December 18, 2025 • 53 mins
First up in our Top 6 most impactful guests from 2025, renowned documentary filmmaker Ken Burns talks about his new documentary film on the American Revolution, his Vietnam War documentary series, his path to a career in movies and more. He has created a legendary catalog of documentary movies including “The Vietnam War,” “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “The War,” “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea;” and more.
His films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including 17 Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and two Oscar nominations. Other topics include the impact of funding cuts on PBS and NPR, what Reddit is saying about watching documentaries by Burns and more.
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(00:00):
We're back. Alphas.
We're coming in hot with inspiring guests, witty banter
and colorful commentary for today's veterans and military
community. This is the Tal Podcast.
Hi there, Alphas. During the holiday season, the
Tal Podcast team is taking a break.
Need a break? But while we're gone, we do have
(00:23):
a little bonus content for you. So we've looked back at all the
things we've done during Season 6 and we've come up with a list
of our our top six most impactful guests from 2025.
And that was not easy. It really was difficult there.
Are so many great guests, but we'll be re releasing those
interviews this week. So if you haven't already,
subscribe to tango Philima on Spotify, apple podcast, YouTube,
(00:45):
or you know, wherever you get your podcast, don't miss our
countdown. We've got we've got you covered.
To start our trip back in time, we're going to take a short hop
back to revisit our recent chat with Ken Burns.
We talked with him back in September just before the
release of his new documentary series, The American Revolution.
Have you guys had a chance to watch any of that?
(01:08):
A couple of episodes, I actuallydug into it quite a bit before
we interviewed Ken and was really, really impressed.
So I'm hoping I'm going to sit back this holiday season with my
feet up and watch the rest that I didn't get to pick up.
I might put my foot up and do the same.
I'm probably going to watch it too.
I haven't had the chance. And, you know, I missed this
(01:29):
episode. I was so sad to miss it.
But you know what? It's already having an impact in
ways that we didn't even forecast.
We've had a couple other documentary film makers on who
went back and said, oh, great, Igot to come on and talk about
making films after Ken Burns. So, you know, they're just
excited to be able to be in the.Comedy.
Such an incredible director as as Ken and you guys absolutely
(01:53):
killed this this episode. I I hated to miss it but you
guys did so good. He is the father, you know.
Yeah. You know, honestly, though, our
documentarians have been some ofmy favorite episodes.
I I like finding people that areobsessed with one thing at
certain parts of their life, andthey just dive in because you're
(02:13):
never going to find somebody more passionate to share.
And so you can ask them anythingabout this time period and
they're going to be like, OK, sothis is what happened.
Here's the back story. The Hungarians were doing this.
You're like, whoa, hold on, we're talking about American
history. Just let's keep it focused.
The. German army revolution, yes.
And, and you know, it's really interesting.
(02:34):
You know, Ken is so passionate about his work, but also
American history, in particular American military history.
And it's definitely apparent in his work.
But his team, let's not overlookthe the people behind these
productions that are making thishappen as well.
This takes a really big a big talented crew and it does Joe
Joe speaks highly about not onlythe work he's doing and why he's
(02:55):
doing it, but his team as well. So shout out to to them and
everybody, everybody with this crew.
While alphas stick around after the break, we'll go back to
episode 284 with myself, Stacy, and documentary of filmmaker Ken
Burns. You might have heard of him.
Advancing the vision. Advancing the vision.
(03:16):
The American Legion educates, mentors, and leads new
generations of Americans. We are veterans strengthen in
America. We are the American Legion.
All right, now that we're done with talking about quilts, today
(03:38):
we're joined by the Ken Burns. His films have been honored with
dozens of major awards, including 17 Emmys, 2 Grammy
Awards, and 2O nominations. In September of 2008, at the
News and Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences with a Lifetime
Achievement Award. In November.
I'm young for that, Joe. Yeah.
(03:59):
Yeah, I want. When I when I accepted it, I
said I want to because with tough times it was the 08
meltdown. I said I want a half lifetime.
What are you guys trying to say here?
Work to do. And then in 2022, you were
inducted in the Television Academy Hall of Fame, which
tells me again, they're trying to get rid of you.
Be careful. There's no getting rid of.
(04:22):
No, in my in my kitchen, I can'treach it right now, but it's an
old New Yorker cartoon and it shows three guys standing in
hell, the flames licking up around them, and one guy says to
the other two. Apparently my over 200 screen
credits didn't mean a damn thing.
And I have that there every day to remind me, you know, and all
(04:42):
of that stuff that you list plus$0.50 get you a cup of coffee.
Outstanding. Well, we're super glad to have
you at the Tal Podcast. We're I, we, I me, myself.
The collected the Royal our our.Weed of royalty in the American
Revolution. So I really blew that, but the
me, myself and I very loud and complicated up here.
(05:04):
That's real a. Loyalist or a patriot?
I did find deep in my, you know,Skip Gates did the Finding Your
Roots thing with me many years ago and was able to
mitochondrial DNA link me to Robert Burns, the poet, which
I'd never been able to do. And I'm fourth cousin of a ran
(05:25):
all this stuff. I had someone who enslaved
people, which I wasn't surprisedabout.
The really bad thing is that despite lots of patriots on my
mother's side, there's a guy named Eldad Tupper that refused
to sign the loyalty oath and moved to New Brunswick.
And I just, to me, that was crushing.
I thought, Eldad, what a great name for a dog.
No more. Yeah.
(05:48):
Welcome to the show, Ken. I'm.
To have you here, and I want to start a little bit by getting to
know you. We're all familiar with you.
You're a household name, so I want to kind of no get to know
the the person behind what people normally see.
And after digging a little bit, I found out that your, your,
your dad was, was he an amateur photographer or pro
(06:10):
photographer? Somebody who?
Amateur. He's an anthropologist, cultural
anthropologist, but he took pictures and my first memory is
of him building a darkroom when I was 2 1/2 in a tract house in
the development in Newark, DE. He was the only anthropologist
in the entire state of Delaware.But that's my first memory is
and then of of, of the magic of sitting in his, you know, being
(06:31):
held in one arm as he's turning the smells and the this magic
taking place. It was great.
So I've got that in my DNA. I was going to ask, I was a
combat photographer in the military and so seeing that
little snippet of your your dad's past made me wonder, did
he pass the bug down to you? Is that what got you into
wanting to do documentary work or?
(06:53):
It's, can I, it's, it's so complicated.
I mean, in a, in a real basic way, yes.
So I got a brownie camera early and I thought I'd be that, but
my mom was sick the whole time from when I was 2 to when I was
12. Oh, she died when I was 11, just
a few months short of my 12th birthday.
And after she died, my dad had avery strict curfew.
(07:13):
But for some reason, on school nights for me, he would let me
stay up late, sometimes till 1:00 AM with all the commercials
to look at old movies. And it was the first time I'd
ever seen my dad cry. Not when she was sick, not when
she died, not at this impossiblysad funeral.
And I remember him crying at a movie called Odd Man Out about
the Irish Troubles and in the 19teens and 20s.
(07:35):
And I just remember saying to myself, I'm now 12.
I want to be a film maker. It provided my dad with an
emotional safe haven. Oh, my God.
And that's what I wanted to do. And so that meant Hollywood.
I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, and all my teachers
were social documentaries. Still photographers got back
interested in that and documentaries.
(07:57):
And then somewhere along the line, by the time I was 22, it
emerged with a completely untrained interest in American
history. Like I've always loved the
questions, the stories, the the parts, difficult and otherwise
of our country. And so all of a sudden by I mean
by 12, I knew what I wanted to do.
By 18 I knew what kind of thing film I wanted to make.
(08:19):
And by 22 it was American history.
And so you're looking at a 72 year old pathetically 50 years
later who has not deviated from that course.
Yet he's going to decide he wants to break wild ponies.
Dad was a Rifleman and an engineer and the Rangers in in
(08:42):
World War 2 landed after, you know, in early 45.
But he was apparently an incredible marksman that I don't
know about whether I've inherited any of that.
Did you talk to your dad a little bit about his
experiences? Yeah, he did not see combat
because he got into La ARV in France at about April of 45.
(09:08):
He ended up occupying as a 19 year old Krupps Essen mansion
with a few other guys and had asa 19 year old turning 20 in in
in June of 45. Had the had the good sense to
soak the labels off the wine bottles from one of Europe's
greatest wine Cellars. And when my dad passed away, I
(09:30):
found this book of all of the labels of what must have been
the greatest wines, right? I mean, Krupp is going to have
that sort of stuff. And he liberated some other, you
know, interesting things. Spreading democracy 1 bottle at
a time. 1 bottle. At a time, I think those are
called war treasures. War booty.
(09:52):
Well, that's incredible. So I so we never really know how
deep somebody's willing to get in.
And, and so I always have like sort of a deeper backup
question. And I, I do want to lean into
that because I think that you seem like the kind of guy that
gets what I'm trying to say whenI ask this question.
So, you know, from civil war to Vietnam War, you're, you know,
(10:14):
you explore these lasting scars of conflict, not just on our
country, but on the, the individual.
And as somebody, you know, like yourself that's interviewed
countless veterans for your projects, My easy question was,
why do you feel that push and desire to share those specific
stories? How did you land on, you know,
(10:37):
America in the way that you did?And then my deeper question is,
is it the history that you want to share and hope that people
draw their own lessons from whatthey see, or is there something
more specific that you hope people get from the stories of
those who wore the uniform? Well, that's a great question,
Joe. So after we did the Civil War
(10:58):
series, which I had to do because I saw that it was the
determining factor, the most important event in American
history once we'd gotten startedand everything issued from it.
My first film on Brooklyn Bridge, the new metal called
Steel, which the Civil War promoted.
Second film on the Shakers, A celibate religious sect that
died out after we murdered 650,700 thousand of our owns own
(11:21):
people and and and the question of the sole survival wasn't as
big a deal in the last half of the 19th century.
History of the Statue of Liberty, which was originally
intended as a gift from the French to Missus Lincoln to
commemorate the survival of the Union.
Besides her husband's ultimate triumph, the Congress.
Obviously its most important moment when there were two
Congresses, one in one in Washington, DC, the other in
(11:44):
first Montgomery and then later Richmond, VA.
So it's just a big, big moment. And afterwards I just looked at
everybody. I said no more wars.
Like it's just too much when, when people in the Civil War,
both North and South had been incombat.
And as you know, not everybody'sin combat, right?
(12:05):
It's it's a, it's a fairly smallsubset of people who actually
see combat and, and certainly regularly.
But when they've been in it, they said we'd seen the
elephant. And I assume that means it was
the most exotic thing you could imagine.
You're trying to tell you you everybody else has no idea what
this like is like. And so I said, you know, we
(12:26):
haven't seen the elephant, but we know what they meant.
We felt their pain and we understood, looked at the gory
photographs and the the cost of war.
So no more. But then at the end of the 90s,
Civil War came out in 1990. At the end of the 90s, I learned
that 1000 veterans of the SecondWorld War, American veterans
were dying every day. That is no longer the case.
(12:47):
It's down to single digits, right?
And that this impossibly large percentage, I can't remember
exactly what it was of graduating high school seniors.
That means with diploma in hand,marching off the thing Thought
we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the
Second World War. And I said, F no way, I've got
to do something. And so we tried.
(13:09):
I mean, this is the only subjectthat I've ever done that had
lots of brethren, hundreds of World War 2 movies.
But I thought, what if we saw the greatest cataclysm in human
history through the eyes of people who lived in four
geographically distributed American towns, Waterbury, CT,
Mobile, AL, Sacramento, CA, and tiny, tiny Laverne, Minnesota.
The other three about 100,000 in1941.
(13:31):
This one has 3000. OK, so we do that.
That takes us more than seven years.
But before the ink is dry on that, I looked at everybody, I
said we're doing Vietnam. And then like, I knew I couldn't
no longer keep that that ban, because it obviously exposes the
best and the worst of us is all the cliches that we say about
(13:52):
war, but it's really fundamentally a portal into
human behavior, experience and that good and bad stuff.
Before the ink was dry in December of 20, 15, before the
September 2017 broadcast of Vietnam, I said, we're doing the
revolution. And I knew how difficult it was
(14:13):
going to be like, you know, no photographs, no news reels.
Everybody thinks nothing happened.
It was this, you know, peaceful thing.
This is a civil war that's proportionally as bad as our
civil war. And our civil war isn't really a
civil war. It's a sectional war.
Civil war means lots of civiliandeaths.
There's almost none, no civiliandeaths outside of Missouri and
(14:34):
eastern Kansas in our civil war.It's, it's just a sectional war,
but man, the loyalists in everything and the killing
patriots and patriots killing loyalists and the disaffected,
those who wanted to just not just like conquer down who are
distrusted by both. It's really bad.
There's some battles in southerntheaters where there may be a
(14:55):
British officer leading the loyalists, right.
But everybody and who's killed in this battle?
Kings Mountain, that's in North Carolina just over the South
Carolina border. Everybody else is an American
killing another American. And, and what happens in New
Jersey and particularly New Jersey and South Carolina is as
bad as you could possibly imagine.
(15:17):
And I just want to communicate. I think most people don't trust
to the ideas. They think, ah, we got to
protect the ideas. It's just great thoughts in
Philadelphia. Plus they're all wearing
stockings and breeches and, and so we can't know them.
But in fact, those big ideas arenot diminished.
They're in fact enlarged by understanding the cost and, and
(15:38):
you know, last April, 250 years ago, last April 19th on
Lexington Green, the chances of our success is zero. 6 1/2 years
later in October of 1781 at Yorktown, it's 100%.
And don't you want to know how that happens?
And don't you want to know not just the top down, but you know,
(16:00):
the Washington who's the most important person and The
Jeffersons and the Adams people?We kind of know about Abigail
Adams, but what about a little girl 10 years old from Yorktown?
What about a 14 year old volunteer for the Patriots from
Boston or a 15 year old for Connecticut?
What's what's the biggest battleof the Revolution?
Battle of Long Island, where George Washington makes a
(16:20):
terrible mistake and and leaves his left flank completely
unprotected and the British takeadvantage of it.
What's the battle of Brand? You want a big set to BC leaves
his white right flank unprotected, you know.
So here you've got the greatest guy, most important, but he also
is flawed. And so we wanted to we, we
introduce you to literally dozens of characters in the
(16:40):
American Revolution. They're wives of German Hessian
soldiers arriving to triumphantly join Bergan's army
as it wins at Saratoga. Oops.
And who is the great hero of Saratoga?
Benedict Arnold, our general, right.
And it's only, you know, you meet him in the first moments of
episode 2 and it isn't till wellinto episode 6, the last
(17:03):
episode, that you find out what it is.
And then he escapes. You know, his his his
conspirator, Major Andre, who's in the British Secret Service,
is caught and hung as a spy. But and I want I'm glad you're
all sitting down. Benedict Arnold then joins and
creates A loyalist regiment called the American Legion.
(17:27):
Boiler Alert. Boiler Alert goes to Virginia
and wreaks havoc until he suddenly realizes that everybody
is now focused on him. He's he's been injured twice in
the service of the Patriot 'cause his same leg.
And so they're everybody's saying we'll just, we'll take
the leg and give it a military burial and the work of him, you
(17:49):
know, I. I actually have a leg that what
they do, military burial. They just loaded me up in the
back of a Humvee and drove me back home.
Same thing. Same thing, same thing.
It it's really pretty amazing and I think, you know, we have
this cast that you I mean, the longest Day doesn't have as
great a cast as we have, you know, Meryl Streep, your.
Voice actor? Who is that?
(18:11):
Holy cow. We have dozens of voices that
are the five actors reading the first person letters, making
people come alive. You know, Paul Giamatti reprises
is John Adams. Claire Danes is is Abigail
Adams. But Laura Linney, who was
Abigail has many different voices.
We've got Tom Hanks, we've got Meryl Streep.
We have. So many recognizable.
(18:33):
And they're all off camera and we're all taking that stuff.
So suddenly the wig business, the separation of paintings,
we've got lot. We followed lots of re enactors,
but very sort of impressionistically.
I can't wait for you to see thisthing because I think it takes
the onus off. You know, I think the barnacles
of sentimentality and nostalgia have encrusted the American
(18:54):
Revolution and that we need to just say this is what happened.
We, you know, that people say Ecclesiastes, that's the Old
Testament said there's nothing new under the sun, meaning human
nature doesn't change. There is something new under the
sun. The most important event since
the birth of Christ is the American Revolution.
That said, you are no longer subjects.
They're going to be a few peopleon earth who are citizens.
(19:16):
And that's a huge responsibility.
And when they say pursuit of happiness, they don't mean
whatever you want to do. You know, the, you know, the
acquisition of things in the marketplace of objects.
This is lifelong learning to earn the virtuous reward of
citizenship. And so I think particularly now
when people are worried about the future of the American
(19:39):
experiment, to go back to the opening moments and understand
the sacrifice. I mean, we always think the
sturdy militiamen, they were often the least reliable
soldiers that Washington had. It was these kids.
It was these narrative wells. It was these felons.
It was these second and third sons who didn't have a chance of
an inheritance. There were women dressed as men.
(20:00):
There were recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany.
They did the fighting. There's a couple battles, one in
South Carolina and Cowpens wherelike Daniel Morgan who's their
commander of Virginia uses tactics that that plays into
Cornwallis and this case is Territons understanding of how
(20:21):
the militia dissolves. So he puts the militia guys in
the 2 front lines and says just fire twice.
That's all I asked. Just fire twice.
Sometimes they didn't fire at all, sometimes they just ran.
Promise me you'll fire twice. They fire twice and then
retreat. Just run behind us.
The second line do the same thing fire twice run behind us
and and Terrell Tim is saying OKwe got them wrapped up and then
(20:43):
over The Reg are the continentals these kids these
you know, you know, the people who who who stuck it out who you
know this was not originally democracy wasn't the object of
the revolution. It was a consequence of it
because in order for these patricians, the Washingtons and
the Franklins and the Adams's towin, they had to begin to
(21:06):
promise regular people rights. And so these are the people that
stayed with Washington, didn't go home to plant a crop, didn't
bail at the first sign of fire. It is so inspiring.
It is so interesting. And we, you know, this was a
rabble. We were called the rabble by the
Germans, he says. One guy we follow, a German guy
(21:27):
named Johan Evald, he's completely contemptuous in the
beginning and at the end at Yorktown, he's surrender.
He's part of the surrender. He says these, this rabble, who
would have thought 100 years agoif this rabble could defy kings?
That's us guys. Well I I am proud to say that my
7 times great grandfather was a terrorist or a patriot.
(21:50):
He said rebel everybody. The British and the Loyalists
called everybody who's a patriotrebels.
OK, well, I definitely come fromgood Rebel stock.
Yeah, yeah, he was a Sergeant, an artillery Sergeant out of
Massachusetts. Yeah, it's great.
Fought in the Battle of Monmouth.
But I also discovered because ofyour Finding Roots episode that
(22:11):
you also had a patriot doctor, Gerardus Clarkson.
Yeah, and he, with Benjamin Rush, started one of the first
medical colleges in the United States, in Pennsylvania.
That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's very cool.
Lots of patriots all up and downthe line.
I'm happy to say let's forget about LLL.
We won't mention that. Name it.
I'm not even giving up for a dog.
(22:32):
OK, so I was lucky enough to watch some of the film, several
hours actually, because I couldn't put it down.
And what I really appreciated about it was, as you said, it's
not a time where pictures existed.
But you guys did an incredible job of supporting it with with
graphics, with, you know, really, really skillful voice
(22:57):
overs, as you said. But I think what was astounding
was the the beautiful cinematography that you had
incorporated. And you included footage from
what all all 13 original colonies.
What was that travel like? I mean, it took almost a decade
to do this film, right? Yeah.
So, so, yeah, it'll be when it'sbroadcast, it'll be a nine years
and 11 months. So the idea was, I've not been a
(23:20):
big fan of reenactments. My feeling is if you're doing
reenactments, you might as well do a feature film, right?
I'm not in the feature film business, but I knew I had to do
that. I had to film people who dressed
in French soldiers as German Hessians, as British soldiers,
as cavalry, as militia, as continentals, as Native
Americans. There are black soldiers, you
(23:41):
know, fighting for the British and black soldiers fighting for
the American. I mean, it's really an
interesting dynamic. And so I didn't want to go and
say, you mentioned the Battle ofMonmouth.
I didn't want to go and say, let's reenact the battle of
Monmouth, right? Let's just go down there, film
in New Jersey and the Pine Barrens and and, and shoot on a
super odd day. But let's take back stuff that
(24:04):
just becomes with all the other stuff we've shot over years and
years and years, just grist for the mill.
So it's like when I'm making thefilm on World War 2, I go to the
to the National Archives and I say, what do you got on World
War 2? And they say, what part?
And you say I'm interested in this.
So we began to blend it in with the maps.
I love maps, and I've had them in almost every film I've made.
(24:24):
And there are more maps in this one film than in all the other
films that I put together combined.
Because people want a sense of what actually happened.
And if you now know this little girl or this little boy who's in
the fight, it gives you a different kind of relationship
to that arrow. You know, the blue arrow for the
Patriots, the red arrow for the for the British or the
(24:47):
Loyalists, whatever it might be.It's so important to us to make
it come alive and take off the onus.
It really helps if you see thesereenactors just their feet going
through mud that sucks down, youknow, opening of our 4th episode
is sucking down a foot and it's really happening to them.
It's not just this sort of pristine reenactment.
(25:09):
So here we are. It's early in the morning, the
lights weird, it's silhouetted, whatever it might be and what it
does, it gives you a tactile sense.
So a feature film is going to have hundreds of soundtracks,
documentary, you know, maybe 10 or 15.
We have 250 soundtracks going at, in some of those battles
because we want to treat it as if it's really happening.
(25:29):
And what's been nice, I've been going around a Film Festival.
I've I've, I've done some screenings, you know, of, of
different things. And people are like, you know,
after the battle of Long Island,as I said, the biggest battle,
like my heart's pounding. They said, you know, and it's
not because I live in New York and my brother lives in Brooklyn
and it's all the places where heis now that this battle took
place, but it's that, you know, you tell a good story.
(25:53):
That's what I want to do. I want to take that onus off the
powdered wigs and the breeches and the buckles on the shoes and
the and the and the and the hoseand all of that since the.
Oversimplification. Yeah, and that they didn't
really experience stuff. War has been bad since the first
human being killed. Another one.
(26:13):
And that's that's where we have to.
You have to start with the fact that this is a really tough
thing, yet this is the first warrevolution in history that came
out saying proclaiming the universal rights of all people.
I think the other thing I appreciate about the film as
(26:33):
well, Ken, is obviously as you said, there was a lot of maps,
but how much of A collaboration did you have with, say, the
National Archives or the Smithsonian?
Like how did you go about sourcing these materials to be
able to include them in this film and bring them to the the
(26:54):
the layperson? I am so glad you asked that.
SO we identified scholars. We may have four or five
scholars who know a lot about Native American.
It's really important dynamic. A lot of scholars who know about
the British Empire and their dependence on their other 13
colonies, which were way more profitable in the Caribbean
because they depended on slave labor of people who are military
(27:16):
historians. Rick Atkinson, who's written,
you know, 2 volumes of three about the revolution, who's just
amazing. A lot of other writers, but we
also hired A cartographer and wealso had to, if you're looking
at Boston today, the, you know, the Charles River just goes like
this. It was a huge, what's called the
Back Bay is all apartments and streets that are familiar to
everybody who's ever been to Boston that was not filled in.
(27:38):
Boston looked like a little headat the end of a narrow isthmus.
And so then you begin to understand one of by land, 2 of
by sea. You understand why your ancestor
working for Henry Knox was able to get that artillery up into
Dorchester Heights and the British look up and go, we're
out of here. You know, the, the, the Patriots
(28:00):
didn't have enough muscle to to take over Boston.
They could go in and out by sea,but they were blocked in.
But the second we could bombard it, the game was over and they
headed to Halifax, NS. So you understand the dynamics
of that. And so we were constant.
I mean, literally all that time is US trying to get that map
right, trying to get this fact right, trying to not put your
(28:21):
thumb on the scale. Just like umpires call balls and
strikes. Like not make loyalists bad.
A loyalist is a conservative. A loyalist is saying, hey, the
British constitutional monarchy is the greatest government ever
invented up till now. And they're absolutely right.
It is. It's not like being a French
citizen, which is abject, you know, you know, the monarchy is
(28:44):
abject authoritarianism, but theBritish constitution, that's a
good system. We're just invented a better
one. And and you have to decide
whether you want to go with thiscompletely untested idea or you
stick with the old thing. So a loyalist is not a bad
person per SE. And so we follow throughout
loyalists and as I said, German soldiers and their wives and
(29:05):
British kings, prime ministers, you know, ministers there and
native people. I mean, there's, it's such a
great cast of figures and it doesn't make it complicated.
It makes it interesting. Like if everything was black and
white and say, the TV series Succession, no, it wouldn't be
successful. It's the fact that people have
(29:25):
within them, you know, differentthings.
Look at Benedict Arnold, he's next to Nathaniel Greene.
He is Washington's most reliablesoldier until he's not.
Which I think is just a fascinating, you know, it's he's
almost a character. You forget that he's human.
He's. A human being, right?
I remember I made a film on HueyLong, the turbulent Southern
(29:48):
demagogue. It got accepted at the New York
Film Festival. And I'm walking out in this
woman separate West side of New York.
She's probably a Jewish woman. She said you should do a
biography of Hitler. And I said, why would you want
me to do that? I'd have to make him a human
being, right? And right now, it's not right
now, but anytime it's almost better to have him as this
symbol of pure evil. But you know, Washington's
(30:10):
deeply flawed. He's rash.
He rides out on the battlefield,hips Bay.
His aides are going no, no, no. And they're grabbing the reins
of his horse and pulling him back because if he's killed,
it's over. It's dead.
And Princeton does the same thing and an aide is putting his
hand over his face. I mean, he's unbelievably brave
and has been since he's a 22 year old militiamen that
probably fired the first shot ofthe Seven Years War war, what we
(30:34):
call the French and Indian War. He may have started it by firing
into an encampment of French andtheir native allies to begin
what we call the French and Indian war later on is has to
surrender later on is you know, Braddock's aid to camp Braddock
is killed arrogantly thinks the I can handle any French and
(30:54):
Native American. He's ambushed Washington
executes, you know it says 2 bullets fly.
He's two horses shot out from under and bullets Pierce's
jacket and he executes a retreatand gets everybody else off and
they won't give him a Commissionin the British Army.
So he's like. OK, talk about being petty.
(31:15):
I mean petticoats I guess. I'm an American, right?
Yeah. So, so you got you guys know
this elementary, let me do this quiz on you.
Reverse question, right. All right.
How are the Patriots, rich and poor, all white men dressed when
they dump the tea in Boston Harbor?
They were all dressed up like Native Americans, correct?
(31:36):
Very, very good, Joe. You get at least temporarily a A
now, Joe, why were they dressed?Or Stacey.
Why were they dressed as Native Americans?
Were they trying to sow discontent of some sort or throw
off throw off the British? That would be what you'd think
they were saying to the British.And this is the great irony of
(31:59):
history and the complication of it.
They're saying we're aboriginal,we're Americans, we're no longer
part of the That's interesting. And they're not trying to blame
it on the Native Americans. They're trying to say, like the
Native Americans, we're different from you.
Meanwhile, the Native Americans are over here like meanwhile.
They're going, excuse me, you'vejust taken our demand.
(32:22):
You're, you're upset with Britain.
The main reason they're fightingyou, not just taxes and
representation and taxes on tea.It's mostly because the British
have said we can't protect you. So don't crossover the
Appalachians and take Indian land, which is what the smallest
farmer wants to do and what the big land speculators want to do
with 10s of thousands of acres they don't own, like George
(32:44):
Washington, like Benjamin Franklin, like Patrick Henry.
They're all pissed because they can't go over and just take any.
So it's, I mean, doesn't that make that so much more
interesting, the whole dynamic, Yeah.
The real question is, who wore it better?
No, no, no, no. Actually, I, I.
(33:04):
So in your film The American Buffalo, which is I, I, I am, so
I, I've loved Native American culture my whole life.
Well, I say my whole life. 2nd grade, I did a report on
Geronimo and found out that my family has some, not physically
to me, at least on my father's side has links to Cherokee
(33:26):
blood. But I, you know, that explores
the near extinction of a speciesthat's intrinsically linked to
the history of the American Westand, and Native American
culture, of course. And I never knew how bad it was
until I did my own research in high school for a paper.
And so weirdly, going into that,I knew a fair amount and was
(33:47):
still blown away. So my question to you is, and
and I mentioned to this that I told Stacey, she had to remind
me to ask you this. How much of it is you going?
I want to know more about this. Let's do a documentary.
And how much of it is is you knowing and just and needing to
share? I'm sure it's a mix, but I'm
curious. 95 percent. Oh, I need to know 5%.
(34:13):
This is what you should know. Because think about it, if it's
the other way around, then it's homework, right?
This is what you know, but if it's me going, hey, let me share
with you what I've just learned,then it's a story.
There's no homework, there's no test on Tuesday.
It's just like something you canshare.
And the best thing, I mean, I, I, I did a conversation with Joe
Rogan a couple months ago, 3 hours, right?
(34:36):
He was going, Oh, I had no idea.Oh, I had no idea.
Oh, I had no idea. Which is the greatest thing that
you want to say because he's well versed and stuff like that.
He knows history pretty well. He's curious guy, you know, and
most of the people we meet presume that they know some
stuff about the revolution. And what I love is not
(34:56):
disabusing of that, but just saying it's more.
I'll tell you once there's a deposed governor of Virginia,
he's royal governor. He's in a ship in the Chesapeake
Bay because the rebels control his province, his colony, our
state, soon to be our state of Virginia.
And he goes, he owns some slaves.
He says, what if we just free? He issues a proclamation.
(35:18):
We'll free the slaves of rebels,not the of loyalists.
How you tell the difference, I don't know.
And if you come over to us, you can fight for us and we'll give
you your freedom, right? It's a very destabilizing thing.
The entire British economy is dependent on slave labor in the
Caribbean and to a lesser extentin South Carolina and Virginia.
(35:39):
And slavery is legal in every state, but the least profitable
is Massachusetts and New Hampshire and places that just
don't have slaves in that regard.
And so it destabilizes the situation and makes a lot of
people who are a bit a bit on the fence go over to the patriot
side. So it gives some, you know,
(36:02):
historians the chance to say it's all about slavery.
It's not, but it's an amazing it's amazing thing.
So here's what we do know. 20,000 black Americans fought in
the Revolution, 15,000 for the British, 5000 for the Americans.
Because even with this promise of continued existence of
(36:24):
slavery, they felt the 'cause right?
Like there's AI agreed Black. There was a kid named James
Fortin who nine years old, hears2 days after the declaration is
signed, the first public readingin Philadelphia.
And he never for a second doesn't believe that those
self-evident truths aren't for him.
He goes on, becomes fights, is imprisoned.
(36:45):
He has a chance to get us to getout if he goes back to England
with the ship captain's son and be fine.
He goes, no, I'm fighting for my'cause he ends up in a prison
ship, nearly dies, and then later becomes rich in the
merchant marine and gives a lot of his profits to funding the
beginning of the abolitionist movement in the 19th century.
I mean this just you can't make this stuff up.
(37:07):
What an American. Yeah, that's James Fort.
And that's just one person. You know, we follow a guy who
left named Harry Washington. Guess whose plantation he was
at? Mount Vernon, Africa, in a new
colony whose capital is Freetown, right, Because they're
(37:28):
not welcome in Nova Scotia, where most of the loyalists go
because it's cold and they're black and they are not so
welcome in England either. So they end up going from
Britain to, you know, and that'sjust a couple of stories.
I mean, it's just so interestingif you just say it isn't just,
you know, guys in in Philadelphia thinking of great
(37:48):
ideas. Do not misunderstand me.
Those are the best ideas human beings have ever come up with.
And our film celebrates them, infact, exalts them.
But if you this is called the American Revolution, meaning
we're not going to pretend like it's just we fire some shots at
Lexington, which is a bloodbath.The Americans are told to
disperse. They start doing some of the
(38:10):
fires and it's a massacre. And then it changes at, at at
North Bridge in Concord. But and then the British are
running. But it's, it's bloody.
You know, I'll tell you some. There's an English historian in
our film named Stephen Conway atthe end of the battle of Bunkers
Hill, which takes place, of course, on Breeds Hill, but we
call it Bunkers Hill. Hal makes his final charge.
(38:33):
They Americans run out of ammunition and their guns are
fouled from overshooting. They've they've inflicted 40%
casualties on the British. The British Army will not
experience 40% casualties again until 1916 and the first day of
the sum. Now we think of World War One as
(38:54):
the worst trench warfare, gut wrenching kind of combat
situations. Bunker Hill, right.
And nobody said don't fire till you see the whites of their
eyes. They started off the first
charge. They was wait till you're
they're 90 yards out. The next is 50, the next is 30
just to save ammunition. But, you know, we get distracted
(39:17):
by the mythology and then we don't suddenly say 40%
casualties. Yeah, come on.
I mean, that's heartbreaking to imagine as somebody who served.
Heartbreaking, heartbreaking. And the you know, you know, a
British general was shot in the head and he was the officer who
had led the charge at Lexington and Concord.
(39:39):
He fell into the arms of his sonand died in his arms.
Warren, who is the head of the Massachusetts assembly, the most
radical of all of them, was shotand killed.
And he was stuffed in a in a Gray mass grave by the British
with two other rebels where their seditious beliefs would be
(39:59):
buried forever. So I mean this, you know, if you
personalize it, you do it from the top down.
You're with the maps, yes, Stacey with the arrows.
But if you know who's there bottom up, and you know what
their wife says when their bodies brought back into Acton,
MA, when you're you're the firstAmerican killed at the North
Bridge, right? You know, Isaac Davis, gunsmith
(40:22):
from Acton, you you've already watched him at dawn leave kind
of seriously and his wife responding, you know, to how
serious he is and then comes back along with the bodies of
two other Acton fellow soldiers and buried their house becomes
the place think of their children.
Then you've got something that any one of us can can hang on
(40:43):
to. You know, remember, after the
Civil War series came out, this woman came up to me and said,
what are you working on next? And I said, oh, history of
baseball. And she goes, oh, my husband and
son will like that. And so I turned to her and I
said, so you're a military history expert.
She goes, oh, no, but it was thestories.
I said, look, I know your son and your husband are going to
watch baseball. I'm making it for you.
(41:06):
These are universal stories. These are stories about
Americans dealing with stuff. Maybe it's a fastball, You know,
maybe it's a curveball. Maybe it's a bullet.
Maybe it's a cannon, but these are big questions of human
being. I don't need to tell you or your
listeners who are the front lines of of why we still are the
(41:26):
greatest country on earth. And, and I should have let off
by saying how honored I am to even spend a few minutes with
you. Oh, we're, we're seeing the
energy and we're, I mean, you know, you can tell when
somebody's life is dedicated to something because they're the
way they light up. And so, yeah, I don't it's it's
self-evident as as our. I, I, I can for one, appreciate
(41:50):
your approach in humanizing these experiences because I
think we can all see ourselves reflected in that, and
especially the alphas who are listening, who've had their own
experiences through the militarywhere there are no winners in
war. And I think that gives you a
better appreciation of other people's turmoil.
And I know I, I kind of teased alittle bit about cause calling
(42:13):
my ancestor a terrorist because depending on which side of the
line you are, it's going to skewhow you view it.
But either side thinks they're they're supposed to be the
victorious ones. Robert McNamara told Curtis
Lemay at the end of World War 2 that if we're the losers, we get
hung as war criminals for the carpet bombing of essentially
(42:34):
wood and paper Tokyo that killed, you know, hundreds of
thousands of people, well, more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
more than a million people, he said.
You know, we, we're, we're, we'dbe war criminals and, and hung
for what we'd done. And so it's one man's meat is
another man's poison. I will say this too, Ken, I've
had a family member who's had skin in the game in every single
(42:58):
era of of war that you've covered in your films.
So from the Revolution all the way forward, we got to get one
on World War One. You didn't do one on that one.
I'll tell you that that's a really good point.
We've covered World War One in alot of different films from
Hemingway, believe it or not, till Jazz and baseball and and
other stuff. So we passed through it.
(43:18):
World War One is in a way, and this is where the isolationist
movement in America started, is their war.
Like we came in and we were the difference and we won it for
them, but it was it was their war in a way that World War 2 is
not in that we did come and win it, but mainly it was our
manufacturing is the biggest cause of the winning of the
(43:40):
Second World War. Second is Soviet sacrifice.
Americans don't like to hear that.
And 3rd is the sacrifice of the Western European allies,
including those people who landed at at Omaha and and and
golden sword that day. So I mean, it's just, it's Utah
and all the other, all the beaches there, you know,
(44:01):
Canadian and British and, and, and mostly Americans.
And the Americans bore the bruntof it at, at, at Omaha, of
course. And you go there and you just
can't help but say they weren't getting paid, they weren't there
for empire, there was no conquest.
They were there for an idea thattyranny and authoritarianism is
(44:23):
not the way of human progress. And that's why I can't even talk
about it without breaking up. Yeah, I mean, I've had, my
ancestors were from after Massachusetts.
They migrated over to Michigan to do farming.
So you talked about moving West.To Ann Arbor.
(44:43):
Yes, yeah, I saw that. I've got.
Yeah. Harbor Springs.
Oh, it's so funny. You talked about Laverne,
Minnesota, and I did the veteran.
So after I got wounded, I started doing the Veterans
Portrait Project, where I traveled to all 50 states to
document veteran stories. And I went to Laverne, Minnesota
and I met this this Korean War veteran named Arvin and he lost
(45:08):
almost his entire unit in Korea.And so they shipped him home.
He land. He said he landed in the middle
of the night and and by the timehe got back to the farm, it was
like 5 in the morning and he wason a tractor harvesting by like
7 in the morning after coming home from Korea and losing.
(45:28):
Anyway, this is the kind of metal of the Americans that that
you document in your films. And I can definitely appreciate
that. And I'm, I'm looking forward to
sitting down and watching the rest of of this film when it
comes out. When, when are we expected to
have this drop? Where can alphas watch it?
Tell us all about. All of my films couldn't have
(45:48):
been made without PBS, which is sorry that it's sort of under
attack. I, I, I, I, you know, they have
one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other
proudly out. And, and that's where I've been
able to do it. I could have gone to a streaming
service or premium cable and said I need $30 million to make
the Vietnam film. And they go great with your
track record here it is, right? But they wouldn't have given me
(46:09):
10 1/2 years, which is what it took to get it right, Right.
So that's what PBS, I had to raise all that money from them
and from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has
just been zeroed out and is no more.
But I was able to do it right. So I PBS will begin broadcasting
this and streaming it for free on on Sunday, November 16th.
(46:33):
And it's going to be broadcast all that week, Sunday through
Friday night. They'll rebroadcast it, do it
marathons on the weekends, rebroadcast in January.
It'll be in pledge, it'll be going and they'll have another
national broadcast again in Junebefore the 250th anniversary of
the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
It's going to be hard to miss the DVDs and Blu rays if you
(46:53):
know what those things are. There's a companion book by
Alfred A Knopf, which is the handsomest of all the companion
books we've done. And we've done educational
outreach. So any school that's interested
in the American Revolution, whether it's third grade, 5th
grade, 8th grade, 11th grade, college, continuing education,
they're not going to miss it. So I'm really hoping that
(47:13):
everybody tunes in. Like we're now so divided, but
we share a lot of things in common.
Like I've made films for almost 50 years about the US, but I've
also made films about us. That is to say, the lowercase, 2
letter plural pronoun. All the intimacy of us and we
(47:34):
and our and all of the majesty, the complexity, the
contradiction and even the controversy of the US.
And it is my great privilege to spend that time telling those
stories. And I can't wait, if we all
watch this together, as it happened to remember at the
Civil War, where you're too young, at the Civil War series,
the whole country stopped. Joe was there.
(47:54):
I I that was the first one I watched actually.
Was Civil War in the 90s? Yeah.
Yeah. So it came out in September of
1990 and you're both too young to stayed up.
But the country stopped and I'm really hoping we don't do that
anymore. But I really hope in some ways,
not for me, but for us to be able to all claim, regardless of
(48:15):
what side of the political divide you're on, claim this
extraordinary the birth of our creation story, our creation
myth, the the the moment that I am calling the most important
moment since the birth of Christ.
Alphas. You can also get your passports
and watch that on on the PBS app.
(48:36):
You can stream it beginning November 16th.
If you want to watch it through your local, whether it's an ETV
or your local PBS station, make sure you check your local
listings. It'll all be the same time.
This one they're going to show at the same time.
OK, great. Perfect.
And you're going to show. Every episode twice.
So on Sunday night they'll show episode 1 from 8 to 10 and then
(48:58):
show episode 1 again from 11:50.So you can go out and have a
beer, you can come back and do it, you can go to bed early and
you know, whatever it is. And they'll do that all week.
So that's called a double pump. Nice.
And if you want to get your kidsinvolved, sit down with a
pitcher of lemonade. And every time they say General
Washington, take a shot of lemonade.
Have a little fun. I can tell you I was drunk.
(49:21):
I was drunk on that sour goodness while watching just a
few hours of it. But you can also find it
probably on Apple TV, Amazon Prime.
So just make sure that there's abunch of platforms, it's going
to be out there and and pretty widespread.
It's going to be hard to miss. Yeah.
We're going to have lots of partnerships of various places
like Walmart that will permit usto to sort of give point of sale
(49:44):
things. It'll be good Christmas stuff.
And it isn't just for Dad. I think it's everybody's story.
Like I, I've got four daughters and couple of them grown.
Yeah. Isn't it the best?
I'm rich in Daughters, but my younger ones, I'll show them
this stuff and they're like riveted.
And they'll go, whoa, you know? And they like the maps.
(50:04):
They like. The There were women in
espionage during the revolution.Indeed, indeed.
In fact, they're what? Perfect spies?
Perfect spies. Exactly, if they can just live.
It's all the petticoats where wehide all the letters, yeah.
That's. Exactly right.
Do you love a good petticoat? Alphas, we're gonna have links
to where you can find more information about the American
(50:25):
Revolution by Ken Burns. You can also be sure to check
out pbs.org back slash Ken Burnsback slash U&UM For more
information there. Ken, as we wrap up, is there
anything that we didn't cover that you wanted to share?
Awesome. I'll just tell you that one of
the first things we did in support of the promotion of
(50:45):
this, which was way back last February, we went, as we always
do, to West Point. And at lunch, you know, we're
all 4000 cadets are hooing. We showed the opening quote by
Thomas Paine about liberty and freedom and throwing off the
feeble engines of despotism. And then 1600 cadets came and we
(51:05):
showed them in an auditorium about 40 minutes of stuff.
It was as it was in the Civil War, as it was in World War 2,
as it was in Vietnam, one of thehighlights of this tour.
So I just, I bless the folks whoput on the uniform and service.
And I think we've done a good job telling your story and
understanding the difficulties of war and getting into just how
(51:27):
bad it is. So it's not sugar coated.
I mean, soldiers always make thebest peacemakers.
I will say that there is a request on Reddit can that you
do a film about Ken Burns. Yeah, right.
Yeah, that when? I'll play you.
I'll need a wig. Yeah, we'll, we'll call that
when hell freezes over. Hell.
(51:50):
Has frozen. The pigs are flying alphas.
That's right, pig, when pigs areflying.
Exactly. Ken, you're a real treat.
Thank you for what you do for American history, for what you
do for public television and filmmaking in general.
And keep up the fantastic, incredible market, setting the
bar high for all of us. It's all back at you guys.
(52:11):
That's that's the thing that we care about.
And we're so grateful for your service and we're so grateful
for your sacrifice. Welcome home.
Let us know what we can do for you.
Thank you so much for visiting us today, Ken Alphas, please
stick around for some scuttle boot after the break.
Welcome back, alphas. We're keeping things short and
(52:32):
sweet on the countdown, so there's no scuttle but today.
But thanks for taking the trip down memory lane with us.
We really hope you guys enjoyed the episode.
On behalf of the entire Tal Podcast team, we hope you're
enjoying time with your loved ones during the holiday season.
If you miss us during the holidays, which I know you are,
you can always subscribe to our podcast, our newsletter, or send
(52:52):
us guest and mail recommendations at legion.org,
Back slash Tango Awful Lima Salon.
Salon.
We're back. Alphas.
We're coming in hot with inspiring guests, witty banter
and colorful commentary for today's veterans and military
community. This is the Tal Podcast.
Hi there, Alphas. During the holiday season, the
Tal Podcast team is taking a break.
Need a break? But while we're gone, we do have
(00:23):
a little bonus content for you. So we've looked back at all the
things we've done during Season 6 and we've come up with a list
of our our top six most impactful guests from 2025.
And that was not easy. It really was difficult there.
Are so many great guests, but we'll be re releasing those
interviews this week. So if you haven't already,
subscribe to tango Philima on Spotify, apple podcast, YouTube,
(00:45):
or you know, wherever you get your podcast, don't miss our
countdown. We've got we've got you covered.
To start our trip back in time, we're going to take a short hop
back to revisit our recent chat with Ken Burns.
We talked with him back in September just before the
release of his new documentary series, The American Revolution.
Have you guys had a chance to watch any of that?
(01:08):
A couple of episodes, I actuallydug into it quite a bit before
we interviewed Ken and was really, really impressed.
So I'm hoping I'm going to sit back this holiday season with my
feet up and watch the rest that I didn't get to pick up.
I might put my foot up and do the same.
I'm probably going to watch it too.
I haven't had the chance. And, you know, I missed this
(01:29):
episode. I was so sad to miss it.
But you know what? It's already having an impact in
ways that we didn't even forecast.
We've had a couple other documentary film makers on who
went back and said, oh, great, Igot to come on and talk about
making films after Ken Burns. So, you know, they're just
excited to be able to be in the.Comedy.
Such an incredible director as as Ken and you guys absolutely
(01:53):
killed this this episode. I I hated to miss it but you
guys did so good. He is the father, you know.
Yeah. You know, honestly, though, our
documentarians have been some ofmy favorite episodes.
I I like finding people that areobsessed with one thing at
certain parts of their life, andthey just dive in because you're
(02:13):
never going to find somebody more passionate to share.
And so you can ask them anythingabout this time period and
they're going to be like, OK, sothis is what happened.
Here's the back story. The Hungarians were doing this.
You're like, whoa, hold on, we're talking about American
history. Just let's keep it focused.
The. German army revolution, yes.
And, and you know, it's really interesting.
(02:34):
You know, Ken is so passionate about his work, but also
American history, in particular American military history.
And it's definitely apparent in his work.
But his team, let's not overlookthe the people behind these
productions that are making thishappen as well.
This takes a really big a big talented crew and it does Joe
Joe speaks highly about not onlythe work he's doing and why he's
(02:55):
doing it, but his team as well. So shout out to to them and
everybody, everybody with this crew.
While alphas stick around after the break, we'll go back to
episode 284 with myself, Stacy, and documentary of filmmaker Ken
Burns. You might have heard of him.
Advancing the vision. Advancing the vision.
(03:16):
The American Legion educates, mentors, and leads new
generations of Americans. We are veterans strengthen in
America. We are the American Legion.
All right, now that we're done with talking about quilts, today
(03:38):
we're joined by the Ken Burns. His films have been honored with
dozens of major awards, including 17 Emmys, 2 Grammy
Awards, and 2O nominations. In September of 2008, at the
News and Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences with a Lifetime
Achievement Award. In November.
I'm young for that, Joe. Yeah.
(03:59):
Yeah, I want. When I when I accepted it, I
said I want to because with tough times it was the 08
meltdown. I said I want a half lifetime.
What are you guys trying to say here?
Work to do. And then in 2022, you were
inducted in the Television Academy Hall of Fame, which
tells me again, they're trying to get rid of you.
Be careful. There's no getting rid of.
(04:22):
No, in my in my kitchen, I can'treach it right now, but it's an
old New Yorker cartoon and it shows three guys standing in
hell, the flames licking up around them, and one guy says to
the other two. Apparently my over 200 screen
credits didn't mean a damn thing.
And I have that there every day to remind me, you know, and all
(04:42):
of that stuff that you list plus$0.50 get you a cup of coffee.
Outstanding. Well, we're super glad to have
you at the Tal Podcast. We're I, we, I me, myself.
The collected the Royal our our.Weed of royalty in the American
Revolution. So I really blew that, but the
me, myself and I very loud and complicated up here.
(05:04):
That's real a. Loyalist or a patriot?
I did find deep in my, you know,Skip Gates did the Finding Your
Roots thing with me many years ago and was able to
mitochondrial DNA link me to Robert Burns, the poet, which
I'd never been able to do. And I'm fourth cousin of a ran
(05:25):
all this stuff. I had someone who enslaved
people, which I wasn't surprisedabout.
The really bad thing is that despite lots of patriots on my
mother's side, there's a guy named Eldad Tupper that refused
to sign the loyalty oath and moved to New Brunswick.
And I just, to me, that was crushing.
I thought, Eldad, what a great name for a dog.
No more. Yeah.
(05:48):
Welcome to the show, Ken. I'm.
To have you here, and I want to start a little bit by getting to
know you. We're all familiar with you.
You're a household name, so I want to kind of no get to know
the the person behind what people normally see.
And after digging a little bit, I found out that your, your,
your dad was, was he an amateur photographer or pro
(06:10):
photographer? Somebody who?
Amateur. He's an anthropologist, cultural
anthropologist, but he took pictures and my first memory is
of him building a darkroom when I was 2 1/2 in a tract house in
the development in Newark, DE. He was the only anthropologist
in the entire state of Delaware.But that's my first memory is
and then of of, of the magic of sitting in his, you know, being
(06:31):
held in one arm as he's turning the smells and the this magic
taking place. It was great.
So I've got that in my DNA. I was going to ask, I was a
combat photographer in the military and so seeing that
little snippet of your your dad's past made me wonder, did
he pass the bug down to you? Is that what got you into
wanting to do documentary work or?
(06:53):
It's, can I, it's, it's so complicated.
I mean, in a, in a real basic way, yes.
So I got a brownie camera early and I thought I'd be that, but
my mom was sick the whole time from when I was 2 to when I was
12. Oh, she died when I was 11, just
a few months short of my 12th birthday.
And after she died, my dad had avery strict curfew.
(07:13):
But for some reason, on school nights for me, he would let me
stay up late, sometimes till 1:00 AM with all the commercials
to look at old movies. And it was the first time I'd
ever seen my dad cry. Not when she was sick, not when
she died, not at this impossiblysad funeral.
And I remember him crying at a movie called Odd Man Out about
the Irish Troubles and in the 19teens and 20s.
(07:35):
And I just remember saying to myself, I'm now 12.
I want to be a film maker. It provided my dad with an
emotional safe haven. Oh, my God.
And that's what I wanted to do. And so that meant Hollywood.
I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, and all my teachers
were social documentaries. Still photographers got back
interested in that and documentaries.
(07:57):
And then somewhere along the line, by the time I was 22, it
emerged with a completely untrained interest in American
history. Like I've always loved the
questions, the stories, the the parts, difficult and otherwise
of our country. And so all of a sudden by I mean
by 12, I knew what I wanted to do.
By 18 I knew what kind of thing film I wanted to make.
(08:19):
And by 22 it was American history.
And so you're looking at a 72 year old pathetically 50 years
later who has not deviated from that course.
Yet he's going to decide he wants to break wild ponies.
Dad was a Rifleman and an engineer and the Rangers in in
(08:42):
World War 2 landed after, you know, in early 45.
But he was apparently an incredible marksman that I don't
know about whether I've inherited any of that.
Did you talk to your dad a little bit about his
experiences? Yeah, he did not see combat
because he got into La ARV in France at about April of 45.
(09:08):
He ended up occupying as a 19 year old Krupps Essen mansion
with a few other guys and had asa 19 year old turning 20 in in
in June of 45. Had the had the good sense to
soak the labels off the wine bottles from one of Europe's
greatest wine Cellars. And when my dad passed away, I
(09:30):
found this book of all of the labels of what must have been
the greatest wines, right? I mean, Krupp is going to have
that sort of stuff. And he liberated some other, you
know, interesting things. Spreading democracy 1 bottle at
a time. 1 bottle. At a time, I think those are
called war treasures. War booty.
(09:52):
Well, that's incredible. So I so we never really know how
deep somebody's willing to get in.
And, and so I always have like sort of a deeper backup
question. And I, I do want to lean into
that because I think that you seem like the kind of guy that
gets what I'm trying to say whenI ask this question.
So, you know, from civil war to Vietnam War, you're, you know,
(10:14):
you explore these lasting scars of conflict, not just on our
country, but on the, the individual.
And as somebody, you know, like yourself that's interviewed
countless veterans for your projects, My easy question was,
why do you feel that push and desire to share those specific
stories? How did you land on, you know,
(10:37):
America in the way that you did?And then my deeper question is,
is it the history that you want to share and hope that people
draw their own lessons from whatthey see, or is there something
more specific that you hope people get from the stories of
those who wore the uniform? Well, that's a great question,
Joe. So after we did the Civil War
(10:58):
series, which I had to do because I saw that it was the
determining factor, the most important event in American
history once we'd gotten startedand everything issued from it.
My first film on Brooklyn Bridge, the new metal called
Steel, which the Civil War promoted.
Second film on the Shakers, A celibate religious sect that
died out after we murdered 650,700 thousand of our owns own
(11:21):
people and and and the question of the sole survival wasn't as
big a deal in the last half of the 19th century.
History of the Statue of Liberty, which was originally
intended as a gift from the French to Missus Lincoln to
commemorate the survival of the Union.
Besides her husband's ultimate triumph, the Congress.
Obviously its most important moment when there were two
Congresses, one in one in Washington, DC, the other in
(11:44):
first Montgomery and then later Richmond, VA.
So it's just a big, big moment. And afterwards I just looked at
everybody. I said no more wars.
Like it's just too much when, when people in the Civil War,
both North and South had been incombat.
And as you know, not everybody'sin combat, right?
(12:05):
It's it's a, it's a fairly smallsubset of people who actually
see combat and, and certainly regularly.
But when they've been in it, they said we'd seen the
elephant. And I assume that means it was
the most exotic thing you could imagine.
You're trying to tell you you everybody else has no idea what
this like is like. And so I said, you know, we
(12:26):
haven't seen the elephant, but we know what they meant.
We felt their pain and we understood, looked at the gory
photographs and the the cost of war.
So no more. But then at the end of the 90s,
Civil War came out in 1990. At the end of the 90s, I learned
that 1000 veterans of the SecondWorld War, American veterans
were dying every day. That is no longer the case.
(12:47):
It's down to single digits, right?
And that this impossibly large percentage, I can't remember
exactly what it was of graduating high school seniors.
That means with diploma in hand,marching off the thing Thought
we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the
Second World War. And I said, F no way, I've got
to do something. And so we tried.
(13:09):
I mean, this is the only subjectthat I've ever done that had
lots of brethren, hundreds of World War 2 movies.
But I thought, what if we saw the greatest cataclysm in human
history through the eyes of people who lived in four
geographically distributed American towns, Waterbury, CT,
Mobile, AL, Sacramento, CA, and tiny, tiny Laverne, Minnesota.
The other three about 100,000 in1941.
(13:31):
This one has 3000. OK, so we do that.
That takes us more than seven years.
But before the ink is dry on that, I looked at everybody, I
said we're doing Vietnam. And then like, I knew I couldn't
no longer keep that that ban, because it obviously exposes the
best and the worst of us is all the cliches that we say about
(13:52):
war, but it's really fundamentally a portal into
human behavior, experience and that good and bad stuff.
Before the ink was dry in December of 20, 15, before the
September 2017 broadcast of Vietnam, I said, we're doing the
revolution. And I knew how difficult it was
(14:13):
going to be like, you know, no photographs, no news reels.
Everybody thinks nothing happened.
It was this, you know, peaceful thing.
This is a civil war that's proportionally as bad as our
civil war. And our civil war isn't really a
civil war. It's a sectional war.
Civil war means lots of civiliandeaths.
There's almost none, no civiliandeaths outside of Missouri and
(14:34):
eastern Kansas in our civil war.It's, it's just a sectional war,
but man, the loyalists in everything and the killing
patriots and patriots killing loyalists and the disaffected,
those who wanted to just not just like conquer down who are
distrusted by both. It's really bad.
There's some battles in southerntheaters where there may be a
(14:55):
British officer leading the loyalists, right.
But everybody and who's killed in this battle?
Kings Mountain, that's in North Carolina just over the South
Carolina border. Everybody else is an American
killing another American. And, and what happens in New
Jersey and particularly New Jersey and South Carolina is as
bad as you could possibly imagine.
(15:17):
And I just want to communicate. I think most people don't trust
to the ideas. They think, ah, we got to
protect the ideas. It's just great thoughts in
Philadelphia. Plus they're all wearing
stockings and breeches and, and so we can't know them.
But in fact, those big ideas arenot diminished.
They're in fact enlarged by understanding the cost and, and
(15:38):
you know, last April, 250 years ago, last April 19th on
Lexington Green, the chances of our success is zero. 6 1/2 years
later in October of 1781 at Yorktown, it's 100%.
And don't you want to know how that happens?
And don't you want to know not just the top down, but you know,
(16:00):
the Washington who's the most important person and The
Jeffersons and the Adams people?We kind of know about Abigail
Adams, but what about a little girl 10 years old from Yorktown?
What about a 14 year old volunteer for the Patriots from
Boston or a 15 year old for Connecticut?
What's what's the biggest battleof the Revolution?
Battle of Long Island, where George Washington makes a
(16:20):
terrible mistake and and leaves his left flank completely
unprotected and the British takeadvantage of it.
What's the battle of Brand? You want a big set to BC leaves
his white right flank unprotected, you know.
So here you've got the greatest guy, most important, but he also
is flawed. And so we wanted to we, we
introduce you to literally dozens of characters in the
(16:40):
American Revolution. They're wives of German Hessian
soldiers arriving to triumphantly join Bergan's army
as it wins at Saratoga. Oops.
And who is the great hero of Saratoga?
Benedict Arnold, our general, right.
And it's only, you know, you meet him in the first moments of
episode 2 and it isn't till wellinto episode 6, the last
(17:03):
episode, that you find out what it is.
And then he escapes. You know, his his his
conspirator, Major Andre, who's in the British Secret Service,
is caught and hung as a spy. But and I want I'm glad you're
all sitting down. Benedict Arnold then joins and
creates A loyalist regiment called the American Legion.
(17:27):
Boiler Alert. Boiler Alert goes to Virginia
and wreaks havoc until he suddenly realizes that everybody
is now focused on him. He's he's been injured twice in
the service of the Patriot 'cause his same leg.
And so they're everybody's saying we'll just, we'll take
the leg and give it a military burial and the work of him, you
(17:49):
know, I. I actually have a leg that what
they do, military burial. They just loaded me up in the
back of a Humvee and drove me back home.
Same thing. Same thing, same thing.
It it's really pretty amazing and I think, you know, we have
this cast that you I mean, the longest Day doesn't have as
great a cast as we have, you know, Meryl Streep, your.
Voice actor? Who is that?
(18:11):
Holy cow. We have dozens of voices that
are the five actors reading the first person letters, making
people come alive. You know, Paul Giamatti reprises
is John Adams. Claire Danes is is Abigail
Adams. But Laura Linney, who was
Abigail has many different voices.
We've got Tom Hanks, we've got Meryl Streep.
We have. So many recognizable.
(18:33):
And they're all off camera and we're all taking that stuff.
So suddenly the wig business, the separation of paintings,
we've got lot. We followed lots of re enactors,
but very sort of impressionistically.
I can't wait for you to see thisthing because I think it takes
the onus off. You know, I think the barnacles
of sentimentality and nostalgia have encrusted the American
(18:54):
Revolution and that we need to just say this is what happened.
We, you know, that people say Ecclesiastes, that's the Old
Testament said there's nothing new under the sun, meaning human
nature doesn't change. There is something new under the
sun. The most important event since
the birth of Christ is the American Revolution.
That said, you are no longer subjects.
They're going to be a few peopleon earth who are citizens.
(19:16):
And that's a huge responsibility.
And when they say pursuit of happiness, they don't mean
whatever you want to do. You know, the, you know, the
acquisition of things in the marketplace of objects.
This is lifelong learning to earn the virtuous reward of
citizenship. And so I think particularly now
when people are worried about the future of the American
(19:39):
experiment, to go back to the opening moments and understand
the sacrifice. I mean, we always think the
sturdy militiamen, they were often the least reliable
soldiers that Washington had. It was these kids.
It was these narrative wells. It was these felons.
It was these second and third sons who didn't have a chance of
an inheritance. There were women dressed as men.
(20:00):
There were recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany.
They did the fighting. There's a couple battles, one in
South Carolina and Cowpens wherelike Daniel Morgan who's their
commander of Virginia uses tactics that that plays into
Cornwallis and this case is Territons understanding of how
(20:21):
the militia dissolves. So he puts the militia guys in
the 2 front lines and says just fire twice.
That's all I asked. Just fire twice.
Sometimes they didn't fire at all, sometimes they just ran.
Promise me you'll fire twice. They fire twice and then
retreat. Just run behind us.
The second line do the same thing fire twice run behind us
and and Terrell Tim is saying OKwe got them wrapped up and then
(20:43):
over The Reg are the continentals these kids these
you know, you know, the people who who who stuck it out who you
know this was not originally democracy wasn't the object of
the revolution. It was a consequence of it
because in order for these patricians, the Washingtons and
the Franklins and the Adams's towin, they had to begin to
(21:06):
promise regular people rights. And so these are the people that
stayed with Washington, didn't go home to plant a crop, didn't
bail at the first sign of fire. It is so inspiring.
It is so interesting. And we, you know, this was a
rabble. We were called the rabble by the
Germans, he says. One guy we follow, a German guy
(21:27):
named Johan Evald, he's completely contemptuous in the
beginning and at the end at Yorktown, he's surrender.
He's part of the surrender. He says these, this rabble, who
would have thought 100 years agoif this rabble could defy kings?
That's us guys. Well I I am proud to say that my
7 times great grandfather was a terrorist or a patriot.
(21:50):
He said rebel everybody. The British and the Loyalists
called everybody who's a patriotrebels.
OK, well, I definitely come fromgood Rebel stock.
Yeah, yeah, he was a Sergeant, an artillery Sergeant out of
Massachusetts. Yeah, it's great.
Fought in the Battle of Monmouth.
But I also discovered because ofyour Finding Roots episode that
(22:11):
you also had a patriot doctor, Gerardus Clarkson.
Yeah, and he, with Benjamin Rush, started one of the first
medical colleges in the United States, in Pennsylvania.
That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's very cool.
Lots of patriots all up and downthe line.
I'm happy to say let's forget about LLL.
We won't mention that. Name it.
I'm not even giving up for a dog.
(22:32):
OK, so I was lucky enough to watch some of the film, several
hours actually, because I couldn't put it down.
And what I really appreciated about it was, as you said, it's
not a time where pictures existed.
But you guys did an incredible job of supporting it with with
graphics, with, you know, really, really skillful voice
(22:57):
overs, as you said. But I think what was astounding
was the the beautiful cinematography that you had
incorporated. And you included footage from
what all all 13 original colonies.
What was that travel like? I mean, it took almost a decade
to do this film, right? Yeah.
So, so, yeah, it'll be when it'sbroadcast, it'll be a nine years
and 11 months. So the idea was, I've not been a
(23:20):
big fan of reenactments. My feeling is if you're doing
reenactments, you might as well do a feature film, right?
I'm not in the feature film business, but I knew I had to do
that. I had to film people who dressed
in French soldiers as German Hessians, as British soldiers,
as cavalry, as militia, as continentals, as Native
Americans. There are black soldiers, you
(23:41):
know, fighting for the British and black soldiers fighting for
the American. I mean, it's really an
interesting dynamic. And so I didn't want to go and
say, you mentioned the Battle ofMonmouth.
I didn't want to go and say, let's reenact the battle of
Monmouth, right? Let's just go down there, film
in New Jersey and the Pine Barrens and and, and shoot on a
super odd day. But let's take back stuff that
(24:04):
just becomes with all the other stuff we've shot over years and
years and years, just grist for the mill.
So it's like when I'm making thefilm on World War 2, I go to the
to the National Archives and I say, what do you got on World
War 2? And they say, what part?
And you say I'm interested in this.
So we began to blend it in with the maps.
I love maps, and I've had them in almost every film I've made.
(24:24):
And there are more maps in this one film than in all the other
films that I put together combined.
Because people want a sense of what actually happened.
And if you now know this little girl or this little boy who's in
the fight, it gives you a different kind of relationship
to that arrow. You know, the blue arrow for the
Patriots, the red arrow for the for the British or the
(24:47):
Loyalists, whatever it might be.It's so important to us to make
it come alive and take off the onus.
It really helps if you see thesereenactors just their feet going
through mud that sucks down, youknow, opening of our 4th episode
is sucking down a foot and it's really happening to them.
It's not just this sort of pristine reenactment.
(25:09):
So here we are. It's early in the morning, the
lights weird, it's silhouetted, whatever it might be and what it
does, it gives you a tactile sense.
So a feature film is going to have hundreds of soundtracks,
documentary, you know, maybe 10 or 15.
We have 250 soundtracks going at, in some of those battles
because we want to treat it as if it's really happening.
(25:29):
And what's been nice, I've been going around a Film Festival.
I've I've, I've done some screenings, you know, of, of
different things. And people are like, you know,
after the battle of Long Island,as I said, the biggest battle,
like my heart's pounding. They said, you know, and it's
not because I live in New York and my brother lives in Brooklyn
and it's all the places where heis now that this battle took
place, but it's that, you know, you tell a good story.
(25:53):
That's what I want to do. I want to take that onus off the
powdered wigs and the breeches and the buckles on the shoes and
the and the and the and the hoseand all of that since the.
Oversimplification. Yeah, and that they didn't
really experience stuff. War has been bad since the first
human being killed. Another one.
(26:13):
And that's that's where we have to.
You have to start with the fact that this is a really tough
thing, yet this is the first warrevolution in history that came
out saying proclaiming the universal rights of all people.
I think the other thing I appreciate about the film as
(26:33):
well, Ken, is obviously as you said, there was a lot of maps,
but how much of A collaboration did you have with, say, the
National Archives or the Smithsonian?
Like how did you go about sourcing these materials to be
able to include them in this film and bring them to the the
(26:54):
the layperson? I am so glad you asked that.
SO we identified scholars. We may have four or five
scholars who know a lot about Native American.
It's really important dynamic. A lot of scholars who know about
the British Empire and their dependence on their other 13
colonies, which were way more profitable in the Caribbean
because they depended on slave labor of people who are military
(27:16):
historians. Rick Atkinson, who's written,
you know, 2 volumes of three about the revolution, who's just
amazing. A lot of other writers, but we
also hired A cartographer and wealso had to, if you're looking
at Boston today, the, you know, the Charles River just goes like
this. It was a huge, what's called the
Back Bay is all apartments and streets that are familiar to
everybody who's ever been to Boston that was not filled in.
(27:38):
Boston looked like a little headat the end of a narrow isthmus.
And so then you begin to understand one of by land, 2 of
by sea. You understand why your ancestor
working for Henry Knox was able to get that artillery up into
Dorchester Heights and the British look up and go, we're
out of here. You know, the, the, the Patriots
(28:00):
didn't have enough muscle to to take over Boston.
They could go in and out by sea,but they were blocked in.
But the second we could bombard it, the game was over and they
headed to Halifax, NS. So you understand the dynamics
of that. And so we were constant.
I mean, literally all that time is US trying to get that map
right, trying to get this fact right, trying to not put your
(28:21):
thumb on the scale. Just like umpires call balls and
strikes. Like not make loyalists bad.
A loyalist is a conservative. A loyalist is saying, hey, the
British constitutional monarchy is the greatest government ever
invented up till now. And they're absolutely right.
It is. It's not like being a French
citizen, which is abject, you know, you know, the monarchy is
(28:44):
abject authoritarianism, but theBritish constitution, that's a
good system. We're just invented a better
one. And and you have to decide
whether you want to go with thiscompletely untested idea or you
stick with the old thing. So a loyalist is not a bad
person per SE. And so we follow throughout
loyalists and as I said, German soldiers and their wives and
(29:05):
British kings, prime ministers, you know, ministers there and
native people. I mean, there's, it's such a
great cast of figures and it doesn't make it complicated.
It makes it interesting. Like if everything was black and
white and say, the TV series Succession, no, it wouldn't be
successful. It's the fact that people have
(29:25):
within them, you know, differentthings.
Look at Benedict Arnold, he's next to Nathaniel Greene.
He is Washington's most reliablesoldier until he's not.
Which I think is just a fascinating, you know, it's he's
almost a character. You forget that he's human.
He's. A human being, right?
I remember I made a film on HueyLong, the turbulent Southern
(29:48):
demagogue. It got accepted at the New York
Film Festival. And I'm walking out in this
woman separate West side of New York.
She's probably a Jewish woman. She said you should do a
biography of Hitler. And I said, why would you want
me to do that? I'd have to make him a human
being, right? And right now, it's not right
now, but anytime it's almost better to have him as this
symbol of pure evil. But you know, Washington's
(30:10):
deeply flawed. He's rash.
He rides out on the battlefield,hips Bay.
His aides are going no, no, no. And they're grabbing the reins
of his horse and pulling him back because if he's killed,
it's over. It's dead.
And Princeton does the same thing and an aide is putting his
hand over his face. I mean, he's unbelievably brave
and has been since he's a 22 year old militiamen that
probably fired the first shot ofthe Seven Years War war, what we
(30:34):
call the French and Indian War. He may have started it by firing
into an encampment of French andtheir native allies to begin
what we call the French and Indian war later on is has to
surrender later on is you know, Braddock's aid to camp Braddock
is killed arrogantly thinks the I can handle any French and
(30:54):
Native American. He's ambushed Washington
executes, you know it says 2 bullets fly.
He's two horses shot out from under and bullets Pierce's
jacket and he executes a retreatand gets everybody else off and
they won't give him a Commissionin the British Army.
So he's like. OK, talk about being petty.
(31:15):
I mean petticoats I guess. I'm an American, right?
Yeah. So, so you got you guys know
this elementary, let me do this quiz on you.
Reverse question, right. All right.
How are the Patriots, rich and poor, all white men dressed when
they dump the tea in Boston Harbor?
They were all dressed up like Native Americans, correct?
(31:36):
Very, very good, Joe. You get at least temporarily a A
now, Joe, why were they dressed?Or Stacey.
Why were they dressed as Native Americans?
Were they trying to sow discontent of some sort or throw
off throw off the British? That would be what you'd think
they were saying to the British.And this is the great irony of
(31:59):
history and the complication of it.
They're saying we're aboriginal,we're Americans, we're no longer
part of the That's interesting. And they're not trying to blame
it on the Native Americans. They're trying to say, like the
Native Americans, we're different from you.
Meanwhile, the Native Americans are over here like meanwhile.
They're going, excuse me, you'vejust taken our demand.
(32:22):
You're, you're upset with Britain.
The main reason they're fightingyou, not just taxes and
representation and taxes on tea.It's mostly because the British
have said we can't protect you. So don't crossover the
Appalachians and take Indian land, which is what the smallest
farmer wants to do and what the big land speculators want to do
with 10s of thousands of acres they don't own, like George
(32:44):
Washington, like Benjamin Franklin, like Patrick Henry.
They're all pissed because they can't go over and just take any.
So it's, I mean, doesn't that make that so much more
interesting, the whole dynamic, Yeah.
The real question is, who wore it better?
No, no, no, no. Actually, I, I.
(33:04):
So in your film The American Buffalo, which is I, I, I am, so
I, I've loved Native American culture my whole life.
Well, I say my whole life. 2nd grade, I did a report on
Geronimo and found out that my family has some, not physically
to me, at least on my father's side has links to Cherokee
(33:26):
blood. But I, you know, that explores
the near extinction of a speciesthat's intrinsically linked to
the history of the American Westand, and Native American
culture, of course. And I never knew how bad it was
until I did my own research in high school for a paper.
And so weirdly, going into that,I knew a fair amount and was
(33:47):
still blown away. So my question to you is, and
and I mentioned to this that I told Stacey, she had to remind
me to ask you this. How much of it is you going?
I want to know more about this. Let's do a documentary.
And how much of it is is you knowing and just and needing to
share? I'm sure it's a mix, but I'm
curious. 95 percent. Oh, I need to know 5%.
(34:13):
This is what you should know. Because think about it, if it's
the other way around, then it's homework, right?
This is what you know, but if it's me going, hey, let me share
with you what I've just learned,then it's a story.
There's no homework, there's no test on Tuesday.
It's just like something you canshare.
And the best thing, I mean, I, I, I did a conversation with Joe
Rogan a couple months ago, 3 hours, right?
(34:36):
He was going, Oh, I had no idea.Oh, I had no idea.
Oh, I had no idea. Which is the greatest thing that
you want to say because he's well versed and stuff like that.
He knows history pretty well. He's curious guy, you know, and
most of the people we meet presume that they know some
stuff about the revolution. And what I love is not
(34:56):
disabusing of that, but just saying it's more.
I'll tell you once there's a deposed governor of Virginia,
he's royal governor. He's in a ship in the Chesapeake
Bay because the rebels control his province, his colony, our
state, soon to be our state of Virginia.
And he goes, he owns some slaves.
He says, what if we just free? He issues a proclamation.
(35:18):
We'll free the slaves of rebels,not the of loyalists.
How you tell the difference, I don't know.
And if you come over to us, you can fight for us and we'll give
you your freedom, right? It's a very destabilizing thing.
The entire British economy is dependent on slave labor in the
Caribbean and to a lesser extentin South Carolina and Virginia.
(35:39):
And slavery is legal in every state, but the least profitable
is Massachusetts and New Hampshire and places that just
don't have slaves in that regard.
And so it destabilizes the situation and makes a lot of
people who are a bit a bit on the fence go over to the patriot
side. So it gives some, you know,
(36:02):
historians the chance to say it's all about slavery.
It's not, but it's an amazing it's amazing thing.
So here's what we do know. 20,000 black Americans fought in
the Revolution, 15,000 for the British, 5000 for the Americans.
Because even with this promise of continued existence of
(36:24):
slavery, they felt the 'cause right?
Like there's AI agreed Black. There was a kid named James
Fortin who nine years old, hears2 days after the declaration is
signed, the first public readingin Philadelphia.
And he never for a second doesn't believe that those
self-evident truths aren't for him.
He goes on, becomes fights, is imprisoned.
(36:45):
He has a chance to get us to getout if he goes back to England
with the ship captain's son and be fine.
He goes, no, I'm fighting for my'cause he ends up in a prison
ship, nearly dies, and then later becomes rich in the
merchant marine and gives a lot of his profits to funding the
beginning of the abolitionist movement in the 19th century.
I mean this just you can't make this stuff up.
(37:07):
What an American. Yeah, that's James Fort.
And that's just one person. You know, we follow a guy who
left named Harry Washington. Guess whose plantation he was
at? Mount Vernon, Africa, in a new
colony whose capital is Freetown, right, Because they're
(37:28):
not welcome in Nova Scotia, where most of the loyalists go
because it's cold and they're black and they are not so
welcome in England either. So they end up going from
Britain to, you know, and that'sjust a couple of stories.
I mean, it's just so interestingif you just say it isn't just,
you know, guys in in Philadelphia thinking of great
(37:48):
ideas. Do not misunderstand me.
Those are the best ideas human beings have ever come up with.
And our film celebrates them, infact, exalts them.
But if you this is called the American Revolution, meaning
we're not going to pretend like it's just we fire some shots at
Lexington, which is a bloodbath.The Americans are told to
disperse. They start doing some of the
(38:10):
fires and it's a massacre. And then it changes at, at at
North Bridge in Concord. But and then the British are
running. But it's, it's bloody.
You know, I'll tell you some. There's an English historian in
our film named Stephen Conway atthe end of the battle of Bunkers
Hill, which takes place, of course, on Breeds Hill, but we
call it Bunkers Hill. Hal makes his final charge.
(38:33):
They Americans run out of ammunition and their guns are
fouled from overshooting. They've they've inflicted 40%
casualties on the British. The British Army will not
experience 40% casualties again until 1916 and the first day of
the sum. Now we think of World War One as
(38:54):
the worst trench warfare, gut wrenching kind of combat
situations. Bunker Hill, right.
And nobody said don't fire till you see the whites of their
eyes. They started off the first
charge. They was wait till you're
they're 90 yards out. The next is 50, the next is 30
just to save ammunition. But, you know, we get distracted
(39:17):
by the mythology and then we don't suddenly say 40%
casualties. Yeah, come on.
I mean, that's heartbreaking to imagine as somebody who served.
Heartbreaking, heartbreaking. And the you know, you know, a
British general was shot in the head and he was the officer who
had led the charge at Lexington and Concord.
(39:39):
He fell into the arms of his sonand died in his arms.
Warren, who is the head of the Massachusetts assembly, the most
radical of all of them, was shotand killed.
And he was stuffed in a in a Gray mass grave by the British
with two other rebels where their seditious beliefs would be
(39:59):
buried forever. So I mean this, you know, if you
personalize it, you do it from the top down.
You're with the maps, yes, Stacey with the arrows.
But if you know who's there bottom up, and you know what
their wife says when their bodies brought back into Acton,
MA, when you're you're the firstAmerican killed at the North
Bridge, right? You know, Isaac Davis, gunsmith
(40:22):
from Acton, you you've already watched him at dawn leave kind
of seriously and his wife responding, you know, to how
serious he is and then comes back along with the bodies of
two other Acton fellow soldiers and buried their house becomes
the place think of their children.
Then you've got something that any one of us can can hang on
(40:43):
to. You know, remember, after the
Civil War series came out, this woman came up to me and said,
what are you working on next? And I said, oh, history of
baseball. And she goes, oh, my husband and
son will like that. And so I turned to her and I
said, so you're a military history expert.
She goes, oh, no, but it was thestories.
I said, look, I know your son and your husband are going to
watch baseball. I'm making it for you.
(41:06):
These are universal stories. These are stories about
Americans dealing with stuff. Maybe it's a fastball, You know,
maybe it's a curveball. Maybe it's a bullet.
Maybe it's a cannon, but these are big questions of human
being. I don't need to tell you or your
listeners who are the front lines of of why we still are the
(41:26):
greatest country on earth. And, and I should have let off
by saying how honored I am to even spend a few minutes with
you. Oh, we're, we're seeing the
energy and we're, I mean, you know, you can tell when
somebody's life is dedicated to something because they're the
way they light up. And so, yeah, I don't it's it's
self-evident as as our. I, I, I can for one, appreciate
(41:50):
your approach in humanizing these experiences because I
think we can all see ourselves reflected in that, and
especially the alphas who are listening, who've had their own
experiences through the militarywhere there are no winners in
war. And I think that gives you a
better appreciation of other people's turmoil.
And I know I, I kind of teased alittle bit about cause calling
(42:13):
my ancestor a terrorist because depending on which side of the
line you are, it's going to skewhow you view it.
But either side thinks they're they're supposed to be the
victorious ones. Robert McNamara told Curtis
Lemay at the end of World War 2 that if we're the losers, we get
hung as war criminals for the carpet bombing of essentially
(42:34):
wood and paper Tokyo that killed, you know, hundreds of
thousands of people, well, more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
more than a million people, he said.
You know, we, we're, we're, we'dbe war criminals and, and hung
for what we'd done. And so it's one man's meat is
another man's poison. I will say this too, Ken, I've
had a family member who's had skin in the game in every single
(42:58):
era of of war that you've covered in your films.
So from the Revolution all the way forward, we got to get one
on World War One. You didn't do one on that one.
I'll tell you that that's a really good point.
We've covered World War One in alot of different films from
Hemingway, believe it or not, till Jazz and baseball and and
other stuff. So we passed through it.
(43:18):
World War One is in a way, and this is where the isolationist
movement in America started, is their war.
Like we came in and we were the difference and we won it for
them, but it was it was their war in a way that World War 2 is
not in that we did come and win it, but mainly it was our
manufacturing is the biggest cause of the winning of the
(43:40):
Second World War. Second is Soviet sacrifice.
Americans don't like to hear that.
And 3rd is the sacrifice of the Western European allies,
including those people who landed at at Omaha and and and
golden sword that day. So I mean, it's just, it's Utah
and all the other, all the beaches there, you know,
(44:01):
Canadian and British and, and, and mostly Americans.
And the Americans bore the bruntof it at, at, at Omaha, of
course. And you go there and you just
can't help but say they weren't getting paid, they weren't there
for empire, there was no conquest.
They were there for an idea thattyranny and authoritarianism is
(44:23):
not the way of human progress. And that's why I can't even talk
about it without breaking up. Yeah, I mean, I've had, my
ancestors were from after Massachusetts.
They migrated over to Michigan to do farming.
So you talked about moving West.To Ann Arbor.
(44:43):
Yes, yeah, I saw that. I've got.
Yeah. Harbor Springs.
Oh, it's so funny. You talked about Laverne,
Minnesota, and I did the veteran.
So after I got wounded, I started doing the Veterans
Portrait Project, where I traveled to all 50 states to
document veteran stories. And I went to Laverne, Minnesota
and I met this this Korean War veteran named Arvin and he lost
(45:08):
almost his entire unit in Korea.And so they shipped him home.
He land. He said he landed in the middle
of the night and and by the timehe got back to the farm, it was
like 5 in the morning and he wason a tractor harvesting by like
7 in the morning after coming home from Korea and losing.
(45:28):
Anyway, this is the kind of metal of the Americans that that
you document in your films. And I can definitely appreciate
that. And I'm, I'm looking forward to
sitting down and watching the rest of of this film when it
comes out. When, when are we expected to
have this drop? Where can alphas watch it?
Tell us all about. All of my films couldn't have
(45:48):
been made without PBS, which is sorry that it's sort of under
attack. I, I, I, I, you know, they have
one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other
proudly out. And, and that's where I've been
able to do it. I could have gone to a streaming
service or premium cable and said I need $30 million to make
the Vietnam film. And they go great with your
track record here it is, right? But they wouldn't have given me
(46:09):
10 1/2 years, which is what it took to get it right, Right.
So that's what PBS, I had to raise all that money from them
and from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has
just been zeroed out and is no more.
But I was able to do it right. So I PBS will begin broadcasting
this and streaming it for free on on Sunday, November 16th.
(46:33):
And it's going to be broadcast all that week, Sunday through
Friday night. They'll rebroadcast it, do it
marathons on the weekends, rebroadcast in January.
It'll be in pledge, it'll be going and they'll have another
national broadcast again in Junebefore the 250th anniversary of
the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
It's going to be hard to miss the DVDs and Blu rays if you
(46:53):
know what those things are. There's a companion book by
Alfred A Knopf, which is the handsomest of all the companion
books we've done. And we've done educational
outreach. So any school that's interested
in the American Revolution, whether it's third grade, 5th
grade, 8th grade, 11th grade, college, continuing education,
they're not going to miss it. So I'm really hoping that
(47:13):
everybody tunes in. Like we're now so divided, but
we share a lot of things in common.
Like I've made films for almost 50 years about the US, but I've
also made films about us. That is to say, the lowercase, 2
letter plural pronoun. All the intimacy of us and we
(47:34):
and our and all of the majesty, the complexity, the
contradiction and even the controversy of the US.
And it is my great privilege to spend that time telling those
stories. And I can't wait, if we all
watch this together, as it happened to remember at the
Civil War, where you're too young, at the Civil War series,
the whole country stopped. Joe was there.
(47:54):
I I that was the first one I watched actually.
Was Civil War in the 90s? Yeah.
Yeah. So it came out in September of
1990 and you're both too young to stayed up.
But the country stopped and I'm really hoping we don't do that
anymore. But I really hope in some ways,
not for me, but for us to be able to all claim, regardless of
(48:15):
what side of the political divide you're on, claim this
extraordinary the birth of our creation story, our creation
myth, the the the moment that I am calling the most important
moment since the birth of Christ.
Alphas. You can also get your passports
and watch that on on the PBS app.
(48:36):
You can stream it beginning November 16th.
If you want to watch it through your local, whether it's an ETV
or your local PBS station, make sure you check your local
listings. It'll all be the same time.
This one they're going to show at the same time.
OK, great. Perfect.
And you're going to show. Every episode twice.
So on Sunday night they'll show episode 1 from 8 to 10 and then
(48:58):
show episode 1 again from 11:50.So you can go out and have a
beer, you can come back and do it, you can go to bed early and
you know, whatever it is. And they'll do that all week.
So that's called a double pump. Nice.
And if you want to get your kidsinvolved, sit down with a
pitcher of lemonade. And every time they say General
Washington, take a shot of lemonade.
Have a little fun. I can tell you I was drunk.
(49:21):
I was drunk on that sour goodness while watching just a
few hours of it. But you can also find it
probably on Apple TV, Amazon Prime.
So just make sure that there's abunch of platforms, it's going
to be out there and and pretty widespread.
It's going to be hard to miss. Yeah.
We're going to have lots of partnerships of various places
like Walmart that will permit usto to sort of give point of sale
(49:44):
things. It'll be good Christmas stuff.
And it isn't just for Dad. I think it's everybody's story.
Like I, I've got four daughters and couple of them grown.
Yeah. Isn't it the best?
I'm rich in Daughters, but my younger ones, I'll show them
this stuff and they're like riveted.
And they'll go, whoa, you know? And they like the maps.
(50:04):
They like. The There were women in
espionage during the revolution.Indeed, indeed.
In fact, they're what? Perfect spies?
Perfect spies. Exactly, if they can just live.
It's all the petticoats where wehide all the letters, yeah.
That's. Exactly right.
Do you love a good petticoat? Alphas, we're gonna have links
to where you can find more information about the American
(50:25):
Revolution by Ken Burns. You can also be sure to check
out pbs.org back slash Ken Burnsback slash U&UM For more
information there. Ken, as we wrap up, is there
anything that we didn't cover that you wanted to share?
Awesome. I'll just tell you that one of
the first things we did in support of the promotion of
(50:45):
this, which was way back last February, we went, as we always
do, to West Point. And at lunch, you know, we're
all 4000 cadets are hooing. We showed the opening quote by
Thomas Paine about liberty and freedom and throwing off the
feeble engines of despotism. And then 1600 cadets came and we
(51:05):
showed them in an auditorium about 40 minutes of stuff.
It was as it was in the Civil War, as it was in World War 2,
as it was in Vietnam, one of thehighlights of this tour.
So I just, I bless the folks whoput on the uniform and service.
And I think we've done a good job telling your story and
understanding the difficulties of war and getting into just how
(51:27):
bad it is. So it's not sugar coated.
I mean, soldiers always make thebest peacemakers.
I will say that there is a request on Reddit can that you
do a film about Ken Burns. Yeah, right.
Yeah, that when? I'll play you.
I'll need a wig. Yeah, we'll, we'll call that
when hell freezes over. Hell.
(51:50):
Has frozen. The pigs are flying alphas.
That's right, pig, when pigs areflying.
Exactly. Ken, you're a real treat.
Thank you for what you do for American history, for what you
do for public television and filmmaking in general.
And keep up the fantastic, incredible market, setting the
bar high for all of us. It's all back at you guys.
(52:11):
That's that's the thing that we care about.
And we're so grateful for your service and we're so grateful
for your sacrifice. Welcome home.
Let us know what we can do for you.
Thank you so much for visiting us today, Ken Alphas, please
stick around for some scuttle boot after the break.
Welcome back, alphas. We're keeping things short and
(52:32):
sweet on the countdown, so there's no scuttle but today.
But thanks for taking the trip down memory lane with us.
We really hope you guys enjoyed the episode.
On behalf of the entire Tal Podcast team, we hope you're
enjoying time with your loved ones during the holiday season.
If you miss us during the holidays, which I know you are,
you can always subscribe to our podcast, our newsletter, or send
(52:52):
us guest and mail recommendations at legion.org,
Back slash Tango Awful Lima Salon.
Salon.
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