Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson (sometimes) - Ken Burns

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

One of our greatest living storytellers Ken Burns joins the pod this week! Ken talks to Ted Danson about what history teaches us about the times we’re living in, the sign he keeps in his yard, why the American Revolution shouldn’t be sanitized, and even some relationship advice. Ken Burns’ docuseries “The American Revolution” premieres on PBS on November 16th, airing over six nights.  To help PBS continue its vital work, make a donation.   Like watching your podcasts?  Visit http://youtube.com/teamcoco to see full episodes.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Richard Powers, a novelist, said the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. Welcome back to where everybody knows your name. Without a doubt, Ken Burns is one of our greatest storytellers, whether it's the Civil War, jazz, baseball, the Vietnam, or the Roosevelt's, his documentaries are often a mirror to America, showing us who we truly are, both in times of prosperity and in times of crisis. That is why I'm so excited for Ken's next docu-series, which explores the founding of this country and how it turned the world upside down. It's called The American Revolution, and it premieres on PBS on November 16th, airing over

six nights. Here he is, Ken Byrd. Can I start with, I was, I'm giddy, I feel like the young kid growing up around my parents. My father was an archaeologist, a professor, Ph.D. He was an anthropologist and a director of a museum. So I was surrounded all my life by scientists, hard cut. I go through life and go to Cheers and Cheers starts paying me too much money at some point. And so I started an environmental organization called American Oceans Campaign that became Oceania, which is one of the largest organizations. But really what I'm doing is I'm saying, hey, dad, I may not be a scientist, but I'm hanging out with them. I'm trying to be like you. And I think that was kind of my motivating force in life.

And here I am talking with somebody who's very dadlike to me. So I'm so tickled. My dad was an anthropologist. I read that. A cultural anthropologist. And I grew up with a map of the United States over my bed that did have very loosely the political divisions of the states. But they were all native tribes. They were all the 300 nations that made up.

And so I grew up with Kachina dolls and with arrowheads. with Neolithic tools and a kind of father interested in communicating what had happened in Olduvai Gorge in East Africa and the dawn of human beings and understanding even though his thing wasn't physical anthropology, as they call it, but cultural anthropology studying alpine peasants. And so in a way, I think I'm like you, we're here having a kind of complicated dad conversation because I'm an anthropologist of American. There's a kind of Grand Canyon, a strata of the stories of us

that have layered upon layer created who we are. I want to do one more thing because I think we both share, is it Dr. Henry, I always call them Skip Gates, finding your roots. I read that you did that as well. I did. And we have, I'm sorry,

always sounds bizarre, but not to you. You brought your skip book? My skip book because I couldn't remember his last name was Smith, but he was Mayflower, you know, came across, which I noticed you also did. I've got some pretty close, not quite Mayflower, but on my mother's side Tupper, there's somebody, but I've learned from Skip and from others doing genealogical research and having just finished this massive thing on the American Revolution that one of my relatives is Eldad Tupper.

When I heard that for a while, I thought, Eldad's great, let's name a dog, Eldad. Then it turns out he's a loyalist and refused to sign an oath and ended up in New Brunswick. And then I was sort of, he was dead to me. I mean, literally and figuratively. I have on my side,

on the Allen's side of my family, my father's mother, pardon me, mother's side, Jolly Allen, who is a tavern owner and who's Jolly Adam? Jolly, uh, Alan is a wonderful name yeah and i think that was maybe the name of his tavern but his last name was alan and it was his tea or at least some of his teeth that ended up in the harbor because he was

a loyalist he was a lot so we have that burden too yeah not just and slave owners i've got a i've got a slave owner and i actually took it with i thought a degree of equanimity when skip and others earlier before that had done it my big thing was my grandmother who got a ph d at yale in 22 and two in zoology and biology, ahead of my grandfather, who she then set aside her career to raise three boys, including my father, the oldest. A remarkable woman had said that we're related to Robert Burns, but I can't prove it. And nothing we could do, no genealogical, no spit test, no nothing. I'd even gone to Scotland lecturing in 99 for the State Department and got a day off and I went to Alloway Cottage and, you know, there was a portrait.

We'd seen the black and white sort of cameo frontispieces. But there's a portrait that looked exactly like me, and I had my second daughter with me and her. And we went in and the matrons at the bookshop just dropped their jaws. I'm reaching into my wallet and showing them I'm Kenneth Lauren Burns. It would have been Mick Lauren, but my parents loved Lauren Bacall, so they cut the Mick off. And I'm Kenneth Lauren Burns. and they're like we could do no wrong that day. So I knew in my gut as far back as my grandmother because I trusted her implicitly,

but in 1999 I could see the visual stuff. And then, God bless, Skip, you know, even the historic New England genealogical society that took me back to Charlemagne could not. Me too, by the way. Go on. Hey, Cuzz, good to see you. Oh, my God. I knew, I knew just watching Cheers all that year.

I went, that's got Charlemagne energy in it. LaMaine Energy. Holy Roman Empire! So I finally I sort of kind of given up and thought maybe this was a sort of genealogical cul-de-sac, but he did the mitochondrial DNA,

which is the mother's stuff, and he got a hit of a cousin and an aunt of Robert Burns. Robert Burns was born in 1759. My folks came over in 1750 from Scotland, but from that area. But we are related. And I just had that great relief. I could just go, okay, you're an American, you got to deal with slavery and all of the stuff.

I mean, 99.99% of my films, we bump into race all the time in it. And the loyalist stuff was hard to digest, but it's complicated. But I've got Robert Burr. And so it would empower the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us. Okay. So now that I've proven that I'm just like you, And we're cousins. Yes.

Which is great. Do you want to spend Christmas or Thanksgiving together? Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. Because my guy on the Mayflower was there. At the original painting? Supposedly him. So I'm not going to bring anything.

Like you'll do all the cooking. Yeah. Okay. Great. No. I don't want to mess up this quote that I heard you say when I was listening to the Sunday morning interview. you, that the Declaration of Independence, the words that were used and what that set up was as earth-shattering as, and I don't want to miss this up, because when you say Christ,

everyone gets everybody's attention and votes. I think the American Revolution is the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ. It is a device to get your attention and to think about the fact that, that this second sentence of the Declaration, second only in the English language to, I love you, is about as earth-shattering and is as complicated. And we have to embrace and understand

and tolerate the undertow and the contradictions, obviously written by a person who had known almost all there was to know, could read in many, many languages, and distilled a century of enlightenment thinking into this second sentence of the Declaration that begins, we hold these truths to be self-evident he doesn't go with john locke he doesn't say life liberty and

property which is what they're all thinking about he's saying in the pursuit of happiness which is not the acquisition of material things in a marketplace of objects but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas so he and let's bracket that lifelong learning is freedom equals freedom so the the the founders all of them would say yes that's exactly what we mean by it, that in order to be this new thing, a citizen, it required a kind of virtuous, lifelong pursuit of something. This is a huge responsibility. A few phrases later, Jefferson says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. It can go. Wait, wait, wait, do that again. All experience has shown that mankind are more

disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. That means, All of human history, here to four, everybody has been essentially subject to an authoritarian ruler. They have been subjects, and we are creating a new thing, and it's going to take a little bit more energy. And so today, as we grapple with all of the forces surrounding us, we can go back to our founding and take real strength from the fact that we lost and we lost and we lost and we lost, and somehow at the end we actually won. And what we triumphed over was the momentum of how human history had unfolded. And that was tyranny and authoritarian rule. And we had created something else that was going to suggest that the people could,

through lifelong learning, through virtue, through less ambition and avarice, as John Adams would say, would be able to govern themselves. And so what you required was an educated populace, It's not a superstitious peasantry in which you've taken education out. I mean, I'm still waking up suffering from the fact that where I have all of my films, all my professional life on PBS has just been defunded by the federal government in an attempt, I think, to actually make us less aware of ourselves. And it's going to hurt not the urban areas as much as the rural areas where the last vestige of

local news is the NPR or the PBS station that is covering the school board or the city council meeting or whatever. And that's not just spin. That is the truth. That is the truth. And so I'm Jefferson's words particularly this morning are kind of resonating with me. And yet I think this story that we've told is the American Revolution that's coming out in November, I think well in advance of next July's potentially fife and drum. treacle, you know, where we're just kind of bombarded with all the patriotic tropes and forget how violent our revolution was. It was a civil war. Our civil war was a sectional war, one part of the country against the other. And this is really interior. Your neighbor could be a loyalist. And a loyalist

is not a bad person, Derek, what we'd call a conservative. Someone says, you know, the British constitutional monarchy is the best form of government on earth. And you'd be right up until now. And why would you want to change this? I've got health. I've got property. I'm literate. Things are pretty good here. What's the problem? Do you want to be ruled one, one loyalist minister said to another, by a tyrant 3,000 miles away or 3,000 tyrants a mile away, meaning the mob of democracy, which was scaring to death, everybody? So we forged this thing out of a really complicated, diverse set of people, native peoples living among us on our western border, enslaved and free blacks, women who are huge part of the resistance and yet are left out entirely from

the spoils. It's a great, great story, and I think might give us some courage as we sort of face the current set of resistance. I want to go back in a second, But to finish to just off what you just said, there is hope in realizing I heard you talk about, you know, we do tend to both sides of, you know, whatever conversation, to hype up the unnatural thing that's happening in the world at the moment, whereas the truth is we've, that's human nature and we've been doing it forever. We've divided out of our revolution during this no-nothing periods of the earth. early 19th century, of course, the Civil War. We killed 700, we murdered 750,000 of our own people over the question of slavery, which we were still tolerating. There were four million human beings owned by other Americans in a country which was bragging to the world that all men were created equal. We've struggled through the Vietnam period, through lots of other things. Division

is given. And I think we do have a kind of chicken little sense of that always, that whatever is happening now has got to be the end, the worst sort of thing. And I think that's where history becomes, I don't want to say it's polyanish, or it's optimistic. It just means you're armed with the fact that, as the ecclesiasse said, there's nothing new under the sun. And like faith, democracy or freedom is not set in concrete. Faith is, I think, is something that you you don't, you know, sign up for and then every Sunday or whatever, you know, it's a living thing that if you do not wake up every morning like you do with your love for your mate and refresh it and work hard for it and make mistakes with it, but engage it literally every day, then you're

not really engaging faith or democracy or love. That is exactly right. And all of those things, faith, democracy, and love, I think that's it. I gave the commencement address last year at Brandeis, and at one point I just said, you know, you have to realize that the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith. It's what keeps it, as you're saying, a practice and not something that then you just wear and say, I'm this and not do the work necessary. The opposite of faith is certainty. Certainty destroys the kind of mystery that the search provides.

Every morning I wake up and have for 10 and a half years received a photograph from a friend. It used to be just him and his dying son who's now passed away back in 2015, and he photographs the page of Tolstoy's Calendar of Wisdom. At the end of his life, he published two books, each with every day of the year, had a set of paragraphs and quotes from other people that are signed, and I respond to it. It comes in at like 5 a.m., and I respond as soon as I'm up, and over the years it's grown and there's a couple hundred people who receive this email and very

few respond but some of them come in with extraordinary stuff but i i make a comment every day and it's my i don't know what vespers are the evening prayers i don't know what the equivalent of what the morning prayer is but for me it's a way to start and it's almost like breaking the ice on a on something that's beginning to harden whatever we think we always take our faith, we take our love, whatever. And there's a, something happens and it begins to harden and it. It's a way to break it up and saying, you know, I'm starting over, you know, and I start every, I make a note and I just always say, new day, exclamation point, meaning what are you going to do? And you think about this. Sometimes he's quoting the Buddha. Sometimes he's quoting Jesus.

Sometimes he's quoting the Quran. And you realize that all of these faiths, which are responsible for so many of our violent things are all, you know, great rivers flowing into the same sea. They have exactly at their heart. I mean, I said in that same speech that, you know, this is a Jewish university, Brandeis, named after the first Jewish Supreme Court justice. And I said, you know, we are now in so dialectically preoccupied, gay, straight, young, old, black, white, Palestinian and Israeli, and just take that dichotomy and just look at the situation. There is this land, which is actually the holy land for three great religions, all of them,

children of Abraham, who've turned it into a shameful graveyard. And I said, God does not distinguish between the dead. The founders of our country, many of them were what are called deists. That is to say that they believe in a supreme being, but one disinterested in the daily activities so when you hit you know a game a walk off home run you don't need to thank nobody did no there was no bigger power that did that and doesn't distinguish between face so it gives us a country started unlike any other country not just on this thing citizen but with no established religion and so you are not essentially saying i am going to participate in the squabbles that inevitably arise from the, I'm right, you're wrong aspects of even the most, you know, all the different

Protestant sex, each one is slightly different from the other with a different thing. And we've permitted those differences and between the larger religions to cloud everything. And that it's all the same, you know, and it gets back. I have a, I live in New Hampshire. I have a yard sign and political yard sign where a big state people come through. And my yard sign says love multiplies, which I think is the only equation the only equation that actually

addresses the universe. And it's great because it's a bit of a hyacu so what the hell is that mean? Yeah, a couple of people come by and then, you know, inevitably somebody will come by, usually a woman and say, well, that's really beautiful. And I said, you want one? So I go to the garage and I pull out, you know, and give them a yard sign that says love multiplies.

We've gone down many verbal, no, hallways. And they're all so- I lost my key to my room. No, no, they're so fascinating that I just wanted to do two things. One. Time out. No, no, no, calling myself out. I did that thing, you know, in school when you don't know

answer, but you want to show that you're, you know, the smart kid raises his hand. And you, once they start, they call on the smart kid, you go, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, I knew that too. I knew that, too. When you did Brandeis and said, was named after I mouthed about a second behind you, Supreme Court justice, you know, just in case my friends here saw that I knew. I saw that, but I still think we're in sync. We are in sync.

But here's why I bring that up. the conversation is at a pretty high level of knowledge of history and everything else. I find you fascinating beyond belief. And one of the things that makes you so fascinating, I think, and drives you is your curiosity. Everything you've talked about is you wake up and you're curious. Little parentheses, I remember my friend Jeff Bridges went through a health scare, nut scare, real deal, cancer thing. And I asked his brother, how's he doing? And he said, well, you know, he's Jeff.

He went, wow, a new experience. I wonder what this is going to be like. That sense of curiosity keeps your life. That's my little hallway I went down. Now, my other thing is I want to make sure that people know, just because some of them may be raising their hand after you start, you know, give the answer that your films, your documentaries, the American Revolution,

which is so important and covers so many things, is so accessible to anybody. Everybody. No matter if you picked up a history book ever or you go, what the hell is this have to do with me? You'll find out it does. Or this is not going to reflect my experience or my relatives or ancestors' experience.

Wrong. It is literally covered. You will see yourself in these documentaries you've made. History is a great mirror. Yes. And one more hallway. Skip Gates did that for me. It's like when I started hearing, well, one of the things is most potent was discovering that one of my relatives had a slave named Venture Smith who wrote a book, famous book, and who was allowed to buy his freedom.

And when I heard the allowed, someone was allowed. to works for you and get this pittance and then use that pittance to buy his freedom and it wasn't like me being oh softy I broke into tears because it's like no wait what yeah I get it so anyway that's available and everything you're you're doing and talking about and once you would see yourself there or see your relatives there history has opened up to you and you're all of a sudden really curious yourself. That's a nice thing to say, Ted. I think documentaries have had this honorable history

of being about a contemporary moment and advocating a particular point of view, all of which is great. You know, we think about the mindfulness when I was growing up about the farm workers in the Central Valley of California and CBS News had a white paper called Harvest of Shame. It's a really great documentary in and of itself.

Of course, we know all the ones that command our attention over the last several decades. But we've tried not to put our thumb on the scale, but to be umpires, to go back to the baseball stuff and throw balls and strikes and just be able to tell a story that's complicated, that tolerates undertow. Because what I was trying to communicate to the students at Brandeis is that we are so dialectically preoccupied that we now are certain their binaries, like that you're different from me. that she's different from me, that you're this, I'm red state, you're blue state, whatever it is.

And we're always making the other wrong. And the success for love multiplies is try not to make the other wrong, to not create, I mean, you know, the sort of headline thing is that I've been making films for 50 years about the U.S., but I've also been making films about us. That is to say the two-letter, lowercase, plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty and complexity and contradiction and even controversy of the United States. And if you call balls and strikes, then there's

room for everybody. And then you are understanding that when we need to create a villain, we've just, I mean, you can throw George Washington out for a few reasons, right? But we don't have a country without him. So you want to stay and find out his complexity and learn also about the hundreds of other people who didn't have their portrait painting and didn't lead the Continental Army and didn't become the first president and didn't give up his military commission

and didn't give up the presidency setting in motion for at least 249 years this unbelievable experiment in self-government and then you can also learn all the other people who themselves, whatever station they also have complexity And so everybody's invited in. And just that moment that you said, I started, that Tira self, you know,

was allowed to buy his freedom means there's a fissure, there's a crack, there's an opening door. When the people were talking about liberty in the American Revolution, it mattered very much, as the scholar Maggie Blackhawks says in her film, to the people at the margins.

The people who's serving tea to the George Washington's and the Patrick Henrys and the Thomas Jefferson and the Samuel and John Adams up in Massachusetts, they're hearing that Liberty talk, and they're saying, I believe it, there's a guy that we follow in our film named James Fortin, who was nine years old when the declaration was read out loud for the first time in Philadelphia, a few days after it was signed on July 4, 1776.

He never for a second didn't think it didn't apply to him. He took its self-evident truths to be applied, and he fought for the patriot cause and is captured. and is put in a prison ship called the Jersey, a horrible prison ship in the East River, nearly died, got out at the end of the war, walked home barefoot to Philadelphia. Mother didn't recognize

him, went on, made a fortune as a black man, and used the prophets to help fund the nascent abolition movement. William Floyd Garrison's the Liberator that begins to be published in the 1820. So everybody knows slavery's wrong. Jefferson

knows it's wrong. Washington knows it's wrong. You can hear it in the quotes in our film, but they're, it's too good a deal, right? It's free labor, right? They're not working for any. I mean, and then when the abolition movement starts and they're really talking about taking it away in the next couple of generations, then the arguments come out where they're inferior. We're taking care of them. They're children. They wouldn't know what to do with freedom. And that's, the white supremacy that we are still imprisoned by now, lashed, you know, down and held back by this sense that the other.

There's no, you know, if you go back to that, I've been making films about us. The only thing I've known is that there's no them. There's no them. It's so hard when you take a path, which we all do, and I'll say, you know, I do it in my relationship. I will, the only time I really get mad at Mary is when I'm flat out wrong and I know it. Because then I have to defend it because I can't be that person you're describing.

I can't allow myself to sit with that. That's a pretty brave thing to say and it's true of all of us and everybody recognizes it, but you said it. And then you double down on something that's a real taboo like owning another human being. you can see how people have to double down and double down and double down because otherwise you have to have the kindness to yourself to realize that you are capable of doing evil and good and it's you know you need to embrace both because it's the truth and it will indeed set you free that's exactly right and why tyrants and authoritarians are able to do it they're offering you the simple way out.

Simple. And they're saying, look, it's not your fault. It's always our fault. My mom taught me that. Oh, to do that phrase. It's always our fault. And so if you say, no, it's their fault. It's them.

They're doing it to you. It might be a Mexican rapist. You know, it's this person. It's a Democrat. Whatever is the popular stuff. And when in fact, it's us. You know, there's a comic strip in the 40s called Pogo by Walt Kelly

and the most famous line in it is we have met the enemy and he is us and that if you can embrace that in a kind of almost spiritual dynamic about oneself then if you've got a problem with me it's my fault

if I've got a problem with you it's still my fault right and then there are no wars love multiplies and there's no no pointing you know because I not to get into politics or partisanship or whatever, but I know that L.A. Times did a non-scientific study once where they wired people up with a conservative, their brains, and a self-professed liberal and conservative.

The conservative brain had a lot of trouble and make them anxious with paradox, withholding both, you know, I can do evil and I can do good, and that's in me and always is. That's hard to deal with and make some people anxious, then if you're the other person who can deal with paradox, one of the things that we have done that's unforgivable, and is contrary to what you just said, if you have a problem with me, it's still my fault. That's right. We make people feel less than if they can't hold paradox. If they're, you know, we make that we, we are snotty sons of guns. Yeah. I am. Yeah. No, I know. And, you know, we spend an awful lot of time, you know, people use the phrase, I'm, you know, I'm an amateur historian, I'm a filmmaker,

I'm a storyteller. And, you know, we've, but I've spent 50 years telling stories in American history, and hear people say history repeats itself. It never, at no event has happened twice, or we're condemned to repeat what we don't remember. It's lovely, often attributed to George Santayana, often about the Holocaust. And you, and you want to say it, it's a lovely thought. It's just not going to happen. That's not the way human beings are wired. Mark Twain is supposed to said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, which is just perfect, right? So I've spent my entire professional life realizing that they're rhymes, but trying so hard to concentrate on telling the story. And I'll give you a good example with the revolution.

The revolution, I said, I looked up and I said to Sarah Botstein, my co-director, I said, we're finishing our film on Vietnam. And it was still a year and a half from broadcast, but we're beginning to lock some of the episodes. And I said, we're doing revolution next. And, you know, she's not kind of gulp. There are no pictures, no newsreels, everything we had, a plethora of. So it's a gulp. And it's, you know, it's a big gulp. And yet, we have this possibility to tell the story of what's going on.

So when we, I said, let's do it, Barack Obama had 13 months in his presidency. And so as you were working on that, there's stuff that was rhyming all the time, that you just had to say, okay, it's in there. we're not going to point in neon signet and said, boy, isn't this so much like today? Because that then helps make the other person wrong. Oh, you can't stand paradox. Or I can do that. You know, you can't. Whatever the thing is, or I'm morally certain, and you can contain paradoxes.

So if our film had come out last year, last fall, for example, we had a moment. It's still an American Revolution. If we'd finished it early and we were outwe. Last fall, we have the wife of a German mercenary general who's coming to join her husband in the ill-fated Burgoyne campaign, which is going to convince the French to come in. She doesn't know that. She thinks she's coming to America with her three little babies. And she's a little bit worried because her reputation is that Americans eat cats.

Now, that would have just rhymed like anything last fall. Right. Now, this fall, when it comes out in November, I'm not sure there'll be many. and maybe a few cognoscenti that will go eating cats, oh, doesn't that trigger a bell? So there's all this stuff. There's a failed invasion of Canada. There's an epidemic of smallpox.

There's a big, you know, stuff that happens, maybe multiple epidemics that take place. There's an eclipse. You know, all of those things happen. And so we've just tried to look at them. And if you're an umpire calling balls and strikes, you're not going, oh, that's one for our side, right? oh that's one for another side we've got lots of loyalists and we're not saying they're bad people in fact

there's just to give you an idea what our revolution is about big ideas but it's also about a guy named john peters who lived in what's now vermont and he is a loyalist he has escaped to canada because of the opprobrium that has been heaped on him by his neighbors his wife has also escaped and found sanctuary on a british boat and life and death kind of stuff oh well i'm going to get to that so he forms a regiment in Quebec, a loyalist regiment. His 15-year-old son signs up first, and they come back down. They're involved in the Battle of Bennington, which is actually into New York State, and he's losing. It's a battle that his side is going to lose, and the Patriots are overwhelming the redoubt,

the hastily built fort that he's in. And his quote to us, and we follow him through most every episode, but this is the fourth episode. His quote is that he is manning this redoubt, and he hears John Peters, you damn Tory, as this person is sticking his bayonet in John Peters and being deflected by the rib cage, he recognized it as the voice of Jeremiah Post, his dear friend growing up in New Haven. And then I was obliged to destroy him as he fires his pistol, killing Jeremiah Post. That, Ted, is also the American Revolution, in addition to all those other things. So I think maybe because there's no photographs or newsreels, maybe because we're so afraid that we might diminish the big ideas, we accept the violence of the Civil War, we accept the violence of the 20th century wars.

But we sort of want to protect the guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts and signing great documents that we're unwilling to sort of open up. And so we've encrusted the revolution with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia, which are the enemies of any real understanding. But when you open it up and understand all of the players, loyalist, black, native, women, patriots, disaffected people who want to be left alone, what a German soldier or his wife feels, what a French diplomat or a French soldier feels, what a British king, prime minister, his officers, the Irish, Scottish and Welsh and English men that make up that army, what they all felt, the native voices, the Spanish. Spanish voices. All of them become this incredible chorus of contradiction and complication. But if you can hold it, it's one hell of a story and there is a place for you. So maybe not the corridors that we keep going down, but maybe the mansion, which we think you can only go through the front door. There are lots of different doors, lots of different entrances that you can get into. It's sad that, and this may just be me and I'm reading life wrong, but it's a little bit

sad that I'm trying to also say, hey, it doesn't matter what's your persuasion. It doesn't matter if you're pissed and angry and feel victimized by life. It doesn't matter. Watch this. You can watch it for any number of reasons, but you can also watch it to be entertained. You know, take your most fame. Yeah, it's a good story. It's a good story. It's a good story. That's really the end. In fact, and the novelist Richard Power says, and this is where we're at right now. And I think what you're what you're trying to do is appeal to something bigger than the dialectic bigger than the there's nothing binary in nature it's just it's all complicated and it's all has you know laws that are much higher than we perceive but richard powers a novelist said the best arguments in the world

won't change a single person's point of view the only thing that can do that is a good story because the good story is like a benevolent trojan horse you let it in it's not going to slay the city. It's going to come out and transform you. So yes, if you are a diehard maga person, I've got some overmountain men in North Carolina that you will recognize. These people are fighting the British because they're pissed off that they're going to tell them first they can't cross the Appalachians and we're going to do it anyway. And when you tell us to come and join the loyalist cause, we're not going to. We're going to come and join the Patriot Cause and we're going to beat your ass on King's Mountain. And that's what has.

happens. And so you see, and then later on when it's, when revolution's over, they go, we don't want to live under this new thing. We want to start our own state in Western thing. And we're going to call it Franklin, by the way. So there are people who are upset at the idea of democracy. Like democracy was not the intention of the founding fathers. Democracy was a consequence because in order to win this revolution, you had to extend rights beyond your class of property intellectual elites, we would call them. And that the revolution in our country comes about because people, teenagers, felons, second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance, nerdy wells, unscrupulous sorts, reaching immigrants from Germany and Ireland, they make up the continental army. The sturdy militiamen, they disappear when the crops have to be sown or reaped or they're scared. And it's these teenagers and this other rabble, as Johann Evald, a Hessian mercenary, describes them, that are able to defy kings.

Got some problem with that? If you're left, right or center? No. Able to defy kings. Pretty good stuff. Unbelievable story. Yeah. And it's our story.

Yeah. All of our stories. And there's uncomfortable parts of that story. And I'm sorry. you know, if you think sanitizing it, the Soviet way was to take your picture off the top of the, you know, the Politburo, watching the May Day parade. What? He's gone now. Well, he's displeased me. You know, and that's kind of the editing that goes on all the time when you want to simplify stuff. Nothing simple. We know this in our marriage. And what you're saying when you do that is you're not, you're not adult enough. You're not grown up enough to be able to hold the idea that people You know, so I'm going to have to take this picture off because I don't trust you to be smart enough, bright enough to hold paradox is what that person is saying. That's great. And so that's an insult to you.

Yeah. That is an insult to you to say, you know, we're going to pull out of this library, Tony Morrison, and leave, you know, mind comp. Because certainly you can't deal with, you know, it's so condescending. Yeah. Well, that's that's what I think the problem. is this idea of setting up an other then presumes that they're lower than you or that in a celebrity culture that you're higher than somebody or that they somebody looks up to you there's there's only communication among equals so at at your first gesture as we wake up in the morning breaking the

ice responding to the Tolstoy messages doing whatever thing we have we have we have to actually make sure that everyone we meet we know is equal to us in all matters, the person who serves you, your coffee that you get, the person who serves your meal later on, the kid that's got a stupid question you think, and maybe if you stopped and listened to it, the central question of the moment. Right. And there's a smidge of Christ-like thoughts in what you just said, And there's certainly, you know, democracy thoughts in what you just said. So there really is everything for everybody in your story. So we go back to trying to make the point, although it's overdramatic, this is the most important event since the birth of Christ.

Because it is, Christ has used an example in the Christian religion as a way to be and as a teacher of that way to be. just as Muhammad, just as Buddha, just as all the various personifications and manifestations in the other religions. And so you can either, as you said earlier so well, you can just take it as, okay, it's Sunday, and now I'm done, now can I watch the game? But it's got to be a daily kind of a breathing exercise

and be every respiration has to have that possibility that you could be aware. And it begins with how we treat others. we're going to take a commercial break now and by that i mean i'm going to talk about mary steambridge and my wife oh good i was going to try to sell green tea right now i love green tea first of all i love your wife yeah oh good she's the best and i know my brother who's a great documentary filmmaker too has used her in many many films and i'm sort of screwing up the courage to ask both of you

cats to come and do more work you've already read that smacks my bailiwick false humility You're screwing your courage up to ask Mary and me to be. We're there. I have you on record. And if we're not doing something within the year, we're coming after you. So here's my commercial break. And it comes from Skip Gates, finding your roots. And Mary and I both said, yes, of course we want to do it because we knew Skip from Martha's Vineyard and all.

that and so when she you're on camera when your life is being revealed exactly so there's a degree of oh oh i'm on camera and my life is being revealed to me and i need to respond in a nice you know on camera way uh and i think someone had just complained recently about finding out that their relatives own slaves and were upset about it wanted to edit it i don't remember who it was doesn't matter But it was like... I remember that. And Mary's going, that boy, that's not my concern.

My family was so poor. I doubt that we had... Anyone had slaves. Turns out, that's not true. They did. But her great fear, Mary's great fear of sitting down with Skip was that I will be boring.

All of my ancestors will just be boring. And please God, don't let that be so. So she sits down and here's your mom. here's your father, and you know you about your grandparents, and these are your grandparents. Do you know about your great-grandparents? And Mary's going, no, please, God, please God. And they were woodchoppers.

And Mary, who's on camera, can't go, oh, shoot me now. Yeah. You know, and she's, oh, oh, really, woodchoppers. And then, yes, and then do you know what his father did? Woodchoppers, and she was just horrified. not horrified, you know, just that kind of, oh gosh, I was hoping for something more exciting in my ancestry. And then he said, okay, now, when we get to the French Indian War or something, I can't remember his fifth grandfather or something, a man named Peter Steenbergen from

Holland went to, I think, Jamaica, where he did indeed buy a slave, and then came to a, I don't remember where in the United States, in New England, and joined the army. He was a great linguist under George Washington. And this is where you can start tracking Peter Steenbergen because they're in letters. And once George is writing a letter, it's there. So this French Indian, so I don't know what he was, a lieutenant or a captain, George Washington. And Peter Stevenson was a very handsome, charismatic rogue.

and was just getting his entire platoon or, you know, all of the men under George in this particular area into deep trouble for his carousing and as this, and letters were written to George saying, if you don't handle this, we may have to handle you, in essence. So Peter could have changed history, you know, by being this thorn. And they were both friends, but he was a problematic friend. He ended up getting dismissed over time and married some wealthy woman and had a tavern. But then during the Revolutionary War, came back and served under Washington. And in one of the British chasing the army across a river, Peter Stingbergen, stayed behind and untied the British boats so that they couldn't follow.

So he became very heroic. But anyway, that's my commercial break to Mary's. And it was really just so overjoyed. Yes. And then just think about it. Then their grandchildren settled down and chopped wood. That's okay. That's okay.

Right? Yes, it's okay. There's no communication except among equals. And what I learned, I was working on a film in the Aughts on the history of the Second World War. And it's the only film I've really done that had hundreds of brethren, like lots of films. And we were telling this story through ordinary Americans in four geographically distributed towns, Waterbury, Connecticut, Mobile, Alabama, Sacramento, 100,000 population in 1941,

and then a tiny little town in southwestern Minnesota called Laverne, you know, a few thousand. And what I understood, or what a dear friend of mine sort of reminded me, and he goes, there are no ordinary people. And then, because you realize that Woodshy, might have been in another generation landing at D-Day at Omaha Beach where there's not a financial reward, you're not getting an empire, there's no conquest involved, you're not gaining territory for your land, there's no treasure to loot, you're there and you're a farm boy from Iowa and you've never seen the ocean, let alone dropped it under those circumstances, then you're

talking about the animation of big stuff, ideas. and they are at the heart of our story. We talk about great experiments. I mean, yes, the Constitution, the United States creation of it is in a grand experiment. The reason why I get close to thinking about a higher, when you say God or Christ or religion,

it just, everything gets so small. but when I think big thoughts my thought is what a grand experiment being human is because everybody has to go through the same it's not like more generations we learn and go oh okay I my we learned that so I don't have to relearn it no you have to wake up and discover what it's like to be human fallible angry that's right magnificent all these things About Jeff Bridges and his trouble with health, I thought that I had a friend who may be the highest person I've ever met, kind of a holy man. He's a painter, but also a philosopher and a businessman. And he was just into sort of esoteric stuff. And I had a great good fortune to know him. And I made three films, little tiny films about him. You're talking Da Vinci, right? No, no.

Well, that's another one. I didn't meet him, but I knew William Siegel was his name. And he was in a terrible car accident before I met him, broke most of the bones in his body. And one of the great Zen masters from Tokyo had come over to visit him named D.T. Suzuki wrote beautiful books about Zen, Zen, flesh, Zen bones, really wonderful stuff. And he went over and he said, you know, Bill, an accident. is worth 10,000 meditations. So you see the eye, and I think Jeff was communicating to you

or your friend that there is even opportunity in this. My origin story is that not my father, but my mother died of cancer when I was 11. There was never a moment growing up when she wasn't there. And I saw after she had died, my father loved movies and he would let me stay up at night on a school night.

And we were watching Odd Man Out by Carol Reed with James Mason about the, Irish troubles. And my dad started to cry. Never cried when she was sick, 10 years, never cried at her death, didn't cry at this impossibly sad funeral. But he cried now at a movie and I just said, I was now 12. I want to be a filmmaker, right? That's what I want to be because it had given him these emotions. And so I was telling this story to... But how old were you when that happened? My mother died when I was 11, just a few months. And this is maybe 12, 12 and a half. And I remember And I said, oh, that's what I want to be.

And that meant John Ford, Howard Hawks, Albert Hitchcock. And I went to Hampshire College, and they were all social documentaries still photographers. It became that. Years later, I was in a crisis. And my late father-in-law was an eminent psychologist. And I was talking about not having really dealt with my mother's death. And he said a few things into me. Like you blew out the candles on your birthday wishing she'd come back.

I said, how'd you know? And they do all this stuff. He finally just looked at me. He says, look what you do for a living. I said, well, he said, you wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? And so what I'm trying to tell you, and I was interviewed by sociologists a few years after that,

and their last question, after three hours, I was like, why did I do this? Their last question was, what was your mother's greatest gift? And I looked, and I said instantly dying, and I burst into tears. And I said, I didn't want her to die. But I wouldn't be talking to you. I wouldn't be making the films. It's all based on loss. It's all based on how you go in and transform suffering,

how you meet the thing that you didn't want to meet and overcome it. And so that's the basis. All of this work is born out of loss. And I would suggest probably that the thing that defines you are less those good times when things. ran smoothly or the traffic in Los Angeles was just strangely, I'm getting here very quickly, but other moments when there were obstacles, when there was pain, when there was loss, when there was self-doubt, whatever it might be. And then in those transformational moments,

something accrues that is more important than the ordinary. And that's the essence of story, right it's the essence of spiritualism it's the essence of you know your final triumvirate which is love and that multiplies and it's also if you just want to say what's in it for me your brain at 77 i'm very curious about how to keep my brain firing as much as possible and doing things new Discept curiosity. Yeah. Stay curious. You know, literally to the point of, you know, change hands.

If you brush your teeth with your left hand, brush it with your right. I once did a commencement. And I said, do this. You know, I said, try brushing your teeth with the other hand tonight. Try even remembering what I just said. And, of course, there is no one, I don't think, that remembered, let alone tried to brush it with the other hand. And to those who haven't tried it yet, it sucks. It's really sucks, but in going against yourself has an amazing payoff.

Yeah. It has an amazing payoff. Because you want to be comfortable. Everybody wants to slide into the thing that says, look, here's the news. I'm really sorry. None of us are getting out of here alive. Yeah. That is my actually, when everything is really hard for me or I feel victimized by life or by whatever it is, whatever it is.

my um or no when i look at life and go um oh i care about oceans and you know and it's such an ongoing process and there's so many defeats and so many this and so many that or something like what's going on politically all of that kind of stuff at some point i turn to myself and go and then you die and then you die you don't get some award for saving an ocean nope you die so I think a therapist once told me years ago that there are two sort of big fallacies that animate lots of our parts of our lives for many people. One is that I'm going to find somebody who is the perfect match. You actually find somebody that you can be a partner in your own self-development and that you grow together. But it's never the perfect match, the one that completes you.

You are a priori complete. And so what you've got to do is figure out how to realize that and manifest. that. And the other is that there'll be some exception in your case, and you'll live forever. Life is, death is becoming less and less of a rumor at my age. But it's been a rumor. I'm going to be 72 in a few days, and I hear you. I hear you. We're talking about even walking into this room, you know, do you go to the bathroom? No, I'm okay. Okay, yeah, no, I think. This, by the way, is the longest I've ever gone without pain. That's how fascinating you are. I don't want to let go of you.

I don't want to let go of you quite yet. I've been asking people, you know, what's your guiding light? What's your North Star? What gives you hope and all that? We've been talking about it with you. I mean, you are, to my mind, but I will ask you this anyway, living your life by these documentaries that you've been putting out. into the world.

You are, your life is a demonstration of what you, I think, believe in. So anyway, here it goes. What is your guiding light? What is that thing that, it must be actually hard for you because you are, your life is so defensible in doing the right thing to my outsider's mind. that I must how do you not slip into complacency the complacency of boy am i on target here boy am i doing the right thing for the world how do you how does that not turn into a complacency how do you stay so the first i left new york city in 1979 with my girlfriend that is soon to be

my first wife and we moved up to a little uh village in new hampshire actually to a farmhouse about a mile and a half outside that village and I'm still sleeping in the same bedroom 46 years later next month. And soon after that I saw a New York cartoon, which I cut out and put on the refrigerator. And then as it was getting yellowed and torn a little bit, I framed it and I made copies of it and I put it every place where I can see it every day. And it shows three men standing in hell the flames licking up around them and one guy says to the other two apparently my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing right i mean there has to be and one of the virtues of living in a small town is they don't care how many emies you have they don't

care how many Oscar nominations or Grammys you have or what awards you've won or whatever. They're actually looking at you from a different way. They're not unaware that I've got a job that is a little bit different than most of the jobs there. But in this small town, there's everything. Somebody said, well, what do you do here? They came up from New York. What do you do here? And I said, everything you do plus farming.

you know and so that's that's our little town so it has sophistication but it also has sort of real grounding and i i love the fact um we are imperfect and nature is perfect and if you live close to nature then you have the ability to be reminded of that we made a film on the national parks and there's a guy who went up to denali uh in the 19 teens and he said it reminds you of your atomic insignificance and And that really feels right. There's a wonderful paradox in that, too, Ted, because, you know, when you experience that,

you feel your relationship to the immensity of nature and the universe, that humility actually inspires you and makes you bigger, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard. And that's a kind of wonderful thing. And so, you know, I'm struggling with impatience, with complaint, with, you know, all the stuff, you know, even when I'm untying my double-knotted sneakers and they get into a knot and I'm, you know, you know, swearing and, you know, and I'm going, what, what is the problem here? You know, all of us are struggling with that. I just think I've got the best job in the country. I'm so, so lucky that it, I work with incredibly talented people. And there are, this is. a collaborative as you know medium and i can't say i to any one of the films i say weed to them because it's not royal we know kings uh we defy kings right um but it's it's because it's so

gloriously collaborative and so many people even this film uh is co-directed by sarah botstein as i said and david schmidt uh who's out there and so we're you know we're we're we're trying to figure out and while the credits go by and there's hundreds of people we quite correctly think There's also about a nucleus of about 20 people that handmade this film over 10 years on the American Revolution. They'll be out in November, and I'm really proud of the intimacy of that. George Washington talks about kind of the intimacy of what happens between people in a struggle like this. And so you find it. I mean, I can't believe that we haven't even talked about Lincoln, who for me is like the bees and knees of Americans.

But what's so surprising about this is I didn't expect to realize for all his flaws, for his rashness and someone called bravery or courage on the battlefield. But a lot of times he risks his life where if he gets killed, it's all over. And makes lots of stupid tactical mistakes as a general, not a good field general in many ways, but is so able to pick subordinate talent, is so able to be there in the middle of the night with some courage. to have understood his role as the historian Jane Kamensky says, as a leader of an insurrection that you just can't be crushed. And Joe Ellis, the historian, says he just comes to this fundamental thing after losing battle after battle after battle, is that he doesn't have to win. He just can't be surrender.

The British have to win. And that's not going to happen because mom and dad are 3,000 miles away. And they're just not as big. They forget. It's not like Liverpool to London. It's like Boston to Charleston is London to Venice. It's a big deal. And it's the weather is going to play a part, the beauty, the natural, the waterways, all of these impediments.

And he gets it. He understands it. And he's one of the ones very early on where you've got 13 colonies that are separate countries. They don't. I mean, a Georgian and a New Hampshireite are like diametrically. opposed but he's the one who begins to talk as others begin to do franklin and uh patrick henry and others that were not a virginian we're not a new englander we're this new thing americans or actually not a new thing it's very old and they've been there for 22,000 years but but

you get the idea i mean remember of first of all you know from grade school like how are the settlers who dump your relatives tea in the um in the um in the Boston Harbor dressed. They're dressed as Native Americans. Oh, right, right, sorry. Right? So, so there's no test on this, Ted. It's okay.

Just let it go, let it go. That was an easy one. Yeah, it was an easy one. Yeah, it was an easy one. Yeah, I know, ooh, ooh, okay, so why were they dressed as Native Americans? Bobby to deflect, yeah, what you think. Those rotten, yeah, fellas. They're saying we're not British anymore.

We're indigenous. We're native to this moment. Phil Doloria, a great scholar at Harvard says this. And you suddenly go, of course, we are putting on crudely the dress of the Native Americans who we live among and whose territory we are systematically dispossessing of on our Western frontiers. But they represent who's here, who's a real American, right? So the great paradox is, of course, we name our army, the Continental Army, we name our Congress, the Continental Congress. We're a collection clinging to the Eastern Seaboard, but we know where we're going. And the tragedy, of course, for Native peoples is they're the real losers in this story.

But the amazing thing is, at that moment, we identified ourselves. We dressed as Indians as a way to say, we're no longer part of you guys. And it becomes, in 1773, you know, well before, you know, two years and a month before the revolution actually starts on Lexington Green. And, you know, three years and a few months before the Declaration is signed of Independence. that we're feeling that we're something different. And that's the beginning of some really big stuff because what becomes quarrels between Englishmen, as a scholar in our film Christopher Brown says,

you know, suddenly are becoming differences about natural rights or the identification of natural or universal rights. And all of a sudden, when it isn't just, how come you're not treating us the way you treat your own people, how come we don't have representation, How come you won't let us take Indian land because you can't protect us from their reaction to that? You're now into the territory

that out of the Renaissance comes the Enlightenment and out of the Enlightenment comes the United States of America. That's what Jefferson, and that's our doing is distilling a century of this new thought about human beings could live as citizens, not subjects, and putting it into that one sentence. Can I thank you enough?

Let me make sure people know when and how they can see the American Revolution. So November 16th, it will be broadcast on PBS and also released the entire thing, six episodes, 12 hours for streaming. That's a Sunday night. It will run Sunday through Friday night on PBS twice. Each episode played twice. There'll be marathons. Inevitably, it will go into pledge. And there are even things called DVDs.

DVDs and Blu-rays. I'm not sure exactly what they're talking about, but what came from a meeting and apparently there'll be DVDs and Blu-Ways. There's a beautiful book that comes with it, but it'll be available for streaming. It'll be, I hope, hard to miss. I'm wearing out enough shoe leather

talking about it that I hope that we'll be able to grab the attention of enough of us that maybe, I mean, I don't, people say, well, what do you want people to take away? And I go, you know, we've worked 10 years to tell us story, you know, we're, we just want you to see this good story and see if there's a place

that you can find purchase and identification. But I'd like to put the us back in the U.S. Yep. I think you are. Trying. Yeah. And it's a battle that's gone on from the very beginning. From the very beginning. So don't be disappointed. Best friend, right? John Peters kills his best friend, Jeremiah Post, there on that redoubt, it's a little bit southwest of what is now Bennington, Vermont. Yes. So stay hopeful, stay nurturing,

stay loving and kind, and do what you can when you can. But don't be hopeless. Yeah, no, no, no. We've always been divided. So what you do is you figure out what the lemonade version of that lemon of division is. Yeah, yeah.

Thank you so much. This is so great. And you know what's so wonderful about you you make me feel smart. So thank you for that. Thank you for that brief moment in my day. That's crazy. The one and only Ken Burns.

His new six-part docu-series, The American Revolution, premieres on PBS on November 16th. As many of you know, this is a dire time for the survival of public broadcasting. To help PBS continue its vital work, make a donation if you have the means. Visit pbs.org slash donate.

That's all for our show this week. Special thanks to our friends at Team Coco. If you enjoy this episode, please send it to someone you love. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and maybe give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts. If you like watching your podcasts, all our full-length episodes are on YouTube. Visit YouTube.com slash team cocoa. See you next time. Where Everybody Knows Your Name.

You've been listening to Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson sometimes. The show is produced by me, Nick Leow, our executive producers are Adam Sacks, Jeff Ross, and myself. Sarah Federovich is our supervising producer, Engineering and Marketing. mixing by Joanna Samuel with support from Eduardo Perez. Research by Alyssa Graal. Talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Battista. Our theme music is by Woody Harrelson, Anthony Gen, Mary Steenbergin, and John Osborne.