A Bit of Optimism - Ken Burns and the Art of Telling the Whole Story

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

We live in a world that pushes us to simplify everything: right or wrong, good or bad, this or that. It makes things and our place in the world easier to understand. But the truth is rarely simple… in fact, it’s often messy and deeply human. For 50 years, Ken Burns has mastered his craft, becoming one of the most prolific and respected documentary filmmakers. His documentaries notably resist easy answers. From The Civil War to The Vietnam War to Baseball, Ken has shaped how we understand American identity, political memory, and our shared history. His latest project, The American Revolution, is a six-part PBS series that tells the story of America’s founding. He revisits the revolution through multiple human perspectives, which reveals new complexity to a familiar story. Ken’s guiding principle is simple: “it’s complicated.” And that philosophy shows up in everything he does. Because the most honest stories hold opposing truths at the same time. In this conversation, Ken and I explore why storytelling matters more than arguments, how simplifying the world can help us understand it—but also distort it—and why empathy lives in the space between what’s included in a story and what’s left out. We also dive into why human behavior hasn’t changed much over time, what mistakes humans keep repeating, how embracing complexity might help us better understand each other, and what history can teach us about who we are and who we’re still becoming. If you’ve ever struggled to make sense of a complicated world, or felt frustrated by how quickly we reduce people to labels, this episode is a powerful reminder: understanding lives in our ability to see the whole story. This… is A Bit of Optimism. --------------------------- If you want to watch “American Revolution” the six-part, 12-hour documentary directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt on PBS, head to: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-revolution ---------------------------

It is okay to try and simplify the world so that we can understand it and feel like we matter in it. And we have to accept that there is complexity that sometimes we understand and sometimes we don't. Those things have to live together. You know, we make films, and they're not additive. You don't build a film. You subtract a film. We have 500 hours of footage, and we get down to 12. And it's to do what you're talking about, to kind of simplify in a way.

But we also want to leave open. This is the mystery of life that we have been hands. It's not the notes, it's the intervals between the notes that make music, and it's the cut between the shots that make film. It's complicated. These are the words that hang on the wall of Ken Burns' editing room. These are the words that also capture how he understands history. It's complicated. There are a few people whose work has actually shaped how we understand things.

And Ken Burns is definitely one of those people. Whether it's our understanding of the Vietnam War, the origins of baseball, or even the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, Ken always tries to build his documentaries to tell the story from other angles, multiple perspectives, including ones we've never heard before, all of which challenge our understanding of what may have actually happened. His newest documentary, a six-part PBS series, explores the American Revolution in a way that reveals so much more depth and complexity

than most of us are even aware of. To sit down with him was insane. He is so smart and his ability to recall entire lines, paragraphs from his own work and the work of others. Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. I mean, it was crazy. I just sat back and at times felt a little stupid, but my God, he's fascinating. So get comfy because this is a detailed love.

letter to storytelling and an invitation to consider what history can teach us about who we are and who we're still becoming. This is a bit of optimism. Your work feels more important to me now than ever because I think television is a large part of where we get our opinions, not just our information, but our opinions. We already know that people don't know what to trust or who to trust, and even documentaries are biased. And your work seems to stand out from those where you are willing

to, I think, start with what you believe is a blank slate in your head and say, let's see where the story goes. How did you get to that? Because you were a documentarian, you can't help but have an opinion.

How do you make sure that you stay even when you're telling a story? That's a really wonderful question, Simon. I remember the first day of film class in college at Hampshire College, a brand new experimental school in second year when I arrived in September of 71, the first day was just this question about objectivity and subjectivity. There's nothing objective, no matter what a documentary may claim, even those proponents of cinema verite aren't. They're pointing their camera in one direction, not looking

in the other. So what you have are degrees of subjectivity. And I think that that's where we've tried to be free. As you said, a blank slate when we begin. We're not trying to impose our own beliefs on the material, nor are we buying into any particular set of historiographies, that is to say, the way in which you engage the past. Maybe it's Marxist, maybe it's Freudian, maybe it's semiotics, deconstruction, queer studies, apocentrism. I mean, there's lots of fashions of historiography. You know, my resort to a baseball metaphor calling balls and strikes. We have in our main editing room, a neon sign that says in lowercase cursive, it's complicated.

And it works on many levels. One is, you know, if you've got a scene and it's working, no filmmaker wants to touch a good scene, right? It's working. Leave that alone. But if you find new contradictory information that would destabilize this perfectly working scene, you're making it perhaps less, perfect, less better.

And we are always willing to do that. that. So that's the first line of it. But a lot of it gets to the larger questions that, you know, we live in a media culture, in a computer culture in which everything is a one or a zero or a good or a bad, a yes or a no. And there are no binaries actually in life. We know this from our friendships. We know it if we look in the mirror. So there's complicated things. So the tendency to say, in the case of the American Revolution, something I've been thinking about for the last 10 years and worked on a film about, you know, you can throw George Washington out because he was an owner of slaves. As the writer Rick Ackinson says, you can't square that circle,

morally, in lots of ways. It's indefensible. And yet, we don't have a country without him. Babe Ruth, if they go back to baseball, strikes out many, many more times than he gets a hit or a home run. But all in our highlight real superficial world, that's all we show, is Bay Ruth hitting a home run. He also comes up only once every nine times at bat. So it means that we're also obligated not just to focus on all of the things, his strikeouts, his strikeouts, game-ending double plays, as well as his walk-off homers, you have to look at the other people. And that's what we've tried to do in that. And so if you go in without an axe to grind, and I don't have one, you're telling a story. The novelist Richard Powers says,

the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do, and that's all your question is implying. The best arguments in the world won't change anybody's point of view. The only thing they can do it is a good story, which means you're not force-feeding what that changes. You're just offering them the range of complexity that allows them to sit in that contradiction, to sit in that undertow, to sit in what Witt Marcellus said in our jazz thing, sometimes a thing in the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. And we can hold that with the people we love. We can have to hold it with ourselves, otherwise we go crazy. And so we've tried to extend that to the work. And so what happens is then amongst a sea of stuff, we come out, having spent 10 years

trying to get it right, staying up at night over, you know, everything is footnoted and it says, I'll make this up, 16 dead, 16 battleship, 16 months. And there are two scholars that have said this. And then all of a sudden, we've locked the thing, the narrator's gone home, it's it. And then we learn that a third scholar believes that it may not be true. Right. So we go scanning all of the stuff that's been read and we find a perhaps six episodes ahead, take the perhaps, copy it, and move it back and say, perhaps 16th months. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, and then we sleep better at night.

Now, even if we had left it alone, even that scholar would never have given us a hard time. Yeah. But if you do that a million times and literally a million times in every film project, particularly the series are more than that, a million problems that you have to sort of overcome and adjudicate and worry about, then you have something which can generally speak to everybody. without feeling like it's pablon,

without being some sort of amorphous thing that doesn't really do think. This is a very dynamic in the case of American Revolution film with new information that sort of shatters the myth of a bloodless gallant story of just guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts. Those great thoughts are not diminished, but we've got a much more complicated dynamic.

People who set out to make a documentary when I talk to them, at some point they will say, I felt the story needed to be told. And usually there's some sense of, where the bias comes in, or not, I guess, but there's some sense of injustice

or there's something just wildly interesting and uncovered, but there's always this story needs to be told. And very curious, for you, how do you come to this story needs to be told? Well, let's take the this out. I'd be more comfortable.

I mean, it is, for me, truly a this. story needs to be told. I remember looking at a map of the Yadrang Valley, which is in the Central Highlands, a map we'd made showing American and NBA, North Vietnamese forces and Vyakon forces. And I suddenly went, wow, this could be the British moving west on Long Island towards Brooklyn. And I went, we're doing the American Revolution. So that story needed to be told, but I didn't know how much it needed to be told. So stories need to be told, Simon, if you just think about Shakespeare alone, all of the major characters are deeply flawed. And some of them are more flawed than they are good.

But Keats wrote a letter about him saying that Shakespeare had negative capability, this ability to hold in tension, people's strengths and weaknesses, and not decide. The moralist in us wants to decide. But if you don't, then you've got a much more interesting plot, and you can follow Iago. You can follow Henry V. You can follow Macbeth. You can follow Shilat. You can follow Shilat.

These are not just primary, but secondary and tertiary. characters. For example, Shylock is essentially a negative force in the Merchant of Venice, but he has one of the greatest speeches of all times. Am I not human? Have I not organs, senses, affections, dimensions, passions fed by the same food, subject of the same diseases. If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? You've got this plea for the understanding of his humanity. And that's one of the great contributions, one of the great moments, the Rialto scene, in The Merchant of Venice, to me, for all its tropes and incipient anti-Semitism, it's Shylock who shines.

Yeah. Was there a time that we were ever not binary? We know that we're super binary now. You said right and wrong, good or bad? I'm right, you're wrong. Is it worse now, or are we romanticizing the past? We're always romanticizing the past, and we're always chicken little's making our presence so bad, so, so bad.

I think the first communication between people, it was a lie. This binary thing doesn't exist. It's what we superimpose on it and what we say. And that's why stories become the incredible, powerful way in which we, again, Witten Marcellus, keep the wolf from the door, I think, is our own mortality. Nobody's getting out of this a lot. But why do we make things binary? I mean, like, I don't know if you ever were a Game of Thrones fan.

No, I don't think that every show women have to show their breasts. a set in and at live parody that the creative director was a was a 15 year old boy. That I find hilarious and wonderful. So that explains everything, right? It does. But it's everything. It's Sopranos. I mean,

I like the Sopranos better than Game of Thrones. Putting that aside, notwithstanding, the thing that was both infuriating and wonderful about Game of Thrones was the good guys, quote unquote, the characters we like, the ones who stood for truth and honor and all of that stuff,

did horrible things. Yeah. And the bad guys who were evil and all of this stuff had virtue. It's called a good story. Human beings and human relationships, you said it right at the beginning. It's complicated. It's messy. Do we default to binary because we're not that smart?

We want things to be simple. We want explanation. Well, I think it's funny because we accept that complexity in almost every aspect of our life, including on our cable TV choices. I should have said that. it really ages me in our streaming choices. But in our politics, we want everything to be binary for simplicity. You know, I've been making films about the U.S. for 50 years, but I've also been making

films about us. That is to say, the lowercase, two-letter plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and me and our and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the U.S. And the only thing I've learned 50 years is that there's only us. There's no them. It is in the interests of authoritarian, if you're speaking politically, or in the interests of news media who just want the simplest way to conflict, which is, of course, the driver of good stories, to just make it a binary thing. It's actually a great segue, which is you studied America

from every angle, you went deep into the Vietnam War, what are the mistakes we keep making? why are we not studying our history because it seems that we keep making the same mistake. Are there the big three that we keep making? Well, I don't know if there's a big three, but I like to quote Ecclesiastes, which is, as you know, the Old Testament, which has filled of, you know, lots of wisdom in addition to some pretty old-fashioned kind of eye-for-eye tooth-for-tooth, which has gotten us into trouble. There's one of your three, you know.

But it says what has been will be again, what has been done, will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun, which means that human nature doesn't change. And it doesn't. You can go back into the revolution and be stunned at the way. I mean, Mark Twain riffed on this. He didn't know his ecclesiasic. But he said history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. If he did say that, and I think he did, and I did a film on Twain, we just couldn't find two sources that agreed.

He didn't write it down. He just said it, and it was recorded by a reporter. No event has ever happened twice. but human behavior never changes. And that human behavior superimposes itself. All the venality and virtue, all the generosity and greed, all the selfishness and self-sacrifice, all of those pairs that you can create human beings do

and not just one person to the next, but within somebody, right? Yeah, I mean, so it's Whitman and asked, do I contradict myself? I contradict myself. So there's that going on. So human beings are always doing that. And there is also this huge,

thing that we understand on a human basic level. Like if you go to the ball and 99 people tell you that your gown, Simon, looks beautiful. And one person tells you that it doesn't. That's all you remember. That's all you remember. And so we are prisoners of the opinions of others. And when this gets to a state level, then you're looking weak if you don't do this. Or you're looking this if you don't do that. The biggest war in history is World War II. And we're pretty clear about it in lots of ways. And there's, there's kind of, it's easy. It's not a good war. There's no such thing as a good war. But it is, as we called in our film on World War II, called Just the War, the first episode is called a necessary. So I think you can make arguments, as we didn't say that, the people commented in our

film made that thing. But World War I is completely avoidable. And it's the most important war in world history. Second World War is the biggest, but the most important, like it's why we're having trouble from the stands back to Israel, the Mediterranean, right? It's all, it's all coming out of what World War I. World War II came out of World War I. And World War II, though bigger, came out of World War I. And so there's, you know, if you can go back to that, and then you can just see on display, you know, the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, and in Sarajevo sets in motion these dominoes. Sometimes you say this is unavoidable.

And you can see if, you know, you take over Ethiopia and then you take over this and then you invade the Sudetenland and then Austria and then you invade Poland and you've got people who have a pact with Poland. You've started a war. And then the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and then Hitler did the greatest favor ever done for the United States, which is he declared war on the United States. so that Franklin Rosegoe could not only declare war in Japan, but declare war on Germany as well a few days later

because that's where he knew the real problem was. So you've got just people doing these things all the time through history, and it's always, it makes mistakes. I've had these conversations with folks in the military, in the intelligence community, in an evening after dinner with a whiskey kind of thing. You know, how... Me too. And I don't know if you know,

Karses' work of the infinite game, finite and infinite games. No, but I'm sure I will get to it because one of our projects, you know, we've got Stalinistic 10-year plans. He actually worked in five-year plans, but one of them is a history of the CIA. So Jim Kars was a theologian and philosopher in the mid-1980s. Well, this idea came from the mid-1980s. He died during COVID. And he defined these two types of games, finite games and infinite games. A finite game is defined as known players, fixed rules, and agreed upon objectives. Football, baseball, even conventional warfare,

if you have a winner necessarily, there has to be a loser or losers, and there's always a beginning, middle, and end. And then you have infinite games. Infinite games are defined as known and unknown players, which means you don't necessarily know who all the players are and new players can join at any time. The rules are changeable,

which means every player can play however they want. And the objective is to perpetuate the game, to stay in the game as long as possible. Right. And I was so struck by Karsis's, work because we are players in infinite games every day of our lives. Nobody wins. Nobody's going to win global politics. It doesn't exist. Nobody wins health. Nobody wins career. Nobody wins business. There's no winner in business. You know, when Circuit City went bankrupt, Best Buy didn't

win anything. But when we listen to the language of CEOs, of politicians, they talk about being number one, being the best, or beating their competition based on what agreed upon metrics, objectives, and timeframes. So maybe you've now added number two. of these truths, that the heart thing between these, the toggling between these absurdity. And when we look at Vietnam, and these are the conversations we would have, which is, which is a finite war exists when you have a declared end state upon when it's reached, the war concludes. When we eject Iraq from Kuwait, the war will end. Right, right? And it did. No moving goalposts.

Right. And Vietnam, when you play with a finite mindset, when the other players playing, you've seen a fog of war. Yes. When McNamara sits down with his counterpart from the Vietnam War, and he said, what was the number? How many were you willing to lose before you would surrender? And his, his counterpart, looks like, is, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? So let me add a little, because I spent many years, 10 and a half years on Vietnam.

Let me tell you, just a few little benchmarks. Yeah. One, in January of 45, OSS parachute into northern Vietnam and save the life of an insurgent leader, hoping that he'll fight a rearguard action against the Japanese. His name is Ochi Min, who's had some disease, which they were able to treat and help him. That September 2nd, that day, is really important in world history

because the Japanese were surrendering unconditionally, you're finite on the USS Missouri and Tokyo Harbor. He declared Vietnamese independence in Badin Square to tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands of people. And standing next to him are OSS officers who are a month later told to get the hell out of there because he's a kami, he's a bad guy, we don't want to be a part of him. Then, you know, the French later on come to us and threaten us. De Gaulle says he'd be forced to go into the Soviet orbit if we don't help him with his bill. So by the time of DNBN food, their devastating loss, the Americans are basically bankrolling 80% of the French military budget. Still can't stop the Vietnamese and General Zop from triumphant.

So then there's a Geneva Accords that are agreed upon in which they divide the country into half and the Catholics, they want to go south and, you know, revolutionaries and other people want to go north. And then in two years, there'll be an election. So in 56, there should be like everyone knew that Ho Chi Minh would be elected. The communists, the Soviets and the Chinese were very suspicious of him. They saw him more as a nationalist than a communist. He would have been elected overwhelmingly, maybe not huge majorities in the South, but certainly in the North. And instead, we went with No Ding Ziam, a corrupt politician in South Vietnam, and then

the die was cast. So that all that sort of stuff, and that a metrics guy, McNamara, coming from Ford thinks you can figure everything out with some figure and doesn't understand the passions of love of country, of freedom. I mean, when Ho Chi Minh declared independence with those OSS guys, guess who he's quoting, Thomas Jefferson, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. He's using our catechism.

We're the first original anti-colonial movement, right? He's not the last. He's not the second. But it's an important moment that the most significant revolution, ours, engendered all these other things first in Europe and then Latin and South America and then in Asia and Africa. And it's all the same idea, this genie let out of the bag, where this British complaints between Englishmen suddenly get broken out into natural laws. And even though it's not about freeing enslaved people or extending votes to women, that's going to happen. because once you've said we hold these truths to be self-at-haven, that all men are created equal, slavery's done, women have suffrage, it's just going to be an impossible long time

for the very reason that human beings, as we've cited, have these kind of unexplainable behaviors. This to me is the most insidious of the repeating behaviors that we don't learn, where you cannot fight finite versus infinite. The player who plays to win versus the player who's playing to survive, the player who's playing to win will always find themselves in Quagmire. Yeah, this is the British, right? George Washington, probably learns. He's the head of an insurgency.

He doesn't have to win. He makes terrible battlesfield mistakes at Long Island and at Brandy Wine, protecting his left and then his right flank. But then he gets away, and they suddenly realize, I don't have to win. Thomas Payne said, we conquer by the drawn game, meaning you are screwed, Britain, because you have to win, and we don't have to win. And this is a war of attrition.

And by the time you get in a powerful ally that's going to spend the equivalent of $30 billion to help you, the French. And by that time, the Spanish come in and the Dutch come in, and they're challenging the British property, not just the 13 colonies. They have 13 much richer, more important colonies to them based on slave labor in the Caribbean. The French and the Spanish are challenging that, and Gibraltar, and then in the subcontinent and then what's now in the Philippines. So it's a global war that is over the prize of North America, but also, the fight between empires in which somebody has to win. This is passion versus metrics, right? It's the banker who tells the CEO what to do

versus the startup who's driven by idealism and passion. And I'm going to, I don't care that I'm in my garage. I don't care that I'm in my garage and I will overcome all odds because I have to. I'm in New Hampshire because I was told not to go there, but I need to go some place where I could live for nothing, 47 years ago. And then when the first film was nominated for an academy, I mean, people said, oh, you'll go back to New York, you'll go to L.A., and I said, no, I'm staying here,

which is that that decision, that second one, is the most important, this kind of professional decision I think. And Jop, you know this better than I do, but I read Jop's little treatise, the people's war, and he understood he couldn't beat America militarily, he couldn't beat America financially, but he could beat them socially. Right. So the other, the question should have been not from McNamara to, to his counterpart, but from his counterpart to McNamara.

Like, what was your number? Yeah, what was your number? They had a number, and we finally figured out what it was. You know, Nixon and Kissinger tie themselves into knots. Yeah. You know, if they'd accepted the peace terms that were available in January of 69 when they came into office, they would have been, you know, better than the terms they accepted before. And there'd be 25,000 more Americans alive and hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million

Vietnamese and Laotians and Cambodians still alive. And if we'd gone with Ho Chi Minh and said, let them have their election. We believe in free elections. And done that, there'd be six or seven million people still alive or their descendants still alive. But we didn't. We went to a place. We had some numbers that we needed. And finally, Nixon and Kissinger say, okay, well, we can just pretend this. They reach out to the South Vietnamese government to buy past the talks, right, that are making progress, thinking that that will keep Humphrey from overtaking him. Humphrey was 20 points down and then he loses by 0.7 percentage points. If the election had happened a week later, Humphrey would have won in 68.

And instead, they had this idea of the decent interval. And we've got Kissinger on tape saying, Mr. President, this is just paraphrasing. Mr. President, the South Vietnamese are weak and corrupt and they're going to fall. And goes, oh, yeah, they've been sucking at the teat too long, our president says. And then he goes, but if we give them a number, enough material, enough money, they will be able to hold out. And when they do collapse, which they will collapse, no one will remember and no one will blame us. So tell that to the mother of the 25,000 Americans who are killed during that indecent interval.

It's like I said, it's the reason I'm enamored by Kars's work, because I see it everywhere. I see it in business all the time where you have an infinite game where people are playing with finite mindsets. And invariably, when that happens, happens, trust is destroyed, cooperation is destroyed, and innovation is destroyed. Question for you, why America, like why not British history? Why not the Plantagenets? Why not the Chuders? Well, because I'm so parochial. I mean, I'm Guam. I'm Samoa. I'm an American possession. It's my country. I'm interested in how it works. And every film, I mean, I made the same film over and over again. Every single one is the same film. It's just asking this question, who are we? And you never answer

that question, you just deepen it, I think, with each successive project, you get, you know, a little bit more. Not to say that the early stuff isn't good. That first film, Brooklyn Bridge, was, I thought, still, I can look at it. And what's so great is that it's just practice. You know what I mean? It's like, when the film is done, it's yours. But up until that time, we're just, it's the process of doing it. And now I'm into other, I'm working on a history of reconstruction called Emancipation to Exodus. I'm doing something on LBJ and the Great Society, his domestic thing as opposed to his foreign policy failures. I mean, he went to McNamara and Rusk and Bundy and Ball and said, I need you more than he

needed you, meaning I'm not an internationalist. I just want to be the second coming of FDR. Just please go take care of this. Now, he's responsible. He's the guy who waited until his landslide victory against Goldwater to put boots on the ground in March of 65. He went into it. He's culpable.

And we only spent one sentence in 18 hours and 10 episodes. talking about his domestic agenda. But the din of the war began to affect the effectiveness of his domestic program. So we just want to go back and sort of understand his complicated and tragic existence. So from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Vietnam War to baseball to the revolution, you know, and everything in between and after. And I appreciate that you can't quote unquote answer the question, but who are we? Who is America relative to the world? Who is America relative? What does it mean to be an American based on what you've learned? I can't answer that. I can give you little feelings and parts of feelings. It's ephemeral. Lincoln gives a wonderful

speech, what we now call the State of the Union speech, but it's in December of 62. Things have been going bad, but we did have the stalemate aden, the bloodiest day in American history. and he's able to give the Emancipation Proclamation, and he's like, he's going both directions. So this is who we are. And because he's the greatest poet president and who gets us in a way, in a timeless way, I can quote this. He says, first, fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.

Okay. So we're prisoners of this history. we've got to be mindful of what it is and we say we're against slavery and we've got to act it and enact then a few sentences later he says the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present as our cases new we must think anew we must act anew we must disenthrall ourselves and then we can save our country the end of this thing is that we calls us the last best hope of birth all three of those i agree with and look at his second inauguration just before he's murdered There is a part in the penultimate moment in which he is Old Testament fuel.

I mean, he has got a lightning bolt. He said, okay, you want to continue this thing and that every drop of blood drawn by the lash, meaning slavery, will be met by one drawn by the sword. We'll do this for as long as you motherfuckers want to do this. He knows the war is going to end very shortly. But he is, it has got unbelievable fury. And then he pivots next sentence practically. He goes, with malice towards none, with charity.

I mean, it goes completely New Testament. And it's all about forgiveness and embracing and taking care of the widow and the orphan and those who have borne the bathroom. I mean, it is amazing. And that is us. And that's as close as I can get for you. I'm going to push you because what makes us not French? What makes us not English?

What makes us not Italian? Geography. No, no, there's something to be an American. Yeah. I mean, we invented this thing. I think the revolution is the most significant event in world history since the birth of Christ. I'm happy to have conversations, not debates, but conversations about somebody else's favorite.

And so that makes us the inventors of putting into practice, enlightenment thinking that had come out of the Renaissance, that borrowed from antiquity, ideas about virtue. Pursuit of happiness is not acquisition of things in a market. place of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. It's about increasing your virtue because you've now had bestowed on you this thing that had never happened. Everybody was a subject under authoritarian rule. Now you were a citizen. What were you going to do? And everybody and the founders were freaked out about. You know, John Adams says, there's so much ambition and average, so much love, lust for profit. Is there virtue enough to maintain a republic? The key word in the

phrase that I quoted was not from Adams, but from the Declaration, is pursuit. We're a nation in the process of becoming 11 years later in Philadelphia in the same place. They say, I'm more perfect union. There is a kind of striving. There is a kind of improvisational genius. Interesting that I said improvisational because at the opening of my baseball series, the scholar and writer Gerald Early said when they study our American civilization 2,000 years from now, And think about how long that is. Because go back 2,000 years and look at civilization. He said, when they study the American civilization 2,000 years from now,

we'll be known for only three things. The Constitution, baseball, and jazz music. And at the heart of these, you know, the Constitution is still the shortest constitution on Earth, four pieces of parchment amended. It's able to adjudicate, for the most part, the most complicated problems from the American story. and then baseball's got infinite chess-like combinations.

And, of course, at the heart of the art firm that we've given to the world is this idea that you don't play the notes on the page, but you listen to what someone else plays and then you interpret this and do something which everyone else can only dream of, which is create art on the spot. I think we're moving down the field here a little bit. One of my favorite things about America is we celebrate our, quote-unquote, independence on July 4th, 7076, which, of course, is nonsense.

That's just simply the date we started. the Declaration of Independence. Yeah. And the war didn't end. And we weren't recognized as an independent nation until a treaty of Paris. Right.

And we won the Battle of Yorktown on October 17, 1781, but the British didn't disoccupy New York City until November 25th, 1783. That's two years and a month plus later. So a full seven years after the declaration do we actually have it?

And then what is it? 1789 is the beginning of the United States government. The Constitution and the first president? Constitution is the summer of 87, and then George Washington assumes office in 1789. Okay, so we have a Constitution in 1787 and president 1789. I love how we celebrate our independence in 1776, but this to me captures one of the essential qualities of America, which is we don't celebrate the day we had it. We celebrate the day we would like to have it. We wanted it.

Yeah. No, it's fantastic. It's fantastic. It's the naive optimism. But these are very interesting. The naive optimism and the quality of improvisation, to your point, which I'd never thought about before, are very American qualities. And if you go to, like, Europe, for example, it's much more structured. It's much more, you know, you go to parts of Asia.

It's much more do as you're told, follow the rules, paint inside the lines. It's just important not to paint this with broad strokes, because you can go to the front lines in Ukraine right now. And I will show you people who are as dedicated and is open and improvising and ideas as, as the Americans were at Brandywine or Valley Forge. But of course, and I can find strict elements in the United States that seem to defy this. Because we do know that New York and Los Angeles belong in America, the cultures there don't belong in France, we do know there is something called American. And it is hard to define, but because we can recognize it, we should be able to put some things.

And in general, of course, we can find examples of all these things everywhere. Well, I have 265 hours of films, which I can, you know, if you want to extrapolate from those 265 hours, what it is, historically, they're mostly all histories. I think you could do that. I'm less in for the distinction because does that not play into the binary? We're Americans and we're better in this way. I didn't say it was better. I didn't say it was better. And I think the important thing is, the important thing is it's like people, right? Which is the character of a name. is like the character of a person. You know, you are who you are. So how do you square that, these particular cultural, linguistic, religious, geographic, uh, differences and the accumulation of them over time with the fact that of ecclesiastes, which says there's nothing new under the sun?

That I can point out behaviors of French nobleman, uh, and Russian peasants and, and Americans that is exactly the same manifestation. Is it a human being? But there is a difference between the behaviors of a, of a, of a person or a small group and the culture of a nation. Like the culture of a, like, you choose to live in New Hampshire because there's a culture there that you like, you feel like you belong, you feel seen, you feel heard. It's not, it's not, it's not necessarily political. There's a thing in the air that you are drawn to.

And we know that there's an Americanness because people, immigrate here because I'm kind of the black sheep of where I grew up. I'm the improviser. I'm the idealist. I'm the crazy optimist. I don't feel like I belong here. You know where I'm going to go. I'm going to go to America. So we know that there's- You're tired, you're poor, your huddled masses, the teeming refuse of your shores, right? I mean, so we're basically, our thing is, we'll take anybody who is there. And some people are lazy and some people are fruitful and some people have bad luck and some people have good luck and some people have both. I'm just pushing back a little bit only because characterizations breed, like if we're exceptional,

and I told you already, I believe the last best hope of earth, right? That was part of that same address of Lincoln in December of 62, not delivered by him. It was delivered in writing to Congress. I believe that. But the trap of exceptionalism, the trap of exceptionalism, the trap of, of distinction is a huge one, and almost all of our flaws come from that, because that's a finite thing in your infinite world, right? I mean, that is where we have gotten into trouble and where we have committed horrible sins, thinking that we are a priori right. I think the nuance here

is not the exceptionalism part, which is we can be different. And it goes right back to the beginning of this conversation, which is empathy, which is, I can. be me and I can recognize the qualities that I have and I can recognize the qualities you have or sometimes I understand you and sometimes I don't. And the rub, the empathy part is, and I don't think I'm better than you. I just think I'm different. And so I want to know what makes America different, not what makes America better. Yeah, it's there, a lot of them are accidental stuff. A lot of them are some of the ideas that you've promoted. I think at our best, we often believe that everybody's equal.

Yep. And there's no communication except among equals. If I somehow feel I'm better than you or you feel you're better than me or worse that, then still you feel you're lesser than me and I feel that I'm lesser than you and some sort of sequoist kind of kowtowing has to take place, nothing happens. So the communication happens in that free exchange. But, you know, you, I think that's human behavior. Yeah.

It's not just purely American. But like why, and I appreciate that back then they were English, but why is it these colonists, why is it that our founding fathers, what was about the conditions and the men at the time that allowed for these people to write that document and pursue that revolution, which you say is, is, you know, the most important things since the birth of Jesus? Why did that group of people not rise up, you know, from York in? against the king. Well, they have not necessarily in York, but certainly in Ireland and Scotland,

and it was brutally. But what was it about these people in these times in this place? So it's complicated, Simon. And what happens is that they have enjoyed about 150 years of what somebody in Britain called salutary neglect. They're the least tax people on Earth. They're incredibly literate. They're very healthy.

They now own land. And they pay about one shilling a year in taxes to local legislation. And the British win, with our help, what we call the French and Indian War, but the rest of the world sees as a global war called the Seven Years War. But the British are depleted. They can no longer defend us. And what Americans want to do more than anything else is go over and take Indian land in the Ohio Valley, like a normal guy whose family has worked in Wales or Scotland or Ireland or England,

dependent land for a thousand years, never own something, now wants something. And the Brits say, we can't protect you. You can't cross over the Appalachian. So they're going, wait a second, you promise. And then they're big land speculators like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin who decided that they own, because they've surveyed 25,000 acres in the Ohio Valley, which then they want to resell at a huge profit. George Washington may at this time be the richest man in the country.

So they're pissed off at the British. And then the British say, well, if we're protecting them and we can't afford to protect them, we need to tax them. And they go, no, that's taxation without representation. So you have all of these arguments that are just the arguments that people do everywhere against imposed stuff. And then all of a sudden, as I suggested before, this clash between Englishmen breaks out into an argument about natural rights. Why? Because we're in the Enlightenment and we are using the big argument. So you have people who enslave people saying that what Britain is doing to us is like slavery.

Right. And it's not like slavery at all. But they're using that as an argument. And so what you have is an increasing rhetoric that the more tyrannical they accuse the government of George III, the more tyrannical they act, the more radical they accuse us of being, the more radical we act. And then we happen. And then after Lexington and Concord, which is April of 75, it isn't for 15 months before anybody gets up the courage to say, well, maybe we should be independent, right?

We've already had the Battle of Bunker Hill. The British have 40 percent casualties. It's a pure victory for them. They take the hill, but they're still boxed in by the Americans, and they won't have 40% casualties till 1916, the first day of the sum, right? I mean, it's that bad, that bloody, but it still takes us another year to say, and actually, we want to be independent. So why an Englishman comes in and writes this thing called Common Sense that comes out in January

of 76? At that time, you know, they want the king to come to their aid, and he goes, it's the king who's the problem. So the answer is so complicated and people are loyalists here. And you may be a loyalist starting off. But when the occupying army rapes your daughter or steals your crops, suddenly you're a patriot. And you're a patriot until they suddenly take away your farm or they've won this battle. And now you're not so sure.

And your chance of winning at Lexington and Concord is zero. And you're going to keep going. What's amazing and gets to the heart of your question is that there are lots of people who are animated by this new idea. For the first time, Jefferson writes a few phrases after Pursuit of Happiness. All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. It just means that people are put up with the autocrats boot on their back, right? Yeah.

On their neck. And that we're creating a new thing called citizens, and that's going to require more energy. It's going to require more virtue. It's going to require more civic engagement than has ever taken place before. and we don't know that human beings can do that. But a few people hold to that and they come to that a lot out of anger. Even Adam says it's unbelievable how much anger as well as cause fuels these sorts of things. Your passion is contagious.

What I'm saying is it's complicated. And you can't bottle that thing and go, this is American and not, I can't go into the lab and go, oh, I see a little bit of French here and I see a little bit of German as well. And there's a lot of Native American. And by the way, there's lots of enslaved people in this story too who get nothing out of this. But they're, you know, what I mean, that when you do a lab analysis, the purity test is falls apart. From somebody who's made a career of trying to simplify the world, I so appreciate your adherence to the complexity of it. Yeah.

And I don't. And I don't disagree about the complexity. I know you don't. What I so love about your point of view, your perspective, your work is that they are there are snippets of time. They're merely arbitrary captures of a moment, maybe because something big happened, you know, but there's a lot that came before and there's a lot that will come after. And sure, you can tell the story of Vietnam. Sure, you can just tell the story of the revolution.

Sure, you can tell the story of any of the stories you tell, and you would be making films forever to explain all the little pieces and things and nuances and things that seem inconsequential become huge and huge things that become inconsequential and all these little ripples that make something happen in this way on this day and by the way that thing will then have ripples beyond it exactly i think there's a duality here that's really important which is i i don't know anybody in the planet that has your recall your ability to keep in your head, the organization, the dates, the people, and your ability to comprehend the complexity and the complicatedness of it all in a moment.

And so I think the reason to try to simplify, and I'm the first to admit in my own work, that I simplify for understanding, fully acknowledging that I'm leaving things out, that makes it technically wrong. Like I know that the chemicals in the body, dopamine endorphins, you know, serotonin oxytocin, they don't release neatly like I write about them. It's messy and complicated, but to understand it, I need to simplify it

just so you'll understand it. And I think there's this duality that has to exist where I do crave simplicity. I want to know why the sun comes in up the morning and why it goes down at the end of the day. I need an explanation because otherwise I will either feel lost or stupid or dumb. But you know that at dawn or sunset, a switch doesn't flip and it goes from

darkness to light or light to darkness. There's this gradual thing that takes place, which we call dawn and dusk, that has the ability to overpower or short circuit, the tendency to go, flick, light is gone, right? Fliq light came on again. Where I'm trying to get to, which is, and if I make any conclusion about the world we live in today, and I do not want to go down that rabbit hole as to how we got here. But the duality matters. It is okay to try and simplify the world so that we can understand it and feel like we matter in it. And we have to accept that whatever simplicity that we latch onto,

that there is complexity that sometimes we understand and sometimes we don't, that those things have to live together. And you have to be cognizant of both. That I am simplifying the complexity, but I appreciate that there is complexity. Well, you know, we make films, and they're not additive. You don't build a film. You subtract a film. We have 500 hours of footage and material, and we get down to 12.

And it's to do what you're talking about, to kind of simplify in a way. But we also want to leave open, particularly in the ability of long form. You know, we always say we want the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. Yeah. And yet we never ask, what's that difference, right? If you build a bridge or a house, one and one has to equal two. But if you're creating art, if you're pursuing ideas, the power of ideas, you want one and one to equal three. And you don't necessarily, and in faith as well, that's in art, that's part of it.

And you don't necessarily know or have even the apparatus to be able to even possibly begin to describe, which is why I dodged your what makes the American different, that difference between the sum of the part. which is just addition, duality, adding up, and the whole. And you have to just, this is the mystery of life that we have been handed. I think what I'm concluding, and I'm sort of realizing this in the moment as I'm talking to, I'm sort of learning as I'm talking to you, which is to understand the duality of subtraction to get to the ability to tell the story, but to recognize that the 500 hours became seven, you know, just to know that.

That is where empathy exists. That's right. That's the space. It's not the note. It's the intervals between the notes that make music. Exactly. And it's the cut between the shots that make film. Exactly.

All of these things. And so like what I mean by that is I can work with someone and I'd be like, ugh, they're lazy. I've now simplified the world around me to make it easy from understanding and easy to understand their behavior or they're an asshole, you know? but if I simply understand the complexity and say, well, I don't know what they're going through, or maybe they had a bad night's sleep, or maybe they're in a job that they don't understand, or nobody's given them any training, or, you know, they have a bad leader.

All of a sudden, the appreciation for complexity, even if I'm simplifying the world, helps me have empathy. That's correct. That's correct. Simplification is an understandable way. When somebody says, how is your day, dear? You don't say, I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb. You just don't do that. You edit human experience.

unless, of course, you get T-boned at that moment, and that's exactly the way you do it. But what happens is we edit it, but we go way too far in the editing it, where we get so reductionist that we get a place where we think it's black and white and nothing is black and white. That is a perfect place to end. I have a couple of questions here that I'm supposed to ask you. By the way, I could talk to you forever, maybe 500 hours. I agree. We'll do this again, right? You're too fun.

It is. All of this is fun. What's your favorite book and why? Wow. I like in a novel, it's a sort of toss-up. Well, I'll just say I like 100 years of solitude by Gabrielle Garcia-Marquez, which is often called magical realism because in the midst of what is a then-and-and-and-then stuff happens that just don't happen on earth, like made a sense to heaven as she's hanging up the laundry. There's just that stuff. I remember weeping at the end of that book and slowing down my reading when I was 100 pages out. Beautiful. And just because I can't help myself, when you do a subject, when you go down, when you decide to go down a rabbit hole, I mean, you can spend a decade of your life. Yeah. On a thing. Yeah.

Well, you know, in that 10 years that I made, the American Revolution, 10 and a half, I made, I released a film a year, sometimes two films a year. So I've got other different groups that are working and I can move when I can give some stuff and then I can come back. And then at the last year, it's pretty intensely that thing. So there's, you know, you're helped by doing other things because it's like, you know, rubbing your tummy and patting your head. You can learn something about separating and you come back to the revolution, the next cut, and you go, you're free and liberated from all of the stuff. When you choose a subject, you sort of like take a deep breath and go, here we go. Or you're like, no, this is worth spending the next decade of my life study. Both, both. You go, yikes.

You buy it. You know, there's a thing on my office door that says from Tyrone Guthrie, who had a theater in Minneapolis, the Globe Theater, but he said, we were looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of it. It's not a very well-written sentence, but I like that idea of biting off more than you can chew and learning how to chew it. And at the same time, you go into it.

People say, you must, 10 years, you must get so bored. You go, no, I actually enjoy the promotion only because it's this airlock that mitigates the grief of letting it go. Because the second this thing is out, it's yours. It's not mine. And people say, what did you intend here? I said, whatever you felt, right? So there is this thing of letting it go.

And so the evangelical, I call it the evangelical part of it, of going out and proselytizing about the American Revolution or Muhammad Ali or Jackie Robinson or this Central Park Five or the Civil War is the way in which you mitigate the grief of having to let it go. I want to keep talking. It's so unfair. This is the exact same thing as to why I think corporations aren't innovative. You know, small companies are innovative.

Big companies buy innovative small companies. And it's not size or scale that makes you lose innovation. I mean, you have all the money, you have all the people, you have all the market conditions, why aren't you innovative? And I think it's this point, which is small companies, their ambitions or their vision is larger than the resources they have available to achieve it. Whereas large companies, they moderate the vision to be very achievable to make sure they can afford it. And I think what keeps you interested for 10 years or in the case of a company,

forever. We're operating on the same seat of the pants thing up here as we did when I first and we and we as a nation say all men are created equal which is clearly an ideal we will never get to but it is we should die trying and that's kind of the point and the ambition is so much bigger than our than our ability and our resources that's the reason to keep at it and everything imposes itself in front of that because you want to make it certain and so that's the authoritarian's imprint. just make it certain. Let's just, we're happy to have the job. That's the finite players, Achilles heel. Yes. Yeah. Certainty. And there's nothing certain. The opposite of faith is not

doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. Amen. Ken Burns, you are wonderful. This has been great, Simon. I really enjoyed talking. You're the best. I hope to meet you in person one day soon. Look forward to it. If you're ever on the West Coast, please let me know. Thank you so so much. This was a thrill. Great. Thank you. A bit of optimism is a production of the optimism company. Lovingly produced by our team, Lindsay Garbenius, Phoebe Bradford, and Devin Johnson. Subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts.

And if you want even more cool stuff, visit simic.com. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.