said to me, careerism is death.

1:43:53He just was saying, you got to find that thing. And people, when I talk to students, they want to know what the secret is. I go, there's only two secrets. One is to know yourself. And that may be understanding that I thought I wanted to be a filmmaker but I don't have anything to say. And it's perfectly legitimate to do something else, to change that thing if you do it. And the others to persevere because there's in every single situation, many more people wanting to be in front of a mic every day. Then there are the possibility of being in front of the mic every day. And so you have to work at it really hard.

1:44:33You can't make assumptions about it. Sometimes you have to do, you know, I sort of felt like moving to New Hampshire was in the Godfather going to the mattresses. You know, it's like, okay, I got handed a job. I needed a job. And I was just so worried that I was going to put the film that I had shot for this first film in the Brooklyn Bridge on top of my refrigerator. And I would just wake up and I'd be 45 years old. And I would have, you know, not finished it. And so I got offered a job, which was like, you know, being offered $800 ,000 a year today. And I said, no, and I moved to New Hampshire where I could live for nothing and finished the film.

1:45:08How did you choose New Hampshire? I had a lot of friends. I'd gone to school in Western Massachusetts and had a lot of friends or hippies and others that sort of after sort of alternative stuff. That after they had not, some had gone to New York and pursued sort of traditional professional lives. But others had become book salesmen or open a natural food store or were a weaver or whatever it might be. And so a lot of them gravitated in Southern Vermont and Southern New Hampshire. A little kind of nice little look. And so I ended up going to this town and had literally, I mean, I walked in. I rented the house for the first two years, first few years and bought it after my daughters were born.

1:45:48And I've lived, I've been in the same bedroom for 46 years. Wow. And I don't feel cut off or starved. I know every part of the country, my films have covered every part of the country and part of the shoe leather that we have to do with PBS. You know, because they don't have the big budgets to smother the American Revolution coming November 16th. So every bus and subway and billboard is you go out and you talk to people. And that puts you in touch and at the same time you have this place to retreat and restore. And every morning I take a three mile walk with my dog into the into the, you know, what looks like 18th century America.

1:46:31Wow. You know, I mean, talk about rich, that's pretty rich, right? Right, you can't buy that. You cannot. Yeah, that's really so important. Really, because it's like, it's the greatest perspective and answer ever. It is. I always say that about going to the mountains. There's, there's nothing different. There's nothing, there's nothing about it that you can recreate artificially. Like you, you, you have to go to the actual source of nature, the true source of nature to really appreciate that. I think it's like a vitamin. I think just like you get vitamin D from the sun, I think you get something from actual pure nature.

1:47:15I agree, capital N. Yeah. I agree completely nature. I think, you know, Americans, you know, manifest destiny basically says see that, you know, that river. Let's dam it. See that forest. Let's calculate the board feet, see that canyon. What minerals can be extracted? That's okay. And we've done that with 98 % of the of the continental United States. But we also, in the midst of all of that, set aside these places that were so spectacularly beautiful, like Yosemite or Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon or Zion or Bryce or Kenya or the Everglades or Acadia or Smokies. And just said, I want my children and my children's children's children to be able to see these.

1:47:58That's one of the most extraordinary things about this country is what Teddy Roosevelt did with national lands. We, for the, that's why I said it's the declaration applied to the, no other countries. We invented national parks. Every other country is, every other country has followed suit. Because we were saying land is not belong to a monarch or to the nobleman or to the very rich. And just reverse engineer that for a second and say, okay, we don't have national parks. So Yosemite and Zion are gated communities. You can't, you maybe have one little observational place along the Grand Canyon to look.

1:48:35The Everglades was long ago drained and his golf courses and strip malls and apartments. It's one of the most diverse ecological environments on earth as flat as it is. It's just spectacularly diverse. It's kind of a mess now. And, and the, and Yellowstone would be a down on its luck. Hey, day in the 1950s, a amusement place called Geyser World. And so, but it's not that. You, you and I, and everyone within the sound of my voice own the most beautiful spots on a continent. And I would argue in many cases the most beautiful spots on the earth. Yeah. It's pretty great. And it gives us that unfettered ability to go into nature to get off the trail, which 90%.

1:49:22We can admit it. There's nothing wrong with that 90 % of the people stay within a hundred yards of any trail, but to get off the trail and go out and see the magnificence of this planet. You know, the Colorado River. Yeah, you stand. And you know the thing I like about the parks is that it isn't just what you see is who you see it with. Like you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon. And the Colorado River exposes pre -Cambrian Vishnu Shist that is 1 .7 billion years old. That's almost half the age of the planet itself. But the Grand Canyon works if you also are holding somebody's hand. Right? It's like who you see it with becomes central to the experience of it.

1:50:11It's a miracle to the grand geological library, all of the strata. It was like a library of telling stories of what was going on. It's why I love American sports. I really love them. But I focus on baseball because in football, the description is, oh, you know, Joe Montana threw the cherry rice with a few seconds left and we scored a touchdown and we won. Or Michael Jordan hit the three -pointer at the buzzer, tongue wagging and we won. But the baseball story always begins, my mom or my dad took me to this game and I remember walking out and seeing the green of the thing. And then Babe Ruth hit a home runner and guaranteed a home runner or somebody, you know, pitched the perfect game.

1:50:52It's all gauged with who you see it with as well as what the thing is. Wow. Yeah. Baseball is a unique American pastime because it's boring. You know, it's exciting. It's not for those moments. It's not for those of us who love it. And it was always the national pastime. It's had competition. I think one of the reasons why we sort of relegate it to this thing is that most of the other forms of entertainment, particularly in sports, are a little bit more fast -moving. Yeah. George Will said to me, though, who's a big football fan, he says football has two of the worst features of American life.

1:51:33Violence punctuated by frequent committee meetings. Right. What a great quote. What a fantastic quote. Yeah. No, but baseball has this thing. It's the only sport in which the defense has the ball. Right? The person scores not the ball. Right. And where do you go? Home. Yeah. And statistics matter. Like maybe you know how many yards Tom Brady has, the greatest of all time? Mm -hmm. Probably you don't. But you know how many home runs, Babe Ruthhead, and how many home runs, Hank Aaron Het, and you know these are things that matter. And if you look up the 1919 World Series, it says that the Cincinnati Red Stockings won the 1919 World Series.

1:52:17There's no asterisk. But then those numbers require you to tell stories about the Chicago White Sox known to us forever as the Black Sox, who took money from Arnold Rossine and other gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series and give it to the much lesser team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. It is great that the statistics matter. A 300 hitter means the same thing to my dad as it does to my grandfather and my great -great -grandfather and my great -great -great -great -great -grandfather. But you still have to tell stories. Mm -hmm. Yeah, it's, I mean, the stories are so important to people too. I mean, it does, it's something that is a part of their life that they tune into to give their life more meaning.

1:53:09And that's the something that I never understood about team sports when I was younger because I never liked them. Because I was always in... I always felt like I don't like team sports because I don't want to lose because Billy drops the ball in the back of the outfield. I don't want to be a loser because somebody else fucked up. I wanted to be entirely dependent upon me. Then after a while I started realizing like, no, there's a richness to being a fan. There's a quality of life that comes, there's an experience that comes from you. Everyone being united in this thing, like wanting the team to win.

1:53:44That doesn't exist in individual sports. It doesn't, I agree with you completely. There's something wonderful I was just talking to my best friend about us the other day. That my daughter was at school and she was the co -captain mildest daughter of her Supple game. And 25, 30 years ago we went to some Misty Saturday morning game. And it was like they were winning three to two in the bottom of whatever the last inning was. And the other team had the bases loaded and no outs. And we got three force outs. And it was like the girls just immediately burst into tears. But it was just an amazing thing.

1:54:22Or you're driving in a suburban or a city area and there's a ball game going on. And kind of slow. You lift your foot off the accelerator as the pitch goes. You know, as it goes, there's something suspended as the pitch is heading from the pitcher to the batter something. Everything stops and possibility is suddenly there in front of you. So I love the game so much. It's just a game that if you try to introduce it today, it'll be very difficult to sell. You know, it's so funny. I get to more often than not and haven't been in a while because I'm such a dull boy and working so much to Fenway Park.

1:54:59And it's always just filled with people and it's always got lots of kids. And they're always there because they want to be my screen saver of my phone are my two daughters at a red... My two youngest daughters at a Red Sox game, you know, 10 or 15 years ago. I haven't been taking it off the thing. You know, this one's now a sophomore at Georgetown University and this one is going into ninth grade. But they were like eight and 13 then. Wow. And look at the expressions on their face. Yeah. It's just pure joy. Pure joy. It's, I mean, it really is uniquely American. And it's accompanied nearly every decade of our national narrative.

1:55:43Even into the 17th century, there are bits of pieces in which there seems to be some stick -and -ball game. And then, before the Civil War and the decades before the Civil War, they begin to combine rounders, sort of a British school yard game with cricket and do something. And it's a lot better than both called baseball. And you know what? There was a guy in 1858 named Pito Bryant, he said. You know, they don't play baseball the way they used to when I was a kid. This is 1858. I don't mean they don't play it with the same rules or the same way. They just lost the spirit of it. So we've always been saying, something's wrong, something's gone out of the game.

1:56:24It's not quite right. And there's always not true. And just it continues on. The steroid era, to me, was really fascinating because one of the things about baseball being so uniquely American, is that the idea of someone cheating at this uniquely American thing was particularly offensive. Whereas at the same time, people were 100 % taking steroids for football. Oh, yeah. Bill Romanowski was, you know, there was bottom of the fold of the New York Times. But as soon as the baseball player was implicated, it was the top of the fold. And that told you, even though the NFL had long overtaken baseball as kind of the national pastime or football had done that.

1:57:11And I think it has to do with the sense that it, I mean, it does allow stealing of bases. But you're absolutely right. There is strategy. There is that wonderful thing about baseball that it seems kind of pure. Yeah. It seems American. And to cheat at that is offensive. And as she does that. And that's why, you know, I used to say, out of some, I mean, bear us by the kind of arrogance of it, I used to say, well, they should not, they should let Pete Rose in after the Hall of Fame after he dies. Now he's died. And I'm still, I sort of feel like, who am I to say that? Certainly the Hall of Fame isn't like a list of angels.

1:57:53But I also still am not sure he should go in. Or she'll list Joe Jackson as much as you want to resurrect the great story of the most promising of the Chicago White Suckings in 1919 that through the World Series, the Black Stockings. I don't know. I mean, it's very complicated. We'll Roger Clements, we'll some of these other people that we know were juicing Barry Bonds. We, you know, we, he was Barry Bonds doing interviews is clearly, or arguably the greatest player that's ever played baseball. And you could even say to the moment he decided he looks at McGuire and says so he knows he's got, it's tons more talent than them.

1:58:35And they're getting all the attention. And he says, I can do this. He's still got, he's, he's right then, he's a first ballot Hall of Famer and would arguably, if he just stopped right then and just quit and said whatever. But decisions are made and then it becomes back to Shakespeare and negative capability. And can you hold intention, the great prodigious gifts and the, in this case, the sort of shortcut of the way in which these gifts were corrupted. But it was so uniquely American that there was congressional hearings on steroids use in a support. Yeah. Which was very strange. And again, while simultaneously it's ubiquitous used in football.

1:59:20And you also live in a society in which you take a pill to deal with erections, you take a pill for this, you take a pill to sleep. You take a pill to sleep, to wake up, to all, we're all drug. And, and, and once person made in our 10th inning, the update to the series on baseball that came out in 94, 10th inning came out in 2010. They said, look, you know, what if you're a scrap scraping, you know, middle end field or second basement, short stop. And the everybody's taken steroids in the clubhouse, everybody knows about the baseball has no rules against it right now until. And, and it's the difference between you getting that four year 28 million dollar contract that in which your family is set for life, you're from the Dominican Republic, you're from, you know, wherever you're from.

2:00:06And maybe ending up in AAA and that's it. Yeah. And then you realize, and, and you're being told by every signal of society, take something to be better. Yes. This, this then complicates the entire dynamic of our, of our judgments of the facility of saying, oh, I'm really absolutist. I, I know this, you know, I, and I realize the more I go, the more disappointed I am in the arrogance of my certainty before, you know, I think one of the big things is, you know, we think that the opposite of faith is doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty, which destroys the mystery of the unknown.

2:00:52And so I, I'm always taken aback sometimes more often in retrospect than in the moment when I could possibly do something about it that I have been more certain about something. And, and less trying to see it from another person's point of view or from the other side of the coin or whatever it might be, or maybe there's many different facets to, to these things. As we were talking about with regard to the revolution and slavery and, and how, what responsibility of imposing the morality of this moment on the previous moment, how much did that previous moment already understand the morality of it, which they did.

2:01:31What, what's the right answer? And I think, I think staying open to the questions I know in filmmaking has made us better filmmakers. And I, it's not a royal week. I, I don't do this alone. There are a lot of people that, that I work with. They're handmade. It's a small little nucleus of people, but they, they deserve credits writers and co -directors and co -producers and, and, and people who are digging in the archive cinematographer I've worked with for 52 years. I think this is so important for people to hear, because I think this very unique and noble perspective that you have is why your work resonates so much with people.

2:02:08I agree. I think what it is is that whatever, I don't want to say sacrifices, but whatever discipline has been imposed on the process of whatever it is we do, people recognize that. Yes. And they know that they can see something. They may not like all the aspects of it, because it is complicated. And, and, and you do see not just the intimacy of us, but you also see the complexity and the contradiction and a controversy along with the majesty of the US. It's all there. But I do think that they know that we have earned their attention. That's the biggest thing we have. Like, you know this. You're, you're asking an extraordinary amount of people right this second.

2:02:59You're asking them to devote their attention. I mean, my, the longest episode I've ever done is like in two hours and 20 minutes, two hours and 30 minutes. That's, that required every skill I had to be able to make that over 10 years. There's an episode, the fourth episode of World War Two, a film called The War. But mostly it's two hours. And it is a supreme compliment if somebody will give me their attention for that amount of time. And then maybe for 10 episodes or nine episodes, or in the case of the American Revolution, just six per total of 12 hours. That is a huge, huge responsibility of trying to keep, trying to earn someone's attention.

2:03:40And that, that's our job is really just making sure that that person who does not know who's ignorant, but curious, which is of course perfectly fine. If you're willfully ignorant, I really can't help you. But if you're curious and ignorant, then we want to make sure that if you've given us your attention for this two hours of the first episode of the revolution and then stay for all 12 hours that, you know, we want to make sure that we've earned it. In, in the simplest way that the equation is not at all above. There's no communication in this world. You already know this except among equals.

2:04:19Like if I look up or down already, I've dislocated the possibility and the only communication is among equals. And that's, you treat your audience like they know something, not that they're familiar with this subject, but they're not stupid. And they don't, they don't have to be added some sort of. Pablo, you don't have to simplify it. It can be complex because if it is, it'll, they'll recognize either themselves or they'll recognize somebody that they know that's very close to them. And that's the essence of good story is its human beings telling stories about other human beings and what they do.

2:04:57That has a resonance that, that a cruise like the layers of a pearl, imperceptively, you can't identify, but you know, and of course a pearl is based on an irritant, a grain of sand that's bothering the hell out of that, you know, oyster, right? You've created this gem out of the friction and irritation and resistance and perseverance of having to do something. I think one of the most uniquely American stories that you've told is the story of Jack Johnson. Yeah, it's, you know, it's interesting because one of the great themes in American history is race. I mean, it's obvious because we were founded on the ideal that all men are created equal.

2:05:41And the guy wrote that sentence on hundreds of human beings and didn't see Fedon as a lifetime to free them. But you also have individuality and what is with Jack Johnson, like a good back boxing match, you have a black man who also just wants to be a man, wants to be fully himself. Now the society doesn't really want him to do that and they're going to put lots of constraints and he's going to overcome those constraints. And then when he does, they're going to find another way to box him in. James Earl Jones was really great on this. He was, he was almost saying, do not just be constantly distracted by the question of race.

2:06:16This is somebody who wanted to be a man, his own person and that a great deal of Jack Johnson and all the travails and all the things that he went through and all the great, great, great skill. I mean, Muhammad Ali, we made a film on Ali too, which I'm really, really proud of. But he's clearly studied Jack Johnson. He knew they would watch those films. Robodope is Jack Johnson. A lot of that making the wearing your opponent out is Jack Johnson from, you know, an earlier century. And this is a time, I mean, his heyday is between 1905 and 1915 when more African Americans were lynched for looking sideways at somebody.

2:06:58And he's openly defeating every great white hope that came at him and dating white women and marrying white women. And so, you know, we call the film, it's, you know, mostly we'd like to have kind of boring things like the American Revolution, Brooklyn Bridge, the Vietnam War. But we call that film, unforgivable blackness, the rise and fall of Jack Johnson. And I did that because the great black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois at the turn of the 20th century said boxing is in great disfavor. Jack Johnson seems to be the cause. But Jack Johnson did nothing that no other boxer or sportsman or even senator has done.

2:07:45Why then as it come, as it come to him, it all comes down then to his unforgivable blackness. But by taking the crown by defeating all comers, it was an unacceptable situation. When in those days, being the heavyweight champion was, there was a sense of this was the supreme masculinity of the world. And that everyone went out of their way from John Sullivan to others to avoid fighting a black man. And finally, somebody paid Tommy Burns guaranteed $30 ,000 to fight Jack Johnson on boxing day. What was that worth today? Oh my God. Oh my God. Millions and millions of dollars. Jack only got $5 ,000.

2:08:26But he's happy to do it. He's been going after Tommy Burns. No relation in Tommy Burns with the pseudonym. I can't remember his name in Canadian. Anyway, in Australia, they fight on the day after Christmas 1908. And Jack Johnson just totally could probably could have taken care of him in the first inning. And he just keeps it going. They finally cut the newsreels off. They actually stop the fight. Because they do not want the public to see this. And when after having digested, I think it's a good word. All of the white hopes that were thrown at him in the interviewing intervening year and a half.

2:09:01They finally convinced Jim Jeffries, the guy who'd retired undefeated the previous champion before Tommy Burns to come out and in Reno on July 4, 1910, the fight of the century. Jack Johnson defeated, you know, no one thought it would happen. Jim Jeffries. And there were riots all across the country, all across the country, white on black riots. The Los Angeles Times wrote their their lead editorial was a word to the black man. Do not lift your chest up too high. Do not put your face up to the sun. Do not you are still the same lowly person you were yesterday just because Jack Johnson. And I mean, the idea that that, you know, it goes back to this issue, Washington knew it was wrong.

2:09:54Jefferson knew it was wrong. They made so much money. It was really hard to do this. I mean, Jefferson himself said, slavery is like holding a wolf by the ears. You don't like it, but you don't dare let it go. Right. And so what happens is that. Somebody like an Abraham Lincoln is born anti slavery. Right. But they're also a developing abolitionist movement. So now they want to abolish slavery. They're not just against it and understand that it's a moral God never know where does God say that that black people are inferior to white people. But what happens is even though most of the slavers know that it's wrong, but there's so many good profits to make what happens when the abolitionists come along.

2:10:45That they begin to make arguments that slavery is actually good and that black people are in fact inferior. And so one of the reasons why the Civil War happens is this sense of threat to their economic power, which are the four million people in the nine million populated south that are owned by other human beings. And it's an extraordinary dynamic. We face it today, the reverberations and Jack Johnson, I think is one of those magnificent cases where he, he just defies your ability to put it in a neat cubby hole defies your ability to make it binary. Like we live in this media culture, right? We live in a computer world.

2:11:23Everything's a one or a zero. Everything's a red state or a blue state. Everything's young or old, gay or straight. What it's not that way. And so to tell a complex story of history, particularly like of Jack Johnson is just to have your molecules rearrange. You know, it really is exhilarating. I probably said that word too many times. It's exhilarating. Yeah. I think it's also one of the rare cultural figures that where a sports figure defines a time much like Muhammad Ali defying the Vietnam era. Like Muhammad Ali, when, when I was a child, my parents were hippies and they never cared about sports at all except when Muhammad Ali lost to Leon Spinks and then had the rematch.

2:12:11We all watched. I remember this being a child thinking how strange it was that my parents were so invested in Muhammad Ali. But what they were invested in is this man that risked his entire career and livelihood. They took his livelihood for three years for protesting the Vietnam war and refusing to go fight. And it was a big thing because he was a cultural hero. It wasn't just that he was the best boxer ever. He was also this guy that said, I'm not doing this. The Vietnamese people didn't do anything to me. I'm not participating in this. I'm not going to go kill anybody. I'm not doing this. And we were all like, yes.

2:12:51And then they took his livelihood away and he became a martyr. He became a hero and, you know, spoke out against the war. And then it was three solid years in his prime before he came back. Yeah. It's an amazing story. And we told it just a few years ago in a four part eight hour series. I agree with you 100%. I'm a little bit older. I remember when Sonny Liston and then Cache's clay fought in Miami. And he was such a new commodity. He was rocking the boat with this verbal onslaught that we were for a nanosecond. Sorry, that Sonny Liston lost because he was the person that we were familiar with.

2:13:37We knew this kind of black man. And we did not know this other scarier verbal person. And almost instantly, and my dad was an anthropologist. I mean, this was boxing. He was not doing the thing. But from then on, we became just loyal. We watched all the stuff through the 60s and then saw his opposition into the war. And then he said, you know, you could come and mow me down with the machine gun. I'm not going to go. And and the ABC did some interviews with black soldiers in Vietnam. And they all to a person said, this is why I'm fighting is why I'm here. I'm fighting for him to say I don't want to be here.

2:14:14And I just I just thought it was great. And I also wanted to do this because nobody people had done certain fights. People had done his fight with the government. And I wanted to do soup the nuts. We wanted to do soup the nuts. My daughter oldest daughter Sarah and my son while David McMahon. We made the film from birth to the death. This guy is in the late 60s, the most hated man in America for that stance that you were describing about the drug and he dies the most beloved person on the planet. And I really love the idea. I love the opportunity of being able to show how that happened in the midst of, you know, they call it the sweet science, but there are some fights.

2:14:54So the three fights with Frazier are like as brutal as anything you could ever possibly imagine. And and what they went through and what he ultimately clearly in retrospect lost as a result of winning two of the three of the fights. This is is one of those miraculous stories. And I agree, like Jack Johnson is is defining an age and so interesting that it's in a marginalized activity, like even back then, like heavyweight boxing. Well, marginalized, but still elevated the heavyweight champion of the world was still the baddest man on the planet and people still wanted to watch it, but it was thought to be a.

2:15:38A back room sort of darkly lit dingy pursuit. You learned it in the dangerous gyms. It's not something that you learn on a college campus with educated professors and analysts that have reviewed proper technique, which is how they teach in Russia, you know, that Russia has a very technical version of what they do in America is well to now, but not like that. Now back then, it was it was the dark dingy gyms mob sporting this sporting world. And you were there. There are gamblers. There are women of the night was, you know, money was being changed. A lot of lots of lots of thrown fights and was in the interest.

2:16:24It was so interesting that that I merged this person who was so resolutely himself, just as Muhammad Ali would be a decades later. It's why I'm drawn to it. I'm not a big fan of boxing. But it's irresistible. We can't take her eyes away from these two men when they're fighting their first of all spectacular specimens. And they are amazing fighters. They changed the whole dynamic. And as you said, there's no greater boxer than Muhammad Ali. Well, the really terrible thing is Muhammad Ali's best years were taken from him. Because if you go to 1967, I've talked about this numerous times on the podcast when he fought Cleveland big cat Williams.

2:17:02That fight was one of the most extraordinary performances of any heavyweight ever. It was Cleveland was a dangerous guy, like vicious knockout puncher. He was a real specimen himself. Yes, he was. And Ali toyed with him. I mean, toyed with him. Just box his face off, knocked him out, moving backwards. Just just picked him apart, popped him and showed movement and speed and agility and technique that we had never seen from a heavyweight ever. He was the greatest, the greatest and then three solid years. So, but here's my take. Yeah, I think this is what makes him so great. This is like Ted Williams only much bigger because Ted Williams loses a lot of time to World War II and to Korea and comes back and, you know, still hits, you know, 350 or whatever it is yet for the Red Sox having lost what you'd consider the prime of his career in his early days in World War II.

2:18:00And then, and as a fighter, this is not like the goodwill ambassador. He's flying fighter bombing runs. You know, I mean, he's like, really, it's every time he can not come back. And he's, he's a magnificent stuff, but it's not denying it as they did in both Jack Johnson. They took away his title. And he, and he was fallow from 1912 to 1915. And finally they put him in the ring in Havana with Jess Willard. He was a younger guy. He's 105 degrees, 110 degrees on the canvas. They're going to go 40 rounds after the 26th. This guy who's got 10 years on Jess Willard. He's 37. Wellards 27. You know, Willard finally gets in a thing and this like, oh, thank God.

2:18:41And they would not let another black man fight for a heavyweight champion until he was not Jack Johnson. That is to say, until he was Joe Lewis, light skinned. Couldn't be seen with a white woman. Couldn't smile at his victories. And Lewis agreed to all of this. It was the unspoken, unwritten rule that you couldn't be an in your face. Black man. And that sort of obtained for a couple of decades. And then Ali came and he said, the bolt the road and essentially based that they used to say when he was training, Ali was training. There'd be ghost in the house, ghost in the house. And that met the Jack Johnson was there.

2:19:22And that Ali had to be that much better. Wow. Ghost in the house. Wow. The Ali of three years later was a completely different fighter, unfortunately. Physically he didn't look the same because he didn't train for three years. He didn't do anything and he lost everything. I mean, he still was one of the greatest. I mean, still was able to beat Joe Lewis still was able to beat George Foreman. But he is a different fighter. He didn't move the same way. He didn't have the same physical build. He didn't look as good. He lost three solid years in his prime of training. And it makes those post Vietnam years, even more spectacular, which I think that he could prevail over, over, I mean, that the rumble in the jungle is just crazy.

2:20:10Crazy. Crazy. What he did. Yeah. What he did. Well, nobody thought he was going to win. No one thought he was. Including Harris Thompson, who famously sabotaged his career by not covering the fight. He was sent over there to cover the fight and instead decided to just swim in the pool and drink. Yeah. Because he didn't want to watch Ali get destroyed. Yeah. I mean, while he missed one of the greatest fights of all, I remember I was in college still and we got soundless black and white footage of the fight. But some of it in slow motion. And my film teacher showed it to us. And none of us were interested.

2:20:46I was like, whoa, this is stuff I did with my dad 10 years before. And it was him delivering a blow to Foreman and seeing in slow motion this halo of sweat coming off the afro of George Foreman. I mean, I will never forget just the spectator, almost the beauty of of of this incredibly brutal sport. Yeah, incredibly brutal brutal. But in those moments, it elevated everybody who watched it. That's the crazy irony of it all. It's like in this brutality, this beat down of another man, everybody who watched it was elevated. It's it's someone did something that we thought was impossible. Exactly. And it was that person who did it.

2:21:36This guy who stood up against the Vietnam War. And you know, at the time, we didn't realize how bad the Vietnam War would look retrospectively. Yeah. No, he he did not enjoy any benefit of the doubt. No, it was really another time of division and people exploiting division and making them. He was the worst them. That there possibly could be. And I think the fact that he was able to stick to his guns. I mean, he could have said, okay, I will go and do goodwill stuff. And it would have been all over. I said, no, I'm not going to. Right. They missly know Vietnamese ever called me the end work. Yeah.

2:22:16And just the fact that at the time we didn't understand we were still locked into this perception of military conflict being like World War II. Yes, right. Where was imperative to save the world from communism and that there was a real problem as a real threat to the American way of life in America as a whole that was going on in Vietnam, which now seems absurd. It seems absurd. There's a wonderful parallel. I mean, when I when I said that Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Like we have a failed invasion of Canada in the in the American Revolution. There's a big debate over inoculation.

2:22:54There's an eclipse that takes place. You know, all of this sort of stuff. And there's always an interesting thing is that particularly New Jersey and South Carolina, the British are always talking about we have now pacified New Jersey. The province of New Jersey. We have now pacified the province of South Carolina and then all of a sudden they have to admit that it's un -passified because the patriots have taken over and done all this guerrilla warfare that has made it un -passified. And at one point, George III and many others within the British government are worried about what we would call the domino theory.

2:23:25If we lose them, then we're going to lose Ireland. If we lose Ireland, we're going to lose Gibraltar. And we're going to lose the subcontinent of Indian. And so you go, there's nothing new under the sun. The Vietnam War and your 18 -hour piece on the Vietnam War is one of the more confusing aspects of the United States history because like looking at it today, it doesn't make any sense how we sold this. No. And every president from Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, even Ford never told us the complete truth about it. And did stuff that got Americans killed and less of other people killed over what would have been whether there's a Geneva Convention in 54 that basically said we could separate into two places and in two years we had an election, which everyone knew Ho Chi Minh would win.

2:24:22If you left it at that, we'd be talking about 3 million people still walking the earth at least. Crazy. Crazy. And the Communist Chinese and the Soviets were very suspicious of Ho Chi Minh. They thought he's not a Communist. He's just a nationalist. And he knew, I'll tell you, the day that the Japanese surrendered in Tokyo Bay officially was September 2nd, 1945. That same day in Biden Square in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence and he quoted Thomas Jefferson. Whoa. And standing next to him were OSS guys. By the end of September, the State Department having realized, oh, this world war two is over, but we're going to be in a new, they didn't call the Cold War yet, but we're going to be in an epic struggle all around the world with communism.

2:25:23And this guy has been to Moscow and whatever so he must be a communist. And so all of a sudden the State Department, the OSS, had saved his life and parachuted into Northern Vietnam looking for people that could, could mobilize in their help against the Japanese and found a second dying Ho Chi Minh. And we don't know what is malaria, whatever treated him and brought him back. And he was, he didn't see us as the enemy. And yet we in those two years in 56 when they should have held an election, we had already decided to place our, our, our, our bets with no Ding Ziam, who was a corrupt South Vietnamese politician, who would eventually be assassinated by, you know, in general, who would be a one in a series of generals until we got to you and key.

2:26:08And those were the people who took us. Out of it, or, or were on their watch when, when the North Vietnamese, you know, finally, you know, they're country. It's, it's just, and the lying, you know, that we have the tapes of Johnson and of Nixon, and, and it just, you know, there's an arrogance to record yourself for posterity, you know, and be careful what you say, the some of the things that not all of them have been listened to, they haven't all been transcribed. And we were fortunate to spend a lot of time just listening and listening and finding just some stuff that, you know, if, if Nixon and Kissinger had walked into the peace talks that were already started in January of 69, and taken the terms that the North Vietnamese were offering, they would have had better terms than what they had in 73.

2:26:58And there would be fewer Americans, lot more Americans alive, 25 ,000 more Americans alive, something like that, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese leotians and Cambodians. But they didn't want to be the first president to lose a war. In fact, they'd already soured the South Vietnamese. They said as Humphrey was coming up in, in the polls, he only lost by 0 .7 points of a percentage in, in the election. And he'd been way behind it was making a lot of speed. A lot of it had to do with what people perceived as progress in Paris. And the Nixon administration, or not administration, the Republican Party of the Nixon's election came reached out through an intermarriediary to the South Vietnamese government and said boycott the talks in Paris.

2:27:43And if you'd had another week or two to the election, you would have had a Hubert Humphrey as president, or if they hadn't reached out to the South Vietnamese, and Johnson got it on tape, they were taping the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington and the palace in Saigon, and he knew it. And he called up Nixon, there's a tape, and he goes, oh, I would never do anything like that. And Johnson either pissed off at Humphrey because he's not as much as a hawk as Johnson had become, or more than likely unwilling to admit to your allies that you had been taping them in their own embassy in Washington and their own palace in Saigon did not tell the truth of what he knew that Richard Nixon had essentially reached out to a foreign power at the time of a national election to try to influence that election.

2:28:33Wow. Yeah, I mean, it's just endless. And the reverberations, like the one thing that it did that I think is like so pivotal is it destroyed the faith that the United States citizens had in its government telling them the truth. And in engaging in military activities, because we had always thought we were a just government, we were a just society, and that if we got into World War II was to save the world. If we got into Vietnam, it was to save the world. Oh, no, it wasn't. Not only that, we got in on the lie. We literally got into the war on a false flag. So it was entirely engineered. And then there was also the heroin production, which was a big part of the whole thing.

2:29:13The heroin trade, there was money that was being allocated to various individuals through the heroin trade that was facilitating a lot of it. It's very confusing stuff when you look at it over time, and you look back at it, you're like, what would the United States look like had clear heads prevailed? Absolutely. What would we look like today? The counterfact. Well, I think we'd be less divided. I think a good deal of the divisions now were sort of born in there that entrenched positions that people take now. I think there's also a sense. The Pentagon papers were McNamara going to a gentleman that we interviewed, Robert Cardin, and saying, I need to find out all the decisions.

2:29:58And he learned not only was he lying at times, you know, going and getting battlefield reports and then coming back and saying it's all rosy, but everybody had been lying back to the Truman administration about what was going on. And it was just a series of lies. And that's what when they asked the rank corporation to sort of analyze some of the data, that's when Daniel Ellsberg, who worked for the rank corporation, certitiously illegally copied them and then released them. To various newspapers, and they became, you know, what we call the Pentagon papers, but they were always the Pentagon papers.

2:30:34And they detail exactly what you just described. Just a complete president, you know, president of both parties, a military industrial economy. You know, when when Eisenhower leaves, just before he leaves, he warns of the military industrial complex. He's not saying this is something that happened last Thursday. Right. He's saying this happened the second World War II was over. Even before that, I mean people talked about it in 33 people. There was so much money to be made that nobody wanted to ramp down the armaments. And so you end up having these proxy wars. You end up having, you know, these places where you're going to not have a hot war because that means the end of the world.

2:31:19In a world of nuclear weapons, but you're going to fight these proxy wars in different places. And in Kennedy, it's a doctrine that Eisenhower and Kennedy, and they all sort of embrace and figure out that they that they can do it. And then of course Johnson, who, you know, Kennedy inherits 700 advisers from Eisenhower, Johnson inherits 17 ,000 advisers now in quotes. When he comes in, and he still has to wait until he wins re -election overwhelmingly a year later. And it's only into the following March of 65 that he commits ground forces first army and first Marines and then army to Vietnam. And then we have the boots on the ground, even though we'd had boots on the ground for a long time and engaged in combat.

2:32:05These advisers were very much engaged in that sort of stuff. And then it just gets escalated, you know, it's a peak. It's well over 550 ,000 soldiers in American soldiers in country. And saying it's also, you know, the coming to fruition of Eisenhower's warnings. And then this inspires this counterculture of the 1960s that sort of reshapes art, reshapes culture, reshapes rock and roll politics. Politics, everything, everything changes. And then, you know, Nixon comes along and to stop the anti -war movement, to stop the civil rights movement puts these sweeping schedule one drug acts on all these different, you know, psilocybin, all these different things that they believe these people were involved in so that they could start arresting people and sort of throw water on the entire movement.

2:33:02And it's effective. It is so interesting to look and I've got to in my office this wonderful two framed maps, if you will, and they're the inter twining of the various two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans over time. So the Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party of emancipation of whatever and the party that invented progressiveism in the first part of the 20th century. Democrats had been not that place, but in the 60s it began to change thanks to Lyndon Johnson of Austin, Texas, who understood that it was the right thing to do to put in those civil rights and voting rights acts and other things that we call part of his great society by a film by the way that we're working on now, we'll be out in a few years.

2:33:48But he knew that the bargain would be to give up the solid south. I mean, you woke up on election day, if you're a Democrat and you had every one of the states of the former Confederacy, all of them, all of them in your in your tally. And that slipped and now you wake up on on election day and you, more or less, have had have all the states of the former Confederacy on the Republican side who abandoned what they were about. And it's interesting to see in which for self interest for whatever, I mean Nixon begins it. Jackie Robinson is a Lincoln Republican didn't go over as many black people did to FDR during the New Deal.

2:34:29He was supporting Nixon for president, but Nixon wouldn't come to, to, um, Carlemn campaign. Wow. So he ended up voting for Kennedy and, and he, and Goldwater fully understood that we're just going to now switch the Republican party and go after just white voters who are disaffected with changes and civil rights. And so it's, it's an interesting story of the way in which parties can change places and be the very opposite of the thing they were just a few years before. Yeah, because they're all gross. Well, I just find the thing is, you know, the bad word is progressive today. And this is, this is the, you know, the Republican party invented progressiveism and in a joint forces with some more liberal Democrats in the big cities, right, but the opposition to the civil rights bill is coming from Southern Democrats.

2:35:27And it's, it's, it's, it's Lyndon Johnson knowing that he will have to use every bit of his powers of persuasion to get it over and he will require lots of Republican votes and he does. So you, you do have something positive happening in American history where the two parties are coming together and not just lockstep where every single Republican votes for something in every single Democrat votes against it. And you just feel like somebody's there from two different planets. Yeah. Another thing about the Vietnam War, it's so crazy. It's like we've kind of accepted the fact that the United States military does things overseas that we don't want them to do.

2:36:06Because after that war, it's sort of set the stage for Afghanistan, Iraq, all those, especially Afghanistan, like this prolonged 20 year, completely, complete failure, especially in how we withdrew from it. It's like we've, we've lost a lot of faith in the decisions that are made. I actually think you have young officers like Colin Powell, who are learning the lessons of Vietnam. And so what you find is extraordinary reticence in the late 70s and the 80s in the early 90s. So the first goal for is very much a reflection of Vietnam chasing by the excesses of Vietnam. We're going to do it with a coalition.

2:36:54You know, we're going to do it with one arm tied behind our back. We're going to stop a little bit sooner. We're not going to have the full destruction of this. All these sorts of things are in Vietnam inherited, but then real politic comes in. And then all of a sudden you realize we're in Afghanistan because of 9 -11. We're pursuing this person. It's not, we had a chance to get him. We missed him. It was not our fault. And we then switched the focus to Iraq and then ended up in both places in a kind of, you know, terrific stalemate. That, as you say, just was, I think, back to being Vietnam. I mean, I always say this that if we, you know, we made our film on Vietnam, it came out in 2017.

2:37:38If I had done the film 10 years, and this is why history requires perspective. If I had done it 10 years after the fall of Saigon in 1985, there's a recession going on in the United States. It's not big. But we talk about the Pacific Rim. Japan is ascendant. We think Japan is going to be the best thing. Vietnam would be this ball and chain that we would be dragging around us forever. If I had waited 20 years to 1995, we're the sole superpower. We're in the middle of a, the largest, to that point, largest peacetime economic expansion in the history of our country. And Vietnam would always be important, but it, it wouldn't be this symbol of our, of our decline, right?

2:38:23If I had waited 30 years to 2005, when we are bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people are beginning to use the language of the Vietnam and getting stuck in these unwanted perpetual, never -ending wars, you have another view. And so the do good history is to actually get some distance and perspective. So you can look at, look at the Vietnam War from the mountaintop of 85 and 95 and 2005 and then realize I've still got other experiences, new scholarship has come, classified material has been released, more of those tapes have been listened to. There's been a mellowing among the veterans and a willingness to speak gold star mothers realize they can't hide their grief that we have won in the film.

2:39:10She can't, she knows that by telling her story, she will help thousands of other people who have lost their children yet we can interview soldiers from other sides of the conflict that seems to speak exactly like our soldiers and that you've begin to develop a way to see it more holistically. That in just a kind of journalistic and almost political response. So that was bad. We did that badly that we did this poorly. You can see it for this hugely, hugely complex machine that it was that just eight up human beings and eight up credibility. As you're saying that the United States had built up as the greatest power on earth and certainly the good guy in what we euphemistically call the good war that good war is the worst war ever more 60 million people lives were extinguished in the world war two.

2:40:02But as we said it in our film about world war two called the war one of our pilots said it was a necessary war and that's what we should be thinking about fighting necessary ones not the ones that are going to, you know, have all these ulterior things that you described. And it's also like unwinding all that bad and sort of reshaping America's perspective and the way the world perceives us takes so much time. And I think we lost so much of that post 9 -11. I think 9 -11 had the entire world in our sympathies. I agree. We were we we had been attacked the whole world thought of us as being like this shining light like wow, we have to stand against this.

2:40:46Then we go and invade Iraq and everyone's like what are you doing? What is this? There's really no weapons of mass destruction. It's all a lie. The the thing that the depression did is it got used to Americans doing without. And it made it very easy for Americans to segue into the second world war because it was about shared sacrifice something they'd learned on a domestic level they can now learn it on an international level. And they did that we had an opportunity at 9 -11 it seems to me and I haven't made a film about it and I imagine once we get enough years out it might be interesting to sort of look at that.

2:41:28We had an opportunity to collectively turn the energy that we had the grief and the and the sense of purpose even anger of that moment as well as the world's unabashed symphony sympathy for what we'd done and turn it into something productive. And yet we didn't we then as you were saying we moved into sort of rationales and justifications for Iraq that were as we know in retrospect completely fraudulent. Yeah from the outside like me looking at your work I get anxiety just thinking about the daunting task of taking on these subjects. And I know you have 10 years for some of them to like really ruminate and really figure it out but what is your process like how do you begin like you said you're going to do something on Lyndon Johnson or if you're going to do something on Vietnam like how do you what is day one look like.

2:42:27Day one is making sure that you're looking yourself in the mirror and you're going to commit to that because I'm now off like a congressman trying to raise money from foundations and corporations and individuals of wealth and the corporation for public broadcasting and things like that. But you're immediately reading you're immediately talking to scholars who spent their life maybe on this aspect or that aspect of Vietnam. We had I think it was 23 scholars all who knew one aspect and I knew we were onto something when we'd have these screenings and a scholar would comment and all the other 22 would like whip over like they hadn't heard that.

2:43:03And so the film would do that is daunting I asked Shelby foot about U .S. Grant and he said. Grant had what they call 4 o 'clock in the morning courage that meant you could tell it wake him at 4 o 'clock in the morning and tell him the enemy had turned his left flank and he'd be as cool as a cucumber. And so what you develop is 4 o 'clock in the morning courage you wake up and go and we're still doing I'm still waking up I didn't like the way that sound why didn't we trail that stuff so you just put one foot in the other you trust to process. Process is a really important thing we're all impatient and impatience kills process just like comparison is the thief of joy.

2:43:42If you're impatient then process is squandered and process teaches you really important things of how to relate to subject how to collect the material and then how to figure out how to digest that material into something that's a cohesive story that I can give to you who may be ignorant of that story. But it's daunting it's terrifying and I wouldn't have it any other way. And I think I'm speaking for the people who work with me because there's something everybody responds at 3 in the morning you know everybody says yeah what what what do we do that we can we can fix this we'll find an alternative to that to make it better and sometimes it's the niggling tiny things or sometimes it's really big to have the courage to take out an entire scene that really is working really well.

2:44:28But destabilizes the film a half an hour later and I did that in our Mark Twain film I took out this beautiful prose thing from life on the Mississippi called white town drowsing about Hannibal disguised Hannibal sort of waking up from its slumbers as it sees the puff of smoke north as the steamboats coming down and the whole town is industry and activity and loading and unloading and whatever and then by the time the puff of smoke is around the bend south everybody's back asleep again. That's called why it was just fantastic and written it was so beautifully Mark Twain is like never wrote a bad word and and I just realized we weren't getting out of the early biographical stuff soon enough and I said to my partner on the film the co producer and the writer who found that quote from from life on the Mississippi I said we're taking it out and he looks so hurt and so pain I said look I'll put it back in if you want it.

2:45:25So we left it out and I thought it work brine he came to me look sad I said I'll put it back in and for about six months we went back and forth and then finally he came to me and he said you're right and I said you can put it in the book put it in the DVD extras will do all the things that you need to do but that's the kind of four o 'clock in the morning courage you need to do is take out something that like it so it worked so well and yet you remember the movie on the days too many notes too many notes. And you just go you got to you got to do that I'd rather the reason why we have the it's complicated is because there's not a filmmaker on earth that doesn't want to change a scene that's working but we have spent our entire professional lives changing scenes that we're working when we found out new compromising sort of contradictory information and maybe it made the scene less maybe the scene disappeared but it actually serves the honor and the virtue of whatever that's story requires and this is true so many things in the American revolution that that that are close to me because we're just coming off the months and months of these unbelievable sacrifices of having to take out one phrase of a sentence or changing one little thing just to help fine tune it nobody would notice if I left it in and you looked at it twice and then I took it out the second time I don't think you'd notice it but I notice it so I'd wanted to to be and and that's the beauty of public broadcasting do is that it gives you that chance to do that there's not a single platform that would allow you to do it that way I don't think there is another platform I assume that a list directors in Hollywood who have you know the final say enjoy that is Steven Spielberg who is you know one of the great directors of all times I'm sure but there's still suits that are coming in there's still people who are giving him notes right we get notes from scholars we get notes that are sort of like this.

2:47:21You've got lots of voices of loyalists in there and that's really good because people tend to ignore the loyalists are just a de facto bad people and you don't make them bad people but you don't have a loyalist who goes through several episodes that you follow throughout the film. So we had this loyalist quote in our fourth episode in the Battle of Bennington where this guy named John Peters who's been in Vermont been driven out by the Patriots he's gone to Canada he's formed a revolution the family his wife and small infant kids are driven out they find a British patrol boat somehow on Lake Champlain they reunite he starts a regimen to loyalist regimen his 15 year old son they find themselves with Bergoyne's army around Bennington where they've been told there's great loyalist sympathies and not that many Patriots is the opposite there's no loyalist sympathies or none that anybody's speaking up or and there are lots of Patriots and they're defeated but at one moment this man John Peters is on a parapet of a quickly made redout of a fourth that you they've put up to try to repel the attacking Americans and he hears the voice of a man named Jeremiah post who is saying Peters you damn Tory which is the other insult that you would give to a loyalist and he recognizes the voice of his best friend growing up and cousin of his sister and at that moment Jeremiah post the the rebel the Patriot stabs him with the bayonet into his into his bone but it's deflected by the bone of the ribcage at that moment as Peter said I was obliged to destroy him and he kills him with his pistol wow that's the American revolution so we had that quote and it was like wow but why don't we go and put John Peters in episode one in episode two in episode three in episode four and then episode six when he's leaving and moving to Nova Scotia permanently and not going to be a part of this new deal but you want to know what their American revolution about it killing your best friend on a hill west of Bennington for month right you know what I mean I mean I mean we say kind of without thinking about the civil war brother against brother you know and it's I guess it's true a few times but the revolution is like that Henry Knox who's this sort of big amiable bookseller who Washington somehow figures out picks out of a crowd and he said oh go to Taikander Rogan get those can and recapture it earlier in the year and bring him back here I got to drive the British out of Boston and Knox does sleds impossible hundreds of miles over land and over Lake George and you know terrible weather and he gets it there but he's married to this young woman named Lucy whose parents are loyalists and so she loses in the revolution her father her mother her brother and her sisters that's the choice she made by marrying Henry Knox this sweetheart of a bookseller who learned most of his stuff about artillery and gun emplacements from the books in his bookstore and from serving as you know in the local militia and he puts the guns he gets the guns up top and the British wake up and go oh oh we're out of here and they go to they go up to Nova Scotia to regroup Massachusetts thinks the war's over they thank General Washington for his service and enjoy his retirement yes you get me I'm going to New York which is exactly right because that's where the British will attack next and the largest battle of the American revolution is the Battle of Long Island and I won't spoil it for you what happens please don't can burns your national treasure thank you so much thank you Joe this really appreciate being here I really enjoyed it and like I said I've been a giant fan of your work for a long time so this is a huge truth thank you thank you thank you go and put John Peters in episode one in episode two in episode three in episode four and then episode six when he's leaving and moving to Nova Scotia permanently and not going to be a part of this new deal but you want to know what their American revolution about it killing your best friend on a hill west of Bennington Vermont right you know what I mean I mean I mean we say kind of without thinking about the Civil War brother against brother you know and it's I guess it's true a few times but the revolution is like that Henry Knox who's this sort of big amiable bookseller who Washington somehow figures out picks out of a crowd and he said oh go to Tygon DeRogue and get those can and recapture it earlier in the year and bring them back here I got to drive the British out of Boston and Knox does sleds impossible hundreds of miles over land and over Lake George and you know terrible weather and he gets it there but he's married to this young woman named Lucy whose parents are loyalists and so she loses in the revolution her father her mother her brother and her sisters that's the choice she made by marrying Henry Knox this sweetheart of a bookseller who learned most of his stuff about artillery and gun emplacements from the books in his bookstore and from serving as you know in the local militia and he puts the guns he gets the guns up top and the British wake up and go oh oh we're out of here and they go to they go up to Nova Scotia to regroup Massachusetts thinks the war's over they thank General Washington for his service and enjoy his retirement yes you get me I'm going to New York which is exactly right because that's where the British will attack next and the largest battle of the American revolution is the battle of Long Island and I won't spoil it for you what happens please don't can burns your national treasure thank you so much thank you John this really appreciate being here I really enjoyed it and like I said I've been a giant fan of your work for a long time so this is a huge truth