1238: Ken Burns | What If the American Revolution Isn’t Over?

1238: Ken Burns | What If the American Revolution Isn't Over?

This transcript is yet untouched by human hands. Please proceed with caution as we sort through what the robots have given us. We appreciate your patience!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Special thanks to Cayman Jack for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Ken Burns: America comes out of violence. It's born in violence. People go, oh man, we are so divided. And you go, okay, when were we not divided? If you're at a point now where we are fractured seemingly beyond repair, on the verge of dissolution, whatever the chicken little sky is falling thing you're gonna say about it might be good to go back to the origin story and sort of pick it up and, and understand the complexity.

Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional [00:01:00] mafia enforcer, rocket scientist, or Russian chess grandma.

If you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, what if the American Revolution isn't over? That's not a conspiracy theory. That's how Ken Burns the legendary documentary filmmaker behind The Civil War, The Vietnam War, Baseball, and now The American Revolution sees it.

He calls the revolution the most important event since the birth of Christ. That's pretty big because for Burns, this wasn't just a war that ended in 1783. It was the start of an experiment that's still being debugged. Two and a half centuries later, his new six-part, 12 hour epic dives into the revolution, not just as a clean myth of freedom and [00:02:00] fireworks, but as a brutal, messy civil war brother against brother ideals against hypocrisy and freedom.

For some built on the backs of others. Women boycotting British goods, enslaved people fighting for liberty. They were denied Native Nations trying to survive the birth of a country that would erase them. The contradictions are staggering, and as burns shows eerily familiar, we'll talk about how a bunch of colonialists with bad wifi and no memes, believe it or not, managed to start one of the most radical political experiments in history.

What that experiment says about us. Now, we'll also dig into the propaganda of Revolution, Sam Adams Spin Skills, the first viral slogans and how every movement needs its storytellers. I had producer Gabriel Mizrahi here with me for this one. Can Gabriel and I also get into the craft, how you take on something this massive without losing the thread, why the Ken Burns Effect became a literal software feature and what keeps him curious after half a century of documenting America and maybe the biggest question of all, if the revolution isn't over, what part are we living through right [00:03:00] now?

So let's roll back the clock. 250 years and maybe fast forward a little bit too with the one and only Ken Burns right here on The Jordan Harbinger Show. You have the documentary about Vietnam. People go, wow, this is really good. It also highlights a lot of things that we maybe would rather forget.

Ken Burns: That's right. It's so funny. I was pretty worried about Vietnam and we kind of had a war room set up. We got a couple of folks from John McCain and John Kerry, who we thought would be a war room that would be able to hurl back the thunderbolts. That would inevitably come from tackling a subject as controversial as Vietnam.

And it turned out to be the opposite. Cobwebs grew on them. There was a normal kind of expected trolling in the far left and the far right over pretty interesting stuff. But it was nothing like the kind of mainstream shit we expected to get. And it, it was really, I think, had to do with a good story. A good story neutralizes, the kind of binary yes and no.

[00:04:00] You know, your bad left, right, young, old, rich, poor, whatever the dialectic is you're involved in. A good story can sort of neutralize it and go, oh wow. I didn't know that. And so there was a element because we had gone into territory we didn't know anything about, and we had scholars who were helping us understand, and each one of the scholars had one area of expertise.

And you'd be in this room with 25 scholars and somebody would speak after a, a script meeting or during a script meeting or in after a, a screening of an episode as it, it was developing. And you'd realize that all the other scholars were turning around. They never knew this information. So then the next person would talk and everybody's look, looked at her or him, and it was great.

You realize, oh wow, this is going to be the cutting edge of what scholarship has determined about. Vietnamese intelligence or military stuff recently declassified by the Vietnamese and they've not listened to all the tapes of Johnson and Nixon. They're not therefore transcribed and then somebody comes across.

We had a intern who was working [00:05:00] with us just listening all the time and went, I think I have something good here. And it was unbelievable. Wow. Moment. So you have this receptivity if you spend enough time doing it, God, we spent 10 years on that.

Gabriel Mizrahi: 10 years for 10 and a half years for a project. How do you, what is it like to be in a relationship with a subject for a decade?

Ken Burns: It's the opposite of what you're worried about. Everybody.

Gabriel Mizrahi: What am I worried about?

Ken Burns: You're worried about how could anybody ever spend that much attention on something and what if you don't like it, and what if?

Jordan Harbinger: Can you stay curious for 10 years about the same thing?

Ken Burns: Yeah. You get more curious. And in fact, because PBS doesn't have huge budgets for promotion, it's a lot of shoe leather.

And I travel all around as I'm doing right now, 40 different markets. But it's this air chamber that allows you to decompress the evangelical period, if I can call it that. Hey, I've got a show that I would like you to watch all around the country, is a way of not having that grief of turning it off because spending that amount of time close to this stuff and you lock the film and then you kind of are looking behind you, like there's stuff going on.

You're, we, I've got [00:06:00] overlapping projects and, and teams. So there's, it's not like I'm, I'm gonna be outta work. It just means I'm really sad to leave this thing and this period of being able to talk about it is the air chamber that permits you. Not to really totally grieve about it, because, oh, that's interesting.

When it's, by the time it's done, it's yours. Like literally it's yours. Mm-hmm. It's not mine anymore.

Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. This show, I don't spend 10 years on each episode, but I, I might spend 10 hours on it. And I will tell you respectfully that after the interview's done, I'm like, I don't wanna read or hear about that person for at least another week or, or maybe like a couple of months.

Yeah. You're calling the American Revolution the most important event since the Birth of Christ. I, everybody probably starts with that, but here we go.

Ken Burns: No, nobody. Every once in a while, people come around. People have done their homework, which is very, very rare. Yes. In the United States of podcasts.

Gabriel Mizrahi: And they're like, Christ was born.

Thank you.

Ken Burns: Christ was born. Yeah. In a manger. By the way. There wasn't any room for the family of That's right here. Very tight quarters. Very tight quarters. [00:07:00] Um, you know what? I feel ambivalent about. Having said that, it was somewhere along the line when I was talking, evangelizing in the post, the film's done, it's leaving for college, you know, and going home and I'll have a relationship at forever.

But it's not the same way as do your homework, eat your dinner, you know, that sort of stuff. And I was thinking about how I spent my entire professional life engaged in American history. And I had not avoided this, but it was just a hard enough topic. I need to have some chops to be able to take a subject that has no photographs and no newsreels and make it come alive in a way.

And so I just at one point blurted it out that I thought it was the most important event. And I'll stand by and I'll defend it and I'll argue it if it needs to be argued, but I, I, it's a way of saying that everybody here to four had been a subject. And for the first time, there's some people living on the Eastern Sea Board of the United States that were citizens, not subjects.

And that that was an extraordinary responsibility. The Old Testament. Says there's nothing new under the sun, [00:08:00] meaning human nature doesn't change and superimposes itself over stuff. And the venality that I can uncover in the American Revolution and the, uh, greediness is matched by virtue and goodness.

And you can find that in every era of any subject, and I probably assume in every other country that anybody would choose to focus on. It was a rhetorical thing that of course the second you say it gets away from you. I mean, it doesn't have the negative effect of John Lennon, you know, that we're more important than Jesus at a at a time.

So they're burning Beatles records for a period. 'cause I think people want to be challenged in ways to think about a subject. And I think the revolution is so smothered in gallant bloodless myth. It's us having noble ideas in Philadelphia and we're against the British. And nobody understands just what revolution's involved in.

And the revolution's happening at the end of the 18th century. It's really bad and bloody, you die from a musket, but more often than not from a bayonet or a cannon that's taking [00:09:00] off a leg or a head or whatever like that. And it's not only a revolution, it's a civil war and more of a civil war than our civil war.

Our civil war was a sectional war south against north, north against South. Very few civilian deaths outside of Missouri in bleeding, Kansas, as they called it, because civil wars mean civilian deaths. Mm-hmm. But lots of civilian deaths in the revolution because it's Americans killing loyalists and loyalists killing Americans.

I see. And loyalist brigades fighting against patriot and militia brigades. I mean, it's super complicated and it's also a global war, not just the French come in on our side. Mm-hmm. Spain does the Netherlands, and it's the fourth global war for the prize of North America. So you realize you're into some deep stuff.

It's got multi-levels and it isn't just these guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts. The war doesn't happen without women who are at the heart of the resistance movement and the tenures. Yeah, leading up to it, there's Native American population assimilated and sort of integrated and [00:10:00] also coexisting within the 13 colonies, the Brits have 13 other colonies in the Caribbean that are much more profitable because they're dependent on slave labor.

There's free and enslaved black people who are up and down throughout. Everybody's got their music. Everybody's got their culture. On the Western border are native nations that are as distinct and have been on the world stage of economies and trade and geopolitics as say, France and Prussia. Mm-hmm. So the Shawnee and the Mohawks, or the Delaware or the Hanana.

Nabi, and they are as distinct group from one another as we would distinguish between Germans and and English. And so if you can wrap your head around that dynamic, then you have one

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Ken Burns: Hell of a story.

Jordan Harbinger: If this is a board game, there's like 200 pieces and 800 cards in a stack. That's right. And the, the board is bigger than the table we're sitting at right now.

So we wanna

Ken Burns: simplify everything, right? We wanna just say, oh, you know, it's sort of, this is our [00:11:00] origin myth and we can accept the violence of the Civil War and the 20th Century Wars that we've been involved in, but let's just protect the big ideas. And they are super big ideas, but in fact, I find them more inspirational as we dug in and we're able to say, you know, as the historian in the film, Maya, Jess off the scholar says, America comes out of violence, it's born in violence.

It helps you even today where people go, oh man, we are so divided. Right? And you go, okay, when were we not divided? Yeah, that's a really good point. You know, when were we not divided? And it doesn't necessarily say that this isn't an existential moment for us, threatened moment for us, but it allows you to sort of have the tools and then if somebody's in distress, we were talking about somebody that we know who was in distress just before you came in Gabriel.

And you go to a professional, you know, you go to somebody and the first thing they want to know is, where'd you come from? What's your origin story? Who are your mom and dad? Where'd you grow up? What was it that experience like? And you begin to [00:12:00] rebuild a sense of your own narrative. So if you're at a point now where we are fractured seemingly beyond repair on the verge of dissolution, whatever the chicken little sky is falling thing you're gonna say about it.

It might be good to go back to the origin story and sort of pick it up and, and understand the complexity and the diversity. I mean, if we're beginning to have a group of people who are selecting us into this sense of heritage Americans, you know, meaning white Protestant, the story of our beginning doesn't reflect that it's really dynamic and diverse.

And complex, and people are involved. And those guys did the, I mean, I will tell you of all the characters, and we try to take a little bit of the opacity away from the people like George Washington's unknowable and Thomas Jefferson's unknowable and all this, try to make them more human. But more important, we introduce you to literally scores of other human beings, you know, teenagers and the wives of German [00:13:00] officers and Native American warriors, and this person and that person.

And they're all read by the greatest cast that we have ever assembled. Yeah. For any movie, anywhere, I can start listing them and then it'll get boring and I'll forget.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, you got Meryl Streep and Samuel L. Jackson and sometimes

Gabriel Mizrahi: it feels like Miranda Priestley from The Devil Wears Prada.

Ken Burns: Morgan Freeman, Tom Hanks, Liev Schreiber, uh, Maya and Ethan Hawke, Jeff Daniels, Josh Brolin, uh, sir Kenneth Branagh, Domhnall Gleeson, Matthew Rhys, Hugh Dancy, Claire Danes, Laura Linney.

Gabriel Mizrahi: And they really bring to life these stories.

Ken Burns: So what they do is they take something and, and you know, we, 99.9% of people didn't have a portrait painting, but that didn't mean they didn't exist. Mm. So we got the portraits of George and we got the portraits of Tom and we've got it of John and Abigail. We don't have a lot of these characters, but they may exist in a line when Joseph Plum Martin, 15 years old and from Connecticut signs up and then you find that he's left some stuff, some writings that are the ultimate grunt [00:14:00] stuff.

This film has so many echoes. There's a failed invasion of Canada. We wanted to make it the 14th state. Believe it or not, it was failed. So just fair warning. Yeah. Um, there's a, you know, continent wide, uh, pandemic that kills more people than the revolution does. And arguments about inoculation. I, oh geez, I can't make this up.

I can't. There's a full eclipse that would never happen again. There's a full eclipse. Yeah. And there's, uh, this kid, this soldier who's a teenager, he's saying, yeah. You know, and other times it would've been an omen of good or ill, but we kinda like just shrugged their shoulder and went on and we go wherever they tell us, we don't ask why.

We just go. We tell them. I mean, I've got Civil War soldiers who said that I've got World War II soldiers in our film on World War ii, and I've got Vietnam, and they're all the same attitude. And then you interview the North Enemy soldier, they're saying the same thing too, you know? So it's like a grunts, A grunts, a grunt.

Well, I mean, you get to know 'em.

One of the joys of your documentaries is just the breadth of the voices and the perspectives that you bring into these things. I mean, in this [00:15:00] doc, you open with a quote from Thomas Payne. Yeah. And then the next two quotes are from a spokesman for the Six Nations, I believe.

Yeah, Contego. Yeah. About the anxiety over losing their land to settlers. Yeah. So just that interest in voices that are typically on the margins of a story. At least they're not the ones that are taught in, in most schools in America, I would say might imply a certain political lens, or at least I imagine certain viewers might read into that.

Do you consider your documentaries political? Not at all in any way, or is featuring these voices? Just good storytelling.

It's calling balls and strikes. So we live in a world in which we just have sports highlights. Right. So Babe Ruth, its home run every time. But Babe Ruth struck out a lot of times. He struck out more than he hit home runs, right?

You gotta show all of the bats and oh, by the way, he only comes up one every nine times. There's a big story in the rest of this information and telling that doesn't have a political thing. I have my own politics, but I don't, I leave it out of there. Calling balls and strikes is really important. Let me tell you that.

Matthew Reese read Thomas [00:16:00] Payne quote, Thomas Payne gives the name of every one of our episodes, and he basically is saying this idea of liberty is a big idea and it's a spark that consumes everywhere without destroying and that you just need to will it in order to overcome despotism. It's kind of a wonderful thing.

And we had moved it at very end of the process to the very beginning, I had begun with cones Dega. His first one is an anxiety about losing land that white people don't think we value this land, but we do. The next one is a description of who he was and what he represented in the six tribes that he represented and the democracy they'd had functioning for centuries that Benjamin Franklin is attracted to and says, why can't we do this for us?

So we have a Native American, yeah, inspiration for the idea of union. And he says at the second quote is, we are a powerful confederacy in whatever you do. Never [00:17:00] fall out one with another. And then as Franklin runs with the ball and nobody wants to, 20 years before the revolution, give up any autonomy, Georgia and, and New Hampshire, just, what are you, what, what are you talking about?

Um, and Franklin assembles him in Albany, seven of the 13 colonies, and they pass his plan of union because he's cut down a picture of a snake, cut up into portions representing the, the various colonies and underneath it, the dire warning, join or die. Even though the plan fails, 'cause nobody wants to give up their autonomy back home.

It becomes a rallying cry 20 years later in, as we say, the most consequential revolution. So all of a sudden, what you've done, Gabriel, what I'm trying to say is if you begin the film with a curve ball, you're not expecting it. Maybe you expect to hear from Thomas Payne, but you're not expecting to hear from Conga.

So it comes in over the pro and you go, whoa, I had no idea. And then all of a sudden you're prepared to receive the complexity of the story that we've spent nearly 10 years

Gabriel Mizrahi: worth. Yes. It makes the audience feel like they're in the hands of [00:18:00] a storyteller who's going to take them in a very specific way through the story, in a way that they haven't been

Ken Burns: so normally in the political question, which is very reasonable to ask.

You're in a binary situation, you're in a dialectic, right? The novelist, Richard Powers said the best argument, which is the function of a binary thing. And that's all we do is argue, right? The best arguments won't change anybody's mind. The only thing that can do that as a good story. So a good story is, like I said this to someone at the New York Times is like a benevolent Trojan horse.

Like it comes in at night, it doesn't come out and kill you or destroy the city. It just says, oh, there may be another way to look at this. And it's like a wheel. And you're trying to get to the hub of what happened, where did we come from, meaning, what's the origin of the United States? What's our mythology?

You know, you're coming at it from lots of different angles. Some of them familiar. Oh, John Adams. I've heard of him. Samuel Adams, his cousin, you know, a failure as a brewer. Did

Jordan Harbinger: not know that.

Ken Burns: That's funny. Yeah. Failure [00:19:00] as a brewer, because that's

Jordan Harbinger: kind of what the, you know, that's the go-to that he's known for now is the peer that named Decker.

But

Ken Burns: he's a guy who is a writer who is able to keep people's. Anger and upset at the British going, he says, my purpose is to keep people alive to their grievances. Grievances. That's right. And so isn't this what we see on our own media today?

Gabriel Mizrahi: We were literally discussing this yesterday because that guy has a rare gift for taking these very big concepts and turning them into easily digestible, very incendiary ideas sound.

And that playbook is obviously still being used today. Human nature doesn't change. Are you trying? There's nothing

Ken Burns: new under the sun.

Gabriel Mizrahi: Are you trying to draw a line between someone like Adams and certain figures today? No. No. And that's the important thing. So Mark Twain,

Ken Burns: we like to say that the cliche we do is history repeats itself.

It never has tell me one event that's happened twice. What happens is human nature doesn't change. Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Mm-hmm. So you see the rhymes, you see the echoes, you see the themes and the motifs that come from just [00:20:00] human nature. You know, if you've got greedy people, which there'll always be greedy people, that greedy is gonna manifest in a certain way.

Sure. And you're gonna go, oh, that's so much like that. You don't need to do that. And in fact, when I began this project in December of 2015, Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. The next month was the Iowa Caucuses, out of which Donald Trump, everyone agreed, was not going to emerge at no chance.

Right? Yeah. Okay. So if you spend a lot of time going, whoa, isn't that, isn't uh, Sam Adams so much? Like fill in the blank. Right? You're lost. I mean, there's a, I mean, if this film had come out last year, last fall, instead of this fall. There is the wife of a German officer that we follow. She's a big character in this thing.

She stayed behind because she's having the third daughter. And so she makes the perilous crossing to join her husband at the triumph and victory of the, of the British and the German higher lings at the Battle of Saratoga. It doesn't work out that way. And [00:21:00] Saratoga's a big defeat. And the general Borgo surrenders and the French go, whoa, you guys are real here.

How's $30 billion in current money to help you win this war? And we'll send an army in a Navy too, and here's some money and some stuff and, and we win 'cause of that. It's not a given how it's gonna be, but she's worried as she's, uh, making the crossing as she writes. Because she's heard that Americans eat cats.

Oh gosh. Okay. So if this had come out last year, I think it's gonna go by. Now that I've said it, I've blown it, but I think it's gonna go by like, you know, nothing. You know, maybe not, but, but a year ago that would've hit different, oh, last year it would've been like, oh, you did that. You put that in because you wanna right point out, because Springfield, Ohio and JD Vance and you know, one of the big, you know, and if you step back and think about it, we just have it in the diary of a, the wife of a German officer that plays a significant role in the Battle of Saratoga.

But that is an Erie parallel That is very strange. But it's, they're everywhere. And you'll hear it in the [00:22:00] way husbands and wives communicate to each other, like Abigail and John Adams. You hear it in the way the teenagers that are in our film are fighting and complaining or not complaining or how a little girl, 10 years old when the war begins, Betsy Ambler, that Maya Hawk reads like she's an angel.

And you go, wow, that's how I got four daughters. I go, whoa, that's, you know, it's the same. And so if you spend a lot of time saying, isn't this so much like today? You've missed the point, which is to tell a story. Like when we go, why is half the phrases we use, expressions that we use come from William Shakespeare.

It's 'cause he figured out how we are, not just from his time, but in all time. And so when we say, you know, the whole world's a stage or this band of brothers, the first quote you hear from George Washington in his film, he's talking about a band of brothers. That's Henry the V. He'd read Henry the V. It's the A speech in adjunct court and it's in Henry the V.

Mm-hmm. And so Band of [00:23:00] Brothers, somebody yesterday, somebody really smart yesterday, said to me. I thought it was just a World War II expression from, yeah. You know, the HBO series, you go, eh, you know. Well, so George Washington said it. I said, no, it's William Shakespeare.

Gabriel Mizrahi: You know, I'm really struck sitting, talking with you about this.

This should not be a surprise at all, but you seem to have such a deep love for the characters you encounter in your work. Do you come by that affection, honestly, easily? Or is that the product of spending years with these people and getting deeply invested in a subject?

Ken Burns: Yeah, I'm pretty ignorant in the beginning and, um.

There's an aspect of it, of the team that we have, which is relatively small, is nonetheless digging into this. And you're finding somebody, how many

Gabriel Mizrahi: people are on your team, by the way? So,

Ken Burns: okay, there is there, I have two other co-directors in this time. People I've worked with for a long time, particularly Sarah Botstein, who's been close to 30 years.

And David Schmidt, who's been working since the Vietnam series. And there's a writer, Jeff Ward, who I've worked with since for 45 years. [00:24:00] Wow. And then there's a handful of co-producers around them, and then the editors who are significant forces in this. Mm-hmm. Three editors and their assistants. And then there's, so it may be this like band of sisters and brothers who are 20 people that are making it even, you know, we thank hundreds of people quite correctly, but it's sort of handmade and that over that period of time we're together and we're learning.

And I'm kind of the guy who's the filter. We'll get something that maybe is a four hour assembly and I'm the guy who brings it down to under two hours. But, and they're all going, but you can't miss that. So I said, we'll leave it in italics. And then the next pass, it's still there. And I go leave it one more time.

And then if it doesn't survive the next time, then you take it out of the script. But it tells you that at all times, this is not an additive process. It's subtractive. You know, I live in New Hampshire, rural New Hampshire, and we make maple syrup and it takes 40 gallons of SAP to make one gallon of syrup.

That's more, this, we have like 40 [00:25:00] a 40 or 50 to one shooting ratio. Wow. And so we're collect 40

Gabriel Mizrahi: gallons of SAP to make,

Ken Burns: yeah. One gallon of syrup or one gallon of, but you don't boil it either. If you boil it, you have rock candy. But if you just keep it under that and evaporate it with an evaporator, you get the elixir.

So, and takes time, like you can turn the burner up on SAP and you'll get rock candy. Right. But. If you evaporate it, you will get this elixir. If I was from Kentucky or Tennessee, I use it. You would be talking about bourbon. Yeah, I'd be talking about distillation. But it's really important. So you, you develop this affection for people and they get realer and then, you know, usually we're doing the, I'm the scratch narrator all the way through 99% of the process.

And then in this case of the American Revolution, you bring in Peter Coyote, or it's Keith David for Leonardo da Vinci or Muhammad Ali, whatever it might be. They're interns and they're associate producers that are reading the voices. And, but then all of a sudden you start collecting. And when Tom comes in and Tom Hanks and comes in and reads, you know, I said, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna make you George [00:26:00] Washington.

'cause everybody's gonna go, that's Tom Hanks. Mm-hmm. And he could read it. I mean, he could read it upside down, backwards in his sleep and it would be perfect. And so we, I gave him like 14 quotes, I think from maybe 12 different people. And every single one is in. He's Alba Waldo. Two quotes in the episode about Valley Forge that has Valley Forge in it.

And he's a doctor at Valley Forge and he's just talking about seeing these people, these sort of frail races of people in tattered clothing, sort of moving through the snow. And then another moment, he marks the death of a Native American soldier fighting, which is unusual for the patriarch cause rather than the British cause.

'cause most native tribes thought she, the way we keep these people from pouring over the Appalachians is to go with the British who'd beat the French. So we kind of have earned the respect, uh, a Mohawk descendant says of this. So it's a very complicated dynamic, and these people then begin to fit in. And the puzzle and the narrative puzzle of what you leave in and what you leave out doesn't necessarily become [00:27:00] instantly clear, but you begin to figure out how it is.

It's based a lot on your affection for people. And I mean that in not a way, like a real friend, but in a way that these are elements of a story. A good story is the best thing that human beings have. Honey, how is your day? Does not begin with I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb unless somebody TBOs you.

And that's exactly what you're saying. Mm-hmm. So you edit human experience and that's all we're doing. We're saying we can't represent the entire revolution, but we can tell you that it isn't just Lexington and Concord followed by, oh, didn't he cross the Delaware and defeat the Christian, uh, on Christmas Eve?

It wasn't Christmas Eve. It was supposed to be Christmas night, but they didn't get there till the morning of the 26th. And, you know, the, of the three different attack prongs, only one made it happened to be Washington's and they routed the hessians. No, they didn't get, you know, the hessians weren't drunk.

The Americans discovered their catch of rum and Washington ordered it destroyed, worried that the, his soldiers [00:28:00] would get drunk. So you've got, there's just stories that you, that have levels of it. And, and there's also, in the leaving out of it, nobody says. Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes at Bunker Hill, which is actually fought on Breeds hill, but they do say hold your fire until they're 90 yards out.

And then the next charge, there's 60 yards out, and then by the time you're running out of ammunition, wait till it's 30 yards and we lose. But we've inflicted so much casualty on the British that they're not gonna see this kind of loss until the first day of the sum in 1916. That's how bad. The revolution is in terms of fighting.

And Paul Revere gets on his horse. He does. He sees, they put the lanterns up. He knows it's, they're coming, you know, across the Cambridge marshes and by sea, in quotes, it's the Charles River's mouth, but he's riding to Lexington and all the towns in between and then onto Concord saying not the red coats are coming or the British are coming.

But the regulars are coming out. The regulars are [00:29:00] coming out.

Gabriel Mizrahi: Doesn't have the same ring. Doesn't have the same ring to, yeah, but it's

Ken Burns: truer. And when you hear that, no, we talk about the flag several times. No mention of Betsy Ross. We don't know who made the first flag. See? And so you leave that out, Nathan Hale, who's captured after Washington abandons New York, and then all of a sudden it's mysteriously burned down.

And the British are certain, and the loyalists are certain that George Washington has done, that. He's actually applied to Congress to burn it. And they say no, and then somebody burns it. So whatever it is, but they capture a spy. Simultaneously, uh, like an espionage agent for Washington, part of an elite group of spies named Nathan Hale.

And he goes to his death, he's hung immediately under a sign that says Washington, the man, they blame for the fire. Mm. And a British officer just notes that he went to his death with great composure. Now, did he say, I regret that I have but one life to give to my country. We can't prove it. And so it's outta the film.

And so what happens is it's not myth [00:30:00] busting, like we're taking this thing pointing arrows at, we don't say, Hey, nobody ever said Betsy. Uh, you know, Ross is just, we don't, and the accumulated stuff gives a sense with the way the narrative moves around and the complexity of being able to balance lots of different storylines, which is what we all love, right?

We love that in Yellowstone. And somehow history, how we've been told now has to be reduced to very simple things.

Jordan Harbinger: The American Revolution might not be over, but neither is this podcast. For now, let's talk about something a little less revolutionary, but a lot more practical. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by MasterClass.

I'm a big believer in learning from people who are smarter and more experienced than you. And now with MasterClass, you can pop on a MasterClass while having a coffee or getting ready. It's amazing how much you can absorb in just a short time. I really like Chris Voss class. He's a former FBI hostage negotiator on episode 678.

It'll change the way you handle conversations, whether it's in a business deal, an interview, getting your kid to put on their shoes. [00:31:00] These negotiation tactics really work, and that's the beauty of MasterClass. You can learn from the best to become your best. With over 200 classes across everything from leadership to writing to cooking, there's something for everybody.

You got people like Bob Iger, Indra Newy, Howard Schultz. Even folks teaching AI and productivity and the classes are bite-sized, you can fit them into even the busiest schedule. Plans start at just 10 bucks a month, build annually. There's a 30 day money back guarantee, so there's really no risk. Three out of four members say they feel inspired every time they watch, and I totally get it.

Jen Harbinger: Right now, our listeners get an additional 15 person off any annual membership at masterclass.com/jordan.

That's 15% off at masterclass.com/jordan. Masterclass.com/jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp. When I used to live in Michigan, winter would roll around and it was like, oh man, here comes the seasonal depression. I'm talking gray skies for months this time of year. Well, it can be rough. The shorter days, the cold, everyone goes into hibernation mode and it's easy to isolate without even meaning to do that.

And that's why BetterHelp [00:32:00] is encouraging everyone this November to reach out, check in on a friend, call your granny, grab coffee with somebody you haven't seen in a while. We're all just a little healthier when we stay connected. And if you've been thinking about therapy, this is a great time to do that as well.

BetterHelp makes it super easy. You fill out a quick questionnaire, they match you with a licensed therapist if it's not a good fit, which anytime they've got over 30,000 licensed therapists, they've helped more than 5 million people worldwide. Sessions average 4.9 outta five stars. So clearly it's working for a lot of folks, including yours truly.

Jen Harbinger: This month, don't wait to reach out. Whether you're checking in on a friend or reaching out to a therapist yourself, BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/jordan. That's betterhelp.com/jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network.

The circle of people I know, like, and trust. I know people are like, oh, you just have a big platform, and so they come to you. I mean, but you know, not entirely true. You can really build the same thing for yourself. You're probably not booking a podcast, but I [00:33:00] bet you're working in your career. You're trying to maintain your social circle.

You're trying to make a name for yourself. Just starting out in your job, wherever you are in your life, this will absolutely help you. It's super easy. It is non cringey. It's very down to earth. It's not gonna make you look bad. It's just gonna make you a better connector, a better colleague, and a better peer.

In six minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and more importantly, contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course free of all shenanigans at Six Minute Networking dot com. Now back to Ken Burns. The lesson here is if you're gonna get executed for being a spy or something along those lines, think of a really good quote beforehand.

That's right. That's right. So that, so that whoever kills you can go like, wow, that was pretty bad ass. I need to give, said I need to give Ken

Gabriel Mizrahi: Burn something really good when he makes the documentary. May have said it,

Ken Burns: but I, I love the fact that you can, like I made a film about the Statue of Liberty very early on in my professional life, and at the end of it, it was two parts.

And so it was, the first was the construction and how it got bit, and then the day, you know, it end, the first part ends with the dedication of [00:34:00] the statue in October of 1888. And the last line of that first part is no one mentioned immigrants. It's only later that this is this thing that immigrants going to Ellis Island pass and they attach to it the symbolism of, of coming to the United States.

Yeah. You're, you're

Gabriel Mizrahi: resisting these easy narrative. You don't, you don't, you don't, there are no layups. Mm-hmm.

Ken Burns: There are no

Gabriel Mizrahi: layups. You see this war and the founding of America, not as a one and done victory, but as an ongoing negotiation. I think you say unfinished business.

Ken Burns: I'm sort of stealing from Benjamin Rush, who's the only physician who signed the Declaration of Independence from Philadelphia, from Pennsylvania.

I have a connection to him. I didn't really realize. An ancestor of mine, Gerus Clarkson actually with Rush formed the first medical school college in the United States, or certainly in in Pennsylvania. But anyway, rush said at the end of the revolution that the American War is over, but the American Revolution is still going on.

And you [00:35:00] think part of what, of the genius of some of the stuff is the unfinished business. These were all guys, when Jefferson said, we hold these truths to be self-evident, they're not self-evident. He actually wrote Sacred and Undeniable. And Franklin said No. And sacred and undeniable would've been a better way of saying it, and kind of more emotional.

Mm-hmm. And so it was really good writing on Jefferson's part. But he goes self-evident. And as somebody said in a film we made a few years ago about, uh, Benjamin Franklin, they said, it's the old lawyers Dodge. You know? Mm-hmm. Just tell 'em it's true. These are the least self-evident truths there, right.

That all men are created equal. What they mean is all white men of property free of debt. Yeah. We don't mean that now. The key to the word the scholar UL Levin said is the word all. Once you said all, it's all over. It may take you four score nine years for slavery to go 144 years to women to get the vote.

But it's done. This, it's hard to write

Jordan Harbinger: footnotes with a little quill. It's just really hard. So this, um, can't bother

Gabriel Mizrahi: this Benjamin Rush quote that you just mentioned. He said, on the contrary, nothing but [00:36:00] the first act of the great drama is closed. The revolution is not over. You lay that audio over images of modern day New York City, which I thought was a really nice choice.

Ken Burns: Modern day. Lots of places. Lots of places. Boston,

Gabriel Mizrahi: there was New York, right. Valley Forward. It ends in, in New York. Uh, yeah. So you're bringing this into the present or maybe bringing the present back? Yeah.

Ken Burns: Into the past. Yeah. I think it's an invitation to the present to go back and sort of rethink about it and think about the process.

Words like pursuit of happiness in the declaration, which is a process we always are thinking what happiness is, it must be material wealth. No, they meant lifelong learning. And then later on in the Constitution, written in Philadelphia and passed there a more perfect union. So you have a sense of process.

And that's, I think, made all the difference for us. Mm-hmm. It's kept us open and expanding to the possibilities of the meaning of the words.

Gabriel Mizrahi: What phase of the revolution are we in now?

Ken Burns: I think we are approaching one of maybe restoration and repair. That is to say that as we've. Inevitably, even [00:37:00] the fastest fastball by the greatest pitcher is going to inevitably arc towards the ground that we have in our power.

The ability to resuscitate by reengaging with the original principles of our founding, who we actually are, and understanding the complexity of the story, and understanding the unbelievable force of the idea that people were not subjects, but citizens and the responsibilities that entail the examples. I mean, after telling you how diverse it is, there's only one person responsible for the United States, right?

And as George Washington, without him, we don't have a country, and you can't say that about anyone else. Franklin's second, because he got all the money from the French to help us win the war, and helped originally think of the idea that maybe we could come together, but without Washington, who is deeply flawed.

Who is rash rides out on the battlefield at KIPP's Bay, nearly as killed. Does the same thing at Princeton, does the same thing at Monmouth Courthouse in New Jersey, and as nearly killed, but stops a retreat. [00:38:00] Who's unknowable? The scholar. Joe Ellis says Maybe Martha gets in there, maybe Hamilton, maybe Lafayette.

He's taller than every us, but he's able to inspire people who are not of his station. He may be the richest person in America. Think about that. The richest person in America risking, as they say in the last line of the declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our lives. That's a big deal. Our fortunes, in many cases, that's an even bigger deal and our sacred honor.

So maybe we can say, we don't use the word sacred too much now, and we certainly don't use the word honor, so leave that off to the side for whatever you can make of it. What would you guys do? What would I do? Would I be a loyalist? Would I be a patriot? What would I be willing to fight for? What would I be willing to give my life and all that I've accumulated in my life?

My fortune would I do that? And so while his officers are deserting at Valley Forge, 'cause they've heard, oh, there's money to be made off the war. If we go home, he stays there. One of the richest men risking everything. He's caught, he's dead. [00:39:00] It's an amazing story. And he's able to get men to fight in the dead of night.

He understands subordinate talent. He goes, you and you are really good. And I'm not threatened by that. Please be my generals. I mean, he picks the smartest people you could possibly imagine. It's like a revelation as you tell the story, it's a wonderful return. Back to the old, simplistic, superficial, sentimental, useless story about George Washington.

Now, are there cherry trees and never telling a lie and rolling a coin across the Potomac? No. We settle that too in this film. Oh, right. Yeah. We've got a young guy that we follow from the first, early on in the first episode, who's a little little kid where he sees the British who are occupying Boston.

They have these great Afro-Caribbean bands and yellow and red, you know, and they're playing fi. So he becomes a fier and then later joins the Patriot. Cause when he's 14, at the end of his life, he's a dentist making teeth for George Washington. Out ivory. Oh, okay. From a [00:40:00] hippopotamus. Now, first of all, I did not know that hippopotamus teeth are considered ivory the way I see elephants.

I did not know that either. So there you go.

Jordan Harbinger: You'll learn a lot from the duck. Yeah. Namely, but okay. That's less grim. 'cause I, I know that some people back then had teeth just from other people that they had to remove, which is, there's, there's some of that too,

Ken Burns: but there's not wooden teeth. Right. And that's, that makes more sense.

And you don't have to say not wooden, you know what I mean? Right. That's the kind of thing. Whereas if you're hedge of thumb on the scale, whether it's political or Aha, look how much we've, how much research we've done. Not wood. You don't need to do that. You just don't include it. And you, what you've said to your audience is you're really smart.

And people are really smart, particularly when it comes to the complexity of stories. Because you know what, we may be politically idiots. That is to say, so certain there's an us and a them. There's only us. The biggest lesson I've learned in my entire professional life, there's only us. The things that we've forgiven ourselves and each other, the people that we [00:41:00] love and the people that we care about, the friends that we have, the family members.

We understand the complexity. You know, it's why people love Yellowstone. The head guy is a murderer, right? He dumps dead bodies off here and he's our hero. And he's got a very strong daughter. He's got one son that's a married to a Native American woman, another who's Benedict Arnold, a traitor, right? And then you know all of the levels of his generals.

And then the people who work for him, and they're gay and they're women, and they're black, right? And their native people throughout. And the main theme is about greed and land. And whether that happens, they'd go, this is a communist film. Well, no, apparently Yellowstone is the bellwether of conservative storytelling.

It's not conservative. It's good storytelling. And in good storytelling you have to have bottom up as well as top down. You have to have conflict. You have to have, mm-hmm. People who are neither and both. I can't make stuff up. Taylor, Sheridan can, William, Shakespeare can. But I [00:42:00] believe there is as much drama in what is and what was my business as anything.

The human imagination changes. Yeah. I mean

Gabriel Mizrahi: we, we love this complexity in the entertainment. Why not in our history, but there are no easy heroes or villains in your documentaries. Or maybe that's what you discover along the way. And I wonder if that's also why documentaries like the Vietnam War eventually do go down well with people because they can't deny that once you start digging into it.

These easy myths don't hold up very well. I went

Ken Burns: to John Kerry and John McCain when we first decided to do it, and I said it took 10 and a half years to do it. I said, I need your help and I'm not gonna interview you. 'cause you're still in the public life. Mm-hmm. You're still publishing your apple. And no matter what we'd say here, you're gonna do that.

You'll be in it. As archival figures, right? Testimony that this young, almost a hippie, uh, John Kerry gives the experience of being shot down in a prisoner in Hanoi. And the stuff recorded from his bed and his release and all of that. They said, of course they understood it completely. But at the end, I came to his office and AIDS said, well, he's got [00:43:00] like 10 minutes, show him some stuff.

So we started showing and they said, Senator, you have to go. He goes, what's it like this? He goes, show me the Vietnamese. 'cause he knew we'd interviewed North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers and that was the thing he wanted to know. He wanted to meet and understand and then realize the complexity. And so this was like late spring.

And then we did a big event in August, I think, at the Kennedy Center just before the broadcast in, um, September of 2017. Now he, we'd given him the whole thing and he looked at it all and he walked into the green room and there's Chuck Hagel who's part of the panel, who's was a Vietnam War senator and, you know, uh, secretary, uh, and Kerry, you know, who is by then the Secretary of State, or had been the Secretary of State, I can't remember.

And he just walked over and he said, I love you, Ken. And that means that there's a story there that has a complexity that opens up a pretty, this is a pretty tough character. Mm. And I said, I love you too, Senator. 'cause I do. 'cause you got to know him and [00:44:00] who he was. Now do I agree with his politics? It doesn't really matter.

Mm-hmm. Do I agree with Carrie's po? What does it matter? These are human beings who have extraordinary experiences. And that's the idea that maybe good stories helps sort of just reconcile the differences and reminds people Oh, right. There's no them, there's just us. Mm-hmm. And it's very convenient that us is the lowercase us.

Bao. Mic drop. Yeah. Nice. Yeah.

Gabriel Mizrahi: One of the experts you interviewed points out that in the European world back then, during the revolution, democracy actually had a bad name. Oh, totally. A bad name. It has, it is a synonym, right? For anarchy. Yeah. And for lawlessness. Yeah. It means a rule. Rule of the mob demo, right?

So it means the people rule, and it was seen as a system that could be exploited by ruthless politicians, demagogues people who pandered to the passions of the common people in order to whip them up and get them to do passionate things and get the government to serve them. I have to say, again, it's hard to watch your documentaries and not map a lot of this stuff onto what is happening, but I think this is also a [00:45:00] timeless story.

It's hard to argue with that view. In many cases, there is at least a kernel of truth to that. Are all democracies necessarily turbulent and messy, or do they get that way over time? Well,

Ken Burns: democracy is a really messy form of government, but it's better than all the other forms because the other forms involve a kind of tyranny and authoritarian certainty.

Democracy's messy. 'cause you actually have to listen to people that you disagree with and you have to compromise. And that's when that breaks down. Then you lose the possibility of, of having that. But democracy has an aspect of mob rule, not the democracy that we imagine. Not 435 representatives and a hundred senators and a, that it's best described by two loyalist ministers in Boston who are looking at the constant demonstrations that are going on a bank against British occupation.

They didn't like the idea that the British army was in Boston, not to protect it, but to police it. That's also a rhyme of the present moment in, in many ways, but we don't have to say anything about it. And that was in our film well [00:46:00] before that happened, including the discussion of people who passionate, people who exploit this stuff that Alan Taylor, the scholar that you're quoting, uh, says in the film.

But the, one of the ministers says, what do you want? One tyrant 3000 miles away or 3000 tyrants, not a mile away. We'd like to say, well, you know, our revolution created our democracy. Democracy was not an object of our revolution. It's a consequence of it because these propertied men wanted, they'd had a disagreement, but because we're in the enlightenment, the arguments they're arguing are that these are natural rights, and then all of a sudden they're articulating things that the people at the margins as the scholar, Maggie Blackhawk and the say, are hugely influenced by it.

When you say liberty and freedom, the people who hear that the most are the people who are serving you. They hear it. They're not dumb. They hear these discussions and they want it to. So what happens is our image of the person fighting the militiamen, who's a [00:47:00] small farmer and the landowner and whatever, that's the ideal.

Actually, the militia are less reliable in the fighting and they tend to run. They're not experienced with this. It's terrifying. Battles are horrible. No, no shame in that reaction to battle. I'm not sure what I would do. What? I'm not sure. If you asked yourself what you would do, yeah, maybe you'd be a loyalist, then that would settle it all.

But people decided to pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor move all their chips to a space that had never been proven. So it turns out in the continental army who survives are teenagers, du Wells felons, second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance property. Recent immigrants without property from Germany and England.

And they do the fighting and they do the dying. And somewhere along the line there's a realization that they have to be. Included in this new thing. So Pennsylvania is first, and in their constitution they don't say men of property. They say [00:48:00] all men. 21 years old, meaning all white men. And that's the beginning.

That's the foot in the door. So democracy is not the object of our revolution. It's a consequence of it, but it's not the mob democracy. It's the most disciplined democracy you could imagine. Does it have problems? Of course it does. The articles of Confederation don't work. The people are rebelling and Chas Rebellion, and then we do a constitution and it works pretty damn well.

Civil War, big exception, and other places throughout our history. But we're always divided. We're always arguing. There's always like a minority that would prefer what's is the seeming simplicity of authoritarianism. It's always a thread. Like just let's be certain. So to me. The opposite of faith. Don't worry, I'll get there.

The opposite of faith is not doubt, doubt is central to faith just as the sort of free electrons of a democracy are messy. The opposite of faith is certainty, right? [00:49:00] Which kills mystery and kills the thing that you're looking for in faith, whether it's art or relationship or actual spiritual things. And so what happens is democracy is a kind of way of permitting the uncertainty of everything to be okay.

And that's the only thing where human progress comes from and where the expansion of the idea that all men are created equal, the the scholar youve love and says, the minute you say all it's there, it's, you're gonna say it, it's not even equal. Or men, it's all. That's the doorbuster of centuries. And remember, this revolution inspires revolutions all around the world for more than 200 years, even when we can't extend it to a significant part of our population.

And half of it is disenfranchised for

Gabriel Mizrahi: 144 years. Women are that uncertainty and mystery also essential to your filmmaking process. It's the heart of art. It's hard

Ken Burns: for me, Gabriel, to describe [00:50:00] exactly how it is because the buck stops here. So do I get the final decision? I'd be an idiot if I didn't listen to everybody else.

And it was just a dictator and saying, we're gonna do it this way every once in a while, and I'll say, let's do this. And I wake up the next morning and look at it and go, what idiot thought this would work? Right? So I think part of the struggle is trying to figure out, particularly with mastering complex narrative of how to juggle all this stuff.

I'll give you an example kind of in, in a way. Say, we say they're 16, maybe 16 dead, maybe 16 months, maybe 16 battleships, right? Doesn't matter. We've got those footnotes, four reputable scholars, 16. Then we read something else, and it's a scholar who says, I'm not sure it's 16, could be 18. It could be 14. So we're freaking out.

We've already locked the film. This is the level that we're at. And I go running and we find somewhere the narrator has said the word perhaps, and we duplicate it and bring it and say perhaps 16. And then we go sit back and go [00:51:00] pH. Yeah. Right. And I'm swear to God, we will fight over that. And the last weeks of editing, they're not moving stuff around.

Usually they're me opening up or closing down a 12th of a second. That is two frames a 12th of a second to make the reception of that quote. It may be within the phrase of the quote or just before the quote begins. Or maybe it's closing it up at the end so that the cut is closer to that. But at 12, and it makes a big difference and I'm spending weeks doing that so that when you see it.

Then we've been working in editing with, you know, four or five sound effects tracks. But in the middle of the worst battles we might have 150 going. And it's, I was at a place last night in New Jersey and I was supposed to go out in the audience and sit with my comrades and watch it. But as I heard the first gun go off at the opening quote by, uh, um, the first Cannon Rumble, the stage shook.

Mm. 'cause of the base. I blew up a folding chair just [00:52:00] behind the, the curtain on the sides. And I did the whole thing there because the, it was every gunshot was like, every cannon fire just rocked it. And I just, I wanted to be back there.

Jordan Harbinger: My video editor's gonna love this, Ian, he's gonna be like Campbell, he edits two frames.

'cause that's for people who, who don't edit film. There's like 24 frames per second generally.

Ken Burns: Yeah. And you could, each one of those frames just to get nerdy with you is not that I haven't been nerdly here. Sorry about that. We be getting there yet. Um, in film. You see each one of those 24 frames for a 48th of a second.

Because in the old fashioned film, oh right, the shutter, there's a claw and the sprockets pulling it down. So the, you see it for a 48th, a thing comes down, it moves. It goes up. And you see it for a 48th. And it is, that's the way it works, right? And if I put black and just one frame of a tree, which you would see for a, you would go tree, right?

So physiologically you can [00:53:00] receive that may not have any meaning, but you're looking for meaning. And so I think what editing is doing, what all these layers of sound effects, what the first person voices complimenting. The third person narration, which is the narrative. Bus driver, right? And then the voices are all the pa, all of that stuff.

I mean, you understand why. And by the way, there's only one place I could have done all of these films. 40 of them. Some of them are an hour, some of them are 20 hours is PBS. Because PBSI can go to a streaming service or a, a premium cable and say, Hey, wanna do the Vietnam War? It's gonna be $30 million, which is what it costs.

And I spent 10 of the 10 and a half years with my cup out trying to raise, desperately trying to raise it. It's not fun. But it did it. I could go to a pitch meeting and walk out with $30 million. Yeah, Netflix could cut you a check for that. But they wouldn't give me 10 and a half years. No, probably not.

They'd say next year, how 10 and a half weeks? Yeah, no, no, they want it 10 and a half months. I can't do that. Right? Because I have to be down at that two frames. I have to be at the complexity of the [00:54:00] story. I have to like not do the traditional dramatic stuff. So I have a neon sign in lowercase cursive up on the wall in my editing room, and it says it's complicated.

If you're a filmmaker and you have a scene that's working, you don't wanna touch it. So we've been touching it and destabilizing good scenes because you can't, in the case of history, have the art overwhelm the facts. You want them to coexist, but at every time, the fact always has to win. And the facts are not convenient necessarily to story people have undertow, and yet at the end, by being faithful to that undertow, the fact Wynton Marsala said in our jazz series, he said, sometimes a thing in the opposite of a thing are true.

At the same time, we know this in our personal lives. But we can't sort of, there's a disconnect in a political, historical military dynamic to it. They're bad guys. They're good guys. Come on. So in our film, we just call balls and strikes the loyalists perfectly [00:55:00] reasonable choice to make. They're the conservatives of today.

They're the saying, wait, the British Constitutional monarchy is the best form of government that's ever existed. Yeah. And they're right. And you wanna put it for this crazy, untested idea? No, no way. All of my health, all of my prosperity, my literacy, my good fortune comes my land. Yeah. My property come from the, why would I change?

And they're passionate loyalists. You know, we have one scene where a guy named John Peters kills his best friend growing up in New Haven, who's accidentally met him on the parapet at the Battle of Bennington, which John Peters is about to lose. But Jeremiah Post comes up and says, Peters, you damn Tory sticks his bayonet in his friend's breast.

It's deflected by the bone. And John Peter says, as. A phrase that is true to the revolution as we hold these truths, which is I was obliged to destroy him. This is a moment in which you understand it's been deflected. He's not gonna die, but he's killed his friend [00:56:00] with his gun. And that to me is as much the revolution as distilling the century of enlightenment thinking.

And if you can tell that story and they can coexist and those big ideas can still shine and perhaps be even more inspirational because they're set in the relief of the real stuff, the mucky stuff. Like one of my favorite shots, you know, we, I don't really like reenactments. I think, oh, you just should make a feature film.

And so we shot Reenacters. We didn't do reenactments. Mm-hmm. We just watched them for years and years in British uniforms in American militia and continental, native American, French, German. Uniforms and they're really authentic. They really care about this. I'm sure their underwear is correct. Right, right.

Yeah. And we just collected a whole bunch of stuff that we could use little bit. So it's not like you're gonna recreate the Battle of Long Island, uh, over in Brooklyn, that is this way. It's just, we'll grab the shot of the muskets fire in the intimacies. Something that's, you know, impressionistic. You don't see faces, you [00:57:00] see just parts of hands warming over a fire or a cannon, you know, the ramrod going down in a cannon.

So all of that contributes to the sense of trying to wake up that moment.

Jordan Harbinger: History teaches us anything. It's that ideas need fuel to survive and so do podcasts. So before we continue debating the fate of democracy, here's something to keep the lights on. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Cayman Jack, America's number one margarita.

We had a little backyard hang recently. Just a bunch of us friends catching up, snacks on the table, music playing, you know, that kind of thing. A few lawn games that somehow get way too competitive. You know how it goes. Eventually everyone hit that moment of looking around like, okay, so who brought out the good stuff?

That's when we broke out the Cayman Jack. Kraken went open. It was like flipping a switch. Instant margarita state of mind. It's got that perfect laid back beach bar flavor, but without any of the effort. No squeezing limes, no sticky blender cleanup, just real blue agave nectar and lime juice, ready to go right out of the bottle.

People were really into it, like really into it. Someone even was like, oh, is this [00:58:00] bottled? You serious? Yeah, that's how good it is. So if you're hosting a crew, you just wanna feel like you're on vacation for a minute. Crack into your margarita state of mind with Cayman Jack.

Jen Harbinger: Crack into your margarita state of mind.

Pick up Cayman Jack at your local store or visit caymanjack.com to find it near you. Please drink Responsibly Premium malt beverage with natural flavors. American Vintage Beverage Company, Chicago, Illinois.

Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by Progressive. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians.

These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way.

Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary not available in all states or situations. This episode is sponsored in part by Airbnb. I've been so burned out cranking out content lately that all I can think about is travel.

There's just something about stepping outta your routine that hits the reset button like nothing else. I got a trip to Patagonia coming up, which I'm ridiculously excited about. It's [00:59:00] that magic of meeting new people, trying foods you can't pronounce, exploring new cities. That's really what travel's about, frankly, not the checklist or the perfect itinerary, but the experiences and connections you make along the way.

Those moments end up being worth more than anything you buy, which got me thinking while you're off exploring, your home is just sitting there empty. Why not host it on Airbnb while you're away? If you ever considered hosting, but you were worried, maybe it'd be too much to manage. Airbnb's co-host network can help with Airbnb's co-host network.

You can hire a local co-host to manage everything from creating your listing and messaging guests to onsite support and even design and styling. So while you're away, you can rest easy. Knowing your home is in good hands and your guests are happy, it's a smart way to turn your space into a source of additional income without adding to your plate.

If you've ever thought about hosting but you want a little help, find a co-host at airbnb.com/host. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support the amazing sponsors who make the show possible. [01:00:00] All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals.

If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, email us. Jordan@jordanharbinger.com. We're happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Ken Burns, we've gotten emails from show fans who are reenactors, and we mentioned it on the show once and he was like, you don't even understand if a button comes off a uniform, it's like a crisis, because you can't just go, oh, I need to go to Michael's and grab another black button.

It's like, I need to find another handmade hand carved wooden button from the same type of tree, so I gotta order it from wherever. And it's like, then I gotta whittle this button. It's like you can't get it in an hour.

Ken Burns: One of my favorite, favorite moments in the film, as you could imagine, would be in the dismount of the Battle of Yorktown.

Spoiler alert. That's where the British finally surrender and the revolution end. We've been following a German grunt, all [01:01:00] the film named Johan Eval, who's contemptuous of this liberty talk. The British army is decimated, so they hire Germans to come and their princes are willing to sell their services.

And Johan eval is very contemptuous, and he's throughout, but he's part of the group that has to surrender at Yorktown. And he has this wonderful quote, half of which says, who would've thought a hundred years ago that out of this multitude of rabble could come a people who could defy kings? And we are tilting up just about a foot and a half of a continental uniform whose buttons are falling off that's ripped and torn.

And you just, you hear Johan Volti now as to say, and by the way, a lot of German soldiers during the war just deserted and blended into German speaking communities and in Pennsylvania and in, in, uh, New York State and in New Jersey and everywhere. And then those that went back after the war. A lot of them came back with their families to settle.

[01:02:00] The ideas are really, really powerful. At the heart of this, the idea that you could be a citizen, that you could have a say in your government after living your family has worked the land for a thousand years in Wales or Scotland, Ireland or England for a thousand years for somebody else, and all of a sudden you, you come here and you own some land and have farm and you can do this and you're literate.

I mean, we're, we're as a literate apo, probably only some Scandinavian countries, even at that time are more literate. But this is, we are a really smart group. We're the least profitable of the British colonies. Only Virginia and South Carolina are profitable, and I don't need to tell you why. Right? Yeah.

All the British colonies in the Caribbean are super profitable and help fuel the British Empire and the profits of the British Empire because it's based on slave labor, which makes some of the ironies of this war. The enslavers, like the Washingtons are using the metaphor of slavery to describe what the British are doing to them and [01:03:00] the people who are being owned a kind of whatever, but they want it too, so Right.

It's you're, you're setting in motion. Nobody really talked about the evils of slavery until the revolution. And as soon as white people started using the metaphor of the British enslaving us, then the question is paramount everywhere. Right? While it will take four score in nine years till the end of the Civil War for the 13th Amendment to pass and end it, it's over the second you start saying.

Gabriel Mizrahi: I was wondering, while I was watching how they managed to pull off that black belt level compartmentalization, because there's slavery and freedom playing side by side are,

Ken Burns: are you actually surprised that human beings could be No, at times hypocritical? Not really. Or miss the fact that the joke is on them, that the booger is coming out of their nose?

Gabriel Mizrahi: Clearly not. But I wonder how much they knew about it at the time.

Ken Burns: They

Gabriel Mizrahi: knew. They knew. They

Ken Burns: knew. I mean, George Wa everybody, I mean, even Washington and Jefferson spoke to it. I mean, there's a wonderful moment in the film and the scholar, Annette Gordon Reed says, you know, slavery's foundational to [01:04:00] him and it bounds his life.

And he knew it was wrong. And then she comes on camera, she goes, so how could he do something that was wrong? She goes, well, that's the human question for all of us. Mm-hmm. She's not letting Jefferson off the hook. She's putting us on the hook

Gabriel Mizrahi: with all this involvement in such meticulous detail. How do you know when you're done with the documentary?

Ken Burns: A story has a conversation with you, like a shot tells you how long it should last. The voice tells you that maybe it's a phrase too long, and it, you could snippet here, the narration feels, uh, redundant or we've said it in another place. Or actually, you know, as important as this, it's not gonna be in our film.

So inevitably you're, you're going around the country and people say, well, do you do Molly Petra? And do you do this battle? And you go, no. I love these questions. And afterwards, when people criticize in the Civil War, oh this general wasn't done. This battle wasn't done. Baseball, this World Series wasn't covered.

My hero wasn't. I feel great 'cause we're not doing it. Encyclopedia. Yeah, we're doing a story. And [01:05:00] so a story develops. A kind of, momentum is not quite the word. It has an isness. It starts speaking back to you. And a lot of times, most of the work you're doing is not so much pushing. Oh, I know exactly what it should be.

That's, you know, Steven Spielberg has to do that 'cause he can make stuff up. I have to say, there's this weak voice in me that says I'm not totally crazy of this thing we're supposed to already decided is really good for the last year and a half and we need to change it. And I remember calling up Sarah Botstein, my co-director one day, and I said, I'm having anxiety about the intro and I'm expecting she's only here.

We locked it, we're done. She goes, yeah, me too. Nice. And so working with our editor of that episode, Tricia e uh, Rey, the first episode, we blew this thing up. We moved that Thomas pain quote to the very beginning. I just try and desperately not to protect Conis Tega. I was worried that, are we saying that it isn't central?

We once again put a white person thinking in head of the Native Americans who are [01:06:00] the author of this, and then we did this beautiful live stuff of a, you know, we took out some narration that was sort of didactic and the rest of the film would take it. So we replace it with, there's one cut from women washing bloody cloth in the middle of a stream at night at sunset, and then it cuts to a black hand on a musket, and then to a woman picking up a lantern and moving through an encampment.

And then the drums of a review. And then you hear Paul Giamatti, John Adams saying, we are in the midst of a revolution. And you just go, whoa. Okay. Now that mm-hmm. Is a little bit bad. But this was like, you know, I can't even say 11th hour. It was well after midnight is the next day. And we were just late in the process.

Late, late in, and we blew the thing up and it was good to listen to that voice. So it's really not necessarily, oh, I'm a great filmmaker and I'm going to exert my artistry on this thing. Mm-hmm. And sometimes you go, how come I didn't let that voice say I wasn't really quite excited about having the Thomas Payne quote in the middle of this thing that Let's [01:07:00] try and, and Sarah was the one who said, let's try it at the beginning.

And then the music we put with it is music that a composer of ours, David Cire, wrote for Vietnam. And we were using stuff like that. Yeah. 'cause I said the experience of battle is, is horrible. Mm. It's universal. Exactly. And out of time. And so what you hear are these scary, unsettling chords that is not 18th century music.

Right. But I'm sure it's in the gut and the sphincter Yes. Of every soldier who's hearing battle. Exactly. Yeah. It's universal.

Jordan Harbinger: That's the word that came to me too. I, what I'm taking away from this is working for you must be extremely frustrating. No, no,

Ken Burns: no. It's actually nobody else. Nobody else. I have, I have a, um, a dictum and I say, I say that every year.

This is not brain surgery. And I don't think even in brain surgery, if somebody hands you the wrong tool that you yell at them, it's counterproductive. And so we work together, we hear, and I'm now as curious about what the interns have to say. These are people who are 22 years old. When I was 22 years old, I knew everything.

I'm now 72 years old, [01:08:00] I know nothing. So I wanna hear from the people who know everything for 22 year olds then. Yeah, exactly. You know, and so hear it and it's very interesting to see from people who think what they believe. It's an important bit of information. I used to go from the seniority down after an editing session and internal editing session.

Now I go from the bottom up and I listen to them and then finally get, you average this stuff out and some of the stuff is good and some of the stuff isn't and you figure it out. And some of the stuff I think is good and some of the stuff isn't and we rewrite stuff and so it's, it's incredibly collaborative and, and a key to this is that I've been working with my cinematographer buddy Squires for 51 years.

I've been working with Jeffrey Ward, the principal writer that I've worked with for 43 years. I've been working with Lynn Novik, a of someone who didn't work on this for 36 years. A few other people for that. Sarah Botstein for 30. So there's no frustration. There's actually people stick around. Mm-hmm. And like we're grant funded.

It means [01:09:00] that as long as I've raised the money, the salaries for the line that says director get paid, or assistant associate producer get paid. And if it runs out. It doesn't have, I was gonna say,

Gabriel Mizrahi: they're not sticking around for the PBS salaries. They're sticking around because there's

Ken Burns: something going on.

And I, I mean, I moved, uh, from New York after I'd done a lions share of shooting on my first film that PBS would broadcast called Brooklyn Bridge. And I moved to this tiny little town in New Hampshire. 'cause I thought I had just taken a valve anonymity and poverty. I really needed a real job in New York.

Somebody offered it to me and I got super scared. 'cause I realized I put the footage that I'd shot on top of the refrigerator on that shelf. And then boom, I'd be 40 years old or 45 years old. And I'd look back at the thing that I was always gonna do and I said, no, I want to look back. And having finished that film.

Yeah. And so I did, and I'm still sleeping in the same bedroom. I moved to 46 plus years ago. Oh wow.

Jordan Harbinger: How does someone get an internship with Ken Burns? That's gotta be a pretty good win for those guys.

Ken Burns: So the, [01:10:00] so there are some things that are mostly all in editing. Because that's where you need to help and where it's a good entry level.

'cause these films are all made in the editing room. Yeah. And they usually, we draw from Dartmouth and from Hampshire College where I went and Amherst, Massachusetts and Keen State College and Keene New Hampshire, which is very close to us. And then it's usually from that. But every once in a while Belmont University had a, a studies in country music.

It's in Nashville. And we were doing a history of country music and there was a gal who came up from Belmont and they'd paid her way and some little stipend. And you know, we give them minimum wage and you know, we just wonderful. And to have the people who do that, but it's a handful. And now things are sort of quiet in New Hampshire, there's more stuff going on.

We may not be having interns for another. Six months or another year. And then we might, in the old analog days, we'd have like 15, like I watched my 16-year-old daughter blush at a company picnic and I turned to Sarah Botstein and said, who is it? 'cause I [01:11:00] know that blush and a 16-year-old means it's a boy.

Oh. And she goes, it's an intern. And I said, which one? She goes, Dave. And I said, they're all named Dave

Gabriel Mizrahi: and turns. Get me my bayonet and

Ken Burns: yeah, get me my bayonet. But it turns out he's my son-in-law and they're, oh, that's so great. We've been working together and they've, well they've been married for 20 years and it's really great.

Dave's still

Jordan Harbinger: on thin

Ken Burns: ice with Ken Burn. Well, it's funny, we, we, I tease him about that, but he says, you know. Being with the boss's daughter is also job security. Right. So we, we agree to disagree. Yeah. He's a terrific person and he's been a co-director on, along with Sarah on the, uh, Leonardo da Vinci and the Muhammad Ali and Jackie Robinson, and the Central Park, five films that we've done together.

Jordan Harbinger: Guess you have to hire him, moon, he the father of your grandkids. Good,

Gabriel Mizrahi: good side door buddy. Yeah,

Ken Burns: exactly.

Gabriel Mizrahi: A lot of your legacy is not just in your documentaries, it's also in the way you make them.

Ken Burns: And it isn't a singular thing. I mean, I walk around with this, you know. Ken Burns thing, and you know, it gets stopped on the street and people say, oh, this Civil War [01:12:00] baseball, jazz.

I can't wait for American Revolution. But it's a lot of people, right? In this case it's Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, the co-directors, Jeffrey Ward, the writer, buddy Squires, the cinematographer I've been working with since college. All sorts of people who find the paintings who catalog it. Thousands and thousands of paintings and drawings and maps that are hugely important in this one, that it was a map in the Vietnam film that said.

I just said, shit, man, maybe I can, maybe we can do the revolution like, because we don't have any pictures. We don't have news reels, but we could do maps. And so I love maps and we have maps in a lot of films and we have more maps in the revolution than in all the other films combined. And they're really cool.

They're some of so cool. Some of them, we just let this beautiful work of art just alone. Some of them, we take a beautiful work of art and maybe put the red or blue arrows of the movements of troops or maybe we take it and we, we spent years working with a photographer to make three dimensional maps of Yeah.

And it's different. Yeah. Boston doesn't look like it. Uh, then, and [01:13:00] then we even did some CGI of Quebec, uh, city and, and of, uh, Trenton and of Yorktown. And That's cool too. And you know, we just. For people who kinda stayed, we like opened up and everything was possible after this

Jordan Harbinger: media blitz are, are you able to talk about what you're working on now or is it all

Ken Burns: Yeah.

You know, I love to, I don't know why people do that. Um, yes, we've been working for many years on a film on LBJ and the Great Society. Mm-hmm. My daughter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon and I have been working for many years and we're beginning to now go into full, uh, stuff on something called emancipation to Exodus.

I've always wanted to do reconstruction, the most misunderstood period, and understand, you know, really complex stuff about race in, in the United States and race is in almost all the films we've done. I can count on the fingers of one hand and still have enough to do this. Mm-hmm. The films that don't have race in it, because we were founded on the idea that all America created equal, but oops, the guy who wrote it owned other human beings.

I've done eight. Two hour [01:14:00] interviews with Barack Obama. Wow. And I hope to do probably two. He'd probably say one more. Just completely independent. Not part of anything, just on a handshake of just doing a history. Very interesting. Just powerful, articulate stuff about it. We've been filming people who knew Dr.

King. I'm interested in doing a history. CIA. Oh, that would be cool. And we started on it for many, many years. It was gonna be reconstruction and then we backed it up and called it emancipation people, self emancipating to Exodus, meaning leaving the South as part of the Great Migration. We wanted to do the Cold World for a long time, but now I'm thinking you get the Cold War if you do the ccia A and you and much more intimate, you're now down with intimate stories.

So God in funding, which is not always, you know, they neither are cooperative. I would love to see that Cold War stuff. So, I mean, I, I, I'm 72 and if I were given a thousand years to live, which I will not run out of topics in American history and it's why I am working on more films now than I ever have.

'cause there's a kind of [01:15:00] urgency, you know, there are too many good stories. Oh, to try to wrestle to the ground. Sure. To speak to your process questions, you know, just about, like, they don't come out because we just sort of know what that we're telling you. What we know and what, therefore you should know.

And the implication is, of course, for everyone in history, that there's a test on Tuesday, there's no test. We'd share with you our process of discovery. So all the stuff I've said about the revolution, I had no idea going in. I am so overwhelmed with the joy of acquiring it, that giving it away feels even better.

Gabriel Mizrahi: I don't know if everyone knows what the Ken Burns effect is. It's a feature in most major editing softwares. In fact, I just found out it's in cap cut. Do you know that?

Ken Burns: No.

Gabriel Mizrahi: I'm sure my youngest daughter knows this, so it's tiktoks editing software. Right. Which is so cool to see. And did they call it Ken Burns?

They call it Ken, the Ken Burns event. That's how I first

Jordan Harbinger: heard of Ken Burns. 'cause it's like Pan zoom, rotate Ken Burns. Yeah. I was like, who's this Ken Burns guy who's there with rotate? So here's the story behind it. That's impressive. I, so it's

Gabriel Mizrahi: basically a slow, continuous [01:16:00] pan and zoom right. Motion across still images and what it is and it brings the image to life,

Ken Burns: right?

Yeah. So I have been trying to wake images up. I wanted to be a feature filmmaker when I first was 12 years old. And I am trying to take an old photograph and treat it as a master shot that a Hollywood director at that has a a long shot, a medium shot, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal insert of details. And so I do that.

I energetically explore the surface and I don't only just see it, I try to hear it or the cannon firing or the bat cracking as the crowd cheering. So I've been doing that since. The late seventies on films, the Brooklyn Bridge film for one. There was one woman where a woman told me that I had news reel of the building of the bridge.

I said, motion picture hadn't been invented. She goes, no, no, no, this and that. And I realized that's Ken Burns effect. I had won. I'd won. She thought that the way we moved on this thing and the sound effects and the seagulls and the hoist and the men yelling new technology, she just thought it was moving.

I thoughts so funny just to let her say, okay and declare victory inside. Anyway, I got called by Steve [01:17:00] Jobs in November of 2002 and he said, I'd like to meet you. And so I flew out to Cupertino and he led me into this office. We talked for a while. He led me to this office and there are two guys, engineers, and he said, we're been working on this for a really long time and it allows you, I'm a Luddite, allows you to, whether you upload or download your photographs to be able to move and pan on them.

And I said, well, that's cool. And he goes, next month it was now December, January of 2003, every Mac computer will have this on it. Wow. And I said, okay, cool. I'm trying not to betray what an idiot I am technologically. And he goes, and so we'd like to keep the working title. And I said, what is it? And he goes, the Ken Burns effect.

I said, I don't do commercial endorsements. And he goes, what? And the two engineers, I think perhaps aware of his periodic galvanic temper. Yeah. Uh, kind of shrink. And then he goes, come with me. So we go back to his office and we ended up talking for another hour and became good friends and we would stay with him to the west of his life.

Two short life. And I finally, I walked out of there and I'd agreed. [01:18:00] Reluctantly, but only in exchange for him Apple giving. What has probably turned out to be more than a million dollars of hardware and software that I could give away to nonprofits. Mm-hmm. To schools like a Final Cut Pro, which was their great editing software at that intermediate level.

Actual hardware of Mac computers, and I have to admit that the couple fell off the truck. Our office didn't have in there going, you're such an idiot. You can't use your electric typewriter. It's 2002. You have to have it. We have, we need another computer here than the one we have, which is ancient and old.

So we got a couple computers, but mainly we were able to give away. And it's a very superficial version of what we try to do in waking up a photograph, but I know it saved millions of bar mitzvahs and vacations and weddings and, you know, the, it's a organized stuff. And if you look, if you've got a iPhone and, and you go back every day, it's gonna offer you a little tiny movie of mm-hmm.

Some event in your past. Mm-hmm. And it dissolves, which we sometimes do, and then it moves again in almost the same way. And it will add a [01:19:00] cheery music soundtrack to it. And, and it just feels so many things, you know, not quite the depth of what we're trying to do, which is like pretty serious anxiety producing desire to try to wake up something that is essentially inanimate and more abundant and about something that's long dead.

And to try to make it come alive to will to life the moment that we're trying to do.

Gabriel Mizrahi: You've talked about a lot of your work as waking up the dead. And I think I heard in an old interview that there was a kind of Freudian

Ken Burns: Yeah.

Gabriel Mizrahi: Analysis of this, uh, impulse to wake up the dead. Do you still feel that way and tell us about that?

Ken Burns: Well, my mom had cancer or got it when I was very young. I mean, I don't remember a moment where there was a happy childhood where there wasn't this sort of damocles of her death coming. And I was even told when I was seven that she was gonna die in six months, and she died just a few months short of my 12th birthday when I was 11.

And, um, my dad didn't cry, didn't cry when she was sick or when she died or at [01:20:00] the funeral, but he let me stay up late with him. And when I was 12, we were watching an old movie on tv, odd Man Out by Sir Carroll Reed, about the Irish Troubles, and my dad started to cry. And I just at that moment said, I want to be a filmmaker.

So that meant a feature filmmaker. Mm. I went to Hampton because it 'cause it, it gave him an emotional safe haven. And I realized it instantly, it was not, I mean, my friends had pointed out that they hadn't cried and that, and they'd suggested that was a pejorative thing. And yet here was this man who had a very too short life and probably was bipolar and some undiagnosed other mental stuff.

But he was very smart and there's just nothing in his life that gave him the ability to express, as many of us do, shut down mm-hmm. Stuff and only do it. But this movie made him cry. And I just, I thought it was like an aha moment. But many years later, I was in a crisis of myself, 39 or 40, going through a divorce.

And my father-in-law, my late father-in-law was an eminent psychologist. I was talking to someone else about how the [01:21:00] fact that the day that my mom had died April 28th, 1965, was always approaching and always receding. But I was never present during the day, ever. For years. And then he looked at me and he goes, yeah.

And I bet you, um, blew your candles out on your birthday, wishing she'd come back. And I go, how'd you know? And he named two or three other intimate things that only he knew strategies that I added. Like they were just personal to me. Mm-hmm. And he knew them already. And then I was just like so perplexed.

And he goes, well look what you do for a living. I said, excuse me? He said, you wake the dead, you make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? Plowing from that. My father had never picked up the ashes. We didn't know where she was. There was no there there for her.

So there's no gravestone, there was no place. So we did, my brother, my younger brother, Rick and I did this exploration and we found out where her ashes were buried with 26 other puls in a grave at a cemetery way outside the town where we lived. And we were able to find the location and [01:22:00] couldn't get it out.

'cause there were cardboard containers of cremains, the euphemism. But we put a gravestone, not. Upright, but one that's flat. And I never have never forgotten April 28th since then. And even during a day when you're, you know, looking at a football game and it's now four minutes and 28 seconds in the first quarter, I say out loud, mommy, mama.

'cause mama is what my younger daughters call their mom and mommy is what? My brother and I still in our seventies call our mother. So there's something intimate about waking the dead. I think it is. And I'm not sure if it's Freudian, but it may be very human to try to, let me just reverse engineer this for a second and tell you that I would not be sitting here if my mother had not died.

And once a sociologist asked me, what was your mother's greatest gift to you? After three hours of interview and I blurted out dying and I started to cry. Mm-hmm. I didn't want her to die. But that loss has propelled. [01:23:00] All that I have become, and there's a great gift in whatever the sacrifice was, was cancer.

It was not anything that was intentional on her part, but the gift. If you can say that of dying, change me in really bad ways and made me bury it for so many years and then have me discover it. And it was, I'm not sure how I could say it was, it made me a better filmmaker, but it was made me a better person to be able to do that and to reclaim her.

And then my oldest daughter named her daughter after my mother, a woman, a grandmother she had never met. It was a great gift and the name was no longer draped in black crepe, but now birds thing and flowers bloom. And so there's, there has been as often as the case, we are always trying to arrange our lives.

So it's all working out well. That we live in kind of the gated commu, the proverbial gated communities of everything. But the inevitable ude of life will visit everybody and nobody is [01:24:00] getting out of this alive. And so we're often more defined by these tragedies and these losses than we are. We care to remember that these are the formative things in a strange and even still emotionally painful way for me.

But that's how you move forward and that's how you get better. The half-life of grief is endless, but it does have an aspect to it that could be creative. And so I think I'd let the Freudian adjective drop and just say that somehow people have the ability to transform the worst situations into something that may have a positive.

And my case, I took the loss of a mother. And not consciously, I'm not in any way suggesting it's conscious, but I've been able to talk about and try to make people come alive not to the dry dates and facts of the past, but to a kind of emotional archeology that makes us feel these people and know these people as a way of waking the dead.

And as my late father-in-law said, who do you [01:25:00] think you're really trying to wake up?

Jordan Harbinger: Ken Burns. Freeze frame. Slow pan to the slow pan, to the slow pan to the coffee. I feel like we should put it down there. Forget the rest of the stuff that's written on the side. That is a really lovely place to really

Ken Burns: thank you.

Jordan Harbinger: How do you earn the trust of a violent outlaw gang, knowing the whole time you're gonna betray them? Jay Dobbins didn't just infiltrate the Hell's Angels. He became one of them living a lie so deep it nearly consumed him.

JHS Clip: The Hell's Angels in Arizona were operating violently and with impunity. No one was really checking him and so I was approached by a case agent.

He was a savage of an investigator and he approaches me and he says, I want you to lead this undercover investigation and we're gonna get side by side with the Hell's Angels. My first reaction was like, I'm not the right guy. I had already started crossing paths with members of the Hell's Angels not as targets just in the criminal community in that society.

He's like, dude, you got a head start. You'll figure out how [01:26:00] to play the game. They already know who you are. We don't have to start from scratch. You know, I jumped in and my mentality on this job was always dangerous. Boys go to dangerous places. A TF didn't hire me to sit at a desk and do a computer investigation.

They hired me to get out and get in the weeds and get down and dirty. The Hell's Angels, they have historically bled and died in defense and fighting for that. That is their religion. It's more important than their wives or girlfriends. Then their kids, then their jobs, then their house, their income, their, there's nothing more important to those true believers than that Hell's Angels name and that death head logo, and they are very much willing to die for it.

Jordan Harbinger: In this episode, we unpack the fake crimes, real danger and brutal psychological cost of going all in undercover. Check out [01:27:00] episodes 1111 and 1112. For more with Jay Dobbins. So maybe the American Revolution isn't over. Maybe it's just changed uniforms. Ken Burns reminds us that this country was built on contradictions, freedom and slavery, idealism and self-interest, unity and rebellion.

And that the real fight wasn't about who ruled the colonies, but about what kind of people we wanted to be. 250 years later, we're still figuring that out. History, as Ken says, isn't a set of answers. It's a conversation with the past, and if you listen closely, it's a conversation that keeps asking, are we living up to the promises we made?

Big thanks to Ken Burns, his new series. The American Revolution, premiers November 16th on PBS, and I can tell you right now, it's worth every minute. It's history, but it's also a mirror. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with somebody else who believes history is boring, or maybe somebody who needs a reminder that history is not over yet.

In the meantime, all things Ken Burns will be in the show notes on the website, advertisers deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and [01:28:00] clickable. At Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter wee bit wiser. It's very specific, very practical.

It's a two minute read every Wednesday. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, and relationships. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Six Minute Networking over on Six Minute Networking dot com.

See you there. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. In this show, it's created an association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

Really the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.