Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Eight Iconic American Symbols with David Rubenstein

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

Today on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon welcomes back David Rubenstein to talk about his new PBS series, Iconic America. The series takes a look at eight different American symbols, from Cowboys to the Hollywood sign. These recognizable pieces of America have surprising histories, and Sharon and David discuss how symbols evolve and take on new meaning over time. Special thanks to our guest, David Rubenstein, for joining us today. Catch his new PBS series, Iconic America, streaming now.  Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: David Rubenstein Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Always delighted that you're joining me. And today I'm chatting with David Rubenstein. He has been on the show before, and maybe you watched our event together, Freedom Matters, at a presidential library. But either way, I think you're going to enjoy this conversation, which is about a new PBS series called Iconic America. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am delighted to be joined again by David Rubenstein. Thanks for being here today. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. I watched with interest your new series. You have a new educational, but also very entertaining

documentary series out. Tell me more about that. Well, you and I have both been interested in educating Americans more about our country's history on the theory that an informed citizenry makes a better democracy, as Jefferson would say. So this is a series which is designed to, on PBS, show eight iconic American symbols and try to educate people about the history of these symbols. And probably people will learn something they didn't know about it before. So we've already broadcast three of them. The first one was a symbol of our national pastime, baseball, and it was Fenway Park, the oldest baseball park in America that's still playing in the major leagues.

And the takeaway was that there was a curse of the Bambino because they traded Babe Ruth in the Boston Red Sox history to the Yankees, and they never won a World Series again for 86 years. But it turns out that it wasn't just necessarily because they traded Babe Ruth, but because the owner of the Red Sox refused to hire any African-American players. So they turned down Jackie Robinson, and they also said that Willie Mays wasn't quite good enough for the major leagues. The second one that was broadcast was the Hollywood sign, the famous sign on top of Hollywood Hills, and it's designed to kind of talk about the history of Hollywood. The third one was about the Gadsden flag, which is the flag that says, don't tread on me, which was used in the

Revolutionary War to say to the British, leave us alone. But interestingly, it's now been used by people in our country who say to the federal government, leave me alone. And tomorrow night, there'll be a fourth one, which is the one on American cowboy. We try to explain what the American cowboy is all about. It's not quite what you saw on TV Westerns over the years. It's much different. And then in July, there'll be four more that will be broadcast. One will be on the American bald eagle, not quite our national bird, but the symbol of the national country a bit. Another is the statue of liberty, you know, a very famous building,, in the Manhattan area. And then next

is the Stone Mountain, where there's some carved symbols of the Confederacy carved into the mountain. And the question is whether it's appropriate to keep those Confederate symbols there. It's a very large granite extruding from the Atlanta area in the United States. And then the last one is the Golden Gate Bridge, which is one of the most beautiful bridges in the world, built against great opposition. Even though people think it's a wonderful bridge, there were 4,000 lawsuits filed to block it at the time, but it ultimately was built in just four years. So those are the symbols. And each one of them tells you something about these symbols that you didn't know before. I will tell you that I've been able to so far watch three of the shows. And first of all, you look great in a cowboy hat, David.

Why aren't you just going to start wearing that around DC? I feel like it goes with the suit. Well, I went to, we went to a store in Oklahoma. I think a famous cowboy hat store and we got outfitted for cowboy hats and we had the whole crew with cowboy hats and maybe it'd be my new symbol. I don't know. I should get one. It suited you. It really did. You could tell that like you talked in the episode about how cowboys were like the symbol when you were growing up, like you wanted to be a cowboy. And I think that's a common feeling for especially a lot of young men. When I was growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s, there were a lot of TV westerns, Hop Along Cassidy and things like that.

And, you know, I thought in those days that cowboys basically carried guns and their job was to kill the Indians. That's basically how it worked. And they always won. realize that wasn't the case, that cowboys basically were herding cattle to get them to go to the trains so that they could go for the slaughterhouses to create beef for the American diet. And it was a very difficult task. Sometimes you'd be on one of these cattle trains for six months at a time, no shower, very sparse food. They were not all white men. About 25% were black, about 25% were Latino. So it wasn't all what you saw on TV in those days. And they weren't out really winning the West. The West was won to the

extent that was won, was won by the U.S. government and Calvary and so forth. So the cowboys were doing different things, but it's just trying to educate people. And now we have a symbol of the cowboy still, and it's a very important part of the life in the West, which is the rodeo. So I went to many rodeos, and I realized that that's a whole different culture than you see on the East Coast. There's a rodeo TV channel out West, and people watch these things with great interest. One of the things that I really took away from this episode, aside from the fact that you look great in a cowboy hat, is the dichotomy between what has been portrayed on television and in comic books and in Western novels about who cowboys were and what the reality of cowboy

life was, who actually were cowboys, what the job was actually like, and the economics behind being a cowboy. We think being a cowboy is like the hat and like riding a bucking bronco and you got your pearl handled pistols and like drinking some whiskey in a saloon. And in reality, it was an extremely hard job. Very tough job. You didn't get paid very much. Basically you were on the road for one to six months at a time herding these cattle. And it wasn't the easiest job. And again, they sometimes could go six months without hot water for a shower or something like that. Food was sparse.

You actually lived out in the open. They didn't have a lot of tents very often. They were just sleeping out in the open. It was not an easy environment. Yeah. And it did mention in the episode, too, about how during the heyday of the cowboy in America, which, of course, has become this very uniquely American symbol, they didn't feel like they could depict people of color.

They didn't feel like they could depict women because that was not going to be popular in the media. It needed to be this symbol of white male Americanism. Well, in the 1950s, what they put on TV was designed to make everybody feel like everything was Ozzie and Harriet. All married couples were happy. All the children listened to their parents. There was no difficult encounters with life.

Very famously, the most popular TV show in the 1950s was a show called I Love Lucy with Lucille Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, who was her real life husband. But it was considered inappropriate to show them in a king bed. So they had, even though they were married, they had them in separate beds because it was considered inappropriate to see, I guess, a married couple in a big king bed. I don't know. But so many things were different in those days. So many things were different in those days. And I think we didn't want to portray the Cowboys in those days as being anything other than heroes or as anything other than people who always would beat the Indians. I also loved that you had Josh Flagg in the Hollywood episode.

Do you ever watch a million dollar listing Beverly Hills, David? It wasn't actually on my TV list of favorite shows, I have to confess, but we tried to get a cross-section of people that would be representative of this. Interestingly, we did talk about this on the show when advertising agencies wanted to say, how can we sell cigarettes better? They came up with the idea that the most impressive male symbol of virility was the cowboy sitting on a horse smoking a cigarette. And despite the fact we now know that cigarettes are not that healthy for you, that was what sold enormous amounts of cigarettes, and it was the most effective ad or one of the most effective ads in the history of television,

having a so-called Marlboro man sitting on the horse smoking a cigarette. And they didn't show women smoking cigarettes, of course, and they never mentioned that it was not maybe the healthiest thing to do. But the fact that the cowboy was the symbol of toughness, virility, independence was something that the advertising agencies picked up on. You know, going back to the episode about Hollywood, and I thought it was really interesting when you were, you know, sort of driving in the car with Josh Flagg, who's this, you know, very prominent Beverly Hills realtor. And he knows an insane amount about Beverly Hills history and real estate.

He really does. And I thought it was very interesting that you mentioned or were able to depict all of these regions, these neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area that did not allow any minority groups, African Americans, Jews, anyone to move into them. Was that surprising to you? Well, no, because I grew up in Baltimore, and Baltimore was a similar situation. If you were Jewish, as my family was, you couldn't buy a home in the non-Jewish areas. Obviously, you were black, the same situation. This was called restrictive covenants, which is to say that you had a mortgage.

Under the mortgage terms, you couldn't sell to a black or a Jew, typically. And the United States Supreme Court outlawed that in 1948 in a case called Shelley v. Kramer, but it never actually got picked up by many people. So in Baltimore, they didn't quite get the word, so they were still doing it. In Hollywood, although a lot of the people who were very important stars in Hollywood, or the people who ran the studios, were Jewish, had Jewish backgrounds, they still had the same restrictive covenants. And so you weren't going to be buying a home if you were Jewish next to Clark Gable, most likely. That was the way that the world operated and people more or less accepted it.

So in the home section of that film, we did drive around some of the homes that were considered enormous homes in those days. Today, by the standards of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, they are starter homes almost because today the homes are 30 40,000 square feet people didn't have them then but it is interesting that today even today there are buses that drive around Beverly Hills to show where the current stars are living and people pay money to look at where these people are living so you have to say why do people want to spend time looking where somebody's living when they can't go meet the people? They're not going to go in the house.

But people like to have a connection to Hollywood and the stardom. And so that's what keeps Hollywood alive, I guess. I thought it was very interesting to learn that when the Hollywood Land sign, and it used to say Hollywood Land, the Hollywood Land sign was put up. It was not put there as a symbol of the movie studios. It was not put there as a symbol of like, wow, we make motion pictures. We have an entire entertainment industry. Right. So what you're referring to, for those who haven't seen it yet, is at the top of the Hollywood Hills, there's a big sign, Hollywood. It's well known. But actually, it was originally Hollywood Land because Hollywood Land

was a development company. They were selling homes in the Hollywood Hills, but there were other people selling homes in the Hollywood Hills and they wanted to get people to come to their homes. So they put a big sign in effect saying, come here, this is Hollywood Land and you'll buy a home. Later when the houses were all sold, they took the land part off and just kept Hollywood up there. And then it's been a symbol of Hollywood and it's had its challenges over the years. People have tried to tear it down. Some people try to deface it. Sometimes some marijuana proponents would change it. So it would say Hollyweed. And then interestingly, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hugh Hefner at times put up some money to keep it from falling apart because the sign was falling down. It's now been rebuilt. But today you can

climb up to the top of the Hollywood sign and see it if you want, as I did in the show. And it's quite interesting how this is a symbol of Hollywood, even though today there are no movies made in Hollywood. All the movies are made in Burbank or other parts of the Los Angeles area. Hollywood mostly is restricted to Grauman's Chinese Theater, which is a simple movie theater, and the places where you put your hands in the cement, where you see famous people's hands or feet. What was the most interesting thing that you learned researching and hosting this episode about Hollywood? Most interesting thing I learned is that people from all over the world still are enamored with the idea of having a connection to, even if it's a very vague connection, with Hollywood. People still come to the Hollywood place on Wilshire Boulevard

and walk up and down thinking they're going to see a movie star. They do. And, you know, there aren't a lot of movie stars walking up and down the Hollywood in the Wilshire Boulevard. They probably are in their homes or they're making a movie or something. But it's an interesting connection. Why do people like to see Hollywood movie stars? I guess it gives them a sense of importance that they run into somebody famous and say, I saw Clark Gable or today I saw Tom Cruise. How that helps you become a better person or be a more productive citizen, I'm not sure, but that is still part of life in Los Angeles. People want to connect with movie stars. People love to see them.

People are always taking selfies of them and that's life. I thought it was interesting, too, how today's stars, you talk about this in the episode, today's stars live in these very private, gated compounds where even if you drive past, you can't even see the house. And that's not how it used to be. Yes. If you look at the houses like Lucille Ball's house or Jimmy Stewart's house, they didn't have hedges in front of them. They had no gates to help. People didn't do that. Now, why do we do that now? Well, there is security reasons. Obviously, there are a lot of people

who are not so smart in terms of their ability to kind of restrain themselves. And so they will knock on doors of people if they can get to the store, the doors of the homes of a Hollywood star. And so Hollywood stars want to be hidden. They don't want people to come in. They don't want to be, obviously, have criminal kind of activity. In those days, a crime didn't really exist the way it does today. So Lucille Ball would have her home, no hedges. You can go on the knock first on the door and knock on it. Maybe she would open up the door or not, but it was a different world. It really was. Yeah. And of course the internet makes it very easy to find people's addresses. And that was not always the case. You had to really like buy a map and drive around and see

if you could find somebody's house. You had to be there physically to be able to figure out where someone lives. Absolutely. And the buses though, still go and do it. The buses are still running around Hollywood or not Hollywood, but Beverly Hills where most of the stars live. And they point out the people's homes. You don't get to go in the homes, but you get to know where they live. And there's some kind of vicarious thrill people get by saying, I just saw the home of some famous person. Have you ever been starstruck? Have you ever, Hollywood or politician or world leader, have you ever been like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I get to meet you?

When I was younger, of course, if I could have met a cowboy, that would have been great. But when I was little in Baltimore, I would starstruck by baseball players. When the famous baseball players would come to town, I would go down to their hotel and try to get their autographs. I live in Washington, and Washington is starstruck not by Hollywoods as much as it is by politicians. And so I did work in the White House. And when you work in the White House, you get to meet the president. And I've met many other presidents.

And so I'm always interested in meeting presidents, I guess. But I, you know, and I was the chairman of the Kennedy Center. I do meet a lot of movie stars and other performers. And, you know, I wouldn't say I'm not starstruck. I'm always interested in seeing what makes these people tick, but I'm probably a little more jaded than I was when I was 15 or 12 or something like that. I remember once that my dad got me a signed baseball that had a Minnesota Twins player on it, Kirby Puckett. Do you remember Kirby Puckett? He's a famous player. He was a great player.

Yeah. So I had this signed baseball that had, you know, Kirby Puckett's signature on it, Kirby Puckett. Do you remember Kirby Puckett? He's a famous player. He was a great player. Yeah. So I had this signed baseball that had Kirby Puckett's signature on it, but nobody told me like, put that away and don't play with it. So of course I played with it and I kind of smudged the signature and I was like, well, that's getting kind of smudged. And so I decided to get out a pen and to just like retrace Kirby Puckett's signature. And then my dad was like, what are you doing? You're you ruined it. You ruined your baseball. So I no longer have my ruined Kirby Puckett baseball. Well, that's a problem. Uh, yeah. As we now know who knew at the time that there's a gigantic business of getting autographs from famous baseball players and there are signing conventions where you go and you get various memorabilia signed by players.

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You can revisit all the office ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to office ladies on the free od free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. I want to turn to talking about the episode about the Gadsden flag, because the symbol of, you know, Hollywood, it's very interesting. It's a huge, you know, it's Americana, same with cowboys. The Gadsden flag has very real,

of course, fascinating history, but also very real political connotations and implications today. So let's start sort of at the very beginning about how the Gadsden flag, the symbol for anybody who doesn't know what it is, it's the symbol of like the chopped up snake or the snake that says, don't tread on me and the yellow flag that's associated with that. How did it start? Benjamin Franklin once wrote a political cartoon in his newspaper, Poor Richard's Gazette, where he had a serpent and it was kind of divided into parts. Each part represented a colony. And his point was, if we stay united, this serpent can actually achieve something of importance.

If we're dividing up the serpent in various chopped pieces, it won't be very effective. That later was used by a man named Christopher Gadsden, who was a South Carolina Revolutionary War hero. He created a serpent on a yellow background flag, which said, don't tread on me. And it was to be used by the Revolutionary War soldiers and other people to say to the British, don't tread on me, leave me alone. Now, the fact that we had slaves in our country and we were treading on them, in effect, was not something that people wanted to talk about.

But they had a flag designed to kind of say to people in Britain, leave us alone. The connection today is that when the events of January the 6th occurred or other marches on Washington, sometimes people use the don't Tread on Me flag. So if you look at the film of January 6th, you'll see a lot of people came to Washington with Don't Tread on Me flags. And the irony is that it was a flag used initially to protest the British by people in this country. Now it's often used by people in this country to protest our own government.

I thought it was very interesting. You had a guest in the episode who talked about how humans are just really attracted to flags. For whatever reason, we just like them and need them. He said, how many Supreme Court cases have there been about model trains? How many soldiers have risked their lives for a stamp? And basically the implication being none, but there are many of both in relationship to flags. Yes. Look, a flag is a piece of cloth. For some people, though, we put our hands over our heart when we're listening to the Star Spangled Banner or a Pledge of Allegiance.

These are just pieces of cloth. They're not anything more than that, but they take on a symbol. And just as the stars and stripes are a symbol of our country, and we pledge allegiance to it, and we honor it, you have to remember that it's kind of a symbol. It's just a symbol. Just like the Don't Tread on Me is a symbol, our current stars and stripes is a symbol, and every country has a flag that's a symbol of the country. And so it's interesting that you want to kind of show your allegiance to the country. How do you do it? Well, you pledge allegiance to a flag, in effect.

You know, one of the things that I found interesting as well in the episode was how people, some of the historians you interviewed, talked about how 2010 was a turning point in political rhetoric in the United States, that it was the growth of the Tea Party movement, many of whom embraced the Gadsden flag, and that 2010 became this time when political rhetoric became increasingly violent. And it was, you know, they point to a lot of things related to the Obama presidency for a variety of reasons. Well, during the Civil War or right before the Civil War, we had enormous amount of division in this country. And during the Civil War period or time or leading up to it, something like 60 to 70 members of Congress hit or had fights with other members of Congress on the floor of the Congress. So it was a difficult time and we lost 3% of our population in the war. So it's a lot of people to die over the division that we had then. We have divisions in our country today. I

don't think it's going to lead to a civil war, though there are proposals by some people that some of the so-called red states would form their own country. I don't think that's realistic. But today, there's no doubt that there's a problem and division in our country, and many people in this country are feeling disaffected from the country. You could say it got revived a bit and the feeling kind of exacerbated during the period of time of Barack Obama. Why? Well, for some people, sadly, the idea that a black American could become president of the United States was just grating to them. And I think there was some racial element to it, but that's not the only factor. He tended to be more liberal than some of the people who didn't like his policies. And he stood firm for those principles.

But there's no doubt that the country is today very divided. We make fun of the Congress by saying they can't get anything done. They're divided. But Congress really represents the country. That's all it does. And so the country is divided and the Congress is divided. When John Kennedy ran for president of the United States, he campaigned in 45 states. Richard Nixon campaigned in 1960 in 50 states. Why?

Because you didn't know how any state was going to go. Today, we know how 40 of the 50 states are going to go in any presidential election. If you are the Republican nominee, we know exactly what states you're going to go. Today, we know how 40 of the 50 states are going to go in any presidential election. If you are the Republican nominee, we know exactly what states you're going to win. If I'm the Democratic nominee, I know what states we're going to win. If there are only about 10 left, they really contest. The country is very divided now, and blue states and red states don't usually change that much. One of the guests in the episode said, we are in a battle for the soul of our republic. And right now, fear, lies, and distrust are more effective at gaining power than the truth. And there's going to be a point in this country where lies and distrust destroy us. Well, historically, the big lie theory was this.

Well, historically, the big lie theory was this. If you say something over and over again, and it's a lie, people will eventually believe it because the theory is, why would somebody say something that's a lie over and over again? They wouldn't be allowed to do it unless it was true. So if you say something over and over again, eventually people will believe it, or at least some percentage of people will believe it. And now because of social media, you can get your message out anywhere. Let's suppose you're living in Minnesota, a good place, a great state that you know,

and you're just an average person and you want to get your message out 50 years ago. Well, what would you do? You might write a letter to the editor, may not get published. Maybe you write an article, maybe it wouldn't get published. Maybe you write a book if you're really lucky.

Day to day, you have a social media access. You can put something on Twitter and in five seconds, it'll be known all over the world what your views are. And so you can spread your views, even if they might be blasphemous in some ways, all over the world. So it's instant ability to kind of communicate. And I think it's a thrill for some of these people to get their views out, to have other people hear their views, right or wrongly.

What, in your estimation, can and should be done about that? This idea that fear, lies, and distrust are more effective at gaining power than the truth. Well, if I had the answer for that, I would be in Iowa and New Hampshire, probably. So I don't really have the answer for that. But I do think that it's sad that so many people have instant access to the whole world and they can say anything they want. There's no filter and there's no block. But I don't know that it's possible to put the genie back in the bottle.

I haven't had a chance to watch the episode about the bald eagle yet, but I love bald eagles. I have many of them near my house. Bald eagles love northern Minnesota because we live by Lake Superior, which is one of their primary migratory routes. Well, you haven't seen the episode, so you may not know that the National Museum of the Bald Eagle is in Minnesota. Tell me all the things. Tell me all the things about bald eagles. I need to know all the things. Okay. Bald eagles are endemic just to North America. There's no bald eagles in other parts

of the world, just in North America. There's no bald eagles in other parts of the world, just in the North America. When our country was created, there were probably 500,000, it's estimated. We went down to only 500 because of DDT, among other things, killing off the bald eagles. But now we're back to 500,000 as DDT has been eliminated. Bald eagles are the symbol of our country. They're not the official national bird, but if you look at the dollar bill or other bills, you'll see the bald eagle on it. It's on our official country seal of the United States, so it's not the official bird. We don't have an official bird.

It is rumored that Benjamin Franklin wanted the official bird to be the turkey, but that's probably not true. The bald eagle is a symbol of strength because these are very strong birds. They're symbols of freedom because they can fly in long ways. They're a very interesting animal because they are very monogamous. The bald eagle will mate with a partner in a very unusual death spiral. They'll kind of go up a couple hundred feet and then they'll link their talons together and they'd go all the way to the ground practically before they'd come up again.

They're very monogamous in the sense that if they have children together, birds together, chicklets together, or eaglets together, and they sit there hatching them for a long time, and then the male will go out and get food, bring it back. Sometimes the female will go out, but then the next year or so, they stay together. Assuming one of the birds is alive, they kind of stay together for maybe their whole life in some ways. Very interesting. And so I went to Alaska where a lot of the bald eagles come together at some times of the year. I went to Minnesota and other places where there are a lot of bald eagles. It's interesting how much bigger females are than males. That's very unique in the animal kingdom.

bigger females are than males. That's very unique in the animal kingdom. And it's interesting how the larger role male bald eagles have in incubation. They will take turns sitting on the eggs and they're like really up in the whole mix of raising babies with their lifelong partners. It's similar to the penguin. If you look at the penguin, what happens is after they have a baby and an egg, the male will sit on top of the egg and nurture it for maybe six or nine months at a time, where the female goes off to get some food for a year or so, and the female comes back and the male is still there sitting over the egg. So they're very monogamous as well. And so it is interesting that there's a lot of monogamy in the bird community.

monogamous as well. And so it is interesting that there's a lot of monogamy in the bird community. How did the bald eagle come to be a symbol of America? By what process? Okay. Eagles that are not bald eagles, but other types of eagles have been symbols of strength for thousands of years. So the Romans used eagles as symbol of strength. Other civilizations did as well. So we found a bird in this country that's endemic just to the United States and therefore kind of as our own. But the reason that people like it as a symbol for our country is that it's a very strong animal. It can fly for very long distances. It is a beautiful animal. It has an unusual construction. The eyes are 10 times as strong as your eyes or my eyes because they always were looking for fish to eat. That's what they usually

eat is fish. They have the ability to swivel their neck around almost 360 degrees because they're always looking for somebody that they might be able to eat, a bird they might be able to eat. And they are really quite beautiful animals because when you see them flying around, they're very majestic looking. So a symbol of strength and ability to kind of do wonderful things as they fly is probably why they are seen as a good symbol for the country. They're strong and so forth. Now, Benjamin Franklin didn't like them as much because he said they're not nice animals. Why? Because very often if a smaller bird gets a fish out of the water, Eagle will swoop in and take the fish away from the other bird.

And he was saying they don't really do their own work. They don't go out and get the fish themselves. Well, he was maybe tongue-in-cheek when saying that, but he didn't think that they were as good as the turkey, which he thought was a better animal. At least it had more edible meat than the eagle did. Yes. I want to talk very briefly about how the series was conceived of and made. What made you think, you know what I need to do is a PBS series. Well, I've written four books based on some of my interviews, and I was looking for a different way to communicate my concerns about people not

knowing that much about history or civics and so forth, something you and I've talked about at the Bush Library. And so it was suggested that I kind of host and help put together a PBS series on symbols of our country. And so we did that. We researched them. We could have picked many others. Obviously, we debated many different ones, but these are ones that were geographically dispersed throughout the country.

They were ones that people didn't know as much about as I thought they should. And so we thought we could educate people. And so it seems to have worked. How long does it take to make a TV series? People are always very curious about behind the scenes. A lot longer than I thought. So I spent most of 2022, my weekends on 2022 filming it because I have day jobs. And so I couldn't get away during the week that much. So I would tend

to go on weekends. I went to France for the Statue of Liberty one where it was conceived. I went to Alaska and the remote parts of Alaska to do the ones on the bald eagle, went to out West to do the ones on the rodeos and the American cowboy. So I traveled a great deal to do it. And I learned a lot about putting TV shows together. And I had a very good partner in show of force, which is an Emmy award-winning television production company. Okay. How can people watch Iconic America? It's being broadcast tomorrow night, Wednesday night at 10 o'clock East Coast time. The fourth one in this part of the series is being broadcast. And that one is the American Cowboy. When July

comes, the remaining four will be broadcast then. But you can watch them on the internet or any kind of on the PBS website or so forth. So they're easily accessible by streaming as well. Yeah, I think you can watch them on pbs.org. And then you would just search for Iconic America. Correct. Well, I am excited to see the rest of these. I love the Statue of Liberty too. Well, thank you very much for talking about this. You obviously know your PBS and your Iconic America because you know as much about these shows as it seems as I do. So thank you for watching and thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk about it. Oh, it was

my pleasure. And I really did enjoy the episodes that I got a chance to see. Thanks, David. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. You can watch Iconic America on your local PBS channel. You can check out pbs.org and enter your zip code and it will tell you when it's airing. And you can also watch it on streaming on PBS. I really enjoyed these episodes. I can't wait to see the rest of them and I hope you'll enjoy them too. Thanks for being here today. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon.

Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? That helps us so much. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon.